RIP Donald Sutherland

Extremely saddened to hear about the passing of Donald Sutherland, one of my all-time favorite actors and easily my favorite of the 1970s group that is (was) still around and kicking. Brilliant in absolutely every single thing I ever watched him in -- go watch Six Degrees of Separation (my personal fave) or Klute or Don't Look Now (or maybe that one is) or MASH or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (or maybe that one is) or hell his every scene in the Hunger Games movies. He was legit incapable of not spinning gold. He is far and away the best thing happening in Ordinary People and somehow he got none of the attention for it. In one of the greatest disasters that AMPAS has ever reigned over Sutherland never got a single Oscar nomination -- they finally gave him an Honorary one in 2018 but let's be real the man should've had several statues by then. I am immensely depressed that we will never see him pop up in another scene of some random movie and immediately make whatever nosnense is going on feel believable and true. This one hurts! Please tell me your favorite Sutherland performances and/or moments in the comments! What a loss.

ETA I just read that Sutherland had written a memoir before he passed, and it's set to come out in November! This makes me very happy -- it's like we'll get to spend some more time with him. Click here to pre-order it. I bet the man had some stories to tell!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Flan Kittredge: This is what I dreamt. I didn't dream, so much as realize this. I feel so close to the paintings. I'm not just selling, like, pieces of meat. I remembered why I loved paintings in the first place, what got me into this. I thought... dreamt... remembered... how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then, one day, he loses it. Loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remembered asking my kids' second-grade teacher: 'Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade - blotches of green and black. The third grade - camouflage. But your grade, the second grade, Matisses, every one. You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade. What is your secret?' 'I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.' 'I dreamt of colour. I dreamt of our son's pink shirt. I dreamt of pinks and yellows. And the new Van Gogh the Museum of Modern Art got. And the Irises that sold for $53.5 million. And, wishing a Van Gogh was mine, I looked at my English hand-lasted shoes, and thought of Van Gogh's tragic shoes, and remembered me as I was-a painter losing a painting.'

I talk often about how Stockard Channing's performance in this film is one of my all-time favorites, and yet I don't give nearly enough lip service to how spectacularly good Donald Sutherland -- who is celebrating his 88th birthday today -- is opposite her. He's the control to her chaos, the control to her chaos, and we like, we like. In all seriousness Sutherland is one of the greatest living actors we have and he hasn't gotten nearly enough praise for it, so take a moment out of your day to praise him. A gold-star MNPP fave!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Woody: You gave him my pink shirt? You gave a complete stranger my pink shirt? That shirt was a Christmas present from you! I treasured that shirt, I loved that shirt! My collar had grown a full size from weightlifting, you saw that my arms had grown, you saw that my neck had grown and you bought me that shirt for my new body! I loved that shirt! My first shirt for my new body and you gave that shirt away? I can't believe you! I hate this life and I hate you!

The Pink Shirt Speech is one of my favorite speeches in a movie full of favorite speeches -- I don't know if there's a movie I quote more in daily life than this one and perhaps you'll find it strange to know how often you can work a rant about a "new shirt for a new body" into your living experience but lemme tell you, it's often. 

But I bring this all up today for another reason. The character of Woody is played by the actor Oz née Osgood Perkins -- he was also memorable in Legally Blonde in 2001 -- and Oz née Osgood (who I might also be bothered to mention is the son of the actor slash Psycho star Anthony Perkins) has now gone and become a horror film director!

He's been at it for a few years, beginning with The Blackcoat's Daughter with Emma Roberts and Keirnan Shipka in 2015 -- I wasn't as bowled over by that film as some people were, but it's perfectly solid -- and 2016's I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House starring Ruth Wilson, which I haven't seen yet despite wanting to; I love me some Ruth Wilson but I just keep forgetting. 

And this week his third film is hitting theaters -- it's called Gretel and Hansel and is a reimagineering of that classic children's tale of cannibal terror and plum-sauces. It stars It actress Sophia Lillis and the always welcome Alice Krige, whose deeply creepy demeanor gives the trailer most of its bite...

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I've seen this trailer at least half a dozen times now in the theater and I was sold from the first, even if part of me worries they might have found a way to commodify what we might call "the A24 aesthetic" a la The Witch, into a tangible selling point... does that make sense? I think it looks cool but I'm not sure the look of it isn't borrowing, to put it mildly, from well celebrated others that have come recently. Or awhile back, even...

... although if you're gonna rip somebody off in 2020 ripping off Alejandro Jodorowsky is a plenty good one to be ripping off. Anyway I will find out tonight when I see the thing -- I'm mostly just excited to have just now figured out that it's the Pink Shirt Speech Dude who directed it. I'll give the Pink Shirt Speech Dude (and you know the son of Anthony fucking Perkins) the benefit of the doubt!

Stroke Me Off

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I've never been able to decide whether the Kandinsky being painted on both sides -- Chaos, Control, Chaos, Control, you like, you like -- in Six Degrees of Separation is whiff too obvious a metaphor; especially when they cut back to the painting spinning side to side later on in the film as Stockard's having her little world-changing breakdown. But at least there are two sides, the characters live and breath and love their pink shirts and they fall apart... which brings me to Velvet Buzzsaw. A pile of fabulous pink shirts, price tagged, begging for a buyer.

With character names like "Morf Vandewalt" and "Rhodora Haze" and "Jon Dondon" it is impossible, from the moment we meet this movie's characters, to take them seriously. But it should be a hurdle that writer-director Dan Gilroy and his actors, led by Jake Gyllenhaal, face front-on -- Six Degrees does after all tell us the story of Flan and Ouisa Kitteredge, names that drip with pretension that nonetheless unravel gold sheaths to reveal creamy centers underneath.

Gilroy keeps Morf and his Darger-adjacent menagerie of fellow looky-loos at arm's length, which allows for some good belly laughs before letting a plucky slasher vibe take hold -- Who Will Die Next And What Will Be Village Voiced Of Them -- and he seems content with keeping it at that surface level; at that level of surface snark then, Velvet Buzzsaw is a perfectly good enough time. As hollow as its targets, but a clever goof with some of my favorite gorgeous people letting loose in ways they don't always get to do. 

I do wish it cut deeper, though. Not only intellectually or emotionally -- if it is going to go broad then on the killings-front it weirdly ends up pulling its punches, as if its slightly skeptical of being all the Final Destination movie it clearly wants to be. If you're going to have your actors play it this big you're going to need to go full Guignol. (Imagine what Paul Verhoeven might have done with that sequence between Jake and the hobo robot and weep for the pervy freakshow that might have been.)

The Toni Collette sequence (glimpsed in the trailer) is really the only place you feel Buzzsaw's combative tones flashing like fireworks -- needless to say Toni's an actress that understands how to mix her paints, her pathos and camp, to get just the right strain of blood red performance. She is chaos, control, chaos, control -- contrarian canvasses twistering up some true, meaty satire. I liked, I liked.

Fantasia 2018: Knuckleball

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Perhaps proving her point I think of Stockard Channing's "Don't think about elephants" line an awful lot. In Six Degrees of Separation Stockard's character is attempting to not think about the elephant in the room - in this case the money she and her husband are trying to make off of a rich guest they're having over for dinner - and she says, "Whatever you do, don't think about elephants." But once the elephants are on parade there's no stopping the...

... and so it went with watching the movie Knuckleball after (importantly, after) having been told that it's an ultra-violent spin on its forefather Home Alone. Suddenly Kevin McAllisters are all you can see, as far as the eye can see. Lucky for us, and them, Knuckleball is fluent in elephant riding. It hops right on the beast's back and rides that bitch like a rodeo pro. There are explicit nods shot-wise, costume-wise, dialogue-wise, but just when you're thinking it's a goof Knuckleball goes for the guts. Literally. Home Alone meets Martyrs? Why the fuck not.

At just over eighty minutes long Knuckleball skins itself down to fighting shape - there's no excess meat hanging off; all the better to bruise. Luca Villacis (in the Culkin role) is a winning kid, adding a dash of haunted to the proceedings with his big woeful gaze, and the weirdo next-door neighbor is given gum-toothed gusto by Munro Chambers. Knuckleball is lean and mean but it'll get your heart thumping, one hard elephant stomp in the snow at a time.

Great Moments in Movie Staches

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In honor of Warren Beatty's 81st birthday today I figured there had to be a movie he made while mustached, given the time he has made movies during (aka all of it), and the first thing that came up was that mega-swoony picture of Warren above in Mike Nichols' 1975 film The Fortune, co-starring Jack Nicholson and Stockard Channing. 

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There's only one problem: I have literally never even heard of this movie before. Have you? Have you, dare I ask, seen it? It's Mike Nichols for goodness sake so it must have some worth, right? Tell me something! I might have to watch this this very weekend if it's supposed to be any good. I love me some Stockard.

Six Degrees of... Somebody!

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If you guys have been around here for very long then you know that the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, starring Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland and Will Smith, is one of my favorite movies, period. It sits among those lofty titles that inspired me to make my home in New York, and I see it and feel it every day I walk around. I mean just last night I was making my way home from a late night art exhibit crossing Central Park when we stumbled upon the statue of a husky dog that is remarked upon in the film repeatedly.  

So I was already feeling the need today to re-watch the movie, and then suddenly this terrific piece on the movie popped up over at The Film Experience and pushed me over the edge - consider this movie on the second I get home.

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bonus gif pic.twitter.com/w8xz6J9cqb

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) June 7, 2017

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The thing is after I tweeted the above gif out I got to thinking about this scene in the film - where Will Smith is found fooling around with a hustler by Stockard Channing in their home - and I realized I had never looked up the actor who played the hustler. So I did look him up... and a mystery appeared!!! This is some real "Six Degrees" shit right here, lemme tell ya.

The actor's name is Lou Milione, and he only has three credits - he was also in Taps (twelve years before Six Degrees) and he was also in something called The Blue Lizard (nine years after). Weird spaced out things, right? But there's not really much else on him anywhere, except a couple of pictures of him on stage in the 80s. Seems not entirely unreasonable for an actor with so few credits so long ago.

But here's the thing: when you just google his name what mostly shows up are a whole bunch of articles about an actor-turned-undercover-DEA agent who brought down a "legendary arms trafficker known as 'The Merchant of Death'" in Colombia in 2012. What the what? Here's an interview with this guy on 60 Minutes!
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Is this the same guy that played the "Hustler" that Will Smith picked up in Six Degrees of Separation?? I am not sure! The DEA agent goes by the full name of Louis Milione, and in the above interview when he's asked about his former acting career he only mentions soap operas and some stage work. But the IMDb page for "Louis Milione" only includes his appearance on 60 Minutes and a documentary about the case he broke. No soaps at all listed in his past...

... but that said there aren't any soaps listed on the IMDb page for "Lou Milione" either. What do we make of it? You guys tell me - is the Naked Dude in Six Degrees of Separation also the DEA Agent who brought down the so-called "Merchant of Death" twenty years later or what?
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Honestly it seems really possible to me that they are the same person, and I sure hope he's not embarrassed by this attention - it's love! So much love. He needs to be proud of this accomplishment! This is a grand great film, and this scene in particular was tremendously important to an entire generation of... certain people... among which I count myself.

But if you're unconvinced and you need to look closer I have included a whole bunch of NSFW gifs from this scene after the jump, you know, for research purposes...

I Am Link

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--- Hot Priors - The restaging of Angels in America starring Andrew Garfield and Russell Tovey premiered this week and the reviews appear to be out of this world - see a few twitter reactions gathered up right here. What do we think the chances are of this getting carried over here to the US? Any? Man I want it. Anyway as you see with that picture there the boys are on the cover of the new issue of Gay Times and you can see some behind-the-scenes video from the shoot over here. (BONUS -- click over to the Tumblr for gifs I made of the fellas together.)

 

--- Six Degrees - Speaking of theater I can't afford, I saw an ad for the new staging of Six Degrees of Separation starring the always awesome Allison Janney on TV this morning and thought about how much I'd love to see that show if I wasn't totally broke right now (sigh) and as if to twist the dagger there's a great big fun article today in The New York Times talking about how the idea of "six degrees" took off as a forever meme thanks to the show.

--- Fifties Freaks - Free Fire is out in theaters this weekend and so director Ben Wheatley's been doing the rounds, and as pumped as I am to see Free Fire I'm even moreso about his next not-yet-filmed movie called Freakshift, which stars Alicia Vikander and Armie Hammer as cops fighting monsters - in a chat with Collider Wheatley says the movie will feel full-on like a 50s B-movie, lots of goofiness plus monsters, which I'm totally there for.

--- The Monster - I expressed my dismay at having blanked on this news on Twitter last night with a remembrance of Brenda Fraser's Hot Moment so you probably want to see that, but seriously - how could I forget that Bill Condon, director of the brilliant film Gods & Monsters, is in talks to direct the new Bride of Frankenstein movie? If a new Bride of Frankenstein has to be made (and apparently it must) well, there's probably not a better choice, director-wise.

--- Superheroes Ahead - A bunch of folks got to see a bunch of Marvel stuff this week, including a super early look at the Black Panther movie, and it sounds like Marvel is really pumped about what they're getting from director Ryan Coogler and stars Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o and Queen Angela Bassett, of course. And also of utmost importance - it sounds like all of the films will keep sexualizing their leading men in the correct ways, too.

--- Oh Norman - As Bates Motel finishes up its run I find myself getting angrier and angrier that its two leads haven't been feted appropriately - the show's often too messy for its own good (I don't care about 85% of its subplots) but Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore have given tremendous performances for five straight years now. You do hear about Vera now and then though, so I was happy to see Freddie get some love thanks to this Gold Derby piece - he has been unjustly overlooked. His Norman Bates can stand proudly alongside Anthony Perkins.

--- Sweet Cheeks - I guess there was a teaser for the trailer for the Kingsman sequel yesterday that flashed by a full trailer in super quick succession -- if you care enough not to wait for the actual trailer to show up you can see captures of its many images over at DH. All I want for this movie, all I demand from it really, is that it end exactly like the first one did, only instead of zooming in on some random girl's butt it's Taron now giving it up for god and country.

---  And Finally I haven't watched this yet but smebody put together a video about "The Cinematic Universe of Andrea Arnold" I am so there for that idea I will watch it as soon as I get the chance. I love thinking about her movies like they're superhero movies.
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993) 

 Paul: Did you see Donald Barthelme's obituary? 

He said that collage was the art form of the 20th century. 

Ouisa: Everything is somebody else's. 

Paul: Not your children. Not your life. 

Ouisa: No, you got me there. That is mine. 

That is nobody else's. 

Paul: You don't sound happy. 

Ouisa: There is so much you don't know. 

You are so smart and so stupid. 

A most happy 73rd birthday 

to the legend Stockard Channing.

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10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1993

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Tis the time to talk to inanimate objects once again - I picked up my phone, I asked it to pick a number between 1 and 100, and it talked back to me... and after it told me to murder every fourteenth person on every odd numbered street it told me the number "93." 93 as in the year 1993. And from there I will choose my ten favorite movies from that year. Like magic, and things.

1993's an interesting year because I can probably pin-point it as the year I became a true movie maniac. I remember getting my very first movie magazine in the mail - it was the issue of Entertainment Weekly with Sharon Stone and Sliver on the cover! It was all downhill, for Sharon and for me, from there. By June I was going to see a particular movie in the theater 13 times over the span of 3 weeks but wait I'm getting ahead of myself...

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1993

Jurassic Park

(dir. Steven Spielberg)

-- released on June 11th 1993 --

The Remains of the Day

(dir. James Ivory)

-- released on November 19th 1993 --

Army of Darkness

(dir. Sam Raimi)

-- released on February 19th 1993 --

Three Colors: Blue

(dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski)

-- released on September 8th 1993 --

The Age of Innocence

(dir. Martin Scorsese)

-- released on October 1st 1993 --

Addams Family Values

(dir. Barry Sonnenfeld)

-- released on November 19th 1993 --

Fearless

(dir. Peter Weir)

-- released on November 5th 1993 --

Manhattan Murder Mystery

(dir. Woody Allen)

-- released on August 18th 1993 --

The Nightmare Before Christmas

(dir. Henry Selick)

-- released on October 28th 1993 --

Six Degrees of Separation

(dir. Fred Schepisi)

-- released on December 8th 1993 --

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Runners-up: The Piano (dir. Jane Campion), Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis), What's Eating Gilbert Grape (dir. Lasse Hallström), Searching For Bobby Fischer (dir. Steven Zaillian)...

... Short Cuts (dir. Robert Altman), Schindler's List (dir. Steven Spielberg), The Wedding Banquet (dir. Ang Lee), Body Snatchers (dir. Abel Ferrera),  Cronos (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)

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What are your favorite movies of 1993?

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Beast Lightnin'

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So if you head on over to The Film Experience you'll see today's Grease-flavored edition of our "Beauty vs Beast" series has gone live, wherein I admit to never having seen the film. I already have a favorite comment on the post, which went up a couple of hours ago, from Paul Outlaw who tells me that if I had ever seen the movie I'd have involved Stockard Channing's character Rizzo in the poll, and I don't find that hard to believe. Stockard Channing is usually always the best thing about where-ever Stockard Channing shows up.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Tess: He offered you parts in Cats? I thought you hated Cats. You said it was an all time low in a lifetime of theatre going. You said, "Aeschylus did not invent the theatre to have it end up a bunch of chorus kids in cat suits prancing around wondering which of them will go to kitty-cat heaven."

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Flan: Why do you stay in South Africa?

Geoffrey: One has to stay there.

To educate the black workers. 

And we'll know we've been successful when they kill us.

Ouisa: Oh, goodness. 

Flan: Planning the revolution that will destroy you.

Ouisa: Putting your life on the line. 

Geoffrey: We don't think of it like that.

I wish you'd come and visit. 

Ouisa: Oh, would we visit you and sit in your gorgeous house, planning visits to the townships, demanding to see the poorest of the poor? "Oh, are you sure they're the worst off? I mean, we've come all this way. I mean, we don't want to see people just mildly victimized by apartheid. We demand shock." You know it doesn't seem right, sitting on the East Side, talking about revolution. 

Since I'm using this bit of dialogue to wish Sir Ian McKellen a happy 77th birthday today I was going to cut it off after he says the bit about knowing they'll have been successful when they get murdered, but I just love the dialogue in this scene, in this movie, way too much to edit it. It's too great. And I think about this scene every time I go abroad and find myself stumbling through a poor neighborhood, not knowing the language and eyeing the local sights, fetishizing the chipped-paint poverty of Other Cultures.

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The Glamorous 9/11 Movie We Been Waiting For

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In the wake of his enormous success with Shakespeare in Love I really thought Joseph Fiennes would go somewhere, but I didn't expect that somewhere to be "right off the face of the Earth." Within three years he was doing straight-to-video-ish dreck like Killing Me Softly with Heather Graham (although bless him he was awfully naked in that). He would pop up here (Running With Scissors) and there (American Horror Story - okay clearly Ryan Murphy loves him) but mostly it's been a bit of a disappearing act. (Do you think he offended Gywneth in some way? She is powerful, vengeful.)

Anyway today there is very exciting and strange news regarding the other Mr. Fiennes -- he is going to play... Michael Jackson??? Yes, that Michael Jackson. And you know what, it's actually kind of great casting? Or it could be anyway with the right make-up, for we're talking Michael Jackson in 2001...

Maybe I'm crazy but I can see it. Anyway it will clearly need a lot of make-up (and shaving, constant shaving) to get there. But that aside, everything else about this project screams "YES YES YES" a million times -- it's based on that legendary Vanity Fair article from a few years back that told the tale of how Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando were forced to take a road trip together in the wake of 9/11 when all the flights out of New York were grounded. They were planning on driving all the way to California, but they only made it to Cincinnati.

To top all of this off, playing Elizabeth Taylor in the tele-film (it's being made for the British TV channel Sky) is Stockard Channing (YES YES YES) and playing Brando is Brian Cox (YES YES YES). Can you imagine? I don't understand why this is only a TV Movie -- they should be spending a hundred million dollars on this thing.
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Ouisa: The girl worked just to stay alive. She was one of those 

armies of people who come to New York filled with dreams, 

and end up on a treadmill, working and working, 

forgetting why they came here. 

 I have posted this quote before but it bears repeating.

Since it floats through my head on a weekly basis, and all.

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