Good Morning, World

British actor Daniel Ings has been making a name for himself over the past couple of years thanks to showy roles in Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen series (which was where I had my "Who the hell is he???" moment) and then as the party-loving Ser Lyonel Barotheon on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (which is where I think most other people had that moment). Or amybe you know him from Sex Education? (I never watched that show.) But as eye-catching and entertaining as he was on those series I have to admit I am suddenly, now that I stumbled upon these gifs, longing for a return to THIS LOOK which he was rocking circa 2020 on the British series I Hate Suzie opposite Billie Piper. Bring back the bear, Daniel! The bear, the beard, the all of it. Woof! I actually tried to watch IHS over the pandemic but it didn't land with me so I gave up after a couple of episodes -- now I sure feel the fool. Just look what I missed out on!

I Want To Believe, Actually

I still haven't gotten around to watching Atlanta and I don't remember her leaving an impact on me in Watchmen (I was really very distracted by James Wolk in his bat-panties while watching that show, to the point where most everything else was blasted out of my brain) but I can very specifically pinpoint the moment that I sat up and was like, "Danielle Deadwyler is a goddamned rock-star" and it was her small but pivotal role on Station Eleven. And since then she's only gotten better every time I've seen her --  Till was always going to be a hard watch but damn AMPAS to hell for ignoring her performance, she's tremendous in it. Anyway that's all to say I hooted with glee when it was announced this weekend that Ryan Coogler's X-Files reboot has found its leading lady with her -- I was never averse to the idea of bringing this show back with new people because the base idea of it is rock-solid and it could and should keep going for ages. And okay no I don't think Sinners is the Best Picture of 2025 but it's still an immensely entertaining horror film with some great scares and performances so let Coogler be the one to do this. Hiring Danielle gives me even more confidence. Also it's pretty clear that Gillian Anderson wants to show up in some capacity as Scully, and Coogler's on the record that they've talked. I'm in! All in! I want this on the air tonight by the time I get home dammit. Get to it!

The Moment I Fell For... Aimee Lou Wood

I keep seeing White Lotus breakout Aimee Lou Wood's quote about feeling "ugly" from her new interview with GQ bouncing around social media today -- Pajiba did a good piece on it here -- and it's making me feel sad, crazy, and angry all at once. So let's give Miss Aimee Lou her roses! I only watched the first season of Sex Education and remember liking her there (although my eye was more drawn to Conor Swindells on that series for, uhh, obvious reasons). But it was her role as a cheerful secretary opposite Bill Nighy (who was giving the performance of his own career) in Oliver Hermanus' 2022 film Living (a remake of Kurosawa's masterpiece Ikiru that I voted my sixth favorite film of that year) where Aimee Lou Wood first won my heart -- I haven't seen Mike White talk about why he was fighting for her so hard to win the role but I would not be surprised if he'd seen Living as well; she should have been nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar alongside Nighy if you ask me. As I said in my review of the film she's tasked with representing all the light and life that Nighy's misplaced amid his daily grudgery, and Wood does so effortlessly (as she did on Lotus, albeit with a darker edge) -- she's just one of those performers that is is incredibly easy to fall head over heels for. And given the enchanting memes that her Lotus character of Chelsea gave life to (not to mention the general reaction to the finale) I don't think I am alone in feeling that way. We adore you, Aimee Lou! 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Elle (2016)

Michèle: I'm very sorry for all you've been through.

Rebecca: Fortunately, I have faith. What's it for

if not to get through tough times.

An incredibly super duper happy 46th birthday to the actress Virginie Efira, who's managed to skyrocket to the ranks of one of our favorite working actresses in the six years since the movie quoted above. It wasn't that movie that did it -- that movie was obviously Huppert's show and then some (here's my review), although Efira did leave a mark in that scene (one that actually changed the way I viewed the entire movie). But no it was the next movie that Verhoeven made with her that did it -- Benedetta, glorious Benedetta (my review), which of course starred Efira as a lesbian nun who goes mad with holiness, of several different sorts. 

What a picture!!! But as revelatory an experience as that film was Efira's has proved herself as much if not even more formidable elsewhere -- she's tremendous in the 2019 movie Sibyl, which I reviewed during that year's NYFF right here. That was how I knew she'd kill it in Benedetta -- and sure enough!

And then I saw her in two films in the past year which have proven beyond any shadow she's the real f'ing deal -- I haven't written properly about Other People's Children (it just got released a few weeks ago here) but our pal Cláudio did at The Film Experience and I underline everything he says about it. Click that link and read.

I did not have anything near enough time to review the also-out-this-week OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN (which I saw at Sundance) but go see it, see it, SEE IT! Virginie Efira is a MARVEL, truly one of our best working today. An unforgettable heartbreaker, this one @musicboxfilms pic.twitter.com/LGajocQHk8

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 21, 2023

And then there's Revoir Paris from director Alice Winocour, which I saw at my beloved annual "Rendez-vous with French Cinema" series here in NYC at Film at Lincoln Center back in March -- Efira is once again phenomenal, this time as a woman who survives a mass shooting and falls apart as she can't remember what happened in the aftermath. It's a perfect companion piece to Winocour's film Disorder with Matthias Schoenaerts (reviewed here); they'd make a great double-feature actually, both being about people manifesting their reactions to trauma in experiential, outward ways.

Anyway Revoir Paris is being released here in the U.S. on June 23rd in New York and then in L.A. the next week, with a wider roll-out to follow planned, and we very much recommend seeking it out. We very much recommend seeking out all of the movies I have mentioned here, all because of the magnificent Efira. Here's the trailer:

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Monster-in-Law (2005)

Viola: That slut is practically throwing herself on him!

Ruby: I don't blame her, that boy's one fine piece of ass!

I have never seen this movie but it's the great Wanda Sykes' 59th birthday today and the movie roles are pretty slim when it comes to Wanda unfortunately, so we roll with what we have. And what we have is so many, so so many, sassy friends. But seeing as how I know that Wanda is calling Michael Vartan a "fine piece of ass" here...

... I am prone to agree. Anyway if you love Wanda as much as I do then you'll be happy to hear she's got a new comedy special coming out soon! It'll be called I'm an Entertainer and it will be hitting Netflix on May 23rd. On stage is where she really gets to shine. Do we think she'll address the "Oscar Slap" situation? I think we might all be over that by then -- I think we were all over that by a week after the Oscars last year -- but I'm sure if Wanda does address it she'll drop some wisdom. Anyway to celebrate my favorite stand-up today here is the "Moment I Fell For" Wanda Sykes, from Chris Rock's old show...

Good Morning, World

Today we wish a happy 50th birthday to one of the movies great under-appreciated talents and sexpots Alessandro Nivola, long-time MNPP fave -- if you don't believe us spend a year skipping back through our Alessandro Nivola Archives! They are thorough, perhaps excessively so. Seems like the right time to share a couple of never-before-posted gifs from Laurel Canyon anyway, which alongside Jurassic Park III the year before made up "The Moment I Fell For..." Alessandro. Who didn't? In related news Laurel Canyon just turned 20 this year -- think it's time for a revisit! There was actually Alessandro news yesterday -- he's going to co-star with the great André Holland in an Apple+ series called The Big Cigar and yes they are totally trying to bait me with that title.  The series is about the Black Panther Huey Newton (Holland) escaping to Cuba with help from Easy Rider producer Bert Schneider (Nivola), and yeah that sounds like a lot of story to tell! Very excited for that, and for the several other projects that Nivola's got lined up too. (Thankfully for someone so under-appreciated he works lots.) Happy birthday!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Christine (2016)

Christine: Is it paranoia if, indeed, 

everyone is coming after you?

Having now watched Antonio Campos' film a couple of times I think I can pretty easily state with real conviction that, as I suspected on my first watch back in 2016, this movie is a masterpiece and Rebecca Hall's performance in it is one of the all-time greats. This is one of the ones that proves the rule that the Oscars are fuck-witted numbskulls who wouldn't know a great performance if it slapped them in the face.

And I was tempted here on Hall's 40th birthday to do a big list of all my favorite performances from her -- of which there are at least a dozen, maybe more, at this point -- but I just kept coming back to that cold hard fact. This performance. This one. This one deserved all the marbles and all the pies and yet here we are six years later and this woman's writing and directing a truly great movie like Passing and she couldn't even score an Oscar nomination for that? Fuck the Oscars, man. Rebecca Hall is everything. Okay fuck it, talking about her awesomness has gotten me all worked up! I gotta do a damn list! Here are...

My 5 Fave Rebecca Hall Perfs Besides Christine

Beth, The Night House

"You were right. There is nothing.

Nothing is after you."

Loretta, Tales From the Loop

"See, there's nothing to be afraid of. 

It's just different."

Elizabeth Marston, Professor Marston...

"When are you going to stop justifying

 the whims of your cock with science?"

Anna, Permission

"It was different... different different."

Vicky, Vicky Christina Barcelona

"You're using me to rewrite your own history."

Runners-up: The Gift, The Prestige,

Godzilla vs Kong, Please Give, Red Riding: 1974...

And stay tuned for her movie Resurrection, coming in 2022!

I reviewed it right here. It is further proof of her rule.

----------------------------------

What are your favorite Rebecca Hall performances?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

Minnie: So maybe nobody loves me. 

Maybe nobody will ever love me. But maybe 

it's not about being loved by somebody else.

Happy 30th birthday to the actress Bel Powley today! So tremendously good right outta the gate with this performance here (okay she'd been in several things before this one but this is "The Moment I Fell For" energy if every there was) -- here's my old review of this fairly perfect movie if you'd like to read it. I don't watch The Morning Show so I didn't realize she was on that -- how is she? Anybody watch that and know? I hope she's thriving. And I'm excited to see she's in at least one episode of Cary Fukunaga's upcoming series Masters of the Air, which I told you about previously here. (Also can you believe I have restrained myself and not brought up Alexander Skarsgard and his perv-stache once? Oh damn nevermind.)

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)

Lily: I am very seldom required to wear white by my employers. But, anyway, I always do. It has always been that wearing white reassures the sick that I can never be touched, even as darkness folds in on them from every side, closing like a claw.

A happy 40th birthday to the great Ruth Wilson today! There were several other projects I wanted to quote for her birthday but IMDb didn't have quotes listed from them, so I went with this 2016 horror film which I still have never seen somehow -- it was directed by Oz Perkins (aka Anthony Perkins' son) who also made the stylishly strange Gretel & Hansel a couple years back; I really should see this one, it's been on Netflix this entire time and everything. 

As for Ruth if I was going to do a "The Moment I Fell For..." post for her it'd be a stage thing -- I saw her act with Jake Gyllenhaal in Nick Payne's play Constellations the year before this movie, in 2015, and she blew me away. I'd only been somewhat familiar with her before then -- she has a face you notice on-screen so she stood out in small roles in Anna Karenina and Suite Française, but I still have never seen her play Jane Eyre in the 2006 miniseries version. Is that worth looking up?

All that said my favorite Ruth role is an ongoing one -- her turn as Mrs. Coulter on HBO's His Dark Materials series -- which surprised me! She did not seem like the right casting for the role going in, but she's been truly exhilaratingly terrifying and weird on it; the best reason to watch the show at all. The third and final season is supposed to premiere sometime this year and I can't wait to see what skin-crawling antics she gets up to. What's your fave Ruth role?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Leave No Trace (2018)

Tom: What if the kids at school think I'm strange 

cuz of the way we were living?

Will: How important are their judgments?

A very happy 21st birthday to Thomasin McKenzie today! This Debra Granik movie definitely marks the moment I fell for her -- I imagine it's the moment most of us fell for her, if you saw it -- but it's kind of nuts to look at how many projects of note that she's stacked up in the past three years since this brought her to our attention. Why she was in M. Night Shyamalan's film Old just this weekend (read my review here) and she was very good in it in a difficult part; before that there were small roles in The King and True History of the Kelly Gang and of course the biggie, Jojo Rabbit.  

What's your favorite from her so far? The next year holds some good or at least exciting stuff -- she's in Jane Campion's new film The Power of the Dog, and I've already seen The Justice of Bunny King thanks to Tribeca (and I reviewed it too, right here) and she is wonderful in that, but it's Edgar Wright's giallo-riff Last Night in Soho with her playing opposite Anya Taylor-Joy that I'm obviously the most looking forward to; the trailer can be viewed right here. That's out on October 22nd! The happiest of happy birthdays to her and please keep the hits coming, Thomasin!

MNPP's Sweet 16

Two things that have been very important to my life are celebrating their birthdays today -- firstly the actor Dominic Cooper is turning 43, and if you haven't kept up with our long love affair then I recommend you click through our Dom archives. (For one there's more of the above 2008 photo-shoot, one of my faves, here and here.) If you were to ask me "The Moment I Fell For... Dominic Cooper" (which is a real series here on the site, although I haven't done one in a bit) I'd tell you it was the scene where he comes on to his teacher in The History Boys...

... and I wouldn't be lying! But equal weight would have to be given to the deleted Mamma Mia scene where we first learned of the junk Dom was carrying in his trunk -- an epochal moment in human existence, that. 

(Then he wore that speedo in The Devil's Double and forget about it.) Anyway checking to see what Domi is up to right now -- it's been kind of quiet since Preacher, my beloved Preacher, ended -- he's doing a UK miniseries called That Dirty Black Bag (which is described as "A steampunk spaghetti Western series" on IMDb) that co-stars his fellow Brit-boys Douglas Booth and Christian Cooke...

... and yes I will surely have people commenting here that they cannot tell these three white boys apart, and that's fine. I get it. I can but that's my job, to mentally rolodex such stuffs. On that note we come to the other thing celebrating a birthday today, which is My New Plaid Pants itself! HAPPY 16 TO MNPP!!!

I started this here website on June 2nd 2005 on a whim of boredom, and I took that whim and I stretched it out for sixteen ridiculous years of nonsense. We just passed 30,000 posts recently? Truly, mind-bogglingly insane, that. Anyway before I send myself off to the Glue Factory I'll do what's become an annual tradition of sorts here at the site for our anniversary -- I'll ask for money! I try not to do this too much (although there's always a PayPal donation button over there in the right-hand column) but our anniversary feels like the correct place for a wee bit of coin begging. If you've enjoyed MNPP at all why not throw us a dime or two? I make basically no money off of this site and all my hard work -- haha forget about the pennies per year the "ads" bring me. Today's as good a day for supporting a writer you like as any, says me, your favorite beefcake pauper. You can donate right here. Thanks, y'all!

Jared Harris Always

This website that you are currently here staring at might seem perfect to you at first glance, but it is severely lacking in one fundamental form of content, and that form is Jared Harris Content, so I'm gonna make up for that a little bit today. Jared Harris, who I first fell in love with when he played the Russian cab-driver slash solid fuck Vlad in Todd Solondz's 1998 masterpiece Happiness...

... is one of your host's very favorite working actors, a fact that came into especially sharp relief over the past couple of years as 1) I binged the entire run of Mad Men for the first time over quarantine, and 2) both The Terror and Chernobyl television programs happened. Mad Men of course lived up to its stellar reputation (I already touched upon that when I finished) but those latter two programs, for all their unrelenting darkness, have become two of my favorite programs of all time...

... and a lot of that is due to The Jared Harris Factor. Making Jared Harris your lead is just about the smartest possibility any show-runner has at their fingertips, and I recommend every one making a TV show try. He'll take what you've got that's good and he'll multiply it by infinity. Which brings me to the inciting impetus for this hosannas- and hail-storm...

... Chernobyl is hitting blu-ray (4K and not 4K) this very day! I know the series won a bunch of awards and there's a good chance you've already seen it, at least if you had interest in seeing it -- a "depressing" and dark show about a nuclear disaster probably warded off a lot of viewers due to its subject matter right from the get-go. But I am here to tell you you should not miss out on this damn show! Even I was a little hesitant at first -- it's been a dark few years in case you didn't notice, and diving into dark entertainment sometimes felt like a big ask. But Chernobyl was, I thought, was worth the leap. I'm planning on re-watching it when I have the chance! Have I got any fans in the house? Of Harris and of Chernobyl specifically?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

You Can Count On Me (2000)

Terry: Put on your seat belt.

Rudy: It pushes on my neck.

Terry: What?

Rudy: It pushes on my neck, it's uncomfortable.

Terry: Well when someone slams into us and

you go sailing through the windshield, that's liable

to be uncomfortable, too. Now, put on a seat belt.

A happy 20 to this lovely film from writer-director-genius Kenneth Lonergan that I nevertheless haven't seen in 20 years. Did you know of Mark Ruffalo before this? There are two things he was in before it that I might have noticed him in -- Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil and the movie 54 as one of Ryan Phillippe's dweeby friends who couldn't get into the club...

... but I don't recall him making much of an impression at the time. We all knew him after You Can Count on Me though. Laura Linney on the other hand we all knew from way back, since we all went and saw Congo one thousand times in the theater. Right? Right...? Ahem. No but seriously twas  her work on Tales of the City and then Primal Fear and then her show-stopping stuff in Truman Show in 1998 which I'm sorry even against YCCOM might remain my favorite Laura Linney performance -- love it so. "Meryl" Forever!

In summation... I should probably re-watch You Can Count on Me, I have just finally been convinced by stumbling upon this photo of Mark Ruffalo and Josh Lucas wrestling with one another in it: