Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Batman Forever (1995)

Robin: Holey rusted metal, Batman!

Batman: Huh?

Robin: The ground, it's all metal. 

It's full of holes. You know, holey. 

Batman: Oh.

Yes I do indeed maintain that the two Joel Schumacher Batman movies are brilliant in their embrace of camp entertainment -- I'm slightly partial to the Batman & Robin (although Clooney is lousy) but they're both such dumb fun and they really should be appreciated as such. Set aside your fears! Straight dudes especially can't seem to get them. Anyway that said, onto the sad reason we're here --  RIP to Val Kilmer. I wasn't ever that huge a fan of him but he certainly was a large and oft formative part of my childhood, gifting us with the volleyball and locker-room scenes in Top Gun, his leather pants in The Doors...

... and of course, the pièce de résistance, Willow. (I should actually send a text to one of my oldest best friends in the world and see how she's doing, as she's the world's biggest Willow fan.) Val was never really my bag but his moving scene in Maverick and the 2021 doc on him both endeared him to me more than he'd been at the height of his career, so I'm at least glad he's not in pain anymore. If you were a fan tell me about it in the comments!

10 Off My Head: Actor Hunter Killer

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Thrillingly for me at least David Fincher's serial killer series Mindhunter starring Jonathan Groff (showering, seen above) is back on Netflix this Friday for its second season. But that's not the only time the subject of "serial killers" has dropped itself into my lap this week -- on Monday I posted about the 1995 thriller Copycat with Sigourney Weaver, which is screening here in NYC this weekend. And on this upcoming Tuesday Arrow is releasing a stellar special edition blu-ray of Cruising, William Friedkin's controversial 1980 gay murder fantasia that stars Al Pacino. Basically, serial killing is having a real moment! (Sorry you blew your load a little bit early, Zac Efron.) 

Anyway all of this made it seem like a good moment to count down our favorite Serial Killer Movies. But then I started making a list and you know what? Depending on your definition of "Serial Killer Movies" -- do you count Slasher Films? -- I seem to like a hell of a lot of Serial Killer Movies. Too many to narrow down to just five, or even ten. My list runs into the dozens. So I decided to be a little more specific and narrow it down to performances as Serial Killers in Serial Killer Films. I still had to up the number to 10, but this is more manageable!

10 of my Favorite Serial Killer Performances

Anthony Perkins in Psycho

Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs

Charlize Theron in Monster

Christian Bale in American Psycho

Jeremy Renner in Dahmer

Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom

John Jarratt in Wolf Creek

Peter Lorre in M

Karlheinz Böhm in Peeping Tom

Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers

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I could name twenty more, but I'll let y'all

name some of your faves in the comments!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Nixon (1995)

Henry Kissinger: Can you imagine what this man
would be like had anyone ever loved him?

For some reason this quote from Oliver Stone's movie is speaking to me today here on what would have been disgraced President Richard Nixon's 105th birthday. Not sure why, hmmmmm...

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Good Morning, Marvel Boys

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Today Captain America Chris Evans is turning 36 while his Age of Ultron Quicksilver co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson is turning 27, and since Aaron's Quicksilver wasn't long for the world (uh sorry several year old spoiler there) this day is really the only day that we get to continue thinking about the two of them together. So let's! Let's turn off all the world news and nightmares and just think about Chris & Aaron making that set trailer rock in between takes. See? There is good in the world. But let's make this thing morning themed...

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Aaron Taylor-Johnson Seven Times

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I can't believe I actually read the entire interview with Aaron Taylor-Johnson that goes along with this photo-shoot at Mr. Porter, but read the entire thing I surely did - even when he talked about shamans and "fresh seaweed stocks you cook in the rice with toasted sesame oil and sake" for god's sake. That's some dedication. Anyway there's a kind of great little jab at Oliver Stone in there if you wanna read it that way (which anyone who knows of Oliver Stone would) so I recommend wading through it; or you can just hit the jump for the remaining six pictures...

Kevin Costner Says What

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If there's one thing I really like thinking about these days it's assassination... the Kennedy Assassination, I mean. Obviously. What with Jackie coming out, and all. I don't know where you thought I was going with that. Anyway I meant to see Jackie this weekend but it didn't happen so we're using the next best thing for this week's "Beauty vs Beast" over at The Film Experience - Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, which stars a slightly older version of that moppet pictured above. Click over, vote -- it's like politics only even more meaningless. Well a little bit, anyway.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

JFK (1991)

Jim Garrison: The FBI says they can prove it through physics 

in a nuclear laboratory. Of course they can prove it. Theoretical physics can also prove that an elephant can hang

off a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy!

But use your eyes, your common sense. 

Happy 61 to Kevin Costner today!

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I Am Link

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--- Baby Maker - IndieWire has a wonderful chat with director Sebastian Silva over here - his new movie Nasty Baby, starring himself and Kristen Wiig, has apparently gotten some strange reception from the festival circuit, which he hilariously details. The movie sounds amazing, I hadn't heard anything about any of the walk-outs or anything, I'm even more excited than I was before. And I was excited before, not just because of Wiig, but because I loved Crystal Fairy tons and tons. Also he's seriously cute, who knew?

--- The Oscars Of Everything - I don't know how he finds the hours in the day for all of this but our pal Joe Reid's been on fire with the articles this week - here's a piece at The Atlantic on the disconnect between the Best Actress nominees and the movies their performances are in getting any correlating Oscar respect! Here's a piece at Slate on Joe's yearly project of seeing every single Oscar nominee wherein he ranks all of the movies from best to worst! (High placement of garbage like Birdman gives me slight agita, but I'll make due, especially with such a great number one.) And here's a piece at Vanity Fair on the nominees for Best Original Song in 1999, aka the greatest years of movies ever. Damn Joe, you're making me tired on your behalf!

--- Joke's On Us - It's amazing how quickly Jared Leto's able to make my skin crawl nowadays - in this new interview with Billboard magazine I went straight from "his beard does look lickable in that picture" to "oh my god shut that asshole up" in like half a second flat. He talks about wanting to gain weight for The Joker and then "vegan tacos" are mentioned and oh my god shut that asshole up.

--- Fall Guys - Taking a breather from the Oscars stuff for a hot second at The Film Experience Nathaniel wrote up some thoughts on a recent binge-watch of The Fall, that serial-killer starring the goddess Gillian plus that perfectly crafted set of abs with legs standing opposite her. I guess the second season is showing up on Netflix soon? They are good, you should watch them. I also wrote up some thoughts on the first season awhile back.

--- Dick Friendly - I suppose some other garbage dump for zombies will just fill in the hole that Two and a Half Men is leaving, having just aired its final episode last night, but I still feel some tension leaving the world now that it's gone. Ahhh. The air feels fresher today, doesn't it? Anyway point being here's Ashton Kutcher talking about his gigantic fake dick.

--- Serious Movie - I want to say it's been awhile since Oliver Stone's been relevant but he did flash Aaron Johnson's anus at us that one time not too long ago so me and Ollie, we're totally good. His movie about Edward Snowden starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who's clearly angling himself towards baity-roles these days (not mastur-baity, but awards-baity, that is) just picked up another hot piece, one Timothy Olyphant! I don't know if an Edward Snowden movie will find room for an anus flash, but let's cross our fingers and toes.

--- Milk The Dead - I wish I could figure out what character she played but an actress named Jill Marie Jones, who was apparently on American Horror Story: Asylum, just scored the leading lady role in Sam Raimi's upcoming Evil Dead television series. Oh wait I just googled it oh god gross I'd forgotten about this scene. You're a big pervert, Dylan McDermott.

Alexander The He Actually Is Pretty Great Now

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I dipped my toe back into Oliver Stone's Alexander with some trepidation. I hadn't seen it since it came out, for obvious stinky reasons. But I'd been curious what all of Stone's tinkering had accomplished - I know he was frustrated that the studio was intent on squishing the homosexual content as much as they could from it; we were all frustrated with that. So I watched the just-released "Ultimate Cut" on blu-ray over the weekend, projecting it up on the big screen in my house, and ya know what? It's not a bad movie anymore. 

Yeah there are still a few moments where Colin Farrell's being out-acted by his wig. I say that with much affection for Colin Farrell's acting talent - that is a lot of wig to act under. Anybody could get buried. But as a whole, with the gay stuff eased back in, the movie just actually makes sense now. When I say "gay stuff" I don't mean there's much more in the way of nudity or sex - sadly, we still don't get to see Alexander crushed between Hephaestion's thighs (save an adolescent wrestling match). 

But the thematically gay stuff, the actual life-long love affair between A&H, turns out to be whaddya terribly important, and Stone treats it as such. It's actually pretty clearly the reason he made the movie, you can see now. The theatrical cut flailed around for meaning because it turns out that the studio had carved the very meat from the movie's bones in paring Alexander and Hephaestion's  relationship down to a couple lingering glances - everybody in Alexander: The Ultimate Cut is constantly talking about Alexander's relationships with men, with Hephaestion and with the eunuch (and we do see some brief kissing between those two before the sheets billow and we wander away furtively).

And so with the center restored to the movie, side-shows like Angelina Jolie's Countess Chocula character don't exacerbate the nonsense, they just add a fun flavor - she feels much more of a piece with Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments now that the movie around her isn't flailing. The battle scenes are beautiful and terrifying - the fight in India with the stampeding elephants amongst a forest of trees is an astonishing set-piece, old-fashioned and epic and singular. I get why Stone kept futzing with the film now. He's carved it into something very nearly great.

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Good Morning, Littlefinger & Hound

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Today is the 46th birthday of Littlefinger I mean the actor Aiden Gillen - the fact that I think of him as Littlefinger now says quite a lot, since it seemed as if he was always just (ha, just) gonna be "the guy who got to eat Charlie Hunnam's ass" for the rest of his life. So bravo, Littlefinger! So many accomplishments under your belt!

These shots are from the 2011 Jason Statham movie Blitz, which is one of the few Statham movies I have not seen. These shots are Aiden reacting to Jason pounding on his door, which well if I were buck-naked and Jason Statham were pounding on my door, there'd be a whole different reaction going on, lemme tell you what.

Today is also the 45th birthday of Game of Thrones actor Rory McCann who plays The Hound, a part which he is wonderful wonderful wonderful in. If you didn't read my pal Sean's interview with him for Rolling Stone you need to right quick, it is a delight. I had to do some digging to find gratuitous pics, but I managed!

He was apparently in Alexander! Looking amazing, too. I've got a few more shots of him after the jump, but two things first - one, as long as we're talking naked Game of Thrones people I feel as if I ought to direct you over to the Tumblr where I posted the shots of Will Tudor finally giving us some good full frontal on the show this week - the show's been needing to level the gender gratuity imbalance and this surely helped. And two, before you hit the jump for more of Rory, I don't want to risk anybody missing this amazing ridiculous commercial he starred in, so make sure you watch this!
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Which Is Hotter?

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Val Kilmer, Rock Star or Ice Man?

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poll by twiigs.com

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This question is brought to you by this bizarre deleted scene from The Doors in which Val as Jim Morrison is stripped naked by a bunch of dudes in prison. If that movie had been two hours of this I might remember that movie better.

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Which Of These Things Does Not Belong?

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If you answered "Absolutely Everything Except The Half-Naked Aaron Johnson Part" you are correct, give yourself a cookie. I just went looking to see if there were any shots of Aaron Johnson in his Godzilla jumpsuit showing him from a better, ahem, angle than the ones I linked to in my previous post and came up with zilch, respective to that, but I did find this picture of Aaron on the set of Savages (via) so all was not entirely for naught.Now if only Blake and Olly would skedaddle so's we could get down to business.

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Good Morning, World

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I've lost all concept of what day it is... it's Sunday, right? Well what the heck, we don't normally post on a Sunday but let's post something since last week was so haphazard, and since that something is finally a good post-able look at Aaron Johnson's altogether in Savages, because oh my god. It's even better than I knew it would be. (And I knew it would be excellent.)

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... remaking Alexander, my way.

Yeah I'm still over here wishing Oliver Stone's movie had been something it never was. Sigh. It's good to know I'm not the only loon fixated though - there's an entire online community devoted to Colin Farrell and Jare Leto's "romance."

(Yes you can find an online community for any lunacy, I know this.) Colin's on my mind anyway because Seven Psychopaths is finally out today. That picture above is from the new issue of Details and it's a doozy right? Right. There's also a video from behind the scenes of that photo-shoot...

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... which you can watch right there. I've got Comic Con the next couple of days but I'm going to try to make it to Psychopaths at some point. How could I not?

I Am Link

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--- Games Keeper - Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who once stared at me suspiciously as I handed him a stack of napkins, is going to play Plutarch Heavensbee (god, the names) in the second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire. I said this back when PSH was rumored and I do believe y'all filled me in then but my brain isn't what it used to be (aka never was) and I can't remember for the life of me any details about this character besides the fact that he's the designer of this round's game-board a la Wes Bentley in the last movie - although I do remember that the games-board this go-around is freaking awesome. Anyway PSH needed a vacation home, the end.

--- Terry Girl - Theresa Palmer, who I've been rooting for ever since she was terrific in the otherwise not Take Me Home Tonight, even though she gets to date Scott Speedman therefore I should hate her, has landed a role in one of those new Terrence Malick movies. Of course getting cast in a Terrence Malick movie and filming hours and hours of footage for a Terrence Malick movie is very different from actually ending up on-screen in a Terrence Malick movie, so we'll wait to see how much of her we get when it comes out.

--- High For Hayek - I don't think I have to review Oliver Stone's new movie Savages since Joe went and did so spectacularly at Low Resolution, go read that. I co-sign his words. I will add since he merely alludes to the fact that both Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson give us their bums on a silver thrusting platter in like the first ten minutes, so maybe you want to see this on a big screen. And yes, Salma Hayek is that terrific.

--- Whimsy She Wrote - Two things happened when I saw this list of people Wes Anderson wants in his next movie included Angela Lansbury - I was all, Yes! Angela Lansbury would be a brilliant addition to Wes Anderson's universe! And second I was all, why the hell don't more people use Angela Lansbury in movies now? In summation: yes also to Jude Law. Always yes for Jude. Depp, notsomuch.

--- Robo Rim - In case you missed the Comic-Con teaser poster for Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim, there it is. It's kind of The Iron Giant meets Transformers, and it doesn't have any Charlie Hunnam robo-bulge, so it' gets a hearty "Meh!" from me.

--- Hark An Ark - Anthony Hopkins will be playing the oldest person of ever Methuselah in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. Apparently Methuselah was Noah's gran-pappy and tried to help his grandson convince folks the flood was coming. That worked out well for nobody. Good job, Methuselah!

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Taylor and Aaron Sitting In A Tree...

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Why won't they just make out arrrrggggghhhhh... ahem. Hey there's some movies out today, including Oliver Stone's blue-balls-busting Savages. Hear all I gots to say over at Celebrity Beehive.

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Quote of the Day

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Yesterday I wondered just how far Oliver Stone's new movie Savages would go in depicting the threeway relationship between Aaron Johnson and Blake Lively and Taylor Kitsch, and in the comments commenter Jonathan told us how just far the book goes, which was pretty far. And now twenty-four hours later, Oliver Stone's answered the question himself (via):

HuffPo: In the book, Blake's character has a very graphic sex scene with the characters played by Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson. Did you ever consider taking a more explicit approach to filming that?

Stone: Which one? There are several sex scenes.

HuffPo: The one where they’re penetrating her at the same time in different orifices.

Stone: Oh, yeah, there was no way I could have done that in the present film environment, where, you know, the rating system and the families ... This film was on the edge of a very hard R. There’s a certain Puritanism in our society that continues to haunt us. So you’re talking to a man who was raised half-French, so I can’t -- I have to live inside this system and make films this way. You know, already to go to where we did was a pretty big step.

First off, I love how the interviewer phrased that. "The one where they're penetrating her at the same time in different orifices." It sounds like a lost episode of Friends!

Second off, you are a pussy, Oliver Stone. Salma Hayek should've eaten you for breakfast. I'm not saying he needed to go dong-shot pornographic here or anything but his purposefully pussy-footing around something that hasn't been edgy since my parents were hip (that was a long time ago, slash never) doesn't bode well for a movie that seems to want to glide on gusts of coolness. DP coulda been this year's watercooler talk du jour and you junked it all up, Olly!