Good Morning, World

Watching the Dahmer series with Evan Peters on Netflix (which I finally finished over the weekend) made me want to re-watch My Friend Dahmer sometime soon as well, which starred Teen Beat bad-boy Ross Lynch seen here -- both MFD and the excellent Dahmer movie starring Jeremy Renner are currently streaming on Amazon; along with Rya Murphy's show and the Netflix doc about Jeff that premiered this week one could really just have themselves a gay cannibal binge if one wanted to. On that note, happy Monday morning, everybody! I have another NYFF press screening (Sarah Polley's new movie!) so I won't be in until this afternoon. Make due with Ross butt until then.

Cox Swings Back Into Action

Back in May I told y'all that two writers were working on a new Marvel series that would bring Charlie Cox's Daredevil back into the MCU -- well I suppose technically it's not "back into the MCU" since the Netflix series he was a part of was never technically, while it was airing, seen as part of the MCU at all. But that's changing! Since Charlie was seen playing Matt Murdock in the last Spider-twink movie, while Vincent D'Onofrio turned up as the villain Kingpin in the Hawkeye series this isn't a total shock. But now we have some more details (even if Marvel themselves still refuse to comment) -- THR says the twosome are joining the previously announced series Echo, which is set to follow the character Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) played on Hawkeye. 

I think her nickname was Echo? I didn't pay a ton of attention to Hawkeye when I watched it, to be honest. I remember her being pretty cool though, I think. And I like Hailee Stanfield of course. That show just felt too low-stakes to me while Loki was out there surfing the universe and having word battles with Jonathan Majors -- that was where my attention was at that time. But bringing Charlie around willc ertainly snag my interest this time! There are rumors that Charlie will be tag-teaming up on the show with Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones again too, which is smart thinking! She kicked ass on her show as well. [Cut to Finn Jones sitting sadly by his silent phone.]

Quote of the Day

If you're smart you pre-ordered NYT writer (and friend of MNPP) Kyle Buchanan's book -- titled Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road about, well, the title says what it's about -- the second it was announced way back. But this excerpt that was posted on Variety today (the book's out on the 22nd) will probably push some of you hold-out pervs over the finish line (in more ways than one):

"Near the end of the process, Hardy emerged as a front-runner alongside Jeremy Renner and Armie Hammer. Hardy and Hammer even read together as part of their audition, and when Hardy gnashed his teeth and spat at his scene partner, Hammer told Miller that Hardy needed to be Max more than he did... 

Audition cameraman Todd Matthew Grossman told Buchanan, “Jeremy and Armie were equally wonderful, but there was something about Tom in the room where it felt like that was Max, without a doubt. He had that kind of suppressed emotional dryness that you’d find in a post-apocalypse and, buried underneath it, disdain for the world. There was this intensity that burned through the lens.” Miller added, “I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.”

Cannibals Are So Hot Right Now

First up, the big news (although I wouldn't exactly call this a surprise) -- Evan Peters is going to play Jeffrey Dahmer in producer Ryan Murphy's new Netflix miniseries, which is aiming to tell the story from Dahmer's victims perspectives. Famously Dahmer's victims were mostly young gay men of color, and the police couldn't give a shit about young gay men of color, so Dahmer was allowed to kill for a really long time. To that end Janet Mock, the writer of Murphy's Pose, will be writing and directing a lot of the series.

It's hard not to have an, uhh, complicated reaction to the news that Ryan Murphy is producing a Netflix miniseries about Jeffrey Dahmer's queer cannibal killing spree in the 70s and 80s no matter what though, given how wildly variant quality remains a concept in Ryan Murphy projects -- could this possibly be another high-water mark like his Assassination of Gianni Versace series? Since it doesn't involve that show's writer Tom Rob Smith (a personal fave, who only worked with Murphy that one time) I am thinking probably not.

But focusing in on the victims is the right thing to do; I mean we've already had two entirely solid films about Dahmer with the Jeremy Renner film in 2002 and My Friend Dahmer in 2017 with Ross Lynch and that's a good batting average, given how shitty serial-killer-movies tend to be most of the time. And Peters, even though a choice so obvious it could be seen from outer space, is good casting. He's proven more than capable over past seasons of American Horror Story of being genuinely scary. And then there's the rest of the cast!

Dahmer's parents will be played by Penelope Ann Miller (now there's a welcome comeback) and Richard Jenkins -- Jenkins in particular is a knee-shakingly good choice, as Dahmer's father is an extremely complicated role, through Dahmer's life and after it. You should read his book A Father's Story if you haven't, it's fascinating. And Jenkins is a wonderful actor of course; this could be a great role for him. But they're not all -- also in the cast is my Claws queen Niecy Nash! She's playing Dahmer's legendary next-door neighbor, who called the police time and time again on Jeff, only to be routinely ignored -- Deadline is saying her role's the female lead of the show. Nash of course worked with Murphy on Scream Queens, and was recently seen to great dramatic effect on the miniseries When They See Us about the Central Park Five.

Don't Rainer on My Parade

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There have been several Rainer Werner Fassbinder related news items this week and I've been shitty at mentioning all of 'em -- this past Sunday would've been Fassbinder's 74th birthday, and whenever it's his birthday I always realize anew how damn young he died and what a huge loss it is that we haven't had him making movies all this time. We're coming up on the 40th anniversary of his death in a couple of years -- that's four decades of Fassbinder movies we have done without for stupid damn reasons. What a loss. And speaking of loss another bit of Fassbinder-adjacent news was...

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RIP THE SUPERB IRM HERMANN
What a terrible week this has been.
Can somebody awful die now please? pic.twitter.com/ySOHAKYIhi

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 28, 2020

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... actress Irm Hermann died on May 26th. She's one of the few who made it through RWF's entire career, putting up with his immense bullshit from even before his first movie Love is Colder in Death (she was in some of his short films preceding it) all the way through to Lili Marleen in 1981, a year before his heart exploded from all the drugs. That's not to say she skated by -- he was emotionally awful to her every chance he got, as well as physically abusive -- you can see their tumult playing out in lots of the roles he gave her; I've always assumed her role as the silent, masochistic servant in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was probably the most biographical. And given her importance in his life...

... I'm a bit shocked to see her name not listed in the list of characters in Enfant Terrible, the perfectly titled forthcoming biopic of Fassbinder that just today whaddya know got a trailer (via, thx Mac). I'm going to have to plead ignorance with regards to any of the people involved -- the director is named Oskar Roehler and he seems to have worked for a long time in Germany but I haven't seen any of his films. Likewise I don't recognize any of the actors...

... Oliver Masucci is playing Fassbinder; funny enough he's in the Netflix series Dark which just came up on MNPP this very morning since it co-stars birthday-twink Louis Hofmann -- I guess that show just flew up the list! 

Back to Enfant Terrible though -- I've been hollering that we need a Fassbinder biopic for, hey look at that,  almost exactly a decade now -- see, here's a post I posted in 2010 titled "Let's make a Fassbinder biopic" even. I wouldn't lie to you. And yes, even though he sucks as a person I still think Jeremy Renner would have been perfect casting.

I mean it is kind of ridiculous how perfect he'd have been. But part of why I have always wanted this biopic has actually come to life on the IMDb page for Enfant Terrible -- just scanning through its cast of charactersmakes me absolutely positively giddy. Brigitte Mira! Rosel Zech! El Hedi ben Salem! Kurt Raab! Ulli Lommel! Armin Meier! Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus! Composer Peer Raben! Hanna Schygulla! MY BELOVED BARBARA VALENTIN!!! These names are like superheroes to me -- they are my Mount fucking Rushmore.

That said, me knowing Fassbinder's life and his company so well introduces problems here in that it introduces distractions. Big distractions. Like hey, Fassbinder didn't look that scraggly when he made Love is Colder Than Death! He was still relatively baby faced then...

Although, that said, Frida-Lovisa Hamann is a 

shockingly good match for Hanna Schygulla.

Right? But that itself introduces more problems, because according to IMDb Hamann is playing a character named "Martha." WTF is a Martha? She's clearly playing Hanna fucking Schygulla! This leads me to believe they couldn't use the names of some of the real-life folks, because of rights or whatever, and that shit's gonna drive me BONKERS when I'm watching the film. Like I'm guessing...

... that Katja Riemann's character is either supposed to be Irm Hermann or maybe Margit Carstensen or I guess possibly Barbara Sukowa, but according to IMDb her character is named "Gudrun" and I'll be damned if I know any "Gudrun" in RWF's circle. Gudrun who, motherfuckers? If she is playing Irm that explains why Irm's name isn't on the IMDb cast of characters at least. And the same goes for André Hennicke...

... playing somebody named "Carlotta." I don't know any damn Carlotta. Is this Vertigo? Did I take a wrong turn at Vertigo? Anybody know a Carlotta? That said I do recognize the outfit Fassbinder's wearing in that above shot as his costume for the movie Kamikaze 89, a film which he was an actor in (he didn't direct it) right before he died.

I mean... do you see how crazy this movie's going to make me????

 All this rambling and I haven't even gotten to the gay stuff!

That's how nuts this is going to make me. But I suppose I should catch my breath because the film isn't even getting released in Germany until the fall, October 1st specifically, and there's no word whatsoever on a US date. One good sign -- the trailer they've released today does have English subtitles, so they're clearly thinking about audiences outside of Germany with this. Fingers crossed! Oh and I suppose I should post the trailer now? Sure why not...

10 Off My Head: Actor Hunter Killer

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Thrillingly for me at least David Fincher's serial killer series Mindhunter starring Jonathan Groff (showering, seen above) is back on Netflix this Friday for its second season. But that's not the only time the subject of "serial killers" has dropped itself into my lap this week -- on Monday I posted about the 1995 thriller Copycat with Sigourney Weaver, which is screening here in NYC this weekend. And on this upcoming Tuesday Arrow is releasing a stellar special edition blu-ray of Cruising, William Friedkin's controversial 1980 gay murder fantasia that stars Al Pacino. Basically, serial killing is having a real moment! (Sorry you blew your load a little bit early, Zac Efron.) 

Anyway all of this made it seem like a good moment to count down our favorite Serial Killer Movies. But then I started making a list and you know what? Depending on your definition of "Serial Killer Movies" -- do you count Slasher Films? -- I seem to like a hell of a lot of Serial Killer Movies. Too many to narrow down to just five, or even ten. My list runs into the dozens. So I decided to be a little more specific and narrow it down to performances as Serial Killers in Serial Killer Films. I still had to up the number to 10, but this is more manageable!

10 of my Favorite Serial Killer Performances

Anthony Perkins in Psycho

Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs

Charlize Theron in Monster

Christian Bale in American Psycho

Jeremy Renner in Dahmer

Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom

John Jarratt in Wolf Creek

Peter Lorre in M

Karlheinz Böhm in Peeping Tom

Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers

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I could name twenty more, but I'll let y'all

name some of your faves in the comments!

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Ross Lynch Rabbit Hole

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This post started out one way and quickly swerved towards another, so let's go in the order my brain went. The actor Ross Lynch posted these pictures of himself on his Instagram this week...
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... which then got me to thinking about how great Ross Lynch was as Young Jeff Dahmer in the 2017 movie My Friend Dahmer. Have you seen that movie yet? Here's my rave review from Tribeca way back when. What if I told you its actual leading man is not a serial killer but is actually his classmate who is played by Alex Wolff...

... who gave one of this year's best performances in Hereditary? Alex Wolff has become a real Scream Queen, hasn't he? One more and he's this gen's Jamie Lee. Anyway My Friend Dahmer has weirdly remained way under the radar for how good it is, which is pretty similar to the last movie to tackle the man -- the 2002 film, just called Dahmer, that starred Jeremy Renner is also seriously underrated. (And you can watch it on Prime right now, btw.)

I guess people just have trouble with this subject? Buncha weirdos. Who doesn't love homosexual cannibalism? Anyway that thought process is where this started, and made me want to ask...

survey tools

... that question. But then I got to wondering

what Ross Lynch was up to now, and I discovered...

... that Ross Lynch plays "Harvey" on Netflix's just-dropped Chilling Adventures of Sabrina! I didn't know this! That show (which I haven't watched) was a big subject of conversation at my Vincent Price themed Halloween Dinner Party this past weekend - everyone else had watched the show, and I learned (without learning it was Ross Lynch) that the Harvey character is at once point outfitted...

... in a "Johnny Depp Elm Street Half Shirt" homage, of all things! That's some gumption right there! And so now, after all that, I've obviously got to ask you people a second question too...

survey service

Men Hugging Men

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Not seeing Fantastic Beasts until tomorrow but I keep hearing that there's a, you know, VIBE between Colin Farrell and Ezra Miller in the movie. So I'm looking forward to that! Anyway you can use this post's comments to report your thoughts on that film (since I assume many of you will be seeing it)...

... or any of the other wonderful movies out, of which there are very very many! This weekend is flooded with riches - you can see Nocturnal Animals (which I just reviewed yesterday) or Manchester by the Sea (which I reviewed at the New York Film Festival) or The Eyes of my Mother (which I reviewed earlier today). Or if you haven't gotten to them yet you can see Loving (here's my review) or Arrival (here's my review) or Elle (here's my review) or The Handmaiden (here's my review) - the list is very long and every single one of these movies is worth seeing. Honestly I really do stand by this tweet...
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I have seen so many good movies this year.
2016 has been a good year for movies.#realtalk

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 11, 2016

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Interplanetary Poetry Slam

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The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

petals on a wet black bough.

If you're watching a movie and you get Ezra Pound stuck in your head then you are watching the right kind of movie, my friends. And Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and out in theaters today, is the right kind of movie. Filled with painterly images of fog and sunrise and strange smoky circles hanging in the air - filled with Amy Adams staring upwards, awe-struck and lovely, a conduit for smarts and understanding and as ever, decency and empathy.

What a movie to watch this week. Filled with a soul-deep admiration for intelligent life-forms the universe over, for love and acceptance and common ground. For making sense of time itself - we are in these moments, these seconds, immemorial, and no matter what horrors might come our way we must maintain humanity and love and we must reach out towards one another, and we must cherish what we do have while we do have it.

I have said "I love you" to the people I love in my life so many times this week, and had it said in return. We are scared. There is a great big terrifying strangeness hovering over the world, and it is unknowable right this minute. But communication, which is Arrival's main currency, is key. We must listen to each other, hear each other. We must make our voices heard. We must put in the work, the hard, long work - it is not easy but it could save us, all on its own. Sometimes a kangaroo isn't just a kangaroo - sometimes it's the infinite unknown; sometimes it's your next door neighbor.

There's so much apocalyptic doom and gloom in our science fiction - and in our real world, for sure! - that Arrival's slow steady and beautiful embrace of possibility, up and over and right through hardness, how ever fantastical it may eventually truly be, well it was inspiring anyway. It speaks to this moment in ways it maybe didn't speak to this moment one week ago. But if you can put the work in and decipher its symbols, it is a message of hope. Damaged and dinged up, wet and difficult, but stirring, rousing, affecting. 

Also hypnotic and strange and beautiful - have I said beautiful fifteen times yet? Because it deserves that word no fewer than that many. I kept thinking that this is what Interstellar could have been if Christopher Nolan actually had ideas and not just plot points - if he actually had dreams and not schematics. But we don't need him because we have Denis Villeneuve now. He will show us the way.

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Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner talking ARRIVAL at MoMA #arrival #amyadams #jeremyrenner #film @themuseumofmodernart

A photo posted by Jason Adams (@jasonaadams) on Nov 10, 2016 at 6:13pm PST

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I Am Link

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--- Love That Lannister - Our pal Sean wrote a really beautiful piece for Vulture about the complicated relationship between Jamie and Brienne on A Game of Thrones that's a must-read for any fan of the show - his basic argument is reducing everything that they've been through to sex makes us no better than that vulgarian Bronn. Although I am probably no better than Bronn either way. Speaking of, the couple I'm shipping on that show these days is Bronn and Pod, who make everything about dicks. The sexual tension between those two's off the charts!

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--- Mother Inferior - When I reviewed The Conjuring sequel yesterday I talked a bunch about that demonic nun thing in the film - well I guess I wasn't alone in finding her striking because the studio's working on a spin-off starring her! I hope they decide to mix it up and it's a rom-com where she decides to go to a remote Italian village to find out what it all means and meets a bearded cobbler who shows her what love can be. They can call it Much Ado About Nun-Thing. 

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--- And Speaking of Sexy Holy Folks, the first trailer for Jude Law's miniseries about Pope John Paul II has arrived and you can watch it over at The Playlist. It's called The Young Pope and it was directed by The Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino and it will air first in the UK in October and then at some later date on HBO.  It also stars Diane Keaton, apparently? Anyway rename this shit The Sexy Pope and be done with it - I mean they put him in white swim trunks...

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--- Forgive Me Holly Hunter - Wanna hear something awful? Just terrible awful? No I didn't kidnap Dominic Cooper and chain him to my radiator in cut-off jean-shorts and a cropped Confederate Flag tee (not yet anyway). What I did, or rather what I didn't do, is I never finished watching the first season of Top of the Lake. I was doo-doo-doo'ing right along with it, liking it very much, I watched probably 3/4s of it, and then... something happened, I probably got distracted by a shiny object (or Dominic Cooper's shiny objects) and I never finished. And now they have announced the second season and that Nicole Kidman will be in the second season and I gotta go catch the fuck up, man. 

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---  Alien Mined - I'd totally forgotten that Enemy and Sicario director Denis Villeneuve was making a sci-fi movie with Amy Adams but it seems like he's pretty much already made the thing and it will be out this Fall. The Playlist has a lot of little bits of info - it's been re-titled from Story of Your Life to the equally (or maybe a tad bit more so) generic title Arrival, and it co-stars Jeremy Renner (blah) and Michael Stuhlabrg (yay). They've also got a promotional image for the film at that link. Afteer this Villeneuve is making the Blade Runner sequel and then he's reuniting with Jake Gyllenhaal, hooray.

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--- You're Buggin' - I don't know if it's making people happy or sad that Donald Glover has joined the cast of the new Spider-man movie in an unspecified role - when they were casting the web-slinger several years back (before Andrew Garfield got it) he made it clear he really wanted to play Peter Parker, and I could see some second or third banana status this time around being seen as tossing the person of color too small a bone? Maybe I'm just paranoid. Anyway I doubt Donald will be showing off that sweet ass of his in someone else's superhero movie and that's the real tragedy.

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--- Be My Bully Tonight - I didn't realize that they'd already cast so much of the cast for the new adaptation of Stephen King's It, but apparently all of the kids have been cast except for that poor lone female character who's on the receiving end of the bonding gang-bang. (Good grief I hope they leave out the gang-bang scene.) Relatedly this site makes a good point, or at least asks a good question - with the casting of the homophobic slash sexually experimental bully character, will the movie delve into all the creepy gay stuff in the book? When I was 12 or so and read it for the first time all that creepy gay stuff was... you know... a thrill.

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--- And Finally the official Twitter account for the Alien franchise has released a picture of Ridley Scott on the set of his new Alien slash Prometheus movie Covenant, in the background of which you can see a blurried Michael Fassbender in character again as the android David! And he's got a totally new look - he appears to've ditched the bleach thank goodness (that wasn't Fassy's best look):

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Wham Bam Spider-Man

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No sooner had I clicked "purchase" on my tickets to see the new Captain America movie (they just went on sale a minute ago) then did I see they've also just released a new trailer for the film and as you can see there - it's Spider-Man! Our very first look at Tom Holland (or, you know, a Tom Holland shaped CG blob) is here! Here's the trailer:

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Seeing Spider-Man is exciting, don't get me wrong, as is the little glimpse of Ant-Man running around, and Black Panther's looking fairly kick-ass too, but it's this shot...

... that's got my panties all bunched up. 

Why is Scarlet Witch melting The Vision???

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