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Thursday, 30 June 2011
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"I'm Betsy Faye Sharon and I'm a bitch.
Now get out of here."
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The skimpy horror speedo?
David Duchovny on The X-Files (see more here),
Paul Satterfield in Creepshow 2 (see more here),
or Kevin Bacon in Friday the 13th (see more here)?
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I couldn't think of a horror movie/show where an actor wore a white speedo - you've gotta be pretty daring slash confident to wear a speedo at all, but even more so to wear a white one - so in honor of Independence Day weekend we'll have to do with the Red, Yellow and Blue instead. Close enough.
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Every so often I'll be scanning down the right-hand column of this here blog and amongst the labels, between Bette Midler and Bill Murray I'll see it. Big Brother. A show I haven't watched or posted about since 2008, when I was so repulsed by the grotesquerie of Dick and his daughter it starts with D I am so happy I can't remember her name you have no idea Danielle dammit that's her name ugh that I gave up the show full-stop. Good riddance, I says! Or said. Because now I see that there's a chance that Will Kirby, aka Evil Dr. Will, could be back in the house and dammit I'm helpless when it comes to him. HELPLESS. I mean, case in point:
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It appears that the forementioned D&D could also be on the show though, and that tempers the pull an awful lot. Plus Will's always paired with that shit-stain Mike Boogie (ugh even typing that moniker pains me) so it's all tempered even further. But then..
Oh Will. Damn you. Damn you. Damn you.
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... I haven't seen As Good As It Gets in years, but I cannot for the life of me get the phrase "Panama City sailor wanna hump hump bar" out of my head. It's been stuck in there on repeat all damn week! Ugh!
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In related news, don't you just love Lupe Ontiveros?
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Why am I so smitten with direct to DVD movies? I guess it started when I was a kid (though it was direct to video then) I'd scour the shelves of the local video stores for movies I hadn't seen. Since I would watch science fiction/fantasy, action or martial arts almost exclusively I would end up seeing everything. I needed product! And straight to video delivered.
So here comes... Never Back Down 2! Official rundown:
"Behind closed doors of a seemingly normal college, the ultimate showdown in underground MMA fighting is being planned. Ex-MMA rising star Case Walker (Michael Jai White) trains four college-age fighters, each with their own individual obstacles. Case will instruct them to master the most mind-blowing fighting techniques and go head to head in the most punishing competition ever devised - The Beatdown. Featuring UFC Champion Lyoto Machida, MMA fighter Scottie Epstein and UFC fighter Todd Duffee."
On September 13th you know what I'll be doing!
I've always been fascinated with WWI, now my favorite childhood director takes it on. Simply stunning...
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While so far they've been stuffed with the sort of praise that horror director Dario Argento's done his damndest for years now to squash deserving, it's still been worth reading the first couple of STYD's dispatches from the set of his Dracula 3D film for little tid-bits like this. When asked what the look of the film will be, Thomas Kretschmann, who you'll remember is starring at the titular bloodsucker himself, had this choice phrase on hand:
"Splatter Visconti!"
I don't care that the previously alluded to squashing of Argento's goodwill makes me doubt this Visconti allusion deeply (once upon a time an Argento movie could at least be considered pretty even while it made no sense; his recent movies have just been ugly. Giallo still haunts me) - I just love that phrase. Splatter Visconti! Splatter Visconti! Splatter Visconti! The staccato cineaste alliteration of it. And I love it especially coming from the tender lips of Tommy boy. It's a keeper.
Tomorrow will be a good day: Star Trek begins streaming on Netflix! TOS, TNG, VOY, ENT begin July 1st with DS9 to follow in October.
Wow, this made my day. I can now stop grumbling at CBS for pulling TOS off it's site. And I no longer have to be at the mercy of BBC America for which episodes I watch during the week.
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Seriously, somebody talk me out of this. I just found out I have tomorrow off from work and I can feel my brain convincing me that I should waste my afternoon by going to see Transformers 3. Michael Bay movies make me crazy. CRAZY. Every single one of them. They make me rue the existence of life itself. And yet I am drawn to them, over and over again, like some sort of brain-damaged masochist. I forced myself to stop with Transformers 2 - that's another thing: I've never seen the second film, however will I keep up with the plot? - in the wake of its "worst film ever made" reviews even from the fan-boys, but now everybody's saying T3's 3D is the best since Avatar and I do really dig the image of that snake robot crushing the building that's in the trailer and Frances McDormand and Alan Tudyk as, and I quote, "a gay ex-Nazi manservant in a weird suit," and ACK make me stop!
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I'm sure y'all remember James Frecheville from Animal Kingdom, right? Yes, this is that same awkward slightly-touched-seeming young man who led that terrific film (my review). I know! He's aging rather well, wouldn't you agree? I mean he's still slightly-touched-seeming, but in a sexy way now. These were shot by Bruce Weber for the new issue of Luomo Vogue (with Novak Djokovic on the cover!), you can see a couple more here.
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Gayle Sweeney (Jane Lynch), Role Models
"Me and the judge have a special relationship... I don't
wanna get too graphic, but I sucked his dick for drugs."
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I know that a lot of people dislike Diablo Cody. They find her writing overly mannered and her real-life persona grating. Well, a lot of people are stupid wrong filthy beasts that I hate too, so it all falls out in the end. I'm super excited to hear this news anyway, via Variety:
"Diablo Cody is getting behind the camera for the first time, helming "Lamb of God" for Mandate from a script she wrote.... Laffer will follow the story of a young religious woman who loses her faith after a plane crash and decides to go to Las Vegas to live the life of a sinner but finds her way back to her faith."
God, the word "laffer" makes me want to scratch my eyes out. Anyway! Cody also offered up some more info on her Tumblr once the announcement was made, including this bit which only underlines why I like her so very much:
"I know the new thing online is for everyone to be really mumbly and self-deprecating. If you don’t pretend like you hate yourself and your life, everyone thinks you’re a terrible asshole. But I’m going to take a risk right now and put this out there:1. I am pleased with this new opportunity.2. It feels good."
Congratulations, lady!
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I was really hoping that the first trailer for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would be up at Apple on top of being on YouTube, where I first watched it this morning, because there are so many lush shots in it that the desire to screen-cap it is rending my insides apart. I mean, director Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In was a gorgeous affair so I don't know why I'm surprised. Alas, it is not up at Apple or in HD anywhere, and capping it from YouTube quality's kinda pointless. So for now, just watch it here (via):
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The colors! That washed-out 70s feel, uhh, it's giving me happy heart palpitations. It's shot by the same DP as Let the Right One In, Hoyt Van Hoytema; he also shot The Fighter last year. A couple of the shots wouldn't really work as screen-caps anyway, you need to see them in motion with the sound - that shot of the plane coming up behind Gary Oldman! The shot of the blood spreading across the red carpet! Love. Love this trailer. I was looking forward to this movie in a vague sense because of Alfredson and Tom Hardy and the rest of the cast but I just got a hardcore injection of enthusiasm here.
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Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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It'd be too easy to make a joke here about wanting to store Novak Djokovic's nuts in my mouth for the winter, yes? Alright then. Anyway Novak has a twitter account? Yeehaw - we're on, motherfuckers!
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Can't wait for the scene where Bucky gets his chance to check out all of Chris Evans' super-soldier improvements back at the barracks after lights out in Captain America!
(You can see a bunch more of Stan here)
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Attack the Block opens with a young white woman named Sam walking to her apartment at night. She is then surrounded by a bunch of mostly black teenage boys, held at knife-point, knocked to the ground, and robbed. Two minutes later Sam's run away, and the film appears to become her muggers' film, and we're supposed to be laughing at their jokes and riding high, and I just wanted to walk out of the theater. Sam does come back a bit later and becomes an integral part of the film. I suppose she and Moses, the 15 year old head of the gang that mugged her, could be considered co-leads of the film since it sort of becomes about their Enemy Mine-like journey to mutual understanding amid science-fictional shenanigans. But I had a fairly rough time with the first forty minutes or so of Attack the Block, trying to wrap my head around why I was supposed to want to spend a second of time with these punks. They weren't as funny as the film seemed to find them, and I spent a good amount - too long, really - wishing the aliens would gobble them up and be done with it.
Oh right, aliens. This is a movie about aliens, in case you don't know. Sort of an untethered-to-nostalgia Super 8, if you will - it's very Goonies, actually. (If The Goonies had punched Martha Plimpton in the face in the opening scene, that is.) See, Moses & Co.'s mugging of Sam is interrupted by some meteors filled with space-monsters falling out of the sky, and it becomes a question of survival on the streets of South London. Course these kids would tell you - and do - that it's always a question of survival on the streets of South London - this night it's just the they're up against a villain of extraterrestrial nature instead of other gangs or the cops.
That the film does a sideways dive into the urban blight of these kids' situation is admirable, and for the most part thankfully handled lightly (nobody goes to a movie about boys hitting monsters with baseball bats for a wordy treatise on race relations). There are more than a couple of moments where they stick the landing - when Sam admits her boyfriend is an aid worker helping out kids in Ghana, one of the kids battling aliens alongside her asks why he doesn't stay here and help the kids in London instead. But for every smart comment like that there's one that feels flat - you could see the "surprise reveal" of Moses' home-life coming from a light-year away, for one. And there were what felt like fifteen slow-motion shots of Sam seeing Moses do something noble and tough and the film poking us in the eye with "Hey, look! She's getting over the mugging thing! So should you!" that felt like trying way too hard...
But did the film really have a choice? I think they might've set themselves a somewhat insurmountable goal in that opening scene, and the only way to dig themselves out of it was to push back like gangbusters at those heavy first impressions they gave us. Imagine if The Silence of the Lambs had opened with the scene of Hannibal Lector eating that nurse's face off that we only hear about second-hand well in the film as is - after that, it would've been a slightly rougher road to anti-heroism for him in the audience's eyes, no? We want our lead characters to be flawed, of course. We want them to be complicated human beings that have to overcome inner and outer obstacles, to ride along with them for that journey, and well-made movies pretty much to a tee give that to us. I suppose the problem here is tone, especially in the wake of what we get at the start. Basically, just don't expect me to start chuckling at these kids' good-time street-thuggery five seconds after you've shown them assault a woman, dude! But wait, aliens. This is a movie about aliens, in case you don't know. And here's the kicker that's really complicating matters for me - unlike the sub-par beastie in Super 8, these alien-monsters really kinda kick all kinds of ass. A totally unique design that's instantly memorable, very creepy, and delightfully inexplicable. Just weird, man! In a funny way that's really a joy to look at. Plus they make a shit-ton of sense thematically (talk about black versus white - they're darker than dark) and there's enough biological explanation to hang a decent plot across.
So where does this leave us? My feelings towards the film are fairly all over the place, but more than I anticipated with a movie about rubbery aliens fighting teenage gangstas and stuffed with weed jokes the movie's put my brain into overdrive. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since last night, for better or worse, and the buttons the film pushes it pushes on purpose, even if at times it's kind of feels like watching a little kid banging on a toy piano.Attack the Block opens in limited release on July 29th.
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Joe "Big Man" Manganiello is going to be guest-starring on White Collar next season as a bad guy who brings Matty Bomer inevitably stylish and sexy trouble. And a million slash-fics were born!
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A trailer's been released for Jake Gyllenhaal's possibly sexy sojourn into the icy wilds of Iceland with Bear Grylls (you can see it below, via) - and if you missed it last week I made a list of gay stuff that could happen on this trip that I found pretty damned amusing, personally - but for now let's just look at that screen-cap up top and marvel at the adorableness. GOD. Why'd ya have to go and make The Face, Jake? That's nearly the same face you made when Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph talked about your mother on Bronx Beat or when you held that puggle.
I have no defense against that damn face! And here I was right now all angry at you for these new lady rumors, flirting with that unspeakable woman, my current arch-nemesis, which seemed designed primarily to hurt me and me alone! And now you jerk me around with The Face! It's too much! Too much dammit!
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Oh, Thomas Jane. Your mouth, and your dick, always getting in the way. Here he is on Headshot, a project he'd been helping to shepherd into production for a long time, like by getting Sylvester Stallone cast alongside him, and then he got pushed out of:"Joel Silver came onboard the project and said that he has a quote-unquote ‘formula’ for these quote-unquote ‘buddy movies’ and it has to be a white guy and a quote-unquote ‘ethnic guy.’ And they relieved me of duty and basically paid me off, which I was really upset about, you know? I didn’t get a call from Stallone. I was a little upset about that. Maybe they didn’t want anybody on the movie with a bigger dick than him."
Talk talk talk, Thomas. Well go on and put your dick where your mouth is then. We're waiting. Starring in a show called Hung about said "bigger dick" isn't enough if you keep hiding it all Austin Powers-like these days. We've seen it already, for god's sake. A few times now, actually. But a memory-refresher certainly wouldn't hurt.
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--- Animal Rites - A writer's been hired to adapt Beasts of Burden, a comic book series about a bunch of talking animals that fight witches and demons, for a CG-animated adaptation. I just read the first collection of this series
a couple of weeks ago and they're a lot of fun and much darker than you might think from the description. This is no Scooby Doo. There's some real horror tucked up in here. Which is why I'm worried that it's a bunch of folks from Walden Media, the production house that's made an effort to create family-friendly spiritual-friendly entertainments like the Narnia series, that have their hands on the stories. There is a lot of room for error tone-wise here that could ruin the reason the series works in the first place.--- Still Siggyless - Lost's Damon Lindelof is one of the screenwriters for Ridley Scott's not-an-Alien-prequel Prometheus and he gave up a bunch of details the other day on what this whole "not-a-prequel" business actually means. Sounds promising in theory, although all his praise of Ridley Scott's "genius" is undercut by the steady string of godawful movies Ridley Scott has been responsible for over the past 20 years. Anyway Fassy!
--- Dewey Sliced - I hope everyone's been keeping up with Glenn's "Scream to Scream, Scene by Scene" series! He's made it to what he calls his "favorite scene in the entire trilogy," and you know, now that he says it I think it could be mine too. I remember the way I felt in the theater watching this scene - so helpless and horrified. Courtney Cox is phenomenal here. Plus, the second scariest pizza of all time!--- Fall Carnage - Slash rounds up some release date announcements of note: Steven Soderbergh's Contagion - his flick about a world-wide virus starring a cast of thousands! - will be out on Spetember 9th, a month and a half earlier than expected. Plus Roman Polanski's Carnage, his adaptation of the play God of Carnage with Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, is out in limited release on November 18th.
--- Miss July - I was just thinking the other day that it was about time for another installment of Low Resolution's Movie Preview, and poof a new one appears. I think perhaps I've got a mental clock devoted to them at this point. Never let me down, Joe. My sanity's built around these now. I mean, I'm linking over even though you diss Miranda July, which no.
--- Call It 301- There is a chance that the director of Orphan might be directing the sequel to 300, which is awesome! But the film is now retitled from Xerxes to 300: Battle of Artemisia, which is awful.
--- Dead Mission - I'm so conflicted about Mission Impossible 4. It is the first live-action movie movie directed by Brad "The Incredibles" Bird, and it stars Jeremy Renner! If I could pretend that was where it ended I would be so excited! But it really for real stars Tom Cruise and Renner's just his sidekick or whatever, ugh. If they build their advertising campaign upon promises of Cruise's brutal death with Renner taking over the film & franchise, I will make it over the hump. PopWrap has the first teaser trailer.--- Whinny Whine - Listen, I grew up loving Steven Spielberg. I saw Jurassic Park in the theater 14 times. There aren't many movies that he's made that I dislike, even at this point. And perhaps my first impression will be misleading. Because this first trailer for War Horse is a pile of sentimental goo that I'm gonna be barfing up for a week. Maybe it's just the fact that I've never gotten "horse movies" - horse eyes creep me out. They're not as bad as cow's eyes, but they're up there. So mooning over a pet horse in movies always makes me sour.
--- Silent Snow - I'd mentioned awhile back that most of the cast of the original Silent Hill film - which is a bit of a curious mess but is genuinely creepy at times, as well as being visually spectacular and well-acted - were coming back for the sequel. What I hadn't noticed, since this was before HBO's A Game of Thrones had aired, was that Kit Harington, aka everybody's favorite emo-bastard Jon Snow, had joined the cast as well. He'll be co-starring with his TV papa Sean Bean! BD has a gallery of images from it.--- Big Bad - I've avoided spoilers as well as I could but I could've sworn that who the villain is in Joss Whedon's The Avengers had leaked awhile back? Perhaps not, like I said I was trying not to notice. Maybe it was discredited. Anyway io9 is listing their top 10 picks for who the villain ought to be, is the point.
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In the wake of Ryan Kwanten sauntering around in a cop uniform on this weekend's True Blood premiere, I find my brain a little bit fixated. Y'all don't mind, I'm fairly sure of that.
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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Right there are the UK posters for the characters that Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell play in the Fright Night remake. (via) Obviously by picking those two from the several character posters and placing them beside each other I am totally pretending to make them kiss. I'm like a three year old girl with her dolls (in so many ways) up in here. Smoochie smoochie you two!
I didn't realize until right this very second that the director Craig Gillespie had directed a slew of United States of Tara episodes. I guess that's how Toni Collette got the mom gig. I mean besides being awesome and deserving of any part ever, of course.
Anyway perhaps this means that he'll fill out his probable next project Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with Tara faces. Brie Larson is Elizabeth Bennett! And Keir Gilchrist is Mr. Darcy!
Anyway perhaps this means that he'll fill out his probable next project Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with Tara faces. Brie Larson is Elizabeth Bennett! And Keir Gilchrist is Mr. Darcy!
Okay no that's just weird.
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If I were to write any words here they would betray my enthusiasm and immediately jinx any and everything involved, or it could just be a string of exclamation points, or I could find a way to make the pixels of your computer screen extend themselves outwards and turn into hands and grab you by the collar and shake you and shake you and shake you some more until you understood how fucking exciting this is to me. But I'll just present the quote from Party Down creator Rob Thomas as is, it speaks for itself.
"People are talking to us about doing a Party Down movie. We are pretty far down the deal-making process with that, so we’re hopeful that there will be a Party Down movie. Ideally, if it works out we could be shooting in television hiatus time next spring. Hopefully that deal will close, and we’ll all tweet about it when it does."
Shake shake shake! (via)
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Well firstly it's probably time to wipe off your damn face. Jeez. Doesn't that possessed-by-demons house have any Baby Wipes laying around? Rip out a page of the damn Necronomicon if you have to then. God. Just clean yourself!
Secondly, it's time to head over to The Film Experience and read this week's "Team Experience," wherein Nat rounds up his TFE contributors, my humble self included, and gets our takes on a couple of topics pertinent to the time. And good clean fun was had by all, the end.
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Michael Sheen: Little Tramp or Big Droog?
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(pics via) I ask you, is there anything Michael Sheen cannot do? I was reminded of this cold hard fact while watching Midnight in Paris this week - I love Michael Sheen, and he made me want to tear the tongue right out of his mouth! Which, uh, I do believe is the reaction we were meant to have towards his character. You know you're in trouble if you've got Carla Bruni rolling her eyes at you.
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(See a few more pics over at Details) Oh my god I hate him so much why would I still have so much sex with him arrrrgggggghhhh....
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