Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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Director Len Wiseman is an attractive fellow and married to a very attractive woman (Kate Beckinsale, ya know), so I suppose he can comfort himself with those things - plus all his money, so much money - when people like me say he is also on top of all that a fairly terrible director. The Underworld movies are pretty much unwatchable (save Scott Speedman's hotness), but I actually pretty much liked a lot of Live Free or Die Hard but that'd be Timothy Olyphant's doing. And is that's really all he's directed so far? That's weird. Anyway he's currently making the Total Recall remake of course, which due to his general terribleness I don't have a lot of faith in, especially when something as completely awesome as Paul Verhoeven's version exists. Still, we'll see. And news like this helps my pessimism - in talking with Collider about things he's shooting a couple of different ways in case the MPAA gives him trouble, he says with a smirk:

Hooray! Now we just need some crimped hair little people prostitutes and we'll be all set! Oh and he's a shirtless shot of Colin Farrell on the TR set that I somehow missed. (via)

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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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--- Post Cappy - Supposedly there an an Avengers preview of sorts at the very end, post-credits, of Captain America. That link has a couple spoilers for the movie so click with caution. I usually don't bothering sticking through the credits of these movies for Samuel L. Jackson's annual appearance but I might have to for Joss.

--- Carnage Quartet - The Playlist has a couple of new pictures from Roman Polanski's Carnage with Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet and Hans Landa and that pudgy guy who could never marry any of them not even Hans Landa.
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--- Sam Noir - Sam Rockwell is replacing Jeremy Renner in Better Living Through Chemistry. It's about a pill-popping pharmacist who has an affair with Jennifer Garner and plots to kill her husband. Sounds very Body Heat On Vicodin.

--- Getting Gangsta - Slash has got word on what director David Yates is looking at doing now that he's finished with Harry Potter (he directed the last four films) - perhaps an Al Capone bio-pic with Tom Hardy, for one! I like it. The thought of Tom is loose suit pants over boxers and wife-beaters and suspenders fill my head and I like it. Also a possibility is a trilogy based off of Stephen King's The Stand.

--- Slave People - The director of Smart People - that movie that should've just starred Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page and forsaken all the rest which was bullshit - is who they've picked to direct the 300 sequel? Okay. Slightly random. I guess he almost directed The Ring Two but bailed, which shows wisdom.

--- The Trance Dance - Seems like Danny Boyle is turning to Michael Fassbender's co-star in A Dangerous Method now that Fassy can't be in his new film - no, not Viggo, but Vincent. Cassel that is. Fassy was going to star in Trance opposite James McAvoy and reignite their hot sexual chemistry again, but it wasn't meant to be. Not that I don't want to see McAvoy and Cassel make out. Not that they will. Not that that's stop me from imagining it.

--- Balls Deep Herself, Ari Graynor, has got another role lined up - she's co-starring in For A Good Time, Call... opposite Lauren Miller, actress and more importantly Seth Rogen fiance. It's a "raunchy comedy" co-written by Miller about two broads, said broads being Miller and Graynor, who start a phone sex telephone line. Do those things even exist anymore?

--- Two Weeks - Meant to link this up last week but there's the first official shot of Colin Farrell in the Total Recall remake. (via)

--- White King - The King dies in Snow White, doesn't he? That's how the Evil Queen takes power over the kingdom? Or is he just too weak to upstage her? I can't remember. Anyway Sean Bean has just landed the part of the King in Tarsem's movie version (with Julia Roberts as his Evil Queen) so we can assume he'll die, him being Sean Bean and all.

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--- Hey Look - Channing Tatum shaved his head. I have no idea what it's for, if it's for a role or whatever, but I want to rub my hands (or you know, my whatever) all over it, I know that much.

--- Three Peeks - DH has descriptions of a few trailers we'll be seeing soon - namely The Dark Knight Rises (which is already leaked online in a crappy pirated version, I watched it this morning but the copy I saw's already gone so search around maybe you can still find it), The Amazing Spider-Man (which'll be shown at ComiCon, and excuse me while I groan at the apparent extensive inclusion of origin story in it - is there anyone on Earth who needs to see him get bitten by the spider at this point?), and the first trailer for John Carter Sans Mars (I think that's what I'm calling it from now on), which is supposedly showing up "with select copies" of Harry Potter this weekend. I better be seeing a "select" fucking copy then.

--- Future Man - There aren't any shots of Colin Farrell or any of the other actors in the Total Recall remake in these pictures from the film's now-shooting set, but there are some amusing looks at the costumes the police extras have to wear. Very TRON meets storm-trooper.

--- Latest Final - BD has a rather extensive (that's code for "I only skimmed it") set report from the latest Final Destination movie, which I am officially so excited for I could barf. As I say every time this franchise comes up, I hope I'm seeing new films from this series every other year for the rest of my life.

--- Suicide Laughs - I must've heard about this project earlier but forgotten - Kristen Wiig is teaming up with the filmmakers behind American Splendor to make a dark comedy about a girl who pretends to try to kill herself to win a dude back, a scheme which backfires and gets her sent to live with her estranged mother. This sounds like exactly what she should be doing, so I am there. It's also kind of reminiscent of the darker edges of Bridesmaids - that character was forced by sad circumstances to move home and deal with her mother too. I sense a theme! Kristen Wiig hates her mother.

--- Hero Boobs - This is my sort of literature! io9 gathered up all the examples of Marvel movie superhero men taking off their clothes that they could think of in one hot spot destination post. Chris Evans as Johnny Storm and Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, they got them all oh wait they forgot a couple which I will now bitch about, that's right. Just off the top of my head they left off Thomas Jane as The Punisher, they left off Eric Bana in the first Hulk movie (although they do give love to Ed Norton in the last film), and they left off Daniel Cudmore as Colossus in X2.

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.... won't you be my neighbor, Vampire Colin Farrell? SYTD's got several new pictures from the Fright Night remake and Colin Farrell carefully smudged with grease in an artfully dirtied-up wife-beater wins everything. Everything!

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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!

Okay no that's just weird.

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--- An Impressive Phallus - Back in May I posted a couple of pictures of James Franco from his movie about the gay poet Hart Crane, as well as the news that there'd be "a love scene" between him and Michael Shannon in it - well I guess the film screened in LA and word on it (via K212) is even more explicit:

Indeed! James Franco is dedicated. (To being awesome.) There's an interview about the film with James at that second link. The film will supposedly come out next year. 

--- Kill Bots - Steven Spielberg's supposedly going to make a movie out of it, but the new book Robopocalypse hadn't even been seen by the general public yet. Til now - it's out, and io9 says it is awesome. I just finished a book and need something to pick up and this sounds awfully perfect for June reading. Killer robots ho!

--- Mars Needs Men - JJ has a couple of shots of Colin Farrell looking like Colin Farrell (aka hot) in jeans and a t-shirt on the Canadian set of the Total Recall remake, which I guess means that movie's finally shooting. Huh.

--- Little Person - Ian McShane is playing the head dwarf in Snow White and the Huntsman (that's the one with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron, not the Julia Roberts one). The head dwarf is named Caesar, snooze - make him act all tough and regal and shit while pulling off a Dopey, dammit. That's acting.

--- Speaking of our current revisionist fairy tale craze, Guillermo Del Toro would love to make Maleficent, he says. He even busts out some dorky knowledge about the dragon's wings! God I love him. But the basic point stands that Guillermo Del Toro would love to make a million movies, but there is only one of him. So I won't hold my breath on that.

--- No Strangers 2 Strange - Bryan Bertino's successful 2008 horror film The Strangers has come up in my home a couple times these past weeks so I'm feeling inclined to hear what's up with its sequel; thankfully STYD got some news from Liv Tyler herself. Unfortunately it's not good news:

Indeed it is, Liv. Bertino's got nothing else lined up on IMDb either. WTF.

--- Tara Burns - PopWrap chatted with everybody's favorite True Blood doormat Rutina Wesley aka Tara and she says Tara will not be victimized this year, dammit! Everybody seems to think the rumor of a character going gay this season will be her, but god do I have my fingers crossed that it's Ryan Kwanten. That ass needs to be appreciated! Publicly. And what happened to all that homo-vibe between Bill and Sam anyway? Explore that some more dammit!

--- O Khaleesi - I still haven't gotten around to the Game of Thrones finale - tonight, tonight! - but you should check out Sean's recap of the episode alongside his friend Megan - Sena's read the books, she hasn't - to see a take on the first season from both perspectives. But only if you've seen the finale already!

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I can't remember the context, but I was just talking about In Bruges earlier this week. I was probably calling somebody a cunt and smashing a telephone to bits, is all. Anyway it's next on my list of "go back and watch that movie again, fool!" is the point. And now, more incentive! Its director Martin McDonagh, a playwright that wasn't even sure he'd make another movie after he was so successful with his first one, is working on a new project. Huzzah!

It's being shopped around Cannes, is how we know - it's called Seven Psychopaths and his Bruges star Colin Farrell's already attached. Along with Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, and Mickey Rourke, which well can you picture a more perfect cast for McDonagh's sensibilities? It's about a screenwriter that gets involved in a botched dog-napping scheme. I want to eat this movie's face off with my love already. As a side-note, did you know that Martin McDonagh is a sexy bitch? I just learned this. Huh.

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--- Spooky Stevie - Y'all have probably already watched this but the teaser trailer for Steven Spielberg's mo-cap Rin Tin Tin Rides a Unicorn or whatever it's called movie is online now, if you're curious. I'll watch it later but pre-seeing I am bogged down with doubts, man. One too many dead-eyed Zemeckis movies have put me off this shit, and nothing I've seen from the early art-work's proven that impression wrong yet. That said, I'm an eternal unapologetic Spielberg fan-boy so I'll presumably be convinced otherwise at some point.

--- Gesundheit - Anton Yelchin looks like a booger that just dripped out of Sky Colin Farrell in the first Fright Night poster. (via)

--- Noe Way - Can you believe I still haven't watched Enter the Void yet? Every time I've glanced at the DVD I see that it's 161 minutes long and I just haven't been in the state of mind for it. Shame on me. Looks like Noe might be turning his sanity-challenged eye to Bret Easton Ellis' script called The Golden Suicides next, which would be a meeting of the pyschos for sure.

--- Killer Kevin - BD has three clips and an ankle-suck picture from that Vampire movie starring Kevin Zegers as a you-guessed-it vampire, but he's not naked and/or gay in any of them so I lost interest right quick. Come on, Kevin. I mean really. Know your fan-base.

--- Peen Poll - I don't think you're gonna find another poll on the week's multimedia penises anywhere but at The Film Experience today. Which is a damned shame - they should be everywhere!

--- To A Flame - It doesn't sound like things are going well for Mary Harron's new horror movie The Moth Diaries, which co-stars Scott Speedman - according to BD it's been having trouble getting picked up by a distributor. WTF morons? Mary "American Psycho" Harron has fans sitting here dying from want, and we're being kept from finished product. It ain't right. Read more about TMD here. BD also has some promo art and images at this link. Boo, I says.

--- For contrast, young male horror director JT Petty - who I like just fine don't get me wrong; read my review of his film S&Man here - is having no trouble at all piling up project after project. He's just signed on to direct a J-Horror flick in Japan called Haunted Temple for producers behind the Ring and Ju-On films, while he's not even finished his other movie Hellbenders (more on that here) yet.

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It's amazing how quickly I freeze up - 24 hours without blogging access has left my gears a little bit stuck. My timing's all off. Gotta grease myself right! Anyway I have yesterday's Way Not To Die sitting here but I've decided, since it's already approaching 4pm on Friday, to just save it for next Thursday. Try not to explode from all the stored-up anticipation. For now though, here be some links that've come and gone in importance in the past day. Enjoy!

--- First Gear - First up and most importantly, there a picture of Ryan Gosling in Drive that I hadn't seen yet, via IMDb. If you click over you can see the rest of the picture, which includes Carey Mulligan, but I've edited it down to what matters most I think. God he's aged well.

--- Speaking of pictures, The Playlist has the first image I've seen anywhere from Rian Johnson's next movie Looper. The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who worked so magnificently with Rian on Brick of course, but for some reason the first image they released is of Bruce Willis. Okay.

--- Nosy Business - After he makes the (first?) Hunger Games movie, Gary Ross will direct a new version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Apparently "the twist" will be its use of modern social media, like Facebook I guess. So Cyrano will be a cyber-stalker, and it'll end with somebody raped and dead. Hooray!

--- G-String Apprentice - Steven Soderbergh has tapped (heh, I'm sure) Alex Pettyfer to play the young stripper that gets tutored by Channing Tatum in Channing Tatum's true life story of male stripperdom. That's a sentence I never thought I'd write, that's for sure. Anyway I am happy that the "Alex Pettyfer" tag here at MNPP is not for naught; his prickishness and terrible choices were beginning to cast it in doubt.

--- Mark's Playbook - Mark Wahlberg is reteaming with David O. Russell, aka the only director not named PT Anderson that knows how to effectively get anything out of Mark Wahlberg, for an adaptation of a book called The Silver Lining Playbook, about a high school teacher who gets outta the loony-bin and tries to restart things with his ex-wife, while having no idea he was just in the loony-bin. The last time Mark Wahlberg tried to play a teacher, we got The Happening.

--- Quite A Fright - You can watch the trailer for Fright Night over at PopWrap. I haven't watched it yet, so you tell me. Well? I'm waiting.

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--- Poof There He Is - STYD has got a look at David Tennant in his role of the Vegas-ish magician in the Fright Night remake. Dare I say it's sort of... sexy? In a really weird way? Oh I am ashamed. I just get blinded by chest fur every time. Anyway Colin and Toni aside this movie is gonna be awful, I think.

--- Natural Selection - Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli's follow-up film, the alien-themed Area 51, hasn't even come out yet but he's lining up what he'll do next. It is "the tale of friends who discover they are not alone after they become stranded in a ghost town overrun by nature." Whatever the eff that means.

--- How Many Makers - I love this listicle at The Film Experience on the working habits of the many directors we love. Would that nearly every single name on the list work more. I don't care. I want it all!

--- Multi-Fassy-ed - io9 dissects a new TV bite-sized trailer for X-Men Muppet Babies that's got a bunch of new moments in it, including a suspicious one involving Michael Fassbenders. That "s" is meant to be there.

--- People Pets - I apparently spaced on posting this news earlier this week so here it is briefly, which doesn't mesh with how epic the news is but whatever, it's been two days and the world's moved on already! Darren Aronofsky and George Clooney are perhaps probably maybe teaming up for a sci-fi movie about a man who wakes up from his cryogenic slumber to find that the human race has been turned into pets for another species. Seems like people are actually tackling harder-edged old-fashioned sci-fi themes these days, doesn't it? I like it.

--- And speaking of Clooney, here's the first clip of him in Alexander Payne's much-waited-for new movie The Descendants. (via) I haven't watched it yet so y'all tell me what's up.

--- Sally Boy - James Franco has cast his Sal Mineo for that biopic he's apparently making - his name's Val Lauren, and he's mostly done TV work so far, although his IMDb bio says he's done a lot of "play originals" with Scott Caan. Mmhmm. I've heard that about Scott. Anyway that's him to the left there and I guess he could look the part, with some effort. If we're looking at later-years Sal, that is.

--- Queen of the Knight - Marion Cotillard says that her part in The Dark Knight Rises is very small and non-challenging for a lady who will be tremendously pregnant when it comes time for her to film.

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