Playing In & Out WIth Jim and Mike

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Gay lovers Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy aren't really the same type - that's what makes their chemistry in X-Men: Muppet Babies so electric. As a wise woman and her wise cartoon cat once said, "Two steps forward, two steps back," after all. (Hey that sorta rhymed! I'm almost as good as MC Skat Kat, sometimes!) 

Anyway the fact that they're different types of swoon-worthy sexy serious thespian dudes isn't keeping director Danny Boyle from swapping them out all willy nilly - Fassy, who was set to star in Boyle's next film, a crime-caper called Trance, has been replaced by McAvoy it seems. With everything Fassbender's piled up on his plate these past couple years it's not surprising that things would have to give here and there - he can't be in everything, unfortunately. Thankfully somebody like McAvoy's there to pick up his droppings!

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Quote of the Day

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Interviewer: I like to pride myself on having moderate mind-reading skills and I think I can work out the question that you get asked that annoys you the most about this movie. So I’ve got to read that, it’s my last question. Question: generally when people come in here and they ask you “Are you in X-Men?” The question that…

McAvoy: How many times did you have sex with Michael Fassbender?

Interviewer: That was the question. And what is the answer?

McAvoy: Four.

Interviewer: Four times. And how tender a lover is he?

McAvoy: [sucks in his breath, considers] …Define tender?

Interviewer: I guess.. a bit of spooning afterward…?

McAvoy: [shakes head]

Interviewer: …some snuggles…?

McAvoy: [continues shaking his head]

Interviewer: …maybe a little [kissy sounds] on the neck?

McAvoy: [shakes head] No, I have to take care of myself afterward.

(via)

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Word of the Day: Fassystache

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As in, "My goodness how I want to graze my upper lip against Michael Fassbender's mustache - aka The Fassystache - every time they show it in this, the first trailer for David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, a film which costars Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley and Vincent Cassel." Make sure to use "Fassystache" in a sentence today - you will not be disappointed. Trust me. Anyway I took several billion screen-caps from the trailer for Fassy looking anguished and Keira baring her underbite if you wanna check them out after the jump. Hit it.
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Whatcha Reaching For There, Ryan Reynolds?

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Is it Fame? Or a pile of balls?

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So I heard it on good authority, a real "Hush! Hush!" scoop here, that Green Lantern is a pile of balls. Who'da thunk? I mean, obviously the people behind the scenes were making the right decisions right off the bat when they decided that they'd have their lead actor, well known for his perfectly sculpted everything, wear CG instead of spandex. Good choices abounded!

This whole weekend's a write-off, ain't it? The only reason I'm glad Mr. Popper's Penguins is here is if I had to sit through that trailer one more time I was gonna smelt somebody's face. That's right - SMELT! I'll do it! I've got a... a... smelter? Right here! Alright whatever this has devolved into nonsense (yeah, devolved, had a real far trip down the evolutionary ladder there).

Point being, go read some more of what I have to say about this weekend's abysmal crap-fest of movies at Celebrity Beehive. Personally I'm skipping the junk and going for the 3D Hitchcock!

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5 Off My Head - What's Half of Eleven

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July 1st marks the halfway point of the year, and so I figured I'd do what I usually do and take a quick look back at the five movies I've enjoyed the most so far this year. Looking at the movies that open between now and then that I'm most curious about all there seems to be is Super 8 and Green Lantern - it that really it for June? - and I don't foresee either of those topping any of these at this point. (Prove me wrong, JJ Abrams!) There are a few duking it out, I could want something else in five minutes, but let's just roll with this.

Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) - Since seeing it back in March there kind of hasn't been a day that's passed where I haven't wanted to watch Certified Copy again. What baffles me looking back is I never wrote a proper review! I wrote a post telling y'all to remind me to write a review, and obviously you all failed me. Your fault! Anyway now I have a reason to watch it ASAP so I can write up some properish thoughts. There are visuals from this movie that accost me all the time. A slipping bra-strap or a boy following his mother or a sad bride.

Hanna (dir. Joe Wright) - my review - Okay okay so I've said enough about Eric Bana's wet longjohns at this point in the year, probably. There are other things! Wonderful things. Joe Wright making an action movie sort of feels like what would happen if one of those giant-headed bug-eyed aliens beamed down into your living-room and you told it to go and make you a peanut butter sandwich. This is that alien's peanut-butter sandwich. Strange and stranger.

13 Assassins (dir. Takashi Miike) - my review - I'm so glad to have another movie from Takashi to love - he makes more than it's possible to keep up with from this side of the world and the few that have trickled over have seemed more like emblems of his lack of concentration than, you know, coherent films. Not so with 13 Assassins, which is an astonishingly old-fashioned slow-burn to madness for the maestro of mayhem.
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Jane Eyre (dir. Cary Fukunaga) - my review - It's all there in that scene in front of the fireplace with Rochester and Jane sizing each other up - Mia and Fassy scouring each other's faces and dragging us along for the ride.

Insidious (dir. James Wan) - my review - Lawd knows I have plenty of issues with plenty of Insidious, but at the same time I had such a hoot jumping out of my seat that I'm willing to overlook a lot of silliness. It packs enough bang for your buck. Good old fashioned spook-sanctioned fun.

So what've been your favorite movies of 2011 so far?

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I Am Link

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--- Make It A Full Moon For Luna - Diego Luna, who I love and probably even prefer to his Y Tu Mama co-star Gael Garcia Bernal if we're being honest, is in talks to join Neil Blomkamp's sci-fi follow-up to District 9, called Elysium and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and District star Sharlto Copley, and which... well hasn't that thing been filming for ages already? They're so damn secretive about it. Anyway yay Diego! Love him.

--- World's End - AICN got a little bit from Simon Pegg on where his and Nick Frost's third film with Edgar Wright stands right now. They are working on the story, and they want it to be interesting, basically!

--- Breathless Mahoney - Has anybody seen Dick Tracy lately? I was the perfect age of 12 when it came out in 1990 and I remember obsessing over it for that Summer but I don't think I've seen it since. I've been meaning to rewatch it for ages now but have no idea what that'll feel like. Anyway Warren Beatty's mentioned making a sequel. Timely, Warren!

--- Always Ari - PopWrap's got the trailer for a new movie with Ari "Balls Deep" Graynor called Lucky, in which she stars opposite Colin "Why does he keep getting jobs oh right, his father" Hanks. Let's make it the year of Ari! This movie's out next month.

--- The Thin Blue Broad - A friend of mine saw a screening of Errol Morris' new film Tabloid last year and apparently the woman who's the film's subject was there - she's that crazy woman who abducted a Mormon guy and cloned her dog, all sorts of bonkers shit - and she had a freak out, and it was awesome. The trailer for it's out now; the film's out in July.

--- Fairey Glare - Y'all have surely already seen this but there's artist Shepard Fairey's poster for John Carpenter's film They Live that he created for a special screening of the film down in Austin, where they vanquish movie-texters with glee. (via)

--- Space Stage - A couple of pictures of the sets and sound-stages for Ridley Scott's Prometheus have made their way online which you can look at over at io9. Green screen and a cave. Thrilling. Just get me pictures of Michael Fassbender's underwear drawer already!

--- And finally, here's video of Dario Argento talking about his intentions for his now-filming Dracula 3D with Thomas Kretschmann and his daughter Asia. After just suffering through the ineptitude of his most recent film Giallo I'm even more skeptical than ever. (via)

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Cary Fukunaga Four Times

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Has Michelle Williams snagged another hot hipster? She's been seen in public with the sexy Jane Eyre director, beaming like he just proved to her the first three letters of his name is no joke. Damn her! Spike Jonze, Heath Ledger, and now the man who gave the phrase "horse hung Michael Fassbender" new meaning. What a life.

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I Am Link

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--- Slow Show - I'm having one of those days where everything I read is making me angry. Take this tag-team take-down by the NY Times critics of a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine about how that writer can't stomach "slow" movies anymore. I agree with most everything Dargis and Scott have to say in rebuttal to this ridiculousness - although I got a little eye-rolly at Scott's insistence on bringing The Tree of Life into it, til he allowed for some wiggle-room for those of us that found that film ponderous for other reasons - but mostly it just made me nuts that the original article even got published in the first place. I get enough of a defense of intellectual laziness from our politicians, thanks very much. I thought I'd be safe amongst art critics. Shame is a lost art in this world.

--- Speaking of everything I just wrote, Slash rounded up a batch of "first impressions" of Green Lantern from Twitter, and I'm ashamed that I wasted my time reading them. Blake Lively is so hot with her brown hair 3D rules verbal barf kill me now!!!

--- Mutant X'd - Over at io9 they're offering a few reasons why X-Men Muppet Babies underperformed a little bit box-office-wise, including it's Michael Fassbender's fault for not being Hugh Jackman, and then  the first comment uses the word "funnest." I am just gonna throw myself off a cliff and be done with it. I have no patience for anything today.

--- Lil' Wizards - Okay, here's a palate cleanser via PopWrap - the first screen-test of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint before the very first Harry Potter movie. Awwwww.

--- Fun Fact of the Day - I didn't know that the background sound in Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" song was her tapping her fake nails on a counter-top! Learn all that and more over at Low Resolution where Joe and Mark are taking on the Best Song category at the 1980 Oscars.

--- And ending on a happy note, here's some behind-the-scenes footage from Ghostbusters 2. Slimer puppetry ho! (via)

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Idris Elba Nine Times

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Idris Alba, who just cut a memorable mini-swath through Thor in a gold gladiator costume and some intense colored contacts, seems to be a little bit on fire right now - not only is he heavily rumored to be picking up the lead in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (if the rumors that Will Smith's not taking the role turn out to be true, that is), but now he's apparently up for a part opposite my beloved Charlie Hunnam in Guillermo Del Toro's not-Godzilla movie about giant Godzilla-like monsters, Pacific Rim. Not to mention that he's currently shooting Prometheus, the not-an-Alien prequel, with Michael Fassbender. His specialty is apparently not-a-fill-in-the-blanks. Who knew being the slab-of-man-meat in a Beyonce and Ali Larter sandwich could lead to such lofty heights?

First Star I See Tonight

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It's so impossible to review these big blockbuster movies when you're coming at them the week after they've arrived. So many people have already had their say, and recently at that; it seems as if I could just point in any general direction and say, "What s/he said." The ether knows the answers! I'm at its mercy. It seems especially so when it's regarding something that I've propped myself up well in favor of for a long enough time as to call my neutrality into question. When it comes to a movie full of Fassy, I could hardly claim to be Switzerland. I'm more North Korea and he's my Kim Jong-Il. That's a sentence.

Point being, I could tell you that Michael Fassbender owns every inch of the frame and every second of the screen-time that he's allowed in X-Men Muppet Babies, and even a good percentage of the time he's off-screen too; that he saunters through this thing as if the camera, that's been chasing him for years now, has finally caught up and tapped into his sex-on-stick-legs rhythm... but who's gonna believe well-past-brainwashed lil' ol' me? Thankfully I knew he was owning it even without the aid of my influence since the audience around me, surprisingly unsedated for a 10am Saturday showing - I guess they were feeling the Fass stirring inside them too - whooped with glee at his every turn. 

I got through all that so that when I say that that the film needed more of him, and to be more focused upon him, it's not just my obsession speaking. I really do think the film would've been helped with a tighter focus, and Magneto's story had the right stuff; not only was Fassbender proving for the umpteenth time that he's the real deal, but the movie seemed to right itself when he and McAvoy were front and central. We know FOX, ever the bastion for eliminating common sense whenever possible in the search for more dollars, rushed director Matthew Vaughn through the hoops for this movie to get it out when they wanted it out; I think if they'd been allowed to tighten their scope just a hint and chisel this thing down to its main story it could've been a much more solid form.

As is though, having too much going for you instead of too little isn't the worst way to spend two hours. I realize you could apply that sentence in a way to something by Michael Bay - if there's something Bay's always got, it's excess - but here I do think Vaughn is at least keeping his pinky finger firmly planted on the right side of coherence. He knows how to tell a story with images that isn't just some hell-storm of CG; plus he's interested enough in the humanity of the characters that he's throwing on-screen to allow his actors to do their thing and get their moderate arcs across, sometimes with surprising-for-this-sort-of-thing precision.  

So scenes like the one where the Teen Mutants show off their skills to each other might sit a little awkwardly in the narrative, tonally at least, but they're still bright little microcosms of fun. These moments pop up and burn brightly all over the film - they just needed a little more glue to hold them together, is all. A steady, healthy flame instead of staggered fireworks. And I guess in the month of June no studio wants that.