Tuesday, August 31, 2010

5 Off My Head - Miss You Miss Gordon

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This past Saturday mark the 25th anniversary of Ruth Gordon's death. I had it marked in my calendar and everything, so deep and lasting an impression did the lady leave in her wake. I figured I had to do something in her honor, and since it's a performance etched on the inside of my skull it only seems natural to talk about her Oscar-winning work as Minnie Castavet in Rosemary's Baby (aka my favorite movie of all time, one I talk about too much probably but oh well, deal with it).

So here are my five of my favorite moments of Minnie's, in no particular order., and off the top of my head (yeah I'm writing this without having the DVD on me and not having seen the film in a couple of months, yet I'm still able to go into probably excessive detail about each moment... did I mention I've seen this movie a million times? Cuz I have.) And if you think narrowing it down to five couldn't possibly have been hard then you weren't around the night I tweeted the entirety of Rosemary's Baby - my love for every single frame of this film is bottomless, and narrowing anything down to a reasonable amount is akin to torture.


"Umf, ads." - The first time Minnie sweeps into Rosemary's apartment she takes inventory of every corner, new color, piece of furniture, what it cost, and so on, and it's hilariously capped off by one final act of privacy invasion, once Rosemary finally gets her ushered to the door, where she rifles through their mail right there on their doorstep in front of Rosemary's baffled face. It's the first time we'll see Minnie steam-roll over Rosemary's politeness but far from the last. Like that time she gets Rosemary pregganant with the devil's baby. That time sucked especially.

"The c-c-c-c-arrrrgh-ppppet...." -Watching this movie I holler out every line of dialogue with the mounting fervor of the entranced. It's charming, believe me. And the fervor's always at high pitch here at the start of the first date between the Woodhouses and the Castavets, where Roman accidentally spills some vodka blush and Minnie, ever lady-like, hocks a loogie of her disapproval at him as she leaps to the floor. Nobody's ever made a simple rug sound so phlegmatic before or since.

And her obsession with the floor's integrity is mirrored wonderfully at the end when Rosemary drops the butcher knife upon finding out the truth of their scheme and Minnie is shown pulling it out of the wood and rubbing at the nick it leaves.

Minnie eating her cake - This is also from the first dinner that Ye Olde Satanists and their young womb-bait share. All four actors are pretty much on-screen during this moment and yet once you find Ruth Gordon in the frame there's no turning back, you won't see or care what anybody else is doing. You think her make-up and costuming is gaudy? Wait until you watch her chew on a slice of cake. My lord. The frosting appears to dislocate her jaw.

"As long as she ate the mouse, she can't see nor hear. Now sing" - I don't know how this little line of dialogue became the one that I quote the most from the movie, but that just shows to go ya how a magician with language like Ruth could transform something that must've seemed sort of inconsequential on the page into music. The way she turned the entire sentence into one violently staccato word. "S'longssheetthamouseshekinseenorheeeeernowsing." It just slips off the tongue like beautiful barf.


Her entrance - What a spectacular burst of vodka blush do the Castavets make, popping out of the darkness of that black city street, stumbling willy-nilly and not at all premeditatedly upon the corpse of the gal they'd been like grandparents to, literally picking her up off the sidewalk. Such color! I knew I was in love from the first instant I saw Minnie daintily put on her glasses.

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The Tingler! In Percepto!

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Well I know what I'm doing this holiday weekend! Film Forum started a mini-fest of William Castle movies this past weekend and all weekend long they're gonna be showing his 1959 schlockterpiece The Tingler with its crazy-ass (literally) gimmick Percepto! Percepto is the one where he attached electric shocks to a random bunch of seats in the theater and at a specified point in the film hits the buzzer and made people's bums go boom! And Film Forum is letting it rip! Hooray! It's one of those always-dreamed-of-getting-the-chance type screenings for me, and I'm so freaking excited.
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John Waters talks a bunch about his childhood experiences with William Castle films in his most recent book Role Models, and explains how he'd go into the theater for the first showing of The Tingler, scan under all the seats til he found one with the wiring attached, and then sit in that seat for every screening all day long, getting his ass zapped. I can't decide if I'd want to be in an electrified seat or not. I don't know that I entirely trust some random stranger to electrocute me. But still, it's an experience!

Check out the full run-down of films they're showing here. If you're in NYC over the weekend I don't know how you could pass up this chance. Has anybody gotten to see the film with Percepto before? My boyfriend's already seen it this way years ago.
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Random Awesome

A friend forwarded these commercials to me and they totally crack me up. Horror and porn and... windshield wipers? Indeed.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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I Am Link

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--- Viva Ari - Yes! Ari Graynor got a lead(ish) role, and in a David Gordon Green movie no less! Somehow she's supposed to be Jonah Hill's girlfriend, but whatever, she'll make it work no doubt. It's called The Sitter and it sounds like DGG mixing Adventures in Babysitting with his own Pineapple Express. In other words, awesome.

--- To Temps - The trio behind the glorious television program Party Down, which includes Veronica Mars' creator Rob Thomas, have gotten a pilot order for a new series with NBC. It's for a show called Temps which "will focus on a group of recent college grads who are forced to take a variety of oddball temp jobs to make ends meet." Just make sure there's a role somewhere for Kristen Bell!

--- Speaking of Miss Bell, she's a Hunger Games fan! So which character should she play in the films? Also, didja see the shot of her from Burlesque? Good grief, this movie.

--- Antiquity Fannypack - Great drag queen name, that. If you want to know where I got it from, click over to Final Girl's latest Film Club, where they took in the 1994 Chuck Norris versus demons epic Hellbound. I almost watched it over the weekend to participate but I just couldn't get my mood right for such spectacular awfulness. Alas, my loss.

--- This Will Never Happen - I will eat my hat if Darren Aronofsky directs Wolverine 2. (Thankfully I don't own any hats.)

--- Jaws of Death - Is there a movie called that? Why isn't there a movie called that, if not? I should make that movie. It might be something like the new movie from the director of the superior Final Destination 2, which is inferiorly called Shark Night 3D and is about sharks... in the night.... in three-dee... and just got four nobodies cast.

--- How Never - Slash rounded up several non-spoilery bits from reviews of Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go and skimming through them it appears my hopes have not been for naught. Hooray!

--- Fresh Soul - BD has word on another new cast member of Final Destination 5 but more importantly they're saying that they've heard that it will most definitely not be called 5nal (ANAL) Destination as had been threatened. Thank goodness.

--- And finally, BD has a gallery of shots of Ryan Reynolds in Buried (saw the trailer this weekend; liked it a lot) and Slash has a huge gallery of new images from David Fincher's The Social Network including most of the cast but most importantly several of my lover Andrew Garfield and here's a bunch, just cuz.

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Monday, August 30, 2010

Lover, will you look at me now?

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How did I not link to this already? Gah. I guess forwarding the link via Facebook last week when it was a timely thing to do sort of counts? I need to blog, email, tweet and Facebook everything seven times over, it's the only way anything counts anymore. It's what keeps us alive in these heady electronic times! Information! Sweet sweet information! Wow it's obviously the end of the day and my brains are scrambled. So I'm just gonna shut up now and tell you that if you missed it there's a free track from Sufjan's upcoming album over here. It's called "I Walked" and I've been listening to it all weekend and it's exceptionally wonderful, and junk. Like I'd say any less of Suffy's songs. Now I'm just gonna stare into his eyes in that picture above for an hour and a half or so. Bye.
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James Marsden Two Times

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I Was Trying To Figure Out...

... why these pictures of Jake seemed so familiar...


... and then it struck me.
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I think we know where I'm taking this.
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Katniss & Co.

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This weekend I flew through Mockingjay, the final book of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, and tweeted as much love as you can stuff into 140 characters the minute I finished. I found the book pretty much a perfect realization of my wants from the final chapter. Everything fell into place effortlessly. An extremely satisfying conclusion, and one that left me mourning the story's end. I will miss Katniss and all the folks of the thirteen colonies...

Until the movie happens, of course! Lionsgate bought the rights a couple of years ago, and EW is assuming that now that the book trilogy has finished they're gonna start to move ahead with the movies. I don't know where they found any facts to back up that assumption, but I like the way it sounds anyway so I won't argue.

At least with that point. What I will argue with is that link to EW is mainly a call to play the casting game and their recommendation for Katniss, the lead character in the books, is Chloe Moretz.

Breathe. Breathe. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

Since I knew the books would probably get turned into movies at some point I played the casting game in my head now and then but not once did that girl spoil my thoughts. And now they unleash this horror upon me? No! A thousand times no! I will not mingle that ham's face with my beloved Katniss. Never!

I have high hopes that they've been biding their time with the books in order to get things right. To go the JK Rowling route, and really get the version truest to the tales, from the page to the screen. So many of these kid's book series have been turned to dust by the stupidity of the Hollywood machine churning them out, I'd hate to see this awesome series fall prety to the same bad instincts. Do this series right!

But EW has a newer post on the casting matters at hand today, thankfully leaving that girl behind, and there be polls to vote in. I don't really have any rec's for characters, I am dork enough to cling to the hopes they'll find unknowns. Their suggestions for Gale are especially ridiculous - somewhere between Taylor Lautner and Skeet Ulrich, eh? That's what y'all see when you read the book? Were you holding it upside down while on fire? Good grief.

So to those of you out there who love the series like I do - any casting suggestions? Or do you hope they go and find a nobody like Danny Radcliffe all their own? And if anyone else finished the book this weekend feel free to share your thoughts. I'm sad letting it go.
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If You're Curious...

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... about what we might get from a James Cameron produced Guillermo Del Toro directed version of H. P Lovecraft's phenomenal story At the Mountains of Madness, then you might find a few hints towards that from this review of an early draft of the thing's script at Twitch. If you haven't read the story... well first go read the fucking story, I loved it. It's thrilling, terrifying stuff. But I don't know that you should read the review without being aware of the source material, it's some geeky stuff that'll probably sound like nonsense at points. Which is right up my alley naturally. Geeky nonsense ahoy!

Anyway it allowed me to temper my expectations a bit, which I should've been doing anyway. There's gonna have to be some major concessions made in order to bring Lovecraft to the screen. That's just a given. Still if Del Toro approaches one tenth of the eerie otherness of that story's concerns it oughta be a treat in the end.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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I Am Link

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--- Stick It Up Your Bum In Three Dimensions, Jim - Jim Cameron went on some rambling nonsense spiel about how a movie like Piranha 3D cheapens the technology and even got a dig in at Friday the 13th: Part 3, which is just inexcusable. Listen, I liked Avatar a lot, but you know what Avatar needed? It needed a yo-yo dropping up in my face. It needed an extended underwater skinny dipping scene. It needed somebody's face pulled off by a boat motor. I know telling James Cameron to get a sense of humor about himself and his self-esteemed place in cinematic history is akin to pulling off your own face with a boat motor, but goddamn does he even go to the movies anymore, or has he not perfected the incredible mind-breaking technology yet that allows the film to be projected so far up his own ass yet?

--- Who For Hobbit - Sylvester McCoy, who played Dr. Who in the 80s, is telling the world that he's in the middle of being cast as a wizard in the Hobbit movies. DH has the details. I guess he was up for Bilbo back in the Lord of the Rings movies, which ended up going to Ian Holm.

--- Now We're Cooking - With Centurion having come out in some markets last Friday there were a bunch of interviews with director Neil Marshall all over the place, giving him the chance to chat up some of the many projects that he's been linked to. At AICN he gave a little teensy bit of an update on Burst, his 3D horror movie about people exploding that Sam Raimi's producing - they're working on the script still. I thought they were past that stage so I guess we've still got a wait on that one. Dammit.

It sounds like the next thing he'll be doing is Underground, which is about "an ambitious young chef who ventures into the terrifying underbelly of extreme cuisine." Extreme chefs? I expect it to be a cannibalism movie once we know more, but Deadline's got some brief details.

--- Best Review Yet - I love everything my bud Sean had to say about Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, especially the bit about how Ramona Flowers is pitched as a knowing inversion of the Manic Pixie trope.

--- Two White Dudes - Isn't one cop supposed to be black and the other white still? Or like Puerto Rican and Japanese? Some crazy ethnic mix where they have to learn to respect each other cultures all while gunning down some other culture that's worse than their own respective cultures? What is happening to the world when Ryan Reynolds and Bradley Cooper are the buddy cops?

--- And finally better late than never, here's my piece from last Friday at Celebrity Beehive on the weekend-that's-already-over's new releases.
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More Duhamel In Less Clothes

This popped up on Friday but I took Friday off at the last minute so I didn't get to post it, but I gotta post it now because hello love letter to me. Y'all catch the poster for Life As We Know It? (via)


Indeed, poster. Indeed. Anyway it made me realize I hadn't grabbed this far too brief moment of Duhamel glimpsed in the annoying trailer for the movie either, so here, consider that done.

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Torture Me, Tommy

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Ooooooooh goodness, look at this news here (via):

""Nip/Tuck" star John Hensley, comedian Skyler Stone, "True Blood" actor Chris Coy and German sensation Thomas Kretschmann have joined the cast of "Hostel 3," an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap."

It seems the obvious assumption at this point in time, knowing next to nothing about the script, that Thomas Kretschmann, being the European here - or as they so delightfully put it, the "German sensation" - will be part of the evil torturing elites that've populated the Hostel series so far. Meaning, if things go according to the way my mind is playing them out as I type this, he'll have recently announced cast-member Kip Pardue strapped up half-naked in front of him very soon.


Do I even have to keep going? I mean I could keep going, my brain keeps going, boy does it ever, but I think we all know where I'm going with this. I find this an extraordinarily pleasing casting announcement. Yessirree.

If you're wondering who the other dude is that was on True Blood, Chris Coy was that vamp-hotel bellhop who shared the brain-talk gift with Sookie last season.
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Cuz When I'm Bad I'm So So Bad

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As it began there were several interesting avenues of exploration that I could see The Last Exorcism heading towards. We start off watching a charlatan preacher-man explaining to us his crisis of faith. How he offers a service and makes the faithful believe they've witnessed an exorcism, but it's all smoke and mirrors. There are no demons, he says. He shows us the wires, the gadgetry with which he accomplishes his fraud on people - a fraud he passes off as simultaneously well-intentioned and money-grubbing, of course. He's helping them, but he's got mouths to feed too, you know. A deaf kid no less, to be shown once at the start and never be heard (ba dum bum) from again.

But the preacher has grown weary of the sham and wants to prove to the world that exorcism is nothing more than a parlor trick, so he's called up these documentarians to film him perpetrating his fraud and finally end the harmful medieval practice for good. Unfortunately, as with so many film characters retiring from so many different professions, our preacher-man is going to learn the hard way that it's The One Last Job that'll always be the one to getcha.

Or something. The film doesn't have the courage of its own convictions, and never successfully follows through on any of the conceits it raises early on. It gets so caught up running from one explanation to the next, from one foggy set of motivations to another, that nothing solidifies except for the murk in between. These characters are like chess pieces being scattered across a board by someone who's intimately familiar with only Connect Four. It turns out to never be about anything. And a silly final-act twist only underlines that. We've spent so much time staring at the smoke and the mirrors that we don't have any connection to this supposed truth once it presents itself. Why are we supposed believe what we're seeing now? Or, more importantly, care?

It can't even keep its own style straight - this single camera crew is suddenly shooting the same scene from several different angles, and spooky music nonsensically shows up whenever the real film-makers need to goose the proceedings. If a film works on me, if it scares me and wraps me up in the tale its unfurling, then I'm the last person to get caught up on these sorts of stylistic slips. But here they're symptomatic of the whole damn-the-details approach they took the this thing from the top down. There is no devil in this film because there is no soul for it to prey upon in the first place.
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Thursday, August 26, 2010

Pic of the Day

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Ooh pretty. That's a newly designed poster for Let the Right One In, via Slash where there's more info on what it's for and whatnot. I am just going to take this opportunity to admit that I saw the latest full-length trailer for the remake Let Me In before Piranha 3D the other night and my attitude has swung back to sorta looking forward to it. Every week my outlook's changed. I'm like a Magic 8 ball tumbling down a flight of stairs. It is decidedly so!
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What Do You S'pose The Chances Are...

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... that Tom Cruise dies in the opening scene - brutally and explicitly, please - of Brad Bird's Mission Impossible 4 and then Jeremy Renner, who's just been announced as his co-star via Deadline, takes over the franchise? Cuz I'd pay to see that.
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Steel Magnolias (1989)

Clairee: All gay men have track lighting.
And all gay men are named Mark, Rick, or Steve.
In all seriousness, I was just a little budding gay when I first saw this movie and track lighting will forever and always seem SO GAY to me because of it. It really did inform my world view! As did the football locker-room scene.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Penn Badgley Four Times

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