"my link saw something that night"

• The next James Bond will be... Damian Lewis? Our first ginger 007 you guys! Rumor only but I could see that happening. [Mirror]
• It's weird that there's not a definitive feature about the airplane-building Wright Brothers. Steven Spielberg wants to make one as it turns out. Seems like a good fit, no?  [/Film]
• Life on the red planet? There's water at least. Did Fox pay NASA to announce this the week before the opening of The Martian ;) ? [The Guardian]

• Rising star Jonny Beauchamp says he owes everything to Roland Emmerich. Oh noooo. Tough debt. Also there's a photoshoot [Interview magazine]
• "I was being talked to like I was a silly pop singer." Grace Jones is still quotable/fabulous/singular. Just released a memoir [Time Out]
• "I've got tea. I've got cookies. No cake!" I cannot tell you how often my best friends and I quote The Log Lady from Twin Peaks. RIP Catherine Coulson [Wired]
• "Marlene Dietrich believed her pussy was magic" is the first sentence of this article so you know you want to read it. Why can't we get a biopic about THESE anecdotes? [Pajiba]
• Is this really Frank Grillo (from Captain America: Winter Soldier) younger & NSFW? [OMG BLOG]
• Everyone in the world has forgotten that Disney was going to make an Enchanted sequel. Except Disney apparently. It's going to be called Disenchanted. I shudder to think of the web exploding with "who should replace Amy Adams?" articles  [Coming Soon]
• "we were certainly looking for shots that told the story without a lot of cutting." - Roger Deakins on point of view and action sequences in Sicario [The Film Stage]
• First image of Woody Harrelson as LBJ in Rob Reiner's forthcoming biopic [Empire] 

Image of the Day
Thor and The Vision making out from the Avengers: Age of Ultron gag/blooper reel. Love the elegant placement of Thor's hammer. The best part of the image is surely that man about to shoot in the corner. 

P.S. My favorite part is Elizabeth Olsen dropping her accent when she messes up a line. 

Video of the Day #1
The Revenant gets a new nearly 3 minute trailer. I won't be watching it because I love the teaser so much (previously discussed, the one with all the heavy breathing) and I don't want any more information in my eyeballs before seeing it than we've already gotten.  The reaction online seems breathless/"MASTERPIECEY"! but one should never bank on trailers to tell you what the finished quality of a movie will be, only to tell you whether it looks like you must see the movie. The last trailer that fooled me with "oh, this will be a masterpiece, hands down!" was Little Children (2006) and that's where I learned my lesson once and for all that the art of cutting trailers into 2-ish minute expressive gems was an entirely different art form (a beautiful art form if you don't give too much away) then making a 2 hour movie. 

Video of the Day #2
"Bitch Better Have My Money" Barbershop Quartet Quintet style with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 

"Oh, what a tweet. What a lovely tweet!"

In case you needed another reason to love Edgar Wright...

Hey @TheAcademy, I don't even need the voting form. Put me down for 'Fury Road' in all categories. Even Documentary. pic.twitter.com/zg0MNPWA9Y

— edgarwright (@edgarwright) September 29, 2015

P.S. I know this is a terribly silly thing to worry about but I worry about it every day. Can Mad Max manage any Oscar nominations?

Mad Max Fury Road is a freaking miracle. Obviously a Best Picture nomination would be a lot to ask for (though deserved) and without precedent (No live-action sequel has ever been nominated for Best Picture unless its predecessor had also been... no not even The Dark Knight or Skyfall despite their abundant nominations elsewhere. And, no, Silence of the Lambs was not a sequel to Manhunter. The only sequel to win this honor was Toy Story 3... in an expanded field). But if Mad Max Fury Road isn't on track for cinematography and sound and editing and the like... what good are any of these craft branches at all since they're meant to recognized inspired work? 

Matt's Mouth Tastes Like Foot. And Other Truths & Lies

For those who aren't on Twitter where I got kind of worked up about Matt Damon's latest foot-in-mouth disease, a quick recap what went down is in order. Before we begin I think it's important to note that I have liked Matt Damon as an actor since School Ties (1992). I still like him as an actor and movie star and The Martian is a lot of fun. Go see it next weekend! What follows is in no way bitching about his work, his fame or even his character (I do not believe he's a homophobe, just that he doesn't quite "get" what he found himself talking about and should probably stop).

Why people (including me) got worked up about what he said after the jump... 

Click to read more ...

NYFF: Les Cowboys

Our coverage of the New York Film Festival turns to France - here's Jason line-dancing along with Thomas Bidegain's modern-ish spin on The Searchers called Les Cowboys.

Much like the killer whales that hover so symbolically over the film there are several themes swimming above and below the surface in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone. The one that landed the biggest blow was its dissection of patriarchal macho via Matthias Schoenaerts' character (Matthias has built his career on the dichotomy between his hulking frame and his tender heart). As a result Rust & Bone's final act, which felt like a detour at first, proved inevitable and invaluable to the film's ultimate achievement. Absence, it turns out, makes the heart grow colder, and only sacrifice - in this case the shattering of exceptional fists - could pound it back to life.

Les Cowboys, the first film directed by Thomas Bidegain, who wrote Rust and Bone (and other famous French films like A Prophet and Saint Laurent), similarly becomes a story of paternal symbiosis - the effects of a father's psychic touch, bruising adjoining generations. In fact the father in Les Cowboys (played by the usually comic François Damiens) and Matthias Schoenaerts' character in the earlier film share the name Alain. While they're both fixated on saving those around them, they're very different men. Cowboys' Alain, though, never finds his way to the forest from the trees. His obsession and his abandonment make eventual islands of everything he comes into contact with.

It's he first who is abandoned, when his sixteen year old daughter steals away in the night with her Muslim boyfriend, sending a letter behind saying not to follow. But follow he must, his pride as a father maligned. The daughter's action at first seems only thoughtless and cruel, an erratic whim of a love-struck teenager. With time - and there are long passages of time in Les Cowboys, trailing across similarly long and distant frontiers - as her father's eyes and words narrow and harden, we begin to understand she might've had more cause to search for breathing room.

There is also a son, a brother, barely even noticed at first. He's a footnote in his own father's eye-line, until he ages up into a capable third hand. What might become of him, dragged along in the wake of these two outwardly moving forces, both as good as ghosts to him? Les Cowboys has smart things to say about these almost ritualistic cycles of abandonment. Yes, one can be a wanderer, and yes two together (or, it turns out, two also apart) are always going some place, but three? Well, three leads to four and five and that universe, once thought ever expanding, manages its own ways to close itself back up again.

Les Cowboys screens at NYFF on Thursday, October 1 and Friday, October 2.

NYFF: De Palma

Brian de Palma. The man behind: Passion, Mission to Mars, Body Double, Scarface, Carrie, Sisters, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, and many more.Jason reporting from the New York Film Festival.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's documentary De Palma is, at a basic level, just a sit-down walk-through with the director Brian De Palma across the length of his entire movie career. The co-directors had previously gotten this tour on a personal level, having weekly dinners with the man, and decided, for awesomeness' sake, to capture for future generations of movie-geeks' sake. I saw De Palma only a week and a half ago, and I feel like it needs to be known that not only have I been forced, literally forced, in the wake of it to go and watch three of De Palma's movies in the time between watching the doc and writing this review, but it's also colored every single thing I've written in the time since, and if you follow my hyperactive blog then you know I write a whole lot in a week and a half. A ton. And Brian De Palma, he done swallowed me whole. I can only see things through his eyes now.

I mean, I'm an easy mark, the easiest of easies: I've vigorously defended the likes of Snake Eyes or Femme Fatale at dinner parties; I've drunkenly slurred out verbal love-letters to Fiona Shaw's three miles passed the mark performance in The Black Dahlia; I've had more nightmares scarred by Angie Dickinson's elevator experience than most people have had nightmares, period.

Paltrow, de Palma, and Baumbach

I love sleaze and I love Hitchcock and in Brian De Palma the twain they meet and they meet like fireworks bursting over a triumphantly dead Nancy Allen, and it's like roadhouse whiskey to me -- I like it, I like it!!!

He is New York's Verhoeven -- fun and dirty and adult, dumb and genius in equal gasping measure. I'll go down with his ship, lapping up every red drop. And De Palma, The Film, captures the the man's madness in glorious measure. It is indeed like sitting down to dinner with the man who could dream up both Holly Body's cum speech and "Say hello to my little friend" and poking him in the belly for more. He is ready able and willing to spill more or more still for us, and it's this geek's idea of paradise. I could've watched fifteen full hours of De Palma.

De Palma is screening at the NYFF on Wednesday, September 30th and will eventually be distributed by A24.  Previous NYFF reviews here. For more Jason De Palma love, you need to visit My New Plaid Pants.