Showing posts with label Steven Soderbergh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steven Soderbergh. Show all posts

Thursday, December 19, 2024

Welcome to Michael Fassbender's Spy Era


I don't know what I was doing on Wednesday when this dropped that I didn't post about it -- that was even the day I shared with you Michael Fassbender in next to nothing on a spy show! But the first official image and the trailer for Black Bag -- Steven Soderbergh's spy thriller starring Fassy, Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris (god I love Naomie Harris), Regé-Jean Page (hopefully he and Michael will make out), and oh right Mr. Bond, aka Pierce Brosnan himself -- all dropped that day so here is me catching up with that. Fassbender has done "spy thriller with Steven Soderbergh" before, having starred in the best scene in the director's 2011 actioner Haywire, but this looks like a very different beast (the "beast" being that asshole Gina Carano, natch -- good riddance to her). It's basically Mr. & Mrs. Smith just slightly more serious? I was going to say that it starred actors not movie stars but that shortchanges Fassbender & Blanchett on the movie star front as well as short changing Pitt & Jolie on the acting front so nevermind... but it's sort of that.


Anyway Black Bag is out on March 14th. 

Tuesday, October 08, 2024

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Limey (1999)

Stacy: Why don't they make shows about people's daily lives you'd be interested in watching? You know, like "Sick Old Man" or "Skinny Little Weakling." "Big Fat Guy." Wouldn't you watch a show called "Big Fat Guy"? I'd watch that fucking show.

You can tell this movie is 25 years old now because there basically are entire networks of shows called Big Fat Guy at this point. Anyway a very happy 25 to Steven Soderbergh's The Limey! This is a movie that needs to be mentioned among the list of that phenomonal year 1999's phenomonal offerings more vigorously -- it ranks right up there among that outrageously good year's very best. Y'all are fans, right? If not go watch it or go watch it again -- I got to see it on the big screen again a couple of years back and man alive this movie fucks. One of Soderbergh's greatest.


Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Soderbergh Steals All the Stars


A quick search through our archives shows a grand total of zilch posts on this forthcoming movie project, but that seems bonkers to me -- I feel as if anybody was gonna write a post about Steven Soderbergh making a movie starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett that somebody woulda been yours truly. And yet here we are and only with word that Bridgerton actor Regé-Jean Page has also joined the cast am I getting around to it. Huh. Aaaanyway the thing is called Black Bag and all we know plot-wise is that that it's a spy thriller based in London. The script was written by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp which, well if I hadn't just been mildly disappointed by Soderbergh & Koepp's haunted house movie Presence (my review here) at Sundance last month that news would excite me more. But I can't not be excited about this. Soderbergh of course worked with Fassbender previously in Haywire, and with Blanchett in The Good German. And now one more picture of Regé-Jean looking gorgeous in a sweater for good measure:



Monday, January 29, 2024

My First Sundance 2024 Three

Okay, so Sundance! Maybe you noticed I was gone all last week? I was in sunny Utah, land of Mormon underwear and wretched anti-trans bills, for Robert Redford's little annual movie festival. Over the course of the fest -- including screeners I saw before I left, movies I saw while there, and movies I watched online once I got home -- I watched fifty-one movies total. That's a lot of movies! And so far I have reviewed... three? Yes, three. These things take time. I'm not a machine. More will be coming this week but first I need to link to the three reviews that've come already. So here those are.

First up I wrote down my thoughts on Steven Soderbergh's latest, the expirimental haunted house flick Presence -- read it right here. It stars Lucy Liu and Julia Fox (in the vaunted role of "haunted house real estate agent" ) among others, and Soderbergh's trick (he's always gotta have a trick) is the ghost is the camera. I had mixed feelings on it. So go read about them!

Next up another horror movie (no surprise there) but one I was much more excitable over (indeed I shared the poster for this one before I even left) -- a first-time feature from director Chris Nash called In a Violent Nature, which flips the script on the Slasher Movie by shooting the entire thing from the murderer's perspective. Read my review right here. This will be hitting Shudder sooner rather than later so stay tuned for more on it when that happens. But it's funny -- it wasn't until I was writing the second review that I realized both this and Presence both pull such a similar trick, showing us the story from the "villain"'s perspective. And yet I think the first-time filmmaker beat Soderbergh at the game? Anyway...

... moving on to the movie I was most looking forward to at the fest -- click here to read my thoughts on Love Lies Bleeding, the ass-kicking bodybuilder noir from Saint Maud director Rose Glass, starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brien as lovers who get all entangled up in a hyper-violent crime-spree -- I shared the trailer a few weeks back and I am super happy to say that this one totally lived up to my expectations. I fuckin' loved it. As I start my review with you should be thinking "Bound meets Mandy."

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Timothy Olyphant Five Times


Are fans of Timothy Olyphant called "Oly-fans"? They certainly should be. And I say that as an Oly-fan myself, so I have a say in the matter. Anyway we Oly-fans should be happy right now because Tim's got two projects on the immediate horizon -- there are new episodes of Justified coming (although here's where I admit I'm a bad Oly-fan because I never watched Justified) and, even more interesting to me, there is Steven Soderbergh's series Full Circle. It's about a botched kidnapping in current-day NYC and the investigation into it yadda yadda, here is the trailer:



The first two episodes of that premiere on max tomorrow! And then two-episodes every Wednesday for the two weeks after, making it a six-hour thing. "Miniseries" used to be the word but I guess "limited series" is where we are these days. Whatever. It's got Claire Danes and Tim and CCH Pounder and Zazie Beetz and William Sadler -- always love William Sadler! A couple episodes premiered at Tribeca but they never sent me screeners so I'll be watching it like the rest of you -- I did hear good things though. Anyway due to all of this content Timothy Olyphant was interviewed by the NYT, which you can read here. Or if you just want the pictures hit the jump...

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Nobody Puts Madsy in the Corner


Well it's that time! What time? Time for me to head off to places unknown (read: my couch) for five straight days. It's a holiday weekend here in the U.S. and I'm off until next Wednesday. I put in the work this past week though -- I reviewed the new Indiana Jones (here), I reviewed the new Jennifer Lawrence (here), I reviewed the new Rock Hudson bio-pic (here), I reviewed the new Wes Anderson (here), and I reviewed a forthcoming Jude Law (here). Oh and I answered the question of which role of Harrison Ford's was the hottest right here. PLUS I have a big piece that has not been not published yet which I will update the site with a link to over the break. That's a lotta goddamned writing y'all and I ready for that goddamned couch.

But like I did just say -- I will be updating the site a little bit over the break; not just that coming piece (heh I said "coming piece") but there's our annual July 4th ridiculousness as well, which will land on (you guessed it) July 4th. So come back and visit over the break for these and perhaps other surprises! Or per usual keep your eyes on my social media accounts -- it's not like I'll be off of those for longer than five seconds. Have a happy 4th, y'all! And even more importantly -- Happy 11 to Magic Mike!


Monday, June 26, 2023

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Jack: It's like seeing someone for the first time, like you can be passing on the street, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there's this kind of a recognition like you both know something. Next moment the person's gone, and it's too late to do anything about it. And you always remember it because it was there, and you let it go, and you think to yourself, 'What if I had stopped? What if I had said something?' What if, what if... it may only happen a few times in your life.
Karen: Or once.
Jack: Or once.

Every time I write this about a 1998 movie a little piece of my crumbles to dust, but -- a happy 25th birthday to this great Soderbergh flick! Another casualty of my busy-ness as of late was me re-watching this movie for the first time in too long and writing a piece on it for this anniversary; I've just had too many other projects due last and this week to get to this one. But I have an open little window tonight and I bought this movie on 4K recently, so maybe I'll watch it here for its anniversary proper. And maybe I'll remember what it felt like, actually liking George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez! In all seriousness though, I loved this movie and am extremely curious how it'll hold up after all these years. Stay tuned!

Thursday, March 02, 2023

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Joe Bang: Well, hello. I guess someone grew up.
What's your name again, little Logan?
Mellie: Mellie.
Joe Bang: Mellie! Mellie, Mellie, Mellie.
That rhymes with... smelly. Nice.

A happy 55 to Daniel Craig today! I considered ranking my favorite performances of his for this here miniature milestone birthday but then I remembered I already did that back in 2018 when he turned 50, so check that out here. Looking at the list today I might have to switch something out for his Benoit Blanc in Knives Out or Glass Onion, but then I can't decide which. You decide for me, then:


Friday, February 10, 2023

Magic Mike's Fury Road


Do not let the above photo that Channing Tatum shared today from the set of Magic Mike's Last Dance (in honor of the movie now being in theaters) fool you -- that photo feels like way more skin than you really ever see in the film itself. And I never wanted to be That Guy -- the one who took these movies to task for trying to be, you know, Movies, and not just Banana Hammock Strip Routines. But this latest one finally defeated me. Head on over to Pajiba to read my thoughts, which are mixed to put it lightly. I will say this is a case where my nagging makes the movie sound worse than it is -- it's a perfectly okay time. Salma Hayek really is terrific. There's just way too little show in this show-and-tell. If only everything had been as effortless and confident as its first twenty minutes, glimpsed here in this clip:

Tuesday, February 07, 2023

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Crash (1996)

James Ballard: You should've gone to the funeral.
Catherine Ballard: I wish I had. They bury the dead
so quickly. They should leave them lying around for months.

A happy 63rd birthday to James Spader today! Amid birthday wishes it's admittedly a shitty place to cop to such things but I'm going to go ahead and say that I've never been much of a James Spader fan -- when he leans into his creepiness (as he does with this film) I can tolerate him, but there's something that keeps me from loving him...

... and I've never really been able to figure it out what that is. He admittedly leans into that creepiness a lot, and if there's one thing I love it's a creep! Maybe it's that it's most of the time a very hetero brand of creep, and that bores me. Sex, Lies and Videotape? Boring! I have given that movie a dozen chances and it never sticks. But you have him and Elias Koteas blowing each other and I'm yours!

So what are your favorite James Spader performances?

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Magic Mike (2012)

Dallas: Fact is, the law says you cannot touch!
But I think I see a lotta lawbreakers up in this house tonight.

Magic Mike came out ten years ago today! Isn't that nuts?
I'm sorry but that's nuts. Soon enough (I would guess next
summer) we'll have a third movie. But we'll always have this:

And this:

And this:

People like to pretend this movie didn't offer up 
the goods but those people are no good.
I think those people need to be punished...



Friday, March 25, 2022

Channaissance Rising


The blessed age of our Channaissance is in full swing with this weekend's release of The Lost City starring him and Sandra Bullock in an adventure-romance that very clearly has the 1984 classic Romancing the Stone on its mind (and buttocks) -- I reviewed it for Pajiba today, and here is that review! It's totally okay and you probably will not have a bad time watching it! (Here is a recent gratuitous clip they dropped, if you need further convincing.) This comes just a few weeks after Tatum's also not bad directorial debut Dog -- which I reviewed right here -- and also hot on the tail of his exquisite for-the-ages photoshoot for V Man magazine, posted here. There's all of that, and Magic Mike 3 is set to start filming any minute I do believe (speaking of -- shouldn't we be getting some casting updates on that one, guys?)... I personally am real glad to have Channing back in our lives. I missed his ass. (Do I need to add "literally"? I don't think I need to add that. You get it.)

Monday, February 07, 2022

Quote of the Day


If you have the chance to read an interview with Steven Soderbergh you take that chance, as he's one of the smartest filmmakers and film-lovers that we have, and we've got the chance today! He's interviewed at The Daily Beast because he's got another new movie out this week, the techno-thriller KIMI starring Zoë Kravitz that's hitting HBO Max on Thursday -- read the whole damn thing here. The choice quotes i've seen going around have to do with Superhero Movies because people can't help themselves -- they gotta ask every damn movie-maker about Superhero Movies -- but I'm going to focus on his comments about the third Magic Mike movie, because.. of course I am. No but seriously he offers up more specific information than what we've had before on where he's going with it:

Daily Beast: You have a lot of upcoming projects, beginning with the third Magic Mike. What brought you back to the series, especially as a director? 

Steven Soderbergh: The live show that Channing and Reid [Carolin] and Alison [Faulk] thought and created. The live show completely blew me away. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen dancing like this, anywhere. I walked out of the theater and started calling everybody to say we need to make a third film about how Mike created that show. 

DB: So there’s going to be a life-imitating-art-imitating-life element to the sequel? 

SS: Yeah. Through a set of very odd circumstances, Mike is presented with the opportunity to make something like this happen, and the film is about another crazy collection of characters who are trying to pull this off. It’s another of my disguised procedurals, but it’s got massive amounts of dancing in it, and I’m super excited about it. It’s as close to a full-blown musical as I’m ever going to get."


Wednesday, February 02, 2022

Channing Tatum Six Times


There's a big cover story interview with Channing Tatum in the new issue of Variety, you can read it here -- he talks about wigs and getting butt-ass-naked in The Lost City (he also admits he hates that they changed the title from The Lost City of D, which has also bugged me) with Sandra Bullock (I shared the trailer for that here), he talks about losing his pet dog and how that became his movie Dog out later this month, and most importantly he talks about making the third Magic Mike movie with Steven Soderbergh, which was just announced in November. Choice quote:

"This one’s going to be a full dance-icle. We’re going to swing for the fence. I’m going to dance as hard as I’ve danced in any movie other than ‘Hail, Caesar!’” he says, referring to the 2016 Coen brothers film in which he learned how to tap dance. “I want this movie to be filled with joy and fun. Everybody is like, ‘Less character, more dancing.’ So I’ve listened."

I'm one of those people -- "those people" -- who's actually liked both of the Magic Mike movies as they've been; I know a lot of people have reiterated what he's saying, that they both were more drama less tea-bagging than people were clamoring for, but I thought they worked. Still I'll come for the tea-bagging too! Of course I will. Anyway Chan's looking mighty fine right? He looks ten, fifteen, years younger? They've definitely put the Hollywood buffing machine to work on him. Hit the jump for the whole shoot...

Monday, November 29, 2021

Back It Up, Channing Tatum


The "it" I speak of is the dump-truck (ass) full of cash to Channing and Steven Soderbergh's houses, because the duo have just announced a third Magic Mike movie! To be titled Magic Mike's Last Dance, Tatum posted a photo of the script cover on his Twitter (see down below) this morning, and I have to admit I'm not super surprised? Happy yes, obviously, but not surprised given how ripped Channing's been seen getting lately -- see here for an example. His abs were like a flare shot into the sky -- I sensed this coming! Anyway there's not a lot of info, besides Soderbergh (no doubt with tongue firmly in cheek) saying, "Mike Lane’s dream of connecting people through dance must be realized," so stay tuned. I can't imagine that we won't see some familiar faces (and you know what comes down below those faces) showing back up for the third round. Personally I'm really hoping they bring Alex Pettyfer back -- I know he was an asshole, but... he put the "ass" in "asshole." He really did.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Don't Fear the Fred


A fresh obsession in my household is the actor Fred Hechinger, who's had a big few months popping up unexpectedly in front of me with Joe Wright's (rightly-excoriated) The Woman in the Window, Steven Soderbergh's Let Them All Talk, an episode of Barry Jenkins' The Underground Railroad, Paul Greengrass' forgotten Oscar-contender film News of the World, the Tribeca film Italian Studies (which I reviewed right here), and finally the biggest ongoing two-fer real reason for this post -- the Fear Street horror trilogy on Netflix and Mike White's HBO series The White Lotus (which I wrote about over here). This is an astonishing run, y'all -- most of us only saw him for the first time in Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade just three years back...

... and now he's everywhere! And I'm great with that! Most of those roles I just rattled off were small but those last two especially, Lotus and Fear Street, have proven him a delight. He played such a fun weirdo in Fear Street: 1994, far and away my favorite thing going on in it, and in Mike White's hands he's... well he's also a fun weirdo there but the performance is dialed down and surprisingly introspective, and I found his whole arc, without getting spoilery, pretty moving. 

Anyway he is very much somebody we should all be keeping our eyes on, and learn his name if you don't know it already. He's good stuff! In related news here's the trailer for the final part of the Fear Street Trilogy, subtitled 1666, which premieres on Netflix this Friday. Have y'all been watching these movies? I think they're a lot of fun -- don't take them seriously, just enjoy the ride. 

Friday, April 23, 2021

I Don't Know No Oscar


So... apparently... I don't know if you heard this... the Oscars are this weekend? I know I'm annoying enough about it that my stance probably seems like a pose I've adopted or whatever -- "I'm the cool guy who thinks awards are dumb, nyah!" -- but I really have paid less interest to the usual awards season antics this year than ever, and that's saying a lot. Because I am on "Film Twitter" I have some vague sense of what's nominated -- I could probably rattle off most of what's up for Best Picture if you held a gun to my head, but just because they're the movies I keep seeing the tweets about. I really have not looked at the list of nominees since the day they were announced and even then it was only cursory.

I think the Oscars are nonsense, but more than that I think they are actively harmful nonsense, for those of us who actually care about The Movies, in that they reduce our conversations about Film Art to statistics in the place of true meaningful discussion...

... and they just suck every ounce of air and life out of the place. But I do still watch the dumb damn show every year, because I do love watching movie-stars put on fancy clothes and mingling with one another more than I do a lot of other things I could be doing. And this year specifically I am pretty excited to see what the show's producer, one Steven Soderbergh, has got up his sleeve -- he keeps talking about the production feeling cinematic, like a movie itself, and I have no idea what to expect but I do know that Steven Soderbergh is a bigger movie buff than all of us put together and the dude knows how to put glamour and celebrity on a pedestal when he wants to. I'm sold. 

Just don't ask me who's nominated for what. But I'll be watching, and not knowing who's nominated going in will give me my own fun game of, "Oh shit, [that person] is nominated! Look at their poofy dress and/or poofy tuxedo! Oh what a night!" It won't be the same game all the awards punditry are playing, shuffling around percentages like bedazzled Rain Men, but it'll be it's own damn thing. So -- and wow, what a sell this has been! -- follow me on Twitter if you don't already, as I'll no doubt be live-tweeting the night in my own fashion. Or tell me in the comments of this post what you're rooting for, or rooting against, or neither, or both. Oh and have a great weekend! Maybe find some time to watch a piece of trash that never ever would've gotten nominated for shit, like Tammy and the T-Rex!



Monday, January 18, 2021

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 2012


Three weeks right in a row has got to be some sort of record for our "Siri Says" series -- it's been awhile since I haven't let my attention slip in between. But here we are, for the third time in as many weeks, asking the little woman inside of my telephone to give me a number between 1 and 100 and then name my favorite five movies from the corresponding year. Today, on the second try, Siri said the number 12, and so today we will skip ourselves back not too far, just to The Movies of 2012.

This year is of course recent enough that I already did this once -- you can check out our so-called "Golden Trousers" awards for 2012 at this link. Those were some substantial Pantys! 2012 represents the peak of my awards-posting -- I posted a ton that year, more than any before or since. What I remember about that is it blew me the fuck out. There's no need for almost 70 posts! I've learned to condense them, thankfully -- my sanity thanks me anyway. 

I was curious to see if my original list of favorite 2012 movies had shifted at all in the past nine years and lo, it has, although not a ton. What surprised me the most is how few 2012 movies I've re-watched since 2012? Ones that placed rather high at the time I just haven't seen since. So there's some shuffling off my head today, mostly due to my memory being hazy, but truth be told if I haven't had the desire to re-watch the movie in eight years that might say something about my love for the movie, right? Right. Anyway, the list as it stands today...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 2012
(dir. Wes Anderson)
-- released on June 29th 2012 --
(dir. Leoz Carax)
-- released on July 4th 2012 --

(dir. Chris Butler & Sam Fell)
-- released on August 17th 2012 --

(dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
-- released on September 21st 2012 --

(dir. Jacques Audiard)
-- released on May 17th 2012 --

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

Runners-up: Amour (dir. Michael Haneke), The Cabin in the Woods (dir. Drew Goddard), Cosmopolis (dir. David Cronenberg), Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg), Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderbergh), The Paperboy (dir. Lee Daniels), Compliance (dir. Craig Zobel), Take This Waltz (dir. Sarah Polley), The Impossible (dir. JA Bayona)...

... Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold), Killing Them Softly (dir. Andrew Dominik), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (dir. Stephen Chbosky), Dark Horse (dir. Todd Solondz), Bullhead (dir. Michael R. Roksam), The Wise Kids (dir. Stehen Cone), The Bay (dir. Barry Levinson), Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Never seen: Hysteria (dir. Tanya Wexler), Goon (dir. Michael Dowse), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb), Hyde Park on Hudson (dir. Roger Michell), Quartet (dir. Dustin Hoffman)

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

What are your favorite movies of 2012?

Friday, December 11, 2020

What is Left in Our Wake


Betrayal is a word that pops up again and again in Steven Soderbergh's melancholic reunion film Let That All Talk, now on HBO Max, which sees a threesome (not a foursome, not a fivesome, and not even an orgy) of old friends -- played by Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen -- gathering together for the first time in decades for a little Transatlantic crossing. Roberta (Bergen), whose real life was mined for the book that made Alice (Streep) famous, uses it the most. But we also see Susan (Weist), the type of friend who always ends up caught in the middle of the bigger warring personalities, spell the word out on a Scrabble board -- Susan's usage is excited, gleeful; she scored a lot of points off of that word!

And betrayal is a word that's been on the tip of my tongue over the past few weeks as well, as I've come into the knowledge that one of my closest friends from college has morphed inexplicably into a full-fledged Trump-supporting Q-Anon believer. I'd been averting my eyes from the mini-quakes that were pointing towards this revelation regarding her pre-election -- just because who had the emotional strength for anything pre-election? -- but once it was safe to poke our heads out from under Our National Nightmare again I peeked back that way and found, with legitimate horror, what my friend has become. 

She's all in, on toppling the election and upending Democracy, on professing a love for the hateful and homophobic Ted Cruz, on screeching anti-Trans screeds -- this was a person who went out and danced with me at the gay clubs when I first came out, held my hand when I cried about my first break-ups, and preached more than nearly anyone I knew a gospel of love and acceptance. I don't recognize my friend anymore -- two weeks ago I asked her where that girl had gone and she said, basically, good riddance. 

So my heart, it is a little broken. I am angry, and yes I feel betrayed. The last couple of weeks, dark though they may be with disease and Republican lies, have been filled with some optimism -- with the vaccines inching forward and Biden's inauguration tip-toeing towards us a little light emerges -- but I keep finding myself dig into that word. Betrayal. It's a balloon that sets itself up in your belly and lets you blow, blow, blow, until it pushes everything else aside. I keep looking at my friend's Instagram and making myself sick about it. Her poison spreads. My memories of the happiest seasons shake just a little -- was there truth in those moments, an ineffable truth that escapes what came of them? Can I still hold them so tight?

All of this was on my mind anyway but Soderbergh's film feels deeply of this moment, this shared experience -- of a time where so many of us are being forced to look across the table, or into our pasts, and recontextualize formative, important relationships with these reams of new and boggling information. I know this is happening across the country, to thousands, hell hundreds of thousands of people, and has been for several years now. For some people it's even closer -- I can't imagine what it's been like for my friend's husband, to witness this personality transplant so very up-close. 

Let All of Them Talk is about this and it isn't -- it's very funny for one thing; I don't want y'all to think you're wandering into some despairing drama. Streep, Wiest, Bergen, Lucas Hedges, Gemma Chan, these are beautiful funny charming people to ride a beautiful boat across the ocean with, and Soderbergh leans easy and clean into all of their strengths as performers. I especially loved all of his long close-ups on Hedges just listening to people -- what an expressive and curious face that actor has; watching him react felt at times like we were learning more about what was happening then we would have gotten from listening to the people doing the talking.

But for all the film's light energy there's this undercurrent of sadness and yes, betrayal, that it is thankfully never afraid of; that it leans into with the most simple and straightforward bursts of humanity, honesty. It lets them talk, yes, but the film listens -- it really truly listens. It is openly engaged with the concept of listening to someone -- hence those close-ups on Hedges -- and how what people say, what they are truly saying, affects those who listen; who truly listen. As the popular self-help rhetoric goes "communication is a two-way street," but that doesn't mean you travel back and forth over the same patch of road forever. Quite often we're picked up and carried unto places we didn't expect or want to go, and there's just simply no way back to where we came from.



Monday, November 16, 2020

And Let Dianne Wiest Talk Most of All!


If it doesn't star Jake Gyllenhaal lord knows I'm lousy at keeping up with all the "what's coming out this year" news but did anybody actually know that Steven Soderbergh has a film starring Meryl Streep, Lucas Hedges, Gemma Chan, Candice Bergen, and DIANNE FUCKING WIEST...

... coming out next month before the trailer got dropped this past weekend? It seems like Steve to just drop this shit on us without warning. Anyway I am terribly excited for the DIANNE FUCKING WIEST alone because DIANNE FUCKING WIEST is not put in front of me nearly often enough. 

The film is called Let Them All Talk and apparently all of the dialogue was improvised and you know I would worry about that if it was like a Judd Apatow movie starring Jonah Hill or some shit but Soderbergh's title applies -- I want him to let Meryl and Candace and DIANNE FUCKING WIEST just talk! Here's the trailer:


Let Them All Talk hits HBO Max on December 10th.
One more thought, though:

Around the time I was reviewing the movie French Exit at NYFF I saw people slamming Lucas Hedges' long hair and I have to say... the exact opposite. My crush on Lucas has grown exponentially with his hair. Keep the hair, Lucas!