I Am Link

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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:

"It features graphic sex scenes of "Franco-as-Hart ebulliently performing fellatio on what appears to be an impressive phallus" and "ecstatic as he is topped during anal sex,"

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:

"It's strange. I've read the script. It's been around the whole time, but I don't know how real it is," she said. "Bryan isn't directing it, I don't know what's happened with it. I didn't love the idea personally, but Bryan's such a good writer. He had another project that I was obsessed with and fell I love with and kept trying to convince them to not do 'The Strangers 2' but 'Let's go straight into this thing and it can be 'From the Makers of...' 'cause it was such a great, also simple story but absolutely terrifying. Someone else has that now and they've actually changed it quite a bit. Who knows? Hollywood is so confusing."

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 Am Link

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--- Dino Might - Seems like it's every six months or so that we get some fresh Jurassic Park rumor-mongering - June of 2011 has Spielberg meeting with a writer to discuss possibilities or whatever. Seems to me this shouldn't be so damned hard - put some dinosaurs on an island, have humans visit said island, and go. Instant movie. As long as there's no strapping laser guns to dinosaur heads we're fine.

--- Cue The Freaks - The Last Circus, the new horror film from Alex de la Iglesia - see a "Ways Not To Die" ode to his 1995 bizzaro movie The Day of the Beast here - has got a trailer and you can watch it at Twitch Hopefully we'll get to see it here in the US somehow.
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--- Easy Being Green - Ryan Reynolds looks pretty darn adorable on the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly, eh? Too bad his movie's being savaged by the critics. Well not really "too bad," I mean I think the pretty boy can take it since he cashed his check awhile ago, no doubt. Probably in between his 485th and 486th sit-up of the day.

--- Labor Pains - Kate Winslet's signed on for Jason Reitman's next movie, opposite Josh Brolin - it's called Labor Day and the basic plot description is so generic, so been-there, it makes me anxious:

"Winslet will play a single mother of an awkward and isolated young son who takes in a stranger. He turns out to be an escaped convict and ends up teaches the boy life lessons, while she falls in love with him over the course of Labor Day Weekend."

It has to be more interesting that that sounds, right? Anyone read the book? Hey if it's got Kate I'll watch it, I just want good things for her, is all.
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--- War's The Pitts - STYD has got some shots from the set of World War Z, the adaptation of Max Brooks' zombie-apocalypse book that's finally getting made after a few years of yap. There's nothing much to see yet, but that nice look at the length of Brad Pitt there demands I at least link.

--- Vaguely Barsoomian - The LAT got to talk to John Carter (I'm really missing the "Of Mars" in this movie's title) director Andrew Stanton about how things are going with that film, which we saw the first (nippleless) poster from yesterday. They also got a couple pieces of concept art, which aren't altogether that thrilling but I'm sharing anyway. The top one's reminding me of the rainbow bridge from Thor, kinda?

Middling Monster Does Not A Super Movie Make

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Taking my time to post some thoughts has bitten me in the ass once again - amongst other places, if you go read what Nathaniel wrote on Super 8 at The Film Experience you're gonna have approximately 98.75% of my opinion summed up for you there. Or familiarize yourself with this paragraph from Roger Ebert's review:

"During the first hour of Super 8 I was elated by how good it was. It was like seeing a lost early Spielberg classic. Then something started to slip. The key relationship of Alice and her troubled father Louis (Ron Eldard) went through an arbitrary U-turn. Joe's own father seemed to sway with the requirements of the plot. The presentation of the threat was done with obscure and unconvincing special effects. We want the human stories and the danger to mesh perfectly, and they seem to slip past one another."

It should be noted that somehow even after expressing all that Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars, which seems a bit off. I had way too many problems with the final 45 minutes of the film to feel that good about the experience once the lights came up. The beats of the adventure swallowed whole the entirely lovely character beats that'd been set up - if somebody can explain to me precisely what big lesson Kyle Chandler's character learned and at what point that drove him to reevaluate his relationship towards his son I'd be much obliged. He hardly has reason to know the sort of danger his son's been in at any point. Their conciliatory hug at the end was as forced as the reappearance of the son at the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, if you ask me. And what of the fractured friendship between Joe and his directing friend Charles, that was so much of the film's story before Hell breaks loose? I can't even remember if they see each other again once they split up. The adventure should spin out from the complications in these relationships, and should somehow feel intertwined. Instead the monster just eats it all up. 

And as for that monster, I did not like that monster. It's an inexplicable tangle of limbs punching out of the blackness for far too long - at some point you need to lay your cards on the table, JJ, or we come to believe your holding a blank deck. Even if Spielberg kept the shark hidden from us for most of Jaws, we still knew it was a shark. We knew it'd have a couple of fins and a big ass mouth. Even once Super 8 was finished I still didn't have a good understanding of what this alien-insect-monster was supposed to be. There were too many legs and perhaps it was made out of bark? And it had a face of some sort? I don't know, and it never did anything nifty enough to make me care to figure it out. A lousy, unmemorable cap to too long a campaign of mystery. Even though I find the 2006 Korean monster movie The Host to be entirely overrated, one thing it got right was how it flung it's monster right into the daylight right at the start. JJ had how much more money to spend? And there was nothing even one tenth as thrilling as that creature's first attack.

But the kids were all terrific - Joel Courtney is a great find, and I'm nursing my Somewhere crush on Elle Fanning even worse after this. I just wish the film had seen fit to care about them in the end as much as it had made me care about them at the beginning.

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Close Encounters of the Abrams Kind

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JJ Abrams ode-to-Spielbergia Super 8 is here, hoorah! I've avoided reviews but the general mood seems positive...? Well we'll know soon, I suppose. For now, read up what little more I have to say on that and the other couple of movies coming out this weekend over at Celebrity Beehive. I get to namedrop "pinochle" and "lanai" in the same sentence, yo. I'm ecstatically geriatric.

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I Am Link

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--- Terminate This - Caught the last ten minutes of the first Terminator on TV last night - I say this with total affection in my heart, but what a cheese-fest! I'd forgotten. When Linda Hamilton - man I miss Linda Hamilton; I guess it's hard to roll out of bed when your bed is made out of billion dollar bills from Jim Cameron's stash - says, "You're terminated!" to the robot as she crushes him I watched my eyes roll right across the room. Anyway more blather about the upcoming reboot over here; apparently it'll be some sort of time-fracture plot a la JJ Abrams Star Trek, which does make sense. They want pretty pretty block of wood Paul Walker for the Michael Biehn role.

--- Song Bird - James Franco is releasing an album. I'd thought he learned his lesson from the Oscars. I guess not.

--- This Bites - Sharks are the new Truman Capotes! Stale Popcorn offers up the trailers for the similarly plotted (or should I say "plotted") Bait 3D and Shark Night 3D, the latter which is so abysmal a trailer I've refrained from commenting upon it yet. It's from the director of Final Destination 2 and has murderous sharks in three-dee - I should be commenting upon it!

--- Frosty Reception - Joe offers up ten thoughts on X-Men: Muppet Babies, all of which sound sound to my ears if I might be ever so slightly less enthusiastic. But I wholeheartedly agree with his endorsement of January Jones take on Emma Frost, as well as the striking resemblance between Banshee and Ron Weasley, which kept freaking me out.

--- Jonze-ing - Spike Jonze's new animated short film will be playing before every movie for the next two weeks at the IFC Center here in NY. Shame that this is what it takes to maybe force me to see the new Godard movie, but there it is.

--- Action Figures - The only reason I'm bothering posting the news that Dwayne Johnson's joining the cast of the next GI Joe movie is so's we can all take a moment, close our eyes, and picture him and Channing Tatum working up a sweat on the film set's personal gym and then hitting the showers, et cetera... et cetera... what was I talking about again?

--- Two By Two - Darren Aronofsky really wants to make his Noah and the Ark movie next, apparently. I will take whatever he wants to give me, so okay. Robes and sandals and two of every animal it is.

--- Re Up - Chris O'Dowd, who won our hearts and therefore our loins with his adorable accented police officer in Bridesmaids, has joined the cast of Judd Apatow's Knocked Up spin-off movie. But then, so has Charlene Yi.

--- Slave Wrangler - It's looking more and more like Leonardo Dicaprio will take the role of the lead villain in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, while it's looking less and less like WIll SMith will take the lead role of Django.

--- Space Jockeys - For a good long while Jake Gyllenhaal was attached to Doug Liman's Moon movie - he disassociated himself from the project awhile ago since the film was taking forever to get off the ground, and went and made his sci-fi movie Source Code instead. But Liman's movie has now gotten a green-light says DH, it's now called Luna, and the names rumored for Jake's one-time role are Bradley Cooper, Chris Evans, Andrew Garfield, Emile Hirsch and Chris Pine. Cast them all and then just eliminate all wardrobe budget!

--- Not So Shy Shia - Shia Labeouf is taking the Transformers 3 press rounds as an opportunity to tell us that a fifth Indiana Jones movie is very close to happening. He's also taking the moment to get photographed with his shirt off as you see there, which I appreciate slightly more. I mean I'm not a Case of Crystal Pepsi hater like most folks; I just have my own specially arranged priorities.

--- Pride Kills - As blessedly happens every June, Billy Loves Stu's going all out for Gay Pride Month and posting delights every day, like several recent interviews with gay horror folk - go forth and read, yo. One covered in gore is my kinda Pride.

--- The Bed That Eats - Hooray new reviews at Final Girl! Stacie's reviewed Death Bed and Castle Freak! There's a pair of titles.

--- Bust A Ghost - I am going to take this rare opportunity to encourage a remake of a film I love... probably just because it's early and I'm not quite myself yet. No, this is positive. Vulture's reporting that MGM wants to have David Lindsay-Abaire, the playwright behind Rabbit Hole, write a script for their long-rumored Poltergeist remake. Better still, they're not imposing any story limitations on him, meaning he could come up with a story all his own and they'd just lazily slap the name Poltergeist on it, I guess. Whatever, he hasn't even taken the job yet, so who knows. But in the same article they mention they're also working on a Carrie remake and that's so offensive I can't even.

--- Shield V Skull - io9's got a new TV commercial for Captain America, which apparently hasn't come out yet? I really feel like I already saw it. Huh.

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I Am Link

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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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I Am Link

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--- Dead Arms - BD rounded up a couple grainy images of the sales posters for the Don't Be Afraid of the Dark remake, produced by Guillermo Del Toro, starring Guy Pearce and (sigh) Katie Holmes. I sorta like that one to the left.  It's got a nice early 80s vibe. Plus it's actually sort of reminding me of another poster I saw this morning over at Twitch, this fun one for an upcoming French monster movie called Dead Shadows (and if you squint at that one the lead dude looks a lot like Michael Fassbender, so bonus!). I agree with Twitch assertion that what the world needs now is a few good monsters, I've about had it with zombies and vampires for the moment. Gimme tentacles!

--- Tower Going Dark - The adaptation of Stephen King's Dark Tower books by Ron Howard might have hit a road-block, namely it hasn't even been green-lit yet because of its budget. If it were nearly anyone other than Ron Howard directing I might care, I might want to see this movie, but Ron Howard is terrible and makes terrible movies and therefore I do not. Sorry Javi.

--- Viva Rose - I can't recollect if I knew about this movie or not, but the always welcome Rose McGowan - so memorably follicled in yesterday's Conan trailer - is starring in a horror film from Jeepers Creepers' Victor Salva called Rosewood Lane and STYD has a few pictures from it. Naturally, this being a Salva film, there's a cute underage-looking boy lurking about. Ugh. He needs to give it a rest.

--- Lost Its Sheen - Michael Sheen is not going to be in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows movie. Tim Burton's loss, obviously, since Sheen makes everything he touches about a thousand times grander. See Tron: Legacy for the ultimate proof.

--- Abe's Boy - Spielberg's gearing up to shoot Lincoln this Fall and he's cast a couple more roles, including Joe Gordon-Levitt as Abe's son Robert Todd Lincoln. Yay Joe! I guess this will have to do since he's admitted he's not playing Cobra Commander in the next GI Joe movie. I guess.

--- Good Girls - I had a long chat about Hanna (my review) the other day that made me desperate to watch it again. Not only to see Eric Bana in dripping wet long underwear either! I mean, not only. God why isn't that online yet! Man! Anyway I'm reminded of this conversation due to The Film Experience's post addressing two of the foremost young actresses with difficult names, Saoirse Ronan and Mia Wasikowska. They both rock. The end.

--- See Chris Be - This post at Paracinema is a couple weeks old but there's never a bad time to glance through several pictures, two shirtless, of Chris Evans, is there? I thought not. You're already gone, I know it.

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Momma Everdeen Be...

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... the actress Paula Malcomson, who's probably best known for playing the mother on the Battlestar Galactica spin-off Caprica. Or maybe for playing the nasty adopted mother who drives off and abandons Haley Joel Osment in the woods in A.I.? Or perhaps it's Trixie on Deadwood? Anyway, she's playing Katniss and Prim's mother in The Hunger Games.

I was just having a conversation with the boyfriend about her a few weeks ago, because she guest-starred on Fringe and was terrific - she managed to make a very specific character that you cared about with very little time and material to work with. Anyway, I completely approve of this right here. Yes.

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Happy 39, Eli Roth

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Thing I learned this morning: Eli Roth has a cameo (that's what you call it when an extra becomes famous later on) in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. You can see him there above, reading the newspaper on the subway with Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm sitting just beyond him. Huh.

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I Am Link

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--- Craving Cabin - A Facebook and Twitter campaign have apparently been activated in hopes of getting the Joss Whedon-scripted and Drew Goddard-directed Cabin in the Woods an actual release date. BD's got the info. I really can't fathom what the hold up is anymore. Nobody wants to bank on Chris Hemsworth's approaching Thor ubiquity?

--- Bow To Belle - The Film Experience's latest "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" episode took on Disney's Beauty and the Beast last night, find all the links right here. I brought this DVD with me to work today so perhaps I'll figure out something to say. Late, naturally. I don't adhere to your worldly schedules!

--- Back Stabbing - Have you been following PopWrap's Scream Week postings? Mostly this week I throw my hands over my eyes whenever I see a mention of Scream, lest I stumble upon a spoiler, but these are all retrospectivey enough not to worry.

--- Speaking of, Final Girl reviewed Scream 4. I'm glad Stacie's tempering my mania a little bit. I'm not so glad that I somehow am the only person online not to get into a preview screening. Damn you, Weinsteins! Damn you to hell!

--- Mister Wonderful - Sean T. Collins rounded up links to several reviews of HBO's A Game of Thrones. Oh, and he also interviewed Daniel Clowes. You're rad, Sean T. Collins.

--- Time For Elevensies - Peter Jackson's first video diary from the set of The Hobbit has made its way onto his Facebook page. Ten minutes of unfettered geekery can all be your by clicking that link!

--- First Lady of Boniva - Old lady Sally Field will be playing the Mary Todd to Daniel Day Lewis' Honest Abe when Spielberg makes his Lincoln movie? Okay...

--- Whose Master - Since Jeremy Renner's too busy wearing purple tights and replacing Tom Cruise now to play in Paul Thomas Anderson's Scientology-skewering sandbox, it looks like slope-shouldered and frog-bearded Joaquin Phoenix might come out of his self-imposed exile for it instead. Boo, he grates on my nerves.

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This Is Going To Be A Very Long Week

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Now that I've seen Glenn's crazed-with-admiration raves for Scream 4 spill across Twitter, the time between right now and me seeing the movie on Friday just got very very very very long indeed, like an extremely cruel dolly zoom. You know, like this...

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Or this...

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Or this...

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Just like that! Ugh!

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