Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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--- Adorable hipster director Cary Fukunaga will make that sci-fi movie Spaceless next, which was a rumor a few weeks back. Two movies down - Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre - ad I'll follow the dude anywhere.

--- Thrones Keepers - Some casting news for A Game of Thrones: they've cast Theon Greyjoy's sister Asha (although she can't be named Asha in the TV series because of that whore character Osha they invented for the show, so now she's called Yara, because none of us need any more complications when it comes to this show) and Xaro Xhoan Daxos, a kingly dude that Dany deals with. I'm not familiar with either actors at first glance, but the show's shown itself pretty dang good at picking the right actors so far.

--- Recent Piranha remaker Alexandre Aja might remake Pet Semetary. I find myself with very little to say about that. Huh.

--- After Zach Snyder makes his Superman movie with Henry "swoon" Cavill, he's lining up a movie called The Last Photograph which sounds more serious than what we're used to from him - it's set in "war-torn Afghanistan" and:

--- Ben Foster will be playing John Gotti Jr. in that Gotti movie with John Travolta; we worried last week when Dominic Cooper was rumored up for the role, and now we're worried for Ben. Mitts off, Travolta!

--- Diablo Cody, who seems to be inexplicably-to-me hated these days more than she's liked, appears to be drawn to birds of a feather since she's apparently offered the co-lead in her directorial debut (previous post) to Russell Brand. These are both people I am always being forced to argue in favor of! This movie will drive me to knife-wielding!

--- Have you seen the poster for Drive yet? It's Goslinglicious! (via)

--- We just rambled a little bit about Miranda July earlier, and here's more - she talked to io9 about the science-fictional way time works in her new movie The Future.

--- And finally, here's the first clip from Todd Solondz's new movie Dark Horse. I haven't watched it yet and I might not watch it in order to keep myself pure - please please please let this movie play at the New York Film Festival this Fall! - but have at it if you will.

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Caught Oscar Isaac in Sucker Punch last week - where I felt driven to comment that he had nearly as much make-up on as Carla Gugino did, and she was wearing A LOT of make-up - and then his name popped out at me the very next day when the trailer for Drive wowed me so. he's having a moment! He's also in Madonna's upcoming directorial debut W.E. and the fourth Bourne movie. (these pics are from Ridley Scott's Robin Hood)

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I'm getting woefully behind with writing up proper movie reviews. Several films have come and gone before me with nary a whisper - I haven't been particularly inspired enough by any of them to force words out of myself... but I should. Force myself, that is. So I'm gonna lop out a few thoughts on several films in one go. Let's see what happens! This is so exciting!

The Devil's Double - A weirdly airless film that can't decide how far it can push the Scarface movie it wants to be without, you know, exploiting the real-world atrocities it's documenting as gangsta cred. It would've been better off going one way or the other - and I would've had it go straight off the deep end, honestly - but as is there's not much tension to be had. Good Dominic Cooper stays good and Evil Dominic Cooper stays evil, and they just kind of sit there and watch each other be respectively good and be respectively evil for two hours. All that said, this tweet contains immense truth that made the viewing experience occasionally dizzying. Good god this movie will do well in The Great Gratuities of 2011.

Cowboys & Aliens - I tweeted an echo of the tweet I just linked to in honor of the spectacle that was Daniel Craig posing in chaps, and that remains my most vivid memory of the flick here less than two days later. What else was there? I mean, besides the same goddamned boring creature design that I railed against a few weeks ago? Slapping some goopy "Benny from Total Recall" arms into their guts does not alleviate the fact that these were basically the same things we saw in District 9 and Super 8 and every damned alien movie forever now. I suppose lamenting the state of creativity in Hollywood is skull-fucking a dead horse at this point but it's especially exhausting when it comes to the monster makers. I want good monsters, people! There's a universe of insane concepts out thereand I keep getting stupid bug-men!

Otherwise C&A wasn't offensively bad - Harrison Ford actually appeared to be sober and paying attention this time! And the film took its time and had people actually talking about things to each other, which somehow seems an extraordinary accomplishment these days. But you know how Daniel Craig's jangly little bracelet would light up to warn them whenever an alien was nearby? All that made me think of was the pulsing alien detector in James Cameron's Aliens, you know the one - "They're all around us, man! Jesus!" - and oh how this movie suffered in comparison.

Crazy Stupid Love - I know I'm not the only person who came out of this movie wishing the entire thing had been about Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's characters but good god did those two have sparks or what? Everything else going on I just kept wanting to get back to them. That island of time in the middle where Ryan's shirtless and Emma's being her goofy spazz self was a little slice of heaven. I didn't mind the storyline with the teenagers - I appreciated it's non-ballistic point of view towards teen sexuality (kids masturbate and take dirty pictures of themselves and it's not the end of the world!). But I kind of thought everything having to do with Steve Carell and Julianne Moore and Marisa Tomei was way off-key.

Sucker Punch - I was sort of mortified about halfway through Sucker Punch to realize that yup, once again I was finding myself, despite my own sanity begging me not to, mostly liking a Zach Snyder movie. There's a clarity to the way he shoots action that I deeply admire - I hear people scoffing at his patented speed-up slow-down way of shooting and focusing in on movement but I love it. Do we prefer Michael Bay throwing our eyeballs into a blender? Snyder's camera pulls way way out so you can see everything - and some of the scenes he fills the frame with here are ridiculously eye-pleasing - or it swoops through the action fascinated by the ballet of it. And I liked that it wasn't slavishly obsessed with prattling on about the rules of the fantasy world either (cough Inception cough) - it set out a couple of ridiculously basic video-game goals (find the map!) and then let the visuals rip from that, and it knew that sometimes ya just gotta throw in Gwar-outfitted orcs for good measure.

But well-shot action aside, Sucker Punch suffers an exceptional lot for its PG-13 rating. Like The Devil's Double it's afraid to go where it needs to to be the movie it needs to be. Where it needs to be has lots of blood and lots of nipples and lots of lesbian heavy-petting, in case you were wondering. It has the imagination but its balls, if not exactly cut off, have kinda shrunk up inside its body. Plus nobody on-screen is even a tenth as compelling as Carla Gugino is as the lost Russian instructor from the Suspiria dance school in a latticed bustier and spackled-on beauty mark. I vant to suck your movie out from underneath you, she cries. Just let her, Zach!

Today I'd rather be...

... rough-riding with a trashy Ryan Gosling. (via)

Wow, white-trash looks good on Ryan, who knew. Although has there been a look that hasn't worked on Ryan? (besides this one, of course) He even made that weird half-balding mustache look in Blue Valentine hot, if you ask me. Here he looks like he'd smack you in the side of the head with a beer bottle, belch, and then demand a blow-job. Hot!


These are from the set of The Place Beyond the Pines, which he's starring in for his Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance. It co-stars several other people plus Greta Gerwig! Hooray!


ETA There's three more shots of him all bleached-out and sleeveless (via) because this shit is fueling some good thoughts today, obviously. Obviously.

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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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(via) Wow, now that I'm sitting here at my desk today I'm realizing I am just not that into forming thoughts today.

Birthday break! Unless I shake this off I think it might be kinda quiet here this here Friday. I dunno. I might change my mind in half an hour, I might not. As a wise man once said, this is my prerogative.

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While it's not quite as exciting as Dominic Cooper's gold-clad crotch on the poster for The Devil's Double, I still give my stamp of approval to Steve Carell's crotch being given center-of-attention treatment in the latest poster for Crazy Stupid Love. (via) Every poster should go this route from now on!

Although... well I wouldn't be complaining if

the CSL poster looked like this either:

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I wish there were Greta Gerwig news every day. Greta Gerwig bought an apple from a street vendor! Greta Gerwig cured cancer! Greta Gerwig bought another apple from the same street-vendor when she passed by him later that same day! If only. What a wonderful world that'd be, my inbox filled with such things. For now we just have to make due with when she signs on for new movies, which thankfully hasn't really let up since she went and showed everybody how she's the queen of awesomesauce. Via Deadline:

I really wanted to title this post "What's Good For The Gerwig Is Good For The Gosling" by the way but that was too long and I've used variations on it for Ryan Gosling posts in the past. Who knew a better circumstance filled with such spectacular alliteration would present itself? Nobody, that's who.

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--- The Lovers, The Dreamers - You can see a photograph of the poster for The Greatest Muppet Movie Made over at AICN, along with word that one of the original songs written for the film is already making grown men burst into tears. Hooray! November 23rd can't get here soon enough.

--- Sob Story - Hooray for praise of Barbara Hershey's performance in Beaches at The Film Experience! Her work really was overshadowed by her lip injections at the time; cornball lady-hysteria aside, she's wonderful in the movie. It makes me short of breath just thinking about the scene where she collapses for the first time, so well does she sell the sickness.

--- The Kings Layer - I haven't watched last night's Game of Thrones yet but I hear there was lots of gratuitousness right up my alley to behold so I'm looking forward to it. For now, we can read this interview from this past Friday at PopWrap with the Kingslayer himself, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau.

--- I See A Samuel - Over at Stale Popcorn, Glenn takes a look at some movie called Road Train, and by "takes a look at" I means posts several pictures of its star Xavier Samuel, last seen by me in 2010's best horror movie The Loved Ones, looking mighty fine.

--- Coop On Chris - Over at Low Resolution, Joe lists the eventual blockbusters still coming out this Summer in order of preference. Special shout-out to the never-stops-being-completely-hysterical shot of Dominic Cooper checking out Chris Evans' pecs in the Captain America trailer is given. Word.

--- Wood Man - It went through about thirty different actors hands, but Snow White and the Huntsman finally has its Huntsman - Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth will star opposite Kristen Stewart as SW and Charlize Theron as the Wicked Queen. I've avoided the Twilight movies like the plague so I don't necessarily dislike Kristen Stewart, but I'm still hoping with those stars attached that Hemsworth and Theron toss her out a window and end the film in each other's arms. Because that'd be HOT.

--- A New Riding - I guess if anybody could maybe make a coherent script for a remake of the terrific British TV trilogy Red Riding, I guess it could be the guy who wrote Zodiac, with its thousand characters and dangling strands. I say they rehire Andrew Garfield for it! And then make him walk around in his little underpants again.

--- Just Josh - Josh Duhamel's signed on for a couple of movies, and this will be the last time you'll hear me mention either of them until the pictures of him with his clothes off in said movies arrive.

--- More Monsters - The original director Gareth Edwards will only produce, he's busy trying to make that Godzilla movie, but a sequel to last year's cost-nothing success Monsters is gonna get made. One of the other producers says they'll be making "much more of a straight genre picture" and "upping the ante," so basically they're planning on canceling out everything that made the first film unique. Mkay.

--- Canadian Idol - Ryan Gosling is becoming a director. I guess we should've seen this coming. He's set to star in and direct a remake of Taylor Hackford's 1980 film The Idolmaker, about the rock n' roll promoter Bob Marcucci, who discovered Frankie Avalon.

--- Pretty Vacuum - Kellan Lutz, Shiloh Fernandez, and Amber Heard are going to star in a movie together. I mean, I'm not sure if it'll be the sheer force of prettiness or the vacuum of the absence of acting skills that'll destroy the world when this happens, but it'll be one of those two. Perhaps the union?

--- Two Tom Cats - Joel Edgerton - see his recent gratuitous post here - and Luke Evans, who is totally 100% straight or something, are both up for the role Ben Affleck almost took, Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

--- And finally, have you seen the original ending to Alexander Payne's Election yet? (via Slash) It's terrible. Terrible! It might be the best example I've ever seen of test audiences working out for the best, because the ending they actually came up with for the finished film is about twenty-thousand times better than this.

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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.