Pics of the Day

It's been over a year since I last posted about Jake Gyllenhaal's first foray into television, a re-do of the Harrison Ford legal thriller Presumed Innocent (based on Scott Turow's book) for Apple and they just dropped the first official image -- Jake dapper in three-piece suits, I am here for it. The series is spearheaded by JJ Abrams and David E. Kelley so no slouch in the showrunner department -- also it co-stars Ruth Negga and Renate Reinsve and Lily Rabe and Jake's bro-in-law Peter Sarsgaard (sidenote: is there any modern actor more built for legal thriller than Pete? He just seems perfect for them) so it's got a lot going for it. No word on a release date yet, this was just a glimpse of Apple's 2024 slate. And it also included our first official look at Colin Farrell in Sugar (below), about which we know next-to-nothing exscept he plays a private detective, which is kinda obvious from the photo. Men in suits!

Good Morning, World

Awww remember Bradley Cooper on Alias? We were all so full of possibility back then. I try to remember back to those happier times when he comes up now but he makes it difficult, what with the stealing jobs from Jake and the ear-bleeding musicals with Lady Gaga. I did think he was terrific in Nightmare Alley though, and not just because I saw his wee-wee. And maybe him macking on Matt Bomer in [the movie he stole from Jake] will be something I also gravitate towards. The world is still full of possibilites, believe it or not! And so a happy 48th birthday to Bradley today. Let's all watch some Alias today in his honor. 

Presumed Gyllenhaal

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the hungry hungry content machine got its teeth hooked into Jake Gyllenhaal's hide, and here we are -- Deadline's reported (thx Mac) that he's signed up to star in an Apple series adaptation of Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow's 1987 legal thriller book that was turned into a Harrison Ford movie back in 1990. Because a two hour movie is not enough anymore -- now the same story must be six hour-long episodes! Anyway the people adapting this time are big, as is only fitting to bring our beloved Jack Twist and Donnie Darko down to the small screen --  JJ Abrams and David E. Kelley, specifically. I never read the book and I probably saw the movie back in the 90s on video but I remember nothing about it, so here's how they describe the plot:

"It tells the story of a horrific murder that upends the Chicago Prosecuting Attorneys’ office when one of its own is suspected of the crime... Gyllenhaal will play Rusty Sabich, the fervent prosecutor suspected of killing a close colleague when the evidence begins to point to him... As reimagined by Kelley, who is an attorney by trade, Presumed Innocent the TV series will be exploring obsession, sex, politics, and the power and limits of love, as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together."

Well sex sounds good, at least. Let's get Jake into some Skinemax shit. Anyway I don't mean to sound skeptical, I look forward to this and hope it's good, and six hour-long episodes of Jake doing anything is fine by me. 

Bradley's Been a Bad Boy

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I was a big Bradley Cooper fan for a very long time -- I was both an Alias nerd and a Wet Hot American Summer devotee, after all -- and then, and then, A Star is Born happened. A truly bad movie that was so inexplicably enjoyed by so many smart (and not so smart) people that I felt like I'd fully lost my mind that Oscar season. Seriously. That movie is bad. And while Bradley's performance isn't by any stretch of the imagination the film's biggest problem -- that would be Lady Gaga's absolutely abysmal work and the film's wretched script -- it is, in the immortal words of Pete Campbell, Not Great Bob. He sells a lot of the emotional heft of the flick -- whatever little heft it does have, actually -- but that booming baritone croaking thing he is doing with his voice is so over the top cheesy and distracting. And then he proved himself an unbearable humorless schmuck all Oscar Season long, and my point is he did a real damn good job of whittling away most of my good Bradley Cooper feelings over the course of a few months. Not Good, Brad!

Anyway I'm going to have to try to get over it -- and judging by how annoyed I am still getting thinking about that entire debacle here in August of 2020 I have some work to do! -- because the future projects he's lined up as an actor are going to demand my attention, and hopefully, my enthuasiasms. Of course there's Guillermo Del Toro's remake of  the Carny Noir Nightmare Alley, which has him tackling Tyrone Power's role opposite Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara and Toni Collette, and which began filming in Buffalo way back before the pandemic -- not sure where that stands now; if they finished filming before shutdown, I mean.

And now today it's been revealed that he is going to be in Paul Thomas Anderson's next movie. I told you about it last November -- it's based on PTA's own childhood growing up in the Valley in the 1970s and it's actually supposed to be a good and proper ensemble piece a la Boogie Nights or Magnolia, aka the sorts of movies he started out making, as opposed to the One (or Two) Man Armies he's been fixated on post-There Will Be Blood. (Although just so we're clear, from my perspective Paul Thomas Anderson has never made a single bad movie, period.) Anyway that lessens the weight on Bradley Cooper's shoulders, thankfully -- if this is an ensemble film my feelings won't rest entirely on his performance. If he went and ruined PTA's perfect record, hooooo boy.

The Pleasure Dom

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If you need something to look forward to -- and who the living fuck doesn't need that right now -- I tell you that in just three days Run, the new HBO series from producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her right-hand woman Vicky Jones (they've worked together on basically everything) and starring Domhnall Gleeson here and the great Merritt Wever, will premiere! I shared the trailer back in January, approximately 9000 years ago -- it looks like an absolute blast.

THE ONLY THING KEEPING ME GOING IS RUN PREMIERES IN THREE DAYS https://t.co/ge6zPG8vwV

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 9, 2020

Anyway since that shit's clearly massaging the needy wanting happy spots in our brain tissue this afternoon I figured we'd keep the pleasure rolling with a lil' Domhnall quiz, as we do enjoy this particular ginger...

online survey

The Tight Pants Strike Back

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You may have (but probably didn't) notice I didn't mention seeing Star Wars XXX: The Rise in my Tightpants in my write-up of favorite things I saw over the holidays -- its absence was as deafening as was the crowd's response to the film's final title card at my screening. What a pile of space-poop it was. But at least we'll always have the set of gifs I just posted on our Tumblr of Oscar Isaac wearing Those Pants and snuggling on John Boyega, at least. If you have any thoughts to share on the movie -- even if it's just to reciprocate my space poop! -- y'all feel free to do so in the comments. And with that... that's that for this week, I guess! Let's all go get un-hungover, watch the Golden Globes together with me on Twitter on Sunday night, and be here bright & early Monday to start all over again...

The Rise of Tight Pants

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I suppose it's antithetical to post about something when I'm avoiding something but hey, I'm just like any other man, and I just wanna look at Oscar Isaac in tight pants. (Sidenote: our pal Manuel interviewed Oscar recently and the tight pants came up... so to speak) Point being I'm not seeing the new Star Wars until Sunday and I'm neither in a huge rush nor terribly enthusiastic about it, but I'd prefer to not get it spoiled. It's just, I realized this week... do people really give a shit about any of these new characters? I like the actors obviously, but these characters -- and yes I include weepy man-baby Kylo Ren -- all read as wafer-thin to me. I recall some visuals from the last couple of movies -- Last Jedi was flat out gorgeous -- but where those characters were emotionally? That's like footnotes. I mean... I don't know what I expect. It's not like Luke & Leia & Han were exactly bastions of depth. Sorry am I murdering everybody's childhoods right now? I'll shut up and make it better:

Someone captured Oscar Isaac fixing Pedro Pascal's collar and We'll Never Be The Same pic.twitter.com/If7ICw9Qbs

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 19, 2019

Know From Adam

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Well here's a thing you and me can read here on our lunch breaks -- I write this as my dripping-with-snow miniature pizza just got delivered to my office and yes, I tipped well -- and said thing is Adam Driver's new cover store for Rolling Stone magazine, at this link. I hope they talk about Marriage Story some and it's not just Star Wars because nobody can actually talk about Star Wars beforehand, which makes for a boring read. A sexy brooding red-and-black photo-shoot, sure, but a boring read. Speaking of the shoot hit the jump for more...

Pics of the Day

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While everybody was busy complaining that they can't buy Baby Yoda merch on Twitter -- y'all know you're falling into (to quote the wise Admiral Ackbar) a trap with that one right? -- EW went and dropped a great big cover story on the next feature Star Wars movie, and gifted us with several new pictures in the process; see all of that here. All I care about is apparent battle going on between Oscar Isaac and John Boyega to see who's wearing the tightest pants in the galaxy. And for the record Oscar is winning -- sorry John. (click to embiggen)

Pic of the Day

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The new Vanity Fair is all Star Wars, with a huge gallery of The Rise of Skywalker photos from the set -- click here to see them all. The shot of Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley fighting in the snow (I think it's snow) is really lovely but of course I have to highlight the shot of Oscar Isaac once again doing his best Captain Tightpants impersonation, because hey you know where you are. You know what we do. The Rise of Skywalker is out on December 20th.

Pics of the Day

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There is a four-day celebration of all things Star Wars happening right now and besides the most exciting thing (that being Oscar Isaac's current voluptuous beard) the next best are these two newly released pictures of Oscar donning some very Captain Tight-Pants tight pants for the still untitled Episode IX, out in December.

JJ Abrams returns to the directing chair this time around, since all the fanboys crapped their diapers over Rian Johnson's hurtful movie. ETA oh wait literally as I hit publish on this post they announced the title -- it's The Rise of Skywalker. Mkay. And here's the first teaser!
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Live Long and Pecker

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I'll never be accused of being the world's biggest Trekkie but I live with one and I appreciate the Trek universe fine enough - it's not a love, per se, but a genuine like for sure. If Bryan Fuller had stayed attached to Star Trek Discovery that might have changed - I'd have watched the show, at least! But he didn't, so I haven't gotten around to it - did any of you? Opinions seemed all over the place. Anyway I might have to give it a go now because the gorgeous and longstanding crush Ethan Peck (grandson of Gregory) has just landed the role of Baby Spock. Okay "Baby" is pushing it - Ethan is 32 now, which is the exact same age Zachary Quinto was when he took on the role in the 2009 Star Trek movie. Anyway you oughta scroll through our Ethan Archives, they're worth a click I promise, and then you can hit the jump here for a few more recent pics I just swiped off Ethan's Instagram as a means of celebration or whatever...

Fear Strikes Out Gays

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The relationship between the actors Anthony Perkins & Tab Hunter in the mid-1950s is one we've covered here at MNPP plenty over the years - here's a little post but really just scroll through our Tab Hunter Archives and you'll see Tony all over the place. These classic Hollywood gay romances (see also Cary Grant & Randolph Scott) fascinate me, as I think they do any movie-loving homosexual so it was only a matter of time before Hollywood, full of movie-loving homosexuals itself, caught up. And by "caught up" I mean "gave a gay person enough power to produce something of this sort." 

Enter Zach Quinto! He's teaming up with his Star Trek buddy JJ Abrams to produce a movie about those two titled Tab & Tony, which will apparently take its inspiration from Tab Hunter's (wonderful) autobiography of a couple years back and which had a couple of chapters devoted to their time together. What I think is especially interesting about this is those two have never really seemed like they had the great love affair we might want to ascribe to them - it always seemed like they probably had some really good sex but that was followed by just a couple of deeply difficult years together, made all the harder by a business that refused to let them just be, but also by a mis-matched clash of personalities.

Those two factors fed one another, obviously - their relationship fell apart when Tony pursued a film role, that of baseball player Jimmy Piersall in the 1957 film Fear Strikes Out (and a terribly, terribly apt title, that; that could probably be the title of the bio-pic itself), which was a role Tab had just played for TV; basically Tony swept in and stole Tab's big role out from under him. 

Anyway as soon as this news broke last night everybody on Twitter was throwing out casting ideas - this was a good one, I thought...

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Well because it should be Andrew Garfield and Billy Magnussen.

— Ryan (@sortathatguy) June 6, 2018

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... although they're both 10 years older 

than Tab & Tony were at the time. 

I thought maybe you could go this way:

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I have to think about it more but you could probably just throw a couple of random twinks from Dunkirk in there and call it a day pic.twitter.com/Rshf733ogO

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) June 7, 2018

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But I am putting it to y'all!

Give up some casting ideas in the comments...

Three By Netflix

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Somehow I ended up having an entirely Netflix-centric weekend this past weekend - I did go out to the theater to see some movies but they were all things I had seen before; the new stuff I watched was all on Netflix. I don't watch many movies on Netflix anymore - I usually just turn the streamer on for one of their series - so this was a real anomaly kinda experience. Point being you too can be like me and watch any or all of these movies on Netflix whenever you like, and I'm gonna do a trio of quick review-like things to tell you what I thought. Even quicker: I definitely recommend the first two!

Strong Island -- This doc, which tells the story of director Yance Ford's brother being murdered and the subsequent totally botched police response, finds entirely unexpected ways to be quietly, profoundly devastating - it's not at all preachy with any political agenda (not that there's not a way to do that right, but it's not always the way); it just ingratiates you into this family, see their love and feel their humanity, understand their story, and then just presents you with a portrait of painfully intimate devastation. And in saying these things I keep hesitating because to do so makes it sound like a slog, but it really isn't - Yance has an utterly transfixing face that we watch in close-up, and so much of this story is joy, and life, and family. It's only in the aftermath where the loss truly takes hold. Not to be missed. (Strong Island is nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars this year - you should read my friend Glenn's review of the movie, which goes into better depth and which I totally co-sign, over at The Film Experience.)

The Wound -- I'm not one hundred percent sure it sticks its landing - I'm not sure whether the inevitability of what happens is profound, in its inevitability, or whether it was just a smidge too obvious a choice - but the path that The Wound takes to get there felt so singular an experience I'm surely willing to cut it some slack. Set in rural South Africa it tells the story of a possibly doomed gay love affair against a tribal initiation ritual - I guess no one outside of the tribe itself knew about this practice (yes, it involves male genital mutilation) until about a decade ago when Nelson Mandela wrote about it in one of his books? Anyway even against that backdrop The Wound has an arresting and unexpected story to tell that's no doubt a landmark in its own country, and it tells that story in surprising and frank ways. 

The Cloverfield Paradox -- This is digging into the Way Back box and a fairly obscure reference but does anybody remember the skit on Mad TV that made fun of the delightfully craptastic syndicated sci-fi series Cleopatra 2525? The main joke was about how the show only had one set, a single room, that the characters would run from one side of to the other side and back again. I thought of that joke watching The Cloverfield Paradox, which spends I swear to god at least a quarter of its runtime having characters run off in opposite directions down hallways. 

We watch Gugu Mbatha-Raw run down a hallway one way, then we watch Chris O'Dowd run down a totally different hallway, then we watch Ziyi Zhang run down another, and on, and on, and The Cloverfield Paradox has a really big cast. A really big cast of really excellent actors that spend most of their time... running down hallways. There are some fun, smart ideas buried inside these box, but you really gotta dig around to find them. Mostly, hallways.

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Good Morning, World

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I didn't see War Dogs - because oh my god why would I have seen War Dogs? - so I can't tell you how big Bradley Cooper's role was in that, but seeing as how he's listed way way way down the page on IMDb I am guessing small. And War Dogs is the only live-action movie that bradley Cooper has acted in since Joy in 2015! He's done voice-work as Rocket the Raccoon in the Guardians movie of course, and he was on that Limitless television show some I guess. 

But it's been a B-Coop quiet couple of years. He couldn't even be bothered to show up in the Wet Hot American Summer show and had to be replaced by Adam Scott, which they played to humorous effect. I know he's working on his Big Serious Comeback as the writer slash director slash co-star of Lady Gaga in the A Star in Born remake, which just recently got an Awards Season push to next fall, so they're clearly gunning for attention with it. And he had a baby, or something. 

So I am sure we'll hear all the PR Spin soon enough, probably starting over the next couple of months, on What Bradley Cooper Has Been Up To, all the serious Career Reassessment jibber jabber, oh boy, can't wait. Anyway I've always like B-Coop, since he made Sweet Sweet Summer Camp Love with Michael Ian Black in the original Wet Hot and since he was Sidney's Sexy Bestie on Alias. So let's hope he can remind us of that soon. Today's his 43rd birthday so wish him a happy one by hitting the jump to stare at another dozen of these gifs from the 2009 rom-com  He's Just Not That Into You...
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Who Wore It Best?

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WHAT A PERFECT NIGHT pic.twitter.com/DyMypfBgxs

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 13, 2017

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Some little outer space movie is out in a few theaters tonight and I have heard a couple of people mention it here and there so I figured I'd take stock of the total nobodies who are trying their hands at acting in it since they showed up in ratty tuxedos looking like hobos at its microscopic garbage party the other night, just cuz.
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Who Wore It Best?

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There are a lotta hot people celebrating birthdays today - we already wished Mark Ruffalo one here on the blog and we just wished Stranger Things' second season sexpot Dacre Montgomery one on Twitter - and among them are also Mads Mikkelsen, turning 52, and Alden Ehrenreich, turning 28.  Coincidentally both actors who've gotten sucked up into the Star Wars machine - Mads was in Rogue One and Alden is of course playing the young Han Solo. Anyway see lots more Mads here, and see lots more Alden here.

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John Boyega Twelve Times

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I'm all thrown off my game after a frustrating morning - pictures of John Boyega in GQ wearing plaid pants and sitting in front of bookshelves do feel like the universe extending an olive branch though, so I'll accept. Still it's taking me a bit to get properly going so until I can do that let's just enjoy this photo-shoot, which you can view after the jump...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Attack the Block (2011)

PesPest: They arrest us for nothing anyway. 

Moses: No, I reckon yeah, I reckon, the Feds sent them anyway. Government probably bred those things to kill black boys. First they sent in drugs, then they sent guns and now they're sending monsters in to kill us. They don't care man. We ain't killing each other fast enough. So they decided to speed up the process. 

Pest: Believe! 

I need to re-watch Attack the Block again. 

A happy birthday to John Boyega today!

Which is Hotter?

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Doesn't it seem as if Oscar Isaac has just up and vanished? I guess it was smart of him, after he rose to the throne of "The Internet's Boyfriend" during the Star Wars hype, to slink away and be quiet for a bit - lord knows we love to turn on our lovers. He's got movies from Spielberg, Clooney, and Alex Garland next year, so 2017 we'll presumably see more of him. Anyway I was missing him today so I went looking around and I found the following picture (no idea where it originated) and obviously I knew right away what we needed to do...

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