Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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--- Lots of Superman news this week - Henry Cavill sported the Supes curl in public which got all the fan-boys wet (I was too busy staring at the way he fills out those trousers and getting correspondingly wet from that to notice his hair), he talked about his crazy training regime and trying on the super suit for the first time, and Laurence Fishburne got the role of Perry White (great choice).

--- Good to see Natasha Lyonne getting some work, we liked her back in the day, and this is some good work at that (we assume, sight obviously unseen) - she's gotten a gig in that dark comedy of Kristen Wiig's called Imogene that we've been hearing so much about lately.

--- Lost Hitchcock movie The White Shadow has been found! Or at least half of it has. Plus Hitch didn't actually so much direct the movie as he did a bunch of important creative tasks in the making of it. But still! Some cool pics from it can be seen over here.

--- End Of Times - Stake Land, a movie I liked, is out on DVD this week and Twitch caught up with its director Jim Mickle to find out his favorite pieces of apocalyptic fiction and it's a fun list.

--- And speaking of apocalypses, and when aren't we, ow weird is it that the problem that's now holding up George Miller's 4th Mad Max film - the one that supposed to stuff Tom Hardy into those snug leather pants - is there's been too much rain in the area of Australia where they were set to film and it's not apocalyptic enough to shoot in now? Cursed by foliage! George Miller can't catch a break.

--- And in sexy apocalypse news, big bad Benjamin Walker, who I haven't seen in anything yet but am still sort of infatuated with, is playing the archangel Michael in Alex Proyas' movie Paradise Lost, which already has Bradley Cooper playing Lucifer. Ben's got the baby-face and godly bod of every dream archangel.

--- Apparently Margaret - the second film by Kenneth Lonergan after You Can Count On Me that's been sitting on a shelf for what, six years now? - is getting released in September. It supposedly has a brilliant performance from Mark Ruffalo, but got all tangled up in legal crap (plus the studio wanted a shorter cut and Lonergan refused).

--- I'm not really sure I have it in me to watch a show from Ryan Murphy at this point. Nip/Tuck became nigh unwatchable after a couple seasons and y'all know my feelings towards Glee, not to mention the man himself has proven himself completely and totally insufferable in the press. I guess we'll always have Popular. Anyway his next show is a horror show so maybe I can be brought around. It's called American Horror Story (Really? Blah.) and it stars Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton (I know people love her from Friday Night Lights but as I've never gotten around to that show she's left me relatively unimpressed so far) but most awesomely Jessica Lange as the neighbor, presumably spooky. I dunno. BD has a teaser and some pictures. McDermott still looks pretty good (although he'll always be the crappy husband from Steel Magnolias to me).

--- Did anybody else see the trailer for Battleship in theaters this past weekend - two minutes of Taylor Kitsch and Alexander Skarsgard looking hot in naval uniforms amidst some really blatant Transformers ripping-off (Really, Peter Berg? Michael Bay's who you wanna rip off?) - and experience what I did when the title came up, which was an entire audience of people bursting into laughter? I wonder if the folks at Universal did, since news is they're scrapping their plans for several of their long-planned board-game movie adaptations like Clue and Monopoly.

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Did this week's True Blood really melodize the sight of Alexander Skarsgard's pumping bum to Neko Case singing one of my favorite songs of hers "I Wish I Was The Moon" or did I fall and hit my head and enter some strange dream netherworld where the greatest things I could ever imagine all mushed themselves up together into one big fat audio-visual ball of hallucinatory eyeball-bursting glee?

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I was a big fan of the first Paranormal Activity movie (my review). I know it wasn't everybody's cuppa but I loved the slow build and the way it forced you to just stare and stare at a static image until you thought your brain would snap from the tension. In the way that The Blair Witch Project mastered its teeny tiny budget through an electrifyingly creative manipulation of its sound-design so I felt that PA pulled a similar trick with its rigid visuals, turning a limitation to their favor.

Unfortunately the second film mucked it all up (my review). There were too many cameras around the house that they kept editing between, slicing any mounting tension up into ineffectual ribbons.

Plus the characters went way too far above and beyond the call of unbearable douchiness. Micah and Katie were deeply flawed characters in the first film - some might call them, and many did, monstrously annoying - but the movie was smart about it, I thought, and seemed to have built their less-than-savory aspects inextricably into the tale they were telling. Their passive-aggressive relationship became a game of one-upmanship and the final frame brought the game, and the camera and the home, crashing down. The awful people in the second movie were just ciphers with no interaction between who they were and what was happening to them. The film never found a purpose, and ended up treading stale steps in the first film's much more successful wake.

Point! We now have a teaser trailer for the third film.

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(via) So it's a prequel way back to the 1980s with the two sisters as little girls who've got access to what would have been at the time super-expensive crystal clear video technology. Mkay. What makes me most sad about this is we won't get to see any more of Micah.


Bye Micah! You were a sexy asshole. The most curious thing here is the fact that this is coming from Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the directors that made last year's buzzy curiosity Catfish (my review), the questionable documentary of a slightly adorable dorky New York douche getting caught up in a sad lady's Facebook espionage. I was pro-Catfish for the most part but didn't really keep up with it once it came out and people began picking it apart.


Anyway I am curious to see what these chaps might bring to the Paranormal table. Catfish was sold as a horror movie but really didn't end up being that at all. But it still managed to wring a lot of tension from that curiosity before you knew what was coming. I vividly remember being freaked out when Nev & Co. get to that horse-farm late at night and are peering through the darkened windows of the barn. So they can maybe handle suspense? I guess we'll see. PA3 is out on October 21st...


... which is a date that's making my brain question a question: What horror movies are we getting for Halloween this year? The Saw franchise is blessedly over and blessedly done with its nearly-decade-long campaign of ruining the holiday, and I thought we were getting Cabin in the Woods but as we found out this morning it turns out that's not coming out until April.

So as long as this is on our brain, let's take a look-see at all the major horror movies coming out between now and All Hallows. (There will probably be smaller films that will get scheduled between now and then that we're unawares of just yet.)


-- The only horror movie out before July is over - if you don't count The Smurfs - is the "teenage British thugs vs. aliens" movie Attack the Block on July 29th, which I reviewed right here. I had a fairly complicated reaction to the film and I'm still sort of plagued by it. Fantastic monster design and some wonderfully staged action scenes though, even if I'm not sure they didn't ruin everything with an erratic tone and possibly irredeemable main characters.


-- In August we get Final Destination 5 on the 12th and the Fright Night remake on the 19th. I've stopped writing about the latest FD movie because I can't look at any more trailers or pictures, I don't want to spoil anymore of the deaths than I already did with the first trailer, but I wanna see this like crazy, like I do with every installment. I hump this series to death. I think Fright Night looks generally terrible but Toni Collette and Sexy Vampire Colin Farrell might get me there anyway.


-- The Guillermo Del Toro produced remake of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark starring the soulless Katie Holmes and the asstastic Guy Pearce is out on August 26th.

-- Shark Night 3D - from the director of two Final Destination movies, including my favorite the second one! - is out on September 2nd. The trailer for this movie is just absolutely awful, but my FD-loving brain keeps arguing with me about it. Whole conversations have been had inside of my head! Crazy ones!


-- Also on September 2nd comes Apollo 18, which is "Blair Witch on the Moon." Space horror isn't done often enough if you ask me - it don't get much more isolated than that! I hope there's a shot of someone being killed reaching towards Earth in the sky for help. That'd be neat-o.

-- September 9th brings us Contagion, Steven Soderbergh's global pandemic movie with an impressively starry and serious cast. Winslet, Paltrow, Law, Damon, Cotillard, and wait what's this John Hawkes! Love him.

-- The closest thing to horror on September 16th is the Straw Dogs remake but that might just be terrifying us because of the basic fact that they remade Straw Dogs. It does have lots of violence and rape though so close enough. But it also has Alexander Skarsgard and Jimmy Marsden swanning around half-naked and there's nothing scary about that. Stimulating, yes. Intimidating, definitely. But certainly not anything even approaching scary.


-- Dream House, which we just saw the shirtless-Daniel-Craig-ified trailer for yesterday, is out on September 30th.

-- As is Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, the supposedly pretty funny horror-comedy starring Alan Tudyk and Reaper's Tyler Labine as two innocent hillbillies caught up in bloody shenanigans. I think the idea is that they get mistaken for serial killers by a bunch of stupid vacationing college kids who then try to kill them as if they're in a horror movie fighting off Jason Voorhees. And it's a really fun idea.


-- The Thing remake is out on October 14th. We just saw the first trailer for that last week. Love the cast and want it to be good but it has been sitting around gathering dust for a little while now. That could just be due to factors other than its worth though - I think, like Cabin in the Woods, it got held up due to studio problems.

-- Also out that same day, at least in limited release, is The Skin I Live In. It's Pedro Almodovar's newest movie. It reunites him with 80s man-muse Antonio Banderas, and it's apparently very dark and very creepy. The teaser trailer scared me. All of these things are making me want it something insane.


-- On October 21st, the same day as PA3 is out, Kevin Smith's Red State finally gets a proper release after Smith toured the country earlier this year with it. But from what I hear it's not really the horror movie it's been sold to be either?


-- Same day, another indie weirdo cult movie (as in a movie about a cult) that got talk at Sundance - Martha Marcy May Marlene also isn't really a horror movie in the oogie-boogie slobbery monster sense but it's supposedly pitch-black and horrifying in its own way. Plus it has John Hawkes again and I will mention him whenever I can. Hi again John Hawkes!

As of right now there's apparently nothing scary scheduled for October 28th, which seems bonkers. Expect something to pick up the slack, I imagine. After Halloween we're into Oscar season so there's not as much spooky scheduled - I refuse to categorize the Twilight movies as horror (except for what they say about our culture); Piranha 3DD is supposedly out on November 23rd - perfect for taking Grandma to over Thanksgiving holiday!; David Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie will presumably be pretty horrific a la Straw Dogs with the violence (a lot specifically of a sexual nature) and the throbbing NIN techno; The Darkest Hour has Emile Hirsch fighting killer aliens.   

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It must be so weird to be one of the guys from True Blood. Or any pop culture sex symbol, really - I'm sure they get laid pretty regularly, so not weird bad obviously, but the way they themselves seem to guide this TV Guide interview towards talk of cock-socks and homoerotic bonding makes you realize how aware they are of their audience and how willing they are to exploit it... it being themselves. At least they're not assholes about it and seem to be having fun. Here's my favorite bit:

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Since I'm always watching all the shows on a delay and we live in an insta-society it usually feels pointless to write up my thoughts on shows by the time I get around to watching them, but I'm gonna go ahead and offer up a few thoughts on some anyway right now, and you're gonna have to summon up the strength to just deal. So let's look at Sunday night's premiere of True Blood then, which I got to last evening.

First up, the obvious: there wasn't anything in the way of dude-nudity (BOO) but everybody was looking so good I almost didn't notice. The guys are competing with each other at this point who can be the most ridiculously fit, right? Because everybody looks amazing. But the MVPs (Most Valuable Pieces) of the episode were Ryan Kwanten first in that cop uniform which is tailored obscenely snug, and then in just his jeans and t-shirt, which well was also tailored obscenely snug.

And then of course Alexander Skarsgard, who shows up in a black t-shirt just a fraction of an inch too short for his torso (SIGH) threatening the mot wanted fang-rape in the history of ever.

Honestly, this cast is just ridiculous though. Guys aside, you know you've tapped into some sexy sorcery when you've got me rooting for two female characters to go at it - no, not Tara and her underwear-model slash kick-boxer girlfriend, but PAM AND JESSICA - oh my god they need to do it.

Fave line of the night:

"Toilets are for humans only.

Do I need to explain why?"

It's all in the delivery. Oh Pam. How I adore your endless snark. And the bat wings framed around her head! Glorious. And I'll agree with the general consensus that the arrival of Fiona Shaw as the head witch was the bright spot, but why would anyone be surprised?

Fiona Shaw is about as crazy (emphasis on that word) talented an actress as there is working today, and she's gonna go for this shit 1500 percent. I give you Black Dahlia. Gutsy broads like this are in short supply and there aren't many shows on the air that'd let them do their thing quite like Blood will so this is a match made in heaven, methinks.

Speaking of shows like True Blood, generally I liked the episode a lot. True Blood has never ever never ever been about anything approaching sane consistent storytelling. So I sat through this episode understanding that I was getting a whole bunch of, "Okay, this is who these people are now for this season, and this is a the ridiculous crap we'll be flinging at them for several weeks." Okay! Sure I'll take a "Charmed if it had aired on SciFi" level Faerie-world shot on old Land of the Lost back-lots! Sounds great! Okay, Tara's a lesbian now, sure, that's how those things happen, right? You just keep giving me Eric Northman rape fantasies and Jason Stackhouse dumb as a pile of steroids in pants so tight you know his religion and little girls biting into sacks of raw meat and you and me? We're good, True Blood.

The other show I want to give a couple moments to is the finale of The United States of Tara, which aired a thousand days ago but I just got around to this weekend. I am going to miss the Gregsons so freaking much, y'all. Has there ever been a better sibling relationship put onto TV than the one between Marshall and Kate? Marshmallow! How I will miss Marshall. 

And having Toni Collette beamed into my life every week felt like such a gift. Even if the show was wobbly here and there, even if I could take or leave mostly leave John Corbett, even if the introduction of that new alter there at the end felt a little bit scatter-shot, I still can't deny that the arrival one-by-one of the alters we've come to love and hate over these three seasons as they said goodbye to someone and were snuffed out really got me. When Alice showed up I screamed, "NO!!!" at the TV and then I was all, "Wait, what? Alice is awful!" And yet there it was. 

In summation, I can't be the only person that screamed, "Goodbye Porpoise Spit!" at the last shot of the show, can I?

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You're welcome.

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... to post the pictures of Alexander Skarsgård in the new issue of Interview Magazine, because they've released the hi-res versions now and they were worth it. Jesus, that one with the bat will get me through some lonely nights. (click these to mightily embiggen)

A note: Remember how Blogger went down last week, and all the posts I wrote on Thursday disappeared? Well Blogger's finally returned several (though not all of them, yet) of them to my saved pile, but not republished them at the appropriate in-the-past place. I'm too distracted today to figure out when they were originally scheduled, and also all the comments y'all made on them are gone now anyway, so I'm just gonna republish each one right now. So yes, you've seen these stories before, and yes they are nearly a week old. Let's do the time warp, et cetera...

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--- Swamp Sweat - The first clip with actual footage from the fourth season of True Blood is online and you can watch it at PopWrap. And yes, as you can see there to the ?, they are highlighting their finer points.

--- And speaking of the finer things on True Blood, Alexander Skarsgard has joined the cast of a movie where he will be married to Julianne Moore. I want to watch them make out.

--- No Escape - John Carpenter's The Ward is getting dumped released on VOD on June 8th. It'll then get chucked into a couple of theaters on July 8th. It is supposedly awful. Dammit, John. I'll watch it at some point no doubt, but just dammit.

--- We Need To Talk About We Need To Talk About Kevin - I mention all this in the comments of the post I'm about to link to, but I started reading Lionel Shriver's book We Need To Talk About Kevin last night and the ol' cliche came true - I couldn't put it down! I lay there til my exhausted eyes ached, completely and immediately sucked right in. Shriver's writing is wonderful. Anyway over at The Film Experience Nat's talking about the reviews coming out of Cannes today for the film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, and how he's staying away from those clips that came out earlier this week. Me too!

--- Block Busted - I'll be in Italy when these happen so I'm gonna miss it - and I'm not that unhappy about missing it since I will be in motherfucking Italy - but that "British kids fighting aliens" movie Attack the Block that's got every blogger from here to thither foaming at the mouth over it is screening in 25 cities on May 25th. Find out more at that link. Word is that it won't be out in the US for real until Fall.

--- Hard For Hammer - You can hear a few thoughts from screenwriter Dustin Lance Black on the subject of his latest politically minded movie, J. Edgar, over here. This bit was up my alley:

--- And finally, it's a fairly lengthy piece but it's really all sorts of wonderful - here's Alexander Chee talking about what the X-Men meant to him thirty-five years ago growing up bi-racial, and what they mean now in the world we live in.

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(via, via)

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But only if your name is Alexander Skarsgård. And then, if your name is Alexander Skarsgård, then the time has also come for you to stop reading my blather and send me an email with the time and the place. You name it, Alex. But if you're not Alexander Skarsgård, then whatever, do what you want, I don't care. God. Why don't you watch the trailer for the Straw Dogs remake and leave me alone, Not Alexander Skarsgård. He mostly never wears sleeves!
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And yeah, Jimmy Marsden's there too but he only shows a little chest fur and leg, he doesn't get full credit for that. Not in the face of this all. Fail, Jimmy! Fail. I know you can do better. Look at them, up on that roof! Remember the last time you were on a roof? I certainly do. I remember it well. Why don't you do that again, hmmm?