So Who Watches Servant?

I only started watching Servant a few weeks back but I've already caught up and would love to hear what y'all think of the show, if you do think of it, and if so also what you thought of the second season finale, which just aired this weekend. I stay vague to avoid spoilers but have at it in the comments if you'd like to. Or if just just want to enjoy that photo of the show's leading man Toby Kebbell I suppose that's fine as well.

Started watching Servant which is serving of a terrific reminder of Toby Kebbell pic.twitter.com/XFbJjCHbaX

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) February 9, 2021

Good Morning, World

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Today we'd like to wish a happy 38th birthday to the actor Toby Kebbell, with some gifs I can't believe I've never posted before -- Toby starred in what I think might be my favorite episode of Black Mirror, or at least it's the one I remember freaking me out the most, the one called "The Entire History of You" from the show's very first season, when the hot first-person sex-scene with Hot Toby Kebbell...

... was revealed to be this weird computer simulation. 

and they smash cut from the above to this horror:

Jinkies! Terrifying. Anyway that's when I really knew I loved Black Mirror, the end. Are there new Black Mirror episodes coming any time soon? The show hasn't been nearly as good since it switched over to Netflix but here and there you get something that still shocks and surprises. And of course "San Junipero" is really The Best, if not actually The Scariest. Hit the jump for a couple more Kebbell gifs...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can leaern from:

Prince of Persia (2010)

Prince Dastan: I know it hasn't been easy between 

us, Garsiv, but still, we are brothers. 

Garsiv: Touching words with my sword at your throat. 

If only this flick had more Jake sword-fighting with Toby Kebbell
content. Alas! A not-so-happy 10th anniversary to it, a terrible
movie, which nevertheless gave us Jake looking like this:

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Nic'll Destroy Ya

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I loved Karyn Kusama's film The Invitation the moment I saw it (my review) but that love has only deepened and strengthened with time, and I now count it among the finest films of the decade. It is terrifying, and in its terror has brutal and unnerving things to say about us as humans in this time and this place - like the best horror films always do. Anyway I'd have been excited about Kusama's new film Destroyer anyway given it stars Nicole Kidman and Sebastian Stan (see a pic of him in character here) and Toby Kebbell and Tatiana Maslany and Scoot McNairy, but in the wake of The Invitation this is even more of a desirable object than it might've been. This first official image of Kidman, who's playing a detective, comes via Vanity Fair - click on over for some quotes from Kidman with more specifics on the character she's playing too. Destroyer is out on Christmas.

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Big Monkey Business

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The trailer for Kong: Skull Island has been out for several days now I think, but have I watched it? No I have not. I suppose you could say I had other things on my mind - and hey they also involve a great big hairy monster rampaging across and destroying the world - so perhaps I will be forgiven. But hey maybe you haven't watched it either so here, let's watch it together! Agreed? Agreed.

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I think it's interesting that both this and this past summer's Tarzan movie are using Samuel L. Jackson, the angriest black man in the business and bless him for it, to confront stories that were race-oriented in their inceptions. The Legend of Tarzan muddled that up pretty thoroughly and I imagine this movie will too - adventure and special effects are prioritized well beyond the kind of ideas that make stories resonate or last beyond that big first box office weekend. Anyway! Things look big and boomy and hey there's Toby Kebbell...

I Am Link

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--- Spoon Fulla Whishaw - The Mary Poppins sequel is still a thing that's happening and somehow it keeps gathering up great names - Emily Blunt! Meryl Streep! Lin-Manuel Miranda! - but it just captured its lynch-pin, the one that forces me to see the blasted thing - my theatrical wisp boyfriend Ben Whishaw is in talks to play grown-up Michael, who it sounds like might be the lead character (you know besides that rude nanny everybody inexplicably loves).

--- Bob Senior - I think most of us probably knew already that Robert De Niro's father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr., was gay, but this new interview Junior just did with Out Magazine is the first time I have heard him really talk about it and it's worth checking out. I guess he made a documentary for HBO that's airing soon. I love that they asked him why he has never played a gay role (although his role in Stardust does come to mind). And I'd never actually seen Sr's paintings before - they aren't bad!

--- Ben Gay Done That - As if we needed fewer reasons to see the new Ben-Hur movie (Jack Huston as the leading man is plenty of reason to not see anything, folks) now comes word that they totally de-gayed the thing and upped the Jesus ante - pretty-boy Stephen Boyd is spinning in his luxuriously gilded grave, no doubt, while Charlton Heston smiles on from Satan's side. And shame on you, Toby Kebbell.

--- Lay Over Get It - I only half read this interview with Bachelorette writer-director Leslye Headland because it seems to go too far into depth about plot points in her new play The Layover, but I am excited she has a new play out this fall - y'all know I love Bachelorette as much as I love having sex with a hamburger. Oh and the play version of Bachelorette is also getting staged this fall too!

--- Pretty Penny - I haven't given this a proper read-through myself yet but Variety interviewed the production designer of Penny Dreadful (thx Mac), who was nominated for an Emmy, and rightfully so -- would that everything from top to bottom on that lovely, lovely show was nominated. (Yes I am getting up right now and going to the store just to buy a forty so I can pour it out for Eva Green before I even finish this post.)

--- Sister Fight - This is a couple of days old (okay all of these stories are a couple of days old, I am slow, sue me) but maybe you missed the news that Catherine Zeta-Jones (known in my house only as "The Zeta" - feel free to borrow that!) has joined the cast of Ryan Murphy's new series Feud -- which will be about the feud between Bette Davis & Joan Crawford as played by Susan Sarandon & Jessica Lange -- in which she will be playing no less than the living legend Olivia De Havilland herself. The thing that scares me about this (I use "The Zeta" as a pejorative, you see) is it makes me think the second season of this feud show will be all about Olivia De Havilland's legendary lifetime feud with her sister Joan Fontaine - topic-wise that's terrific but a full season of The Zeta? Not so sure about that...

--- And Finally there's a new trailer out for Andrea Arnold's film American Honey, watch it below! If you missed the original trailer we did a post on it here. I think this might be, now that I have seen Paul Verhoeven's Elle, the film that I'm most looking forward to this Fall. I wish it was playing NYFF dammit!

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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... gnawing on Toby Kebbell's zucchini.

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(via) You have to admit he's got a great big zucchini.
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Quote of the Day

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"I was disappointed, but the fans aren’t wrong. The fans want what they want to see and if they don’t get satisfaction, they let you know. I don’t know if I learned anything from [playing] Doom, apart from, perhaps, when I see something I don’t agree with, to voice that immediately. As an actor, you’re conscious that your career is at stake with each job, especially on these larger productions,” he said. “A film like that comes out, and I’m being sent maybe four scripts in a week, and those scripts go to zero when it doesn’t come out successful, so that actively affects my career."

I'll always give an actor or actress a pat on the back (or the body-part of their choosing, in Toby's case) when they're honest enough to admit something they made didn't work, and since everyone on Earth agrees that the Fantastic Four movie did not...

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Holy shit is Fantastic Four excruciating and ugly garbage, and everyone associated with the making of it should have to do community service

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 30, 2015

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... oh god I want those two hours back... anyway it's nice to hear at least one of the actors acknowledging that. Bless you, Toby Kebbell. I can't believe that anybody's holding the film against him specifically though - what is he, in like five minutes of it? I mean "Doctor Doom" is in more than five minutes of it but this movie's "Doctor Doom" is a shitty masked special effect that nobody should ever associate with Toby. We should associate Toby with that awesome episode of Black Mirror he was in where I first developed my crush on him though, that's what we should associate him with...