Steven Yeun Nine Times

The interview is paywalled so I can't tell you if Steven Yeun confesses to a torrid love affair with his Nope co-star Daniel Kaluuya within his chat with WSJ magazine today, but we'll go ahead and pretend that. We'll spend some time sitting with that. We'll have to contemplate that, for awhile now. But even as we're lost in these day-dreams -- or perhaps I should say helping out these day-dreams -- are the photos. We got all of the photos thanks to Steven himself on Insta. Subverting the paywall man! It's just like Okja, but sexy. (I know some of you are saying "but?" and to you freaks I say g'bless. I mean I remember Jake's Shorts in that movie. Never forget!) Dear lord I came back from lunch today feeling weird. Don't mind me. I am weird today. I think they may have cooked hallucinogens into my pad thai? Anyway hit the jump for these decidedly un-weird photos...

Good Morning, World

A happy 34th birthday to the Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya today! I was gonna say that I can't wait to see what him and Jordan peele get up to next but I kind of hope that peele alternates between films starring Kaluuya and films starring Lupita Nyong'o -- wouldn't that be rad? They can be his versions of Hitchcock's Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. I'd take that. (In related news I have been dying to re-watch us lately, especially after re-watching Nope last weekend.) Anyway whatever you've got in store for us next Mr. Kaluuya I'm sure it'll be terrific -- dude's got an amazing batting record to date. 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Nope (2022)

Antlers Holst: This dream you're chasing,

where you end up at the top of the mountain,

all eyes on you. It's the dream you never wake up from.

I have seen Nope twice now -- including once just a week ago -- and I never not once realized that Michael Wincott's character's name was "Antlers." WTF? Anyway "Antlers" (apparently) was to me a really funny gag on the self-appointed God-dom of cinematographers even before I realized his name was "Antlers" -- do we think Jordan Peele is riffing on a specific person, or just the general self-seriousness of the profession?

Did Jordan Peele or Hoyte Van Hoytema ever name-drop Kerry James Marshall when they talked about their gorgeous night-time filming? Because every time all we can see is Daniel Kaluuya's eyes in the black-blue darkness KJM is all I can see pic.twitter.com/z7WTh1c0sj

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) February 11, 2023

I liked Nope better my second time through; not that I precisely disliked it the first time, but it kind of played out long-game-like. I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it the first time. But it sat on me. And sat on me. The movie wouldn't let me go. So when I did finally watch it that second time last week a bunch of stuff clicked into place, and that's how it made my list of runners-up for 2022 posted yesterday. I have a feeling it's a movie I will watch a dozen more times and it very well might continue rising in my estimation -- we'll see. When I re-do my list ten years from now I'll probably think myself a fool for under-valuing it. We'll see. 

Anyway point being happy birthday, Jordan Peele!

I think y'all should rank his three movies in the comments.

So Who Saw Nope?

Did you see Jordan Peele's film Nope over the weekend? Some of you must have. I would love to write about Nope but the sad truth is nobody's paying me to write about it and I've got about ten thousand reviews of Fantasia Fest movies that are higher priorities at the moment, so I might not end up writing about Nope. But at the same time for sanity's sake I might have to force myself to write about Nope anyway because I do have things that I want to say about it! So... I'm stuck in a little bit of an undecided limbo today, is my point, unsure which way to go. We'll see how the week treats me. But for right this moment if anybody wants to share their thoughts to me on the movie here is the place to do it, in the comments of this post. I'll even give you a shirtless photo of scene-stealer Brandon Perea to coax you (I posted a few more on Twitter as well). Well it'll coax you to something anyway...

Just Say Nope

I was definitely hoping we'd get at least one more hot Steven Yeun photoshoot before Nope came out this weekend but it looks like we'll have to make due with the two we did get back in June -- check our archives for those. The above photo's an older one, I have probably even posted it before, but fuck it it's lovely and it fits my mood. Because of my week away I am only just seeing Nope tonight but it's an IMAX screening and Jordan Peele will supposedly be there for a Q&A so I win after all. Granted I'm sure it's going to be incredibly crowded and nobody's going to be wearing masks and I am dreading it but so it goes in 2022 I suppose! I'm always an anxious mess now so par meet course. Anyway stay tuned to my 'socials" as the kids call them (all linked in the right-hand column) and maybe you'll see something happen there, Nope-wise. Otherwise have a good weekend and stuff -- no really, I mean it. Sincerity spills out of me like so much gunk.

Nope Two

No they haven't green-lit a sequel for Jordan Peele's horror film Nope (out in July), at least not that they have told us about yet -- although do you think it would be called "Nope Two" or do you think it would be called "Nope Nope"? I prefer the latter -- but they have dropped a second poster for the film, seen above. The first one's right here, and here is the trailer. And contrary to the film's title -- YUP I am still excited.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

Fred Hampton: Politics is war without bloodshed 

while war is politics with bloodshed.

A happy 34 to Daniel Kaluuya today. Did I really 

never post the Nope trailer here? WTF me. Here ya go:

I Did It All For You, Lakeith

When I first read this news this morning I thought they were remaking the 1980 horror classic and I wasn't sure how I felt about that, but it ain't that -- Lakeith Stanfield is set to star in an Apple+ series based on a 2018 book by Victor LaValle called The Changeling, which sounds kinda The Omen-esque in that the birth of a son sends a married couple's lives spiraling into horror. Here is how Deadline describes the story:

"The Changeling, from Annapurna and Apple Studios, is a fairytale for grown-ups. A horror story, a parenthood fable and a perilous odyssey through a New York City you didn’t know existed. In the LaVelle’s book, when Apollo — the role that Stanfield will be playing — and Emma have their baby, Brian, it feels like both a reward and a challenge for the new dad. Apollo, the son of a single mother, had been scraping by as a bookseller who hunts estate and garage sales for rare first editions, so even the unusual circumstance of Brian’s birth (on a stalled subway train) seems like a blessing, as does the way Apollo stumbles across a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (inscribed by Harper Lee to Truman Capote, no less) shortly thereafter. But after some young-parent squabbles and inexplicable images on their smartphones foreshadow trouble, the story turns nightmarish."

Anybody read the book? The description on the book's Amazon page is a little different and brings up the subject of "racism" so I'm guessing Lakeith was looking for his own Get Out, just where he gets to be the star this time. Good on 'im. Lakeith should be the star more often. And in another nod towards Daniel Kaluuya, Melina Matsoukas, the director of Queen & Slim, will direct -- I didn't like Q&S much but it was plenty stylish and maybe I'll like this one more.

Big Nope

Weird that I have only before now mentioned this film in passing, given how much I am looking forward to it, but the teaser poster for Jordan Peele's next film has just been dropped -- we now know it's called Nope (and that is a great fucking title); we already knew it has Peele re-teaming with Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya, alongside the great Keke Palmer and the also great Steven Yeun. What else do we know and not know about Nope? It's out in July of 2022, and I do believe we know that Palmer is playing the villain. And it's got to do with relations between the sexes. And that poster seems to hint at a maybe-supernatural, or I should say extraterrestrial,  threat. Peele is so good with finding instantly iconic imagery though, right? The kite string (if that's what it is -- it could also be one of those flag strings from outside car dealerships, I suppose) coming out of the cloud feels immediately familiar, like out of a Charlie Brown panel, but obviously of a darker import this time around. Although this is where I admit that that tree that ate kites in Charlie Brown scared the shit out of me as a kid. Anybody else?

Steven Wonder

Maybe you woke up this morning immediately wondering to yourself, "Hey, what is Oscar nominee and godly-cheekboned actor Steven Yeun gonna do next anyway?" Well have I got news for you! But I don't actually have it here, I have it over at The Film Experience where I wrote said news up. Click on over and your day will be made! I promise! And if your day isn't made, well, fuck you. I'm not your momma.

Good Morning, Lakeith Only

Newly minted Oscar nominee (!!!) Lakeith Stanfield is looking mighty fine in (and on the cover) of the new issue of Flaunt magazine -- not that Lakeith ever looks anything but, but still. And I know people are weirded out about both his and his Judas and the Black Messiah co-star Daniel Kaluuya's nominations being for Supporting Actor when they are clearly co-leads of the film but...  well the Oscars themselves and their rules are dumb and arbitrary and measuring Art is ridiculous, let's just be happy that an actor as good as Lakeith -- and he gave my favorite performance in Judas -- got nominated when nobody thought he was going to. 

He's always so good, and even better and more important in real life he seems like a genuine weirdo and y'all know how I feel about weirdos, I was just going on about weirdos yesterday in my review of the new Udo Kier movie. The movies, hell the world, needs more genuine weirdos. And if they look like Lakeith, well, all the better. On that note (of looking at Lakeith) there's an entire photoshoot alongside his Flaunt interview and I've got it after the jump...

Pics of the Day

The magazine known as British Vogue has dropped their 2021 "Hollywood Portfolio" today and there's so much hotness therein after I was done scanning down the gallery I had to go to the bathroom and make sure my eyebrows were still there. (They are.) If you click over wear protective glasses, please! We have lost enough in this past year, nobody needs to go blind for beauty! There are women included in their portfolio of course but because I am me I gathered up all the photos of the Menfolk that I plan on having an Oscar night orgy with -- hey, in the famous words of that monster that haunted the baseball field back in the 1980s, "If you build the sex swing, they will come." That's how I remember that movie anyway. Maybe I rented something else? I don't know. Hit the jump for the hot guys photos...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Get Out (2017)

Jim: Life can be a sick joke. One day you're 

developing prints in the dark room and the next day 

you wake up - in the dark. Genetic disease.

Chris: Shit ain't fair, man.

Jim: Oh, you got that right! Shit ain't fair.

A happy 32nd birthday to Daniel Kaluuya today! If you haven't seen Judas and the Black Messiah yet you definitely should -- there's a lot great going on in it I thought, especially the performances. And very excited for him to re-team with director Jordan Peele, on some sort of horror thriller that will apparently have the terrific Keke Palmer playing the villain...

BABES NOTHING BUT BABES pic.twitter.com/zIQvls0tS6

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) February 16, 2021

LaKeith Stanfield One Time

Apparently this photo is from an interview in Vogue magazine circa Sorry To Bother You in 2018 but I don't have any idea how it could've made it past me for so long. No idea! Weird! Our LaKeith Archives, stuffed though they might be, have never felt so empty! That wrong righted have any of you watched Judas and the Black Messiah yet? I believe it's on HBO Max now? I thought it was terrific filmmaking with several sharp performances, and just as importantly a good reminder that...

Lakeith in Judas and the Black Messiah got me feeling all pic.twitter.com/CidcrlzBSN

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 27, 2021

LaKeith Stanfield Two Times

One of the most eagerly-anticipated still-remaining "2020 Movies" that will actually be coming out in 2021 is Judas and the Black Messiah, the bio-pic of Black Panther founder Fred Hampton starring Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith here that's out on February 12th. Whispers abound it's very good -- not a lot of people have seen it yet, but Sundance just announced it'll screen there at the end of this month so I'll at least be seeing it then. And that's what matters. My opinion on the Black Panther movie. Anyway EW has a cover-story out this week, check it here, that includes a big gallery of both the film's stars, see those here -- I just grabbed these two cuz they caught my eye. As LaKeith so often does. Oh and the trailer's over here if you haven't watched that yet.

Dear White People

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Today seemed like a good day for me to mostly shut the hell up and let the conversation around Black Lives Matter (donate here) and our fascistic police force / shit President do its own talking. That said I did manage to throw a little topical love this afternoon towards the tremendously chilling scene in Jordan Peele's film Get Out seen above, and Betty Gabriel's tremendously chilling work therein, for today's episode of "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" over at The Film Experience -- click on over for that. And then go fucking riot.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Get Out (2017)

Jim: I used to dabble myself. Wilderness mostly. I submitted to Nat Geo 14 times before realizing I didn't have the eye. I began dealing. Then, of course, my vision went to shit.
Chris: Damn.
Jim: I know. Life can be a sick joke. One day you're developing prints in the dark room and the next day you wake up - in the dark. Genetic disease.
Chris: Shit ain't fair, man.
 Jim: Oh, you got that right! Shit ain't fair.

I need to re-watch Get Out. It's been a hot minute; not since seeing Us earlier this year at least. Also with me not liking Queen & Slim it'd be a nice reminder how great Daniel Kaluuya can be. On that note -- a happy 31st birthday to him today! Up next for him is a bio-pic of famous Black Panther Fred Hampton reuniting him with his Get Out co-star Lakeith Stanfield, and then he's doing voice-work in some sort of  "darker fantasy" slash "radical retelling" of A Christmas Carol alongside Andy Serkis and Carey Mulligan. Mkay.

Slim Pickings

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I considered writing up Queen & Slim and The Two Popes at once, a two-fer, because they're both films I found undone by last acts that unraveled everything good that came before them, including some very good performances. And not just that but both instances involved my atheism getting activated (it's my superpower apparently), which made more sense when it came to The Two Popes since that one's specifically about religion. (Read that review here.)

I decided against that though because Queen & Slim, even if the character arc they carve out for its leading lady Jodie Turner-Smith is some regressive bullshit that pissed me off righteously, even if that it still has more to offer and deserves being grappled with on its own. For one Turner-Smith deserves to be a big star, she's an electric presence; add to that that Daniel Kaluuya, who's already proven himself more than enough with Get Out and Widows, delivers some of his finest work to date here.

Director Melina Matsoukas also shoots the hell out of this thing, gifting us with a molasses slow lovers-on-the-run road-trip across the south that riffs on the iconography of the Black American Experience in exactly the same way as Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise did with womanhood -- that was the movie I thought of the most watching this, and I sure don't mind being made to think of Thelma & Louise whenever I can be.

The script ends up being the film's big problem -- too often it mistakes generic for iconic; there's the Platonic Ideal of a table and then there's just a plain old unremarkable kitchen table, and Queen & Slim spends a lot of time on plain old unremarkable kitchen tables. Characters that should read large fall flat, impersonal -- real big screen presences like Chloe Sevigny and Flea and Indya Moore and Bokeem Woodbine show up but then just sort of float around for a minute or two; nothing about who they are seems to offer anything to the leads' journey. 

And oof, where Queen and her Slim are going -- wake me when we get there so I can start screaming. Without getting too aggressively spoilery let me just say that the film whittles down everything interesting about its "Queen" and finds growth out of recession. The character is far more interesting at the start than at the end -- Turner-Smith works hard to sell this as a flowering, but the movie leaves her stranded in the weeds. And me fuming, exhausted, sputtering please stop.

Let Him Or Her Without Sin Cast The First Stone

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They don't make 'em like Widows anymore - no... seriously. This is an adult action drama starring a massive cast of hyper talented actors shot by one of our finest artists that takes everything, from the genre aspects to the very real toll that the genre aspects take on the humans trapped inside of it, seriously - did they ever make movies like this? Sure yes back in the 1970s, but those movies didn't star women, they sure didn't star a cast mainly compromised of people of color, and Widows wows on all fronts. Technically audacious, thrilling, an emotional wringer. You'll be covered in bruises by the time this movie's done with you - your brain from being jostled around, and your fingers from digging into whoever or whatever is sitting closest by.

Viola Davis is front and center as Veronica, an unreal housewife to an elite criminal (Liam Neeson) living in a two-tone castle in the skies of Chicago - she says she's got a gig with the Teacher's Union but for all intents and purposes as this movie plays out that's just for show. Veronica's a fascinating character, never quite what she seems - since she's played by Viola Davis and is the lead we expect certain things, but Davis and director Steve McQueen seem intent on swatting away those expectations and leaving Veronica's culpability, her morality, in serious question. She is a terrifically complicated figure, and that's before she starts strutting around in power suits with a dog just this side of Blofeld's pussycat in her arms.

Nothing is simple or easy, and that's how heist thrillers oughta be - McQueen & Co dig deep into the meat of that, not just by adhering to Murphy's golden rule of eventual snafus, but by obscuring people's intentions, fogging up our mirrors in. Veronica is, for most of the movie, a woman grieving, but her reasons for being closed-off run deeper, and McQueen manages to pack a wallop or ten as he unfurls everybody's extraordinary damages.

And that extends to the supporting cast and then some, a crew of And Then Somes if ever there was - best in show is all thirty yellow-blond feet of Elizabeth Debicki, strapped into a Russian Hooker dress like a spangled explosive aimed at the further reaches of outer space, set to Boom. For those of us who've been waiting for Debicki to get to shine like we know she can (I saw her steal the stage right out from under Isabelle Huppert and Cate Blanchett once, so) this is a fine introduction to what she's capable of. She quakes under that effortlessly perfect skin of hers, injecting real danger, emotionally speaking, into every scene. 

That danger flows from every corner. You already know not to trust when Colin Farrell slips into a business suit or when Jacki Weaver teases her hair up, but it's Daniel Kaluuya in particular who rains terror down with his every terrifyingly flat glance - his sociopathic smiles stretch across the movie like a symphony of suppressed, half-swallowed shrieks, a low drumming hum of menace haunting every shadow and street. He is a chill when you're alone at night - he's a Halloween Costume come to life.

But he is, in the end, as human as anybody in this whip-smart full-throated bludgeon of old-school movie-making. There are moments in the last act where people act perhaps too dumb for their own good, but once the blood's rushed out of their heads to other places, once the blood's pooling on the floors and we're all white-knuckling it towards hellfire, who wouldn't? The final resting places where McQueen & screenwriter Gillian Flynn start to lean hard into genre convention, tossing together all of their well-structured toys into a broken heap, they feel fine after a couple days letting them rest, once you sort out it's all after all a movie, and what a movie it all is.

Do Dump or Marry: I Wanna Wakanda

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I was tempted to use Black Panther director Ryan Coogler for today's "Do Dump or Marry" in honor of the movie because if you ask me...

... Ryan Coogler is as hot as anybody in the cast. (Well maybe not as hot as Daniel Kaluuya. Daniel wins over everybody, if you ask me.) But then from what I have heard once I have actually seen Black Panther I will regret not giving 1/3rd of this post to actor Winston Duke, who admittedly turns it on as "M'Baku" even just in stills...

... so let's go with him. Him versus Chadwick Boseman in the lead 

and Michael B. Jordan as the villain! 

Give your answers in the comments!

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