... why I will love Dakota Johnson forever.
Thursday, June 05, 2025
Sam Nivola Five Times
Rather than leave you all weekend staring at my disappointing take on the Jai Courtney Shark Movie whenever you open the site, let's have a happier event on top -- The White Lotus' twink du jour Sam Nivola's new photoshoot for Dust magazine. He was photographed by the great Ryan McGinley so the photos are the good stuff (I got them off RM's Insta since Dust doesn't seem to have a link, at least not yet) -- I don't know if this is it or there might be more coming, but y'all make due. Oh and P.S. the Tribeca Film Fest begins today so I'm gonna be in screenings off and on for the next week so posting will be erratic. We'll see how it goes when we get there! Hit the jump for the rest of this tight little shoot anyway...
Maybe the Dangerous Animals Were Us All Along
I have been relentlessly hyped for Dangerous Animals, the "Jai Courtney murders people with sharks" movie since it was announced in May of last year -- how could I not be? That description has everything. Jai Courtney. Murder. Sharks. These are my interests boiled down to their essence. Just glance through our archives and you'll see all my ceaseless yapping. So anyway now the movie's in theaters today, the critics have been raving, and... y'all I didn't like it. What? How??? I even watched the movie twice just to make sure! I thought maybe the first view might've been a fluke because I had a really annoying woman sitting next to me at the screening who kept talking through the entire thing -- seriously if your deep insights amount to, "Oh he's dead" maybe keep that shit to yourself? -- but unfortunately the second viewing only cemented my first negative opinion, and even harder.
Jai himself is a lot of fun, but the rest? Ooof. So yeah go read my review at Pajiba for the all of the gory details. I'm feeling extremely alone on an island with this opinion, too -- like I said as of right now this movie has a positive 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. But I'm right. Since it pains me to say it so much I have to be! It just never threads the needle it needs to between dumb and fun. The script is legitimately and deeply bad (dialogue that made me want to permanently deafen myself) and the movie takes itself stupidly serious. And I hate hate hated the two lead characters that weren't Jai. What a sad day for us all. Well at least we'll always have The Loved Ones, director Sean Byrne. Onto the next...
Just finished a review sort of eviscerating a movie I was really looking forward to and I thought I liked fine on a first watch - we critics can be unwieldy beasts
— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 5:21 PM
I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watchin' Me
My favorite movie from Sundance this year was the queer-ish thriller Lurker starring Archie Madekwe (Saltburn) playing a rising pop star and Théodore Pellerin as the fanboy who worms his way into his inner circle -- the movie really keeps you on your toes and both the leads (as well as Havana Rose Liu from Bottoms) are absolutely ace. Here is my review of it. Today they dropped the trailer...
... and the poster (see the bottom of this post) since the movie is hitting screens on August 22nd so prepare yourselves! Honestly maybe don't watch the trailer, as it gives a lot up. Just listen to me! Why isn't that enough for you? Have I literally ever steered you wrong? Each and every one of you agree with me 100% of the time and I won't hear otherwise.
Seriously though -- everybody is terrific in this movie but this is sort of the role that Pellerin (an actor I've loved in everything I've seen him in to date) was kind of born to play... which maybe seems like an insult, given the role? But the boy nails it so he shouldn't care. (It probably says more about me than it does him to be honest.) But yeah he's so great in this -- just utterly cuckoo delicious. Will probably be one of my, if not the most, favorite performances of the year. So slap this bitch on your calendar, yo. And hit the jump for a couple more gifs from the trailer of note plus that poster...
Leave No Ma Behind
I don't know if any of you missed the news yesterday that Octavia Spencer is returning as Ma in Ma 2: The Ma-ening, but I wouldn't want anyone to go without that news so here I am making sure you don't. Yes I made up that title but clearly -- clearly -- that needs to be the title. I am available for script supervision, Octavia! I'm cheap! (Cheap as fuck.) Here is my review of the first movie -- here is the bit that really sells the movie, I think:
"Ma is superficially ninety minutes of ridiculousness and fun, a goof where Missi Pyle gets plowed over for a lark and Luke Evans' peekaboo cock is put to excellent prop use; where a lewdly photographed teenage boy does a gratuitous striptease and Allison Janney gets put in a dog cage."
So let's hope they know the movie they're making and
they go for it again. Welcome to the Ma Rennassaince!
Good Morning, World
I had something else planned for our last "Good Morning, World" post of the week this week but when I woke up this morning and opened my phone the first thing social media greeted me with was Jonathan Bailey strutting around in straight boy drag -- plus a skirt! -- for GQ and voila, our fortunes were altered. Doesn't this shoot feel like a somewhat purposeful choice though? To make him come off just a little itty bit butcher as he becomes the leading man in an enormous Hollywood franchise? But then...
... there are also shots like this and I feel as if I should rein in that talk. Not that nominally hetersexual menfolk a la Oscar Isaac and Morgan Spector haven't been rocking the skirt lately as well. Just shots like this...
... feel like such a sudden put-on to me. He's like chugging beer and eating chips in the video -- we're more than halfway to Tradie Porn here. Yes I might be American but I still gleefully know what Tradie Porn is thank you very much. And I think Jonathan certainly knows what it is as well. I don't know. It's early and I'm trying to think too much. Let's just look at the pictures! Hit the jump to just look at the pictures...
Wednesday, June 04, 2025
A Very Important Bisexual Announcement
Gregg Araki's throuple-coded romp Splendor from 1999 and starring a perhaps never hotter Johnathon Schaech, Kathleen Robertson and Matt Keeslar (swoon), is now streamng, for the first time anywhere I believe, on Tubi! Watch it right here! Granted the man-on-man action in this movie is extremely and frustratingly limited -- Araki for all his gay cred often edged us on that front -- but the homo-tension between Schaech & Keeslar is still enough to light my socks on fire every time I watch and re-watch and rewind and pause this movie, and I think you'll enjoy it too if you've never seen it. (See my previous posts on it here.) I have been having the feeling that this movie might be getting a physical media release soon -- once Gregg''s long long long begged for "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy" finally made its way to Criterion and then Smiley Face made it to Vinegar Syndrome I figured it'd only be a matter of time before the rest of his classics got dug up. I have a feeling that The Living End might be ahead as well. Also I just realized that I think Kaboom is out of print too? WTF! And of course Araki's series Now Apocalypse is still in desperate need of any release at all. Get to it, studios!
Oh Alain You Devil
Misericordia kind of fell through the cracks for me last year -- I saw it at NYFF but never got the chance to review it and then I was never really clear about its theatrical release... anyway the latest movie from Stranger By the Lake director Alain Guiraudie is very good and very very gay (no shock there) and I wish I'd written about it, is my point. But here's my chance, as well as yours -- Criterion will be premeiring the film on the Channel on June 10th! That's less than a week from now! Gay Pride is good for something! Also they've dropped the news that the film will also be getting a blu-ray release in September -- they haven't added it to their site yet but I imagine it'll be up there soon for pre-order. Anyway y'all should catch this one when it drops, whether online or on physical media, it's a weird little gem (quality "Queer Creeps" content) that's wedged itself into my brain and refused to let go all these many months. I look forward to revisiting it mself. Here's the trailer:
Good Morning, World
We here at MNPP HQ have been trying to monitor the Lucas Bravo Situation -- namely that the actor has been spotted "canoodling" with granola pariah Shaileene Woodley on several ocassions -- but for now we have nothing to report. Other than Lucas has gifted us with a sexy new photoshoot and video for yet another new magazine, this one called Imagine. This is the real news you can use.
The magazine hasn't shared any interview online yet -- they haven't even shared the photoshoot officially and all of these images are taken off of various Instagrams. So perhaps Lucas will 'splain himself in there, or not, whatever. We'll try to get over it with the assistance of these photos and the gifs I made, after the jump...
Tuesday, June 03, 2025
Yura Star!
How lovely! An opportunity to post a couple of pictures of Anora breakout star Yura Borisov! And with some helluva news, too. For a quick minute the headline for this news freaked me out -- all I saw was a THR headline with "AI" and "Luca Guadagnino" in it and I was like, "Noooooooo Luca!" I feared he was going the Natasha Lyonne route of disappointment. But no it's not that thankfully -- Luca is attaching his name to a movie called Artificial that is about the true life story of Open AI and its CEO Sam Altman, who was fired and rehired over the course of a couple tumultuous days in 2023. So a Social Network kinda biopic sitch is what I'm getting from this. Anyway as for casting Yura isn't playing the lead Altman...
Cosmo Jarvis Plays the Other Man of Steel
Somehow I totally missed this news that dropped a couple of weeks back -- Variety reported that our talented boy Cosmo Jarvis is going to play Joseph Stalin in a movie called Young Stalin, directed by Georgian director Géla Babluani and based on the bestseller by author Simon Sebag Montefiore. You can see a photo of what Stalin looked like in his earlier days down below -- I'd say Cosmo's pretty good casting, especially once he slaps on that stache. Apparently Little Joe got himself into all sorts of criminal shenanigans involving bank robberies and that's what this story's about -- I don't know why they'd feel the need to draw a throughline from a life of criminality to dictatorships these days. So weird. Just coming out of nowhere, that one! (As a more pleasant aside if you'd like a couple more photos of Cosmo from the shoot seen up top, click here.)
Quote of the Day
FARROW: You’re a real movie buff. Are you seeing enough big emotions in movies these days?ESCOLA: No, I like melodrama and high stakes that maybe don’t make sense. Silent movies, I find particularly moving right now. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid or even Joan Crawford in Dancing Daughters.FARROW: She’s scary. And she was scary in person as well.ESCOLA: Oh, did you meet her?FARROW: Yes. I more than met her. I forget what movie was shooting, probably that one with Betty Davis, the scary one.ESCOLA: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?FARROW: If that was shot at Fox, then that was what they were shooting. And for whatever reason, she started sending a whole refrigerator of Pepsi Cola for my trailer ’cause I was in a TV series called Peyton Place. I don’t particularly like Pepsi Cola, but a lot of Pepsi Cola kept coming to my trailer, more than anyone would ever want. And then she came over to see me and I got a strange vibe from her. So I’m back in New York, and she knew my mother. I hung up people’s coats for my mom when they came into the house. And I hung her coat and out falls a flask of alcohol. She grabbed it like that, and she put it in her handbag. She drank quite a lot. Then she invited me to her apartment. I thought it was a party, but I arrived, and I was the only one there.ESCOLA: In New York?FARROW: Yes. I was 17, and everything was green in her apartment. It just had very low lighting. And there were no other guests, just Ms. Crawford and me. And I just wasn’t very comfortable.ESCOLA: Of course.FARROW: So I just made up a lie that I wasn’t feeling very well and I didn’t want to give her any diseases. I think I said the word “diseases” as I walked out of the room. I was scared of Ms. Crawford.
Do we think Joan was coming on to baby Mia? I've heard many a bisexual rumor about Joan before and this feels like Joan was hot for the little girl. I laughed so hard at Mia saying "I think I said the word 'diseases' as I walked out of the room" lol. What a life.
Good Morning, World
Well here's a piping hot and totally random treat for an otherwise banal Tuesday morning -- I forgot until just now that I'd stumbled upon this vintage batch of Shōgun (among many many many other things) actor Hiroyuki Sanada photos last week, but hubba hubba am I right? I've seen a couple of these photos before but never this whole lot, and this whole lot is worth the look-see. So get to look-seeing after the jump...
Monday, June 02, 2025
Happy 20 to MNPP
I've known that the 20th anniversary of this site was coming... well for twenty years techinically! I mean this seemed unimaginable when I started barfing up random thoughts for the sum total of myself back in 2005 but over the past couple of years it began to seem real, that we'd actually make it here to 20, and here we are. And yet all that time to prepare some thoughtful and I avoided it until now, today. So the usual! It's been 20 years of this -- you thought we'd change? Why would you want us to change? Why do you hate us so much??? Aww no playful antagonism -- I love that people still come and read MNPP after 20 (good lord) years. I'd be doing it without you because I have to, I literally cannot stop. But it's awesome and weird that I don't have to go it alone on this big horrible interweb. I know websites have changed, how we consume media has changed. I've read all the articles about the concept of individual personal "blogs" being an artifact of a dusty age. And I just keep on keeping. I'm a creature of habit -- indeed over the years I've self-diagnosed myself into a bit of a psychological condition on that front, but let's not stray too far into the weeds today! This is a thank you to everybody out there who's come here for twenty minutes or twenty years. I don't know what these past two decades (good lord) would've looked like without you and I don't want to. Y'all rock.
And while that would be a lovely sentiment to end on I must also do what I do every anniversary we've marked -- lightly recommend you pay me! We always, more than you know, appreciate a tip here and there for our work, and there always are donation links over in the right-hand column -- or just can click here and drop us a nickel. It makes us feel special! (Oh and I also added a heap of movies for sale on our eBay this past week.) I am after all a blogger for money, I'll blog what you want me to blog... a blogger for money, and any old blogging will do....
Tramell Tillman Seven Times
Not to do Hollywood's job and put people in a box but once upon a time we didn't have any big beautiful out black gay men getting mainstream roles in movies and T.V. and then came Colman Domingo and it felt like... okay we've got one, that's all we'll get. This is how we've been trained, as queer people. So to have Tramell Tillman be gifted to us so soon after Colman became a big thing? It makes us very happy. (See more Tramell that we previously posted here.) From what I've heard he's a highlight of the new Mission: Impossible movie (still haven't seen it), and he of course marched away with the second season of Severance, so we're hoping Tramell can keep bringing the heat. He sure is in these photos for Them magazine. Hit the jump for them all...
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