Pimps Don't Commit Suicide

In the run-up to today's drop of Arrow's fancy schmancy blu-ray of Richard Kelly's mucho maligned 2006 flick Southland Tales -- which includes the also mucho maligned longer "Cannes Cut" of the film -- there have been approximately eleventy billion interviews with Kelly talking about the movie (this has been compounded by the 20th anniversary of Donnie Darko). Far more than I could ever begin to link to. Just google his name, they'll all come up, I promise. And I even watched the "Cannes Cut" a few weeks ago hoping I'd have something to say about the movie here. But... this movie, man. This movie still defeats my ability to say anything coherent about it. I both hate it and love it in equal measure -- it confounds me. I thought it might be better, 15 years on, but...

I AM GOING IN
WISH ME LUCK pic.twitter.com/qaCHHTdBnz

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 27, 2020

... no. Nope. Nada. I still just kind of sit there dazed by the thing. (By the way that tweet above, if you click over to Twitter, will give you a Twitter thread from December when I re-watched all three of Richard Kelly's movies -- Tales, Darko, and The Box -- within a 24-hour span.) I feel like I could make two columns, a Love and a Hate column, and diagram Southland that way, and maybe that flatness might approach the actual way Southland makes me feel, but then I'd be no better than the Jim Cunninghams & Kitty Farmers of the world, would I?

I love that Kelly got to make Southland Tales more than I actually love the experience of sitting through it -- it's always inspirational when batshit of its magnitude gets funded. I just don't think Southland, and what it is about, speaks to me like Darko did and does and forever will -- even The Box on this re-watch felt like it had more to tell me than Tales does. But if Kelly ever does get to make the sequel like he keeps saying he wants to in all of these interviews (he will not) I will be there opening night, that I promise.

Final Destination's Ways Not To Die

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 Final Destination (2000)

We're doing this week's "Ways Not To Die" a couple of days early because my favorite horror franchise began 15 years ago today! The first Final Destination movie came out on March 17th 2000 (yes the same day as Erin Brockovich). It came in second to Brockovich that weekend with just over 10 million bucks, but its eventual 53 million dollar take and for sure smashing success on home video etc. led the way to four sequels over the next eleven years, up through Final Destination 5, which (spoiler alert) rounded itself back to the original time-wise and closed up (haha) the saga.

I laugh because I dare to dream - I hope I hope that the series ISN'T done. I want more, endless more, gory more. The only thing keeping them from making more is thinking up new ridiculous ways to die and surely there's an endless supply - if there's anything my series of "Thursday's Ways Not To Die" is a tribute to, it's that. Really this series was probably most inspired by the Final Destination movies themselves. We've wrung more posts out of this franchise than any other. See them all after the jump!

I Am Link

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--- Big & Friendly - This broke a couple of days ago so surely you've all heard it already but this is very very very big news to the Little JA sitting inside my heart so bear with me - Steven Spielberg is probably going to direct a movie version of Roald Dahl's book The BFG. I've expressed my childhood (and beyond) adoration for Dahl here before; The BFG was one of my tip top faves. This gives me tingles in places I didn't know could tingle. Now all I need is Mike White or Todd Solondz to direct The Twits.

--- Days of Future TV - X-Men Days of Future Past writer Simon Kinberg says that they're looking at the X-Men's potential for a TV series, and he's right with what he says about the comic book format lending itself to episodic storytelling well. The only problem you run into (which SHIELD is dealing with) is the show's inability to deal with the big characters or to mess up anything too large, since that stuff's the domain if the money-making movies.

--- Spot The Fassy - I posted an edited lo-fi version of this picture of Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender in their upcoming MacBeth movie last week, but now there's a much nicer quality copy over here, thank goodness. We need to feel as if we're sniffing Fassy's pores, if ever possible.

--- Wet N Wild - Hopefully you read my review of the horror film The Canal out of Tribeca; the movie's pretty darn terrific. I thought it had already been picked up for distribution here but I guess I got my wires crossed (not hard when seeing a thousand movies a day) because here's news via STYD that they've picked up the movie through their distribution wing and will be releasing it. No word on a date yet, but they say it'll be the whole online-on-demand-theaters thing.

--- And Speaking of Tribeca, I hope you guys have been reading up everybody's reviews over at The Film Experience, we've been tearing that fest a new one - like here's Andrew on Starred Up, the prison drama with Jack O'Connell (seen to the left) which I am really sad to have missed (it'll definitely be getting a proper release in the US this year, so patience) and here's Glenn on Courteney Cox's debut film Just Before I Go, which stars Seann William Scott as a suicide-case visiting the people who wronged him, and which I had the misfortune of not missing - it is every ounce as awful as Glenn says it is. And here's Nat on three gay films including Der Samurai, the incredibly strange German movie which I also saw and need to write something about.

--- Stupor Man - So apparently Warner Brothers has just flung up their arms and said, "Fine, you do it! We don't even care anymore!" to Zack Snyder, and now on top of directing Man of Steel and Batman Vs. Superman he will also be directing the Justice League movie. I was pro-Zack for a long time, longer than most even, but the one-two punch of the loathsome Man of Steel and his casting fuck-ups for the new stuff (Ben Affleck was bad enough, but nothing I've seen so far regarding that woman he cast for their Wonder-Woman-to-be has instilled any confidence) has turned me sour.

--- Space Invaders - This is the sort of story that sets every geek's spidey-sense a'tingling - a bunker filled with Atari cartridges of the supposedly epically-awful E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial video-game has been discovered by a documentary crew. They will be able to sell those things for so much money, if they decide to do such a thing.

--- New Beginning -  Friday the 13th fever is kind of hanging in the air right now, what with the TV series being announced, so I don't blame Final Girl for taking this moment to express some love for an under-rated chapter in the movie series with a couple of quick but hilarious stabs at its delicious ridiculousness. I really like that movie too, but a lot of that has to do with John Robert Dixon, one of my favorite of all the Friday Fellas.

--- And Finally, it was the last fuller trailer for Sam Mendes' Showtime horror show Penny Dreadful that finally got us appropriately excited for such a thing as can be described as "Sam Mendes' horror show" (appropriately being very), so we've been looking forward to its May 11th premiere... only now we don't have to look ahead, it has been found! The entire pilot's been released online, you can watch it right here! I know what I am doing tonight.

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Starf*cker

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After leaving the Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert last night I saw Seann William Scott with a bunch of friends on 14th street; this pissy tweet I sent out right after passing him expresses the gist:

Seann William Scott is an asshole who walks down the wrong side of the sidewalk and doesn't move out of your way, pass it on.
— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 8, 2013

I tend to just walk right into people who refuse to move over, so imagine my consternation that it was my boyfriend who SWS didn't move over for - I would've slammed right into him, and it would have been awesome because he would've gotten the word that YOU MOVE THE FUCK OVER on the sidewalk, and secondly, I would have gotten to touch Seann William Scott. Win win! I've always thought Seann was good looking but post-rehab he is looking really good. Even if he's a dick who doesn't move over on the sidewalk. I saw that Dukes of Hazzard movie, buddy - you owe me, not the other way around.
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TGT12: A Moment of 2012 Awesomeness

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I feel like this is the only appropriate moment of awesomeness to follow the shitty movies I just posted about. Let's just get it all out of our systems. (Love you, Stifler!)

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The 2012 Golden Trousers

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Prepare for Pantys!

 

Our annual awards start on Monday! 

Come, let us bask in the awesomeness!

Who Wore It Best?

The Man Poodle-Mullet?

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poll by twiigs.com

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It didn't even occur to me to call Slater "Mario Lopez" when I wrote up this poll. There is no Lopez, only Slater! Anyway I don't know what the frick is going on with Sam Worthington's hair in the new Titans movie, but just say no. 

Is anybody planning on seeing Wrath? Some of the monsters look nifty in the trailer I think, but so did the Kraken and we all know how that turd turned out. Read up my thoughts on that movie plus this weekend's other news releases over at Celebrity Beehive. I get to make with more inappropriate child murder humor!

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Good Morning, World

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I don't really know what possible pie-fucking and sitting bare-assed in a cooler has to do with morning per se, but I needed some excuse to post these pictures of Seann William Scott and Jason Biggs in the international trailer for American Reunion and so... a top (well, two bottoms) of the morning to you.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Paul: Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in - it's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.

I finished re-reading The Great Gatsby the other night and so I've been thinking a lot about 1) Baz Luhrmann's oncoming 3D (so strange!) adaptation, and 2) Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Woody's film. Specifically on that second point, how much in love I am with them these days.

Bless them, they are amazing. Plus I just watched the trailer for the Seann William Scott hockey movie Goon and there Pill was, looking so completely different.

A chameleon, that one. Anyway as for Baz's take on Gatsby I tried to force my brain to read the book with the actors who have been cast in the parts in my mind's eye, and there were some interesting results (as ever where my brain's concerned). It was surprisingly easy picturing Leo as Gatsby and Tobey as Nick, but I could not stop seeing Mia Farrow as Daisy no matter how hard I tried. Which is weird because Redford's film is mostly terrible and I love Carey Mulligan and I'm dying to see her take on the character. Also odd was how I kept seeing Tom Hardy as Tom, even though it's his Warrior brother Joel Edgerton that is playing Tom in Baz's movie.
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Oh and Isla Fisher is the perfect Myrtle. Perfect!