Good Morning, World

Well this sure feels like it came out of nowhere! Hannibal actor Richard Armitage has a new "erotic thriller" series called Obsession on Netflix that's getting headlines like, "This may be Netflix's kinkiest series yet!" And I haven't watched it myself but if by "kinkiest" they mean" Richard Armitage full frontal-iest" then they're right! Out here putting the Dick in Richard, Richard! Has anybody watched it? With all the talk about "erotic thrillers" and the sexlessness of our current moment in entertainment this feels like it's timed well? Anybody watched it? Well I've got a NSFW taste for you (speaking of what we were just speaking of) right after the jump... 

Good Morning, World

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When I review things perhaps you have noticed that I very much tend to talk more about the film's broad themes and emotional beats and how they affected me and not wade too deep into specifics with regards to performances and such. If a movie worked on me all the way I think it should just be assumed that I liked those things and they worked in concert with the film working on me. And so it was when I reviewed The Lodge, the new horror film out today in theaters from the directors of Goodnight Mommy -- I mentioned the fact that the Dad in the movie is played by Richard Armitage and the Step-Mom-To-Be is played (magnificently) by Riley Keough. But that was that on that front.

So consider this morning's little gratuitous post a nod in Richard's (now sort of out of the closet) direction -- I seen ya, Richard! Truth be told he's not in the movie a lot -- his absence is the juice that drives the engine that drives the car off the cliff -- but he's there and he brings the just right notes of distrust to Daddy, that Dad's being a little thoughtless, a little irresponsible, that Richard is thinking with his Richard and not the facts in front of him, but als, importantly, that he's not truly a villain either. The Lodge smudges up our ideas about "villains" real well -- most specifically the idea of "The Evil Stepmother" but it does make time and some room for us to see that Dad's not a total dick. Anyway see The Lodge is my point, and I'll share a couple more gifs of Richard here in the series called Berlin Station after the leap...

Children Shouldn't Play With Crazy Things

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There's an exchange in Frank Darabont's film The Mist where two characters trapped in a supermarket at the end of the world discuss whether having faith in humanity's inherent goodness is wise or whether, once the lights go out and you frighten everybody bad enough, they'll revert to caveman brain. The Mist comes down, and it comes down hard, on the side of post-apocalyptic misanthropy, and now it's got a good bad-time buddy in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's traumatically delicious The Lodge (their follow-up to the glorious Goodnight Mommy), out in theaters this weekend.

We don't meet our main character of Grace (Riley Keough) until a good fifteen minutes into The Lodge, instead spending our set-up with her presumptive family-to-be -- psychotherapist Richard (Richard Armitage) with his teenaged boy Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and approximate tween Mia (Lia McHugh) -- as they deal with the dissolution of their previous familial arrangement, leaving their depressed Mom (Alicia Silverstone) in the dust. And it won't be the first time this film leaves its sense of Grace delayed, let's leave it at that.

Keough haunts these early scenes, though -- the back of her head exiting a garden here, a milky figure wavering behind frosted glass there -- more of a spectre than a person. And as the film does eventually close in on her, staring hard in the face of Grace and her terrible past, marking her terrible future, her ghostliness becomes inescapable -- her attempts at finding form, at finding a sane place in the world where she can define herself outside of all her traumas, rattle like sand on an earthquake surface. Everything disassembles.

For anyone who was raised under the smothering blankets of someone else's absolute beliefs in something that is ultimately unknowable -- Grace turns out is the single surviving deprogramee of a messianic death cult (not much of a spoiler as we learn this relatively early in the film) -- the fear that that deep programming of your childhood is always there with you, a monster suit forever at your side for the easy slipping into, is a profound one. When the world goes dark, when the phones cut off and the apocalypse presents itself, waving howdy doo disaster, how will you find yourself? Is there any piece of you standing on firm ground, or are you simply a pile of behaviors in the place of a center, ones that will slip with the slightest nudge?

The Lodge, a feel bad classic in the making, digs up some terribly sad answers to these questions as it traps this Family 2.0 in a blizzard-blasted nowhere, forcing them to face their empty faces, a series of mirrors set up in the snow. Insidious resentments snake around in the cold slush of this place, a series of un-maskings that keep stripping reality down through flesh to off-white exposed bone. Colorless brine shrimp, as big as lobsters, bat against plastic bags, unwitting props in an opera of morbid dissolution, disillusionment. It hurts until it doesn't, and then it hurts some more.

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Quote of the Day

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Congrats to The Hobbit and Hannibal actor (and one-time companion, ahem, of Lee Pace) Richard Armitage for at last turning the long rumored page in his new interview with the Telegraph -- you've got to subscribe to them to read the full interview but I'll give you the choice bit:

"Speculation has swirled for years about Armitage’s sexuality, so I approach the question cautiously, but… would he like to have a family of his own? ‘I would need to do it in a way which was either through adoption or surrogacy, because of the nature of my relationship,’ he says, with remarkable candour. ‘I’d have to sit down very pragmatically and work it out.’ He is in a relationship, he confirms, ‘a good one’, though he isn’t keen to say more about it. And though I have no wish to press him further on the subject, he returns to it himself, later. ‘I think the turning point was losing my mum,’ he says. ‘Up until that point, I felt like I mustn’t put a foot wrong, that if I said the wrong thing or revealed too much about my personal life, it could all come crashing down, and it would come down on my parents, and they wouldn’t be proud of me anymore.’ He shrugs. ‘Now that I’m past that I’m actually much more carefree about the choices I make.’"

Now he can play the father in the Fun Home movie!

My Favorite Tiger Lady

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It's our gal Joan Allen's 63rd birthday tomorrow so if you click on over to The Film Experience we've given some love to one of her under-sung performances -- Reba in  Michael Mann's original Lecter joint Mindhunter. She is terrific in the role and I wanted to focus on Joan because of her birthday, but I do wish I could've worked in a reference to Rutina Wesley's performance on Hannibal in the same part, because she too knocked this character outta the park.

They're Coming For Mommy Again

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The last time that co-directos Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz made a movie about the familial rift between a woman and her children taking shape in an isolated house we got the tremendously unsettling 2014 film Goodnight Mommy, one of MNPP's faves. (Read my review here.) In that film a pair of creepy (duh) twins become convinced that the woman under bandages who's come home from surgery to recuperate is not their mother, yadda yadda, horror movie.

Well now they've gone and made The Lodge, their US debut, which stars the great Riley Keough (I feel no qualms calling her "great" at this point, and neither should you) as a woman left in a snowy middle-of-nowhere cabin with her fiance's two kids and, well, yadda yadda horror movie. The Lodge got fantastic raves at Sundance and it's set to hit screens this summer, so here's its trailer...

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ETA I am re-upping this post because the trailer was ripped off the internet back in April when I originally posted this and just re-uploaded this week. I'm not sure if this trailer differs any from the earlier version, but it's a movie we're excited about so we're gonna re-post dammit.

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Who Wore It Best?

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It's Brit versus Brazilian today for a beautiful birthday babe-off - Rodrigo Santoro, most recently of Westworld but one we've been loving on since the second Charlie's Angels movie at least, turns 43 today, while former Lee Pace good friend and Hobbit and Hannibal actor Richard Armitage is hitting 47. 

So to celebrate this monumental simultaneous occasion I went and dug up some pictures of the two actors in sweaty revolutionary drag for two different projects (Santoro in Che and Dick in Strike Back) and now you must choo choo choose...

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One Rough Ride

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I think I can be forgiven for reading into the way Jon Bernthal and Richard Armitage are looking at each other in this scene from Pilgrimage, the medieval action movie that I reviewed out of Tribeca over at The Film Experience. I mean, really. Add Tom Holland to the mix and well... I mean really.

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Do Dump or Marry - Three Dolarhydes

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The third season of Hannibal hits blu-ray today -- it is so so good, go go buy it -- and so here now I shall ask you guys to Do Dump or Marry the three fellas that have played the dragon himself Francis Dolarhyde at this point in our pop-culture existence - Tom Noonan in Manhunter, Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon, and Richard Armitage (and his little black underpants) on this show.

(My apologies to Tom Noonan, who'll inevitably bear the brunt of your dumps -- and here I was just praising Anomolisa, in which Noonan voices 95% of the characters. For shame, me.) Anyway after you've taken to the comments and answered the query head over here and read this great big interview show creator slash smart person Bryan Fuller on the making of the blu-rays and all of the extras, plus how much he loves Fargo. Yessir!

Good Morning, Francis

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If you follow me on Instagram you'll know that 1) I am kind of boring to follow on Instagram (I'm no Nico Tortorella, that's for sure) and 2) that I've spent the past week touristing my ass off in the Upstate New York region I grew up in. I took the boyfriend to see all the big beautiful sites my homeland's got to offer that he'd never seen, a la Niagara Falls. And yet, even as I stared at the wonders of the world before me, in the back of my head...

... I really wanted to crawl into a bed, any bed, and watch this week's episode of Hannibal, which finally got to the Red Dragon story with Richard Armitage (and directed by Neil effing Marshall!), which we've been very much looking forward to. Well I finally got around to it last night and thankfully it did not disappoint. I'm not even speaking of the twisted homage to American Psycho seen here (although that didn't hurt; my boyfriend whispered, "Wow he's so much hotter than Lee Pace" in the middle of it)...

... the entire introduction to Francis Dolarhyde and his very specific horrors was just balls out unnerving, from the teeth to his film-stock psychosis to Will Graham's horrific recreation of the main murder scene... this was horror, great horror. Good goddamn why won't anybody pick this show up? All the television channels, all of them, should be ashamed of themselves. Anyway hello folks, I'm back. Hit the jump for the rest of Armitage's twisted up and terrifying howdy-do...