Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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I was just updating my calendar with movie release dates - don't act like you don't do the same thing! - and in so doing came upon Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In page of release dates. It comes out in the US on October 14th, but at that link it also lists the film as showing at this year's New York Film Festival on October 8th. Correct me if I'm wrong but I've been following NYFF news and all they've formally announced so far is the opening night film - Roman Polanski's Carnage - and the centerpiece film - My Week With Marilyn with Michelle Williams tackling Miss Monroe (not to mention Dominic Cooper... not tackling Marilyn Monroe too, he's just in the movie, although that'd be something to see) - and so perhaps somebody updating something at IMDb jumped the gun? Whatever the case I plan on watching the fuck out of the NYFF this year so I'll be there!

The final weekend of the fest is also when NY's ComicCon is happening, plus the remake of The Thing comes out... I will be a busy bee. Speaking of...

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I had a laughing fit recently when this part of Best In Show 

popped into my head. "That's a bear in a bee costume."

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When we got word of the Toronto International Film Festival's slate yesterday, I listed off several films I'd kill to see there (even though I probably won't be going). There were a bunch! Looks like an excellent year. Well five minutes later the fine people at TIFF released pictures for most of their films, and a lot of these were our very first looks at these films. Like the ones that I already posted from director Steve McQueen's reunion with Michael Fassbender, Shame, for instance. Well there are other instances of this sort, having to do with movies I'm crazy excited over, and I feel it my duty to post them lest they go unposted, which apparently is the sort of thing that could cause my fragile psyche to swirl the drain. We wouldn't want that, would we? Well let's get on with it then.

First up are 5 new pictures from Todd Solondz's Dark Horse. 

It stars, as you can see there, Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow (!!!) and Selma Blair and Jordan Gelber. We don't know a whole lot about DH yet; TIFF describes it as "Todd Solondz creates an intimate dark comedy about a manchild whose desire for a romantic relationship runs smack into reality, " while IMDb says "Romance blooms between two thirty-somethings in arrested development: an avid toy collector and a woman who is the dark horse of her family." I'm guessing Gelber and Blair are the ones falling in love. 

Here's a new shot from Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In:

If anybody can make Antonio Banderas sexy again, it's Almodovar.

Here's a shot of Michael Shannon in Take Shelter:

I could've sworn I wrote about this movie once before but I can't find the post so maybe I dreamed it.  It's from the director of Shotgun Stories, which Shannon was fantastic in. It co-stars Jessica Chastain.

This shot of Tilda and John C. Reilly in We Need To Talk About Kevin is sticking a finger in the wound that is the fact that I'm not seeing this movie right now and must wait:

I didn't take note of Burning Man when looking through the list of TIFF movies the first time but it apparently stars Matthew Goode who obviously grabs one's interest right quick, face-wise. He plays some sort of hopelessly sexy chef beset by distracting womenfolk! Yeah I probably won't see this unless Goode takes his clothes off then.

And finally here are two shots from Sarah Polley's next film Take This Waltz, which stars Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen. Give it to me!

That's someone named Luke Kirby in the second shot with Michelle, and he is adorable. Here he is in his underpants in some other movie. Ending things on a bright but random  note!

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--- Yo Joe - The little boy from the first Jurassic Park, Joseph Mazzello, has been getting quite a few little parts lately now that's he grown into a handsome young man, and he just got cast in the GI Joe sequel. And his name is Joe! That's nuts! Anyway are they even bothering with any girls this time around? Channing and Joe and The Rock and Ray Stevenson and sexy bitch Byung-hun Lee. Beefcake on top of beefcake! Which sounds about right. That's how I played with my GI Joes at least.

--- And speaking of Jurassic Park, yes Steven Spielberg confirmed the push for a fourth film at Comic Con and yes they're saying it could be in the next two years. But it's not really anymore news then we heard a couple months ago. so I'm sitting on my hands til real concrete stuffs comes out like, I dunno, the movie itself. No more yanking me around! (Riiiight, this will last.)

--- Pro Dentata - Over at The Film Experience Robert crafted a wonderful ode to the 2009 vaginal horror flick Teeth, which I need to rewatch right soon. Why hasn't Jess Weixler gotten more work off off that movie? She's so good in it! Or hey what about young buck Hale Appleman? He's so hot in that!

--- Dead Man Walking - Frank Darabont has quit his job running AMC's The Walking Dead. Sadness! According to him he wasn't quite prepared for the demands of a day-to-day TV show after being a movie-maker for so long, but there's been a lot of drama behind the scenes of that show since the start. The first season was wobbly so I dunno what this might mean, good or bad, up or down, for the second season which starts in October. Guess we'll have to wait and see (says Mr. Obvious).

--- Royale With Cheese - Astonishing Stacie Ponder wrote up some thoughts on a bunch of Asian horror flicks the other day, including her first time with Battle Royale and Audition! Now that's a kick-ass two-fer.

--- Skin Tagged - Also via Twitch is the full trailer for Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In, which I would set fire to the Statue of Liberty in order to see right a screening of this second.

--- Damme Hot - I know he's a crazy weirdo, but Jean Clauda Van Damme's gotten himself all beefed up for The Expendables sequel as you can see there (via) and I can't help but gawk again. I know there won't be, they never even got Always-Shirtless Jason Statham out of his top for the first one, but I'd kill for one more look at JCVD's greatest asset.

--- Speaking of Statham, Crank 3 will supposedly be made with or without him in it, says Efren Ramirez who was in both of the earlier films too. I can't imagine Statham not making the third film. God I love these movies. They're so ridiculous.

--- Let's Go Leviathan - Robert Zemeckis has finally decided to step the hell away from those dead-eyed monsters he'd been forcing us to stare at movie after movie and making something with real human beings, plus sea monsters! I guess the massive flop heard round the galaxy, Mars Needs Moms, drove the point home finally. The new project is called Here There Be Monsters and it may or may not be a project he does in the near future, but it sounds cool on paper. I've been jonesing for a giant monster movie renaissance for some time!

--- One Lopsided Triangle - Emma Stone might be re-teaming with her Zombieland director for Gangster Squad, which would make her the moll caught between her Crazy Stupid Love co-star Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn, which eww. Is there even a whiff of a choice there? I mean really.

--- Re Masked - Have you guys gone over to the Facebook page for Before the Mask, the prequel to the wonderful slasher flick Behind the Mask, yet? They're raising funds from fans in all sorts of neat-o ways, including offering up - for a price, natch - the opportunity to be killed on-screen! How rad is that? it's beyond my meager budget unfortunately, but man that is cool. You can also win a telephone call from the slasher himself, Nathan Baesel, who was so good in the first film. But they don't say if it can be a phone sex call or not. I'll just assume that's a yes. The director Scott Glosserman talks about this and more over at STYD.

--- Inn July - Twitch posted a couple of reviews worth checking out today. I loved their take on Miranda July's The Future. I had so much fun writing my review but it was vague in a lot of ways. On purpose, but still. So I don't think I made it clear how much darker this movie is than her first film Me and You and Everyone We Know. And despite is rep MAYAEWK was no walk in the park. Anyway I love this movie more and more the further I get from it. It's out this weekend in limited release! See it!

And secondly they've got a review of Ti West's follow-up to The House of the Devil, the haunted house (make that inn) story The Innkeepers, which I would set fire to the Statue of Liberty a second time in order to see a screening of right this second.

--- And finally, my bud Sean wrote a Spider-Man comic! That is so cool! Conrgats, Sean!

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It's been a slow news day so far today. But hark! Here is the list of films showing at the Toronto International Film Festival this year! I seriously doubt I'll be going since I've never gone before and I can't see that changing now - although Toronto is a lovely city so if they want to invite me they can do that! - but since it's a slow news day let's name five movies playing at the festival that make me wanna slap some marching boots on and storm the north come September.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey) - Everybody's read the book by Lionel Shriver by now, right? I hope so. Go read the book if you haven't! Because this book is amazing. AMAZING. And this movie has Tilda Swinton starring in it. AMAZING TIMES TWELVE.

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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.   

We saw a clip from Almodovar's The Skin I Live In back in May that creeped me out pretty ferociously, and now we've got a teaser trailer to do that double-time. The film's out in the US in November. (via)

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