Here's Alain To Save The Day!

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Mister Trouble never hangs around

 when he hears this Mighty sound:

 "Here I come to save the day!!!" 

 That means Alain Delon is on his way.  

Yes sir, when there is a wrong to right

Alain Delon will join the fight. 

 On the sea or on the land, 

 he gets the situation well in hand.

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James Dean Four Times

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Which is Hotter?

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poll by twiigs.com

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Oh how I do love these two. Movies and actors, that is. See more Benno here and more Mortiz here.

A happy 47th birthday to director Tom Tykwer, himself a good looker. The fact that he cast these hot pieces and tossed them into bed with then girlfriend Franke Potente makes me wonder how personal a story he was telling with his recent bisexual romp Drei...

... if only. It's nice to imagine, anyway. Anyway I was looking back through my Tykwer posts just now and I chuckled at a 2008 post called "The Wachowskis Must Love Tom Tykwer" where I took note of how both Benno and Mortiz were cast in small parts in the Wachowski's Speed Racer - I chuckled because the Wachowskis and Tykwer are totally making a movie together right now (Cloud Atlas, ya know) so I was totally on to something way back when. Go me.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Pic of the Day

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Lived a dream of my Nineties self last night by finally getting to see Garbage live, and was not disappointed - they put on a rocking good time. Shirley Manson was all the strutting snarling sexy Scotswoman I'd hoped for, and more. I downloaded a few videos to YouTube from the show, here's one of my favorite songs from my favorite record of theirs Version 2.0, "Push It":



You can see videos of them performing their songs "Queer" and "The Trick is to Keep Breathing" and "Milk" and "Stupid Girl" plus a couple of their new songs over here. (I also posted some more pics on Facebook.)
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Egads, Gatsby

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books, if not my single favorite book, and so I've been perplexed about the Baz Luhrmann adaptation. I mean... 3D! Leonardo! That's two strikes already. However I am pleased to announce that I totally love the just released trailer.



It might be the deep well of affection I have for Carey Mulligan but she sailed me right through this thing. Well her, and Joel Edgerton being sinister hot, and the visuals, yes the visuals. Good lord this thing is giving my eyeballs a handy. Here are ten of my favorite shots:

I mean, can you even imagine what those shots will look like in 3D? Even just that shot of the group sitting at a dining table looks sumptuous. I'm already salivating.

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Good Morning, World

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Five years of Fringe (or it's about to be, at least) and I'm only just now finding out Joshua Jackson flashed his impressive bum one time? Egads, I say. Egads. It's from some 2005 movie called Americano where JJ backpacks through Europe and "learns lessons" about "how to live" or whatever. But hey, if you're gonna have an epiphany, you might as well do it with your ass out, that's what I always say.

The Devil Inside in 90 Words or Less

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Why is it so damned impossible to make a good exorcism movie? Did The Exorcist just gobble up everything there was to be said? I feel like there must be a way past Blatty's eternal beast, but The Devil Inside is not the way or the light. It doesn't even seem to be trying - it's a lazy talky thing that relies on its wooden actors to just suddenly randomly start yelping at any given moment to goose a scare. Blah blah BLAH blah, and repeat.The devil deserves better.

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Don't Go Looking In Stranger's Basements

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Marcus Schleinzer went straight from casting the dour-faced evil children of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon to making a dour-faced evil pederast movie. There's an inappropriate comment to be made here but I'll save it for somebody with a stronger (i.e more inappropriate) constitution. Michael - and are we meant to connect the dots further between this movie's title and Schleinzer's former employer, or should I just quit with the terrible false equivalencies? - tells the story of a very plain fellow named Michael who lives a very plain life with a very plain job in a very plain suburb all while keeping a very plain ten-year old boy locked up in his very plain basement. For raping purposes, plainly.

It pushes a little bit too hard if you ask me at making this fellow Michael into "Someone Who Could Live Right Next Door To You!!!" - it's so concerned with making the everymonster into the everyman that some specificity's sacrificed; that's kind of my way of saying it gets a little boring, ninety minutes of watching them wash dishes in fluorescent lighting and then sneak off-screen for the bad stuff. I suppose that's the point - to horrify with the mundanity of this very real horror, but it's so skittish about its own purpose that it only succeeds in fits. It's just too meticulous in its presentation and artfulness for anything as ugly as real ugliness. It flinches from itself.

Still that's in keeping with its lead, and once the bubble bursts I was surprised to find myself gasping for that air - it had effectively lulled me into its awful little place enough by its final moments that getting out seemed vital enough to run, but nagging enough that you can't help but look back, suspecting a curse nipping at your heels. Ultimately it might land a couple of claw-marks, but it's not turning anybody to salt. (You can watch Michael on Netflix Instant.)
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Catherine Martin: Can I help you with that?

No! You do not help! This is by far one of the most important lessons I have learned from the movies - do not trust creeps in casts that want you to climb into their creep van with their creep couch. You have no idea how many times this rule of thumb has saved my life. No idea. It's like, daily.

And a happy 45th birthday to Brooke Smith!

(Do you think she gets a lot of baskets of lotion for her birthday?)

Who else is hoping Bryan Fuller finds a role for her in Hannibal?

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Sean Avery Two Times

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No idea - he's like a metrosexual hockey player that everybody hates 

or something? Whatever, he looks good mostly naked. (via)

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Betting On Blackwater

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Hi Nicky... ahem. Speaking of HBO (we just were, ya know), there are only two episodes left to the second season of A Game of Thrones, and the penultimate episode airing this coming Sunday is a biggie - it's called "Blackwater" which means something to those of us who have read the books and will mean something come Monday to those of you who have not, and it's the episode that we were very excited to learn way back when that Neil Marshall, the director of The Descent amongst other fine genre efforts, was directing from a tele-play written by the esteemed Thrones somebody George R. R. Martin. (I got the use the word "tele-play," I feel so old school!) 

Anyway EW interviewed AGOT's show-runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, which you can read here (beware some light spoilers), and then they posted the teaser trailer for the episode, which you can watch right here:

Maisie Williams is a superstar. 

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Charlie's Keen On Keener

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Deadline reported yesterday that Sir Charlie Kaufman (well he's knighted in my mind anyway) is teaming up with brittle caustic lady muse Catherine Keener to make a half-hour comedy television series for HBO. Yes it's okay I will wait while you go back and read that sentence a second third and possibly a fourth time, all the while your goosebumps growing larger and larger, your brain beginning to sweat. Here's how it's described:

"The untitled comedy is described as an exploration of one day in a woman’s life and how the events leading up to it can affect, or not, the reality in which she lives."

Of course that is how it's described! I'd expect no less. Keener's also supposed to star (alongside Nicolas Cage and Kevin Kline and Steve Carell and Jack Black and Kate Winslet!) in Kaufman's second (after making best-movie-of-the-last-decade Synechdoche New York) directorial effort called Frank or Francis, which is that Hollywood satire about a blogger's bizarre war with a filmmaker.

Anyway if this turns out half as good as Mike White's brittle caustic lady muse project Enlightened did (and I have no reason to think it won't turn out even better than half as good, even) then I'm going to just set up a toilet inside my barcalounger and call it a day, there's no reason to move from the front of the TV set ever again. (And yes you are welcome for that visual.)

And as long as I brought it up (no not the betoileted-barcalounger thing, don't worry) - have we heard any news about the second season of Enlightened? Because I need that like yesterday.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Peter's Keep

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First things first, director Peter Weir - he who made The Truman Show and Fearless and Picnic at Hanging Rock, amongst other great films - has announced a new film. I somehow still haven't watched his last film, The Way Back with Colin Farrell, but here we are. His new movie is an adaptation of a book called The Keep by Jennifer Egan. At first I thought it was a remake of Michael Mann's 1983 movie of the same name with Scott Glenn (which was very pretty but bored me to tears) about spirit-hunting Nazis, but it ain't. 

Second things second, it took me five seconds into reading what the book's about to order a copy. Two cousins, haunted by some sort of horrific childhood prank, decide to reunite years later at a haunted castle!  Gothic mayhem ensues! I don't know why, maybe it's the impending Summer, but this just sounds like the  most important thing I will ever read to me this morning. Has anybody read it?

And eventually this will be a very important movie, as well. Peter Weir making a haunted castle movie! He hasn't made anything of this sort since Hanging Rock, and we all know how that turned out. (Masterful, in case you don't.) Sign me up.

Quote of the Day

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I suppose it's best for my sanity that entire months will go by without remembering that hey, there's supposed to be a new Mad Max movie starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron being made, because if I were as anxious about it as I started out being several years ago when the news broke I'd be asylum bound by now. Empire caught up with Hardy (and his exuberant beard) at Cannes and he had this to say about the long delayed movie:

"We keep moving that around, you know?” he shrugs. “Who knows when it’ll come out? I’ve been on stand-by for two years… but it’s all part of it. It’s kind of the cool thing to do, to be elusive with dates and all that.

... It was going to be a year of filming, then six months, and now we’re supposed to be doing it in six days. It’s a musical – we’re going to go around shopping centres in a little wagon and sing songs. People were expecting big, but we’re going to give them small. It’ll be a live, free-running musical and it’s coming to a place near you soon.” 

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Good Morning, World

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Sir Laurence Olivier was born 105 years ago today, and what better way to appreciate that fact than to post a bunch of pictures of him and John Gavin in towels in Spartacus? In all honesty

I'm kind of hoping somebody can turn me on to Olivier here. I've never gotten him, but then I've never given him much of a chance - I've only seen him in a couple of movies (Rebecca, Spartacus, Marathon Man, and Clash of the Titans of course). If I were going to program myself an Olivier marathon that would keen me onto why he was such a celebrated thespian, synonymous with Acting for such a long time, what should I watch? I imagine his Shakespeare movies (none of which I've seen) since that's the foundation upon which Branagh clambered. I don't think I've ever seen his Wuthering Heights, either.

Yadda yadda tell me what I should see in the comments if you please, and for your efforts after the jump there are several more pictures of John Gavin and Olivier... although mainly Gavin cuz come on...

Who Wore It Best?

The blood of Rocky Balboa?

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poll by twiigs.com

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A happy 60th birthday to Mr. T today!

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Rust And Bone... and Brawn, Oh My

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The other I skimmed over a Cannes review of Rust and Bone, the new film from A Prophet's director Jacques Audiard, and it was exceptionally positive... so my mounting pre-hype feels better justified now. Phew! We can go about ogling its big beefy beautiful star Matthias Schoenaerts some more in peace. Dodged a bullet there. (As if we need such lofty excuses.)

Anyway not sure if the trailer's been around, but I'm just seeing it...

I want this movie. I mean, just look how they bounce!

Hit the jump for more Matthias...