Today brings us the longest trailer yet for Man of Steel, the Zack Snyder-directed, Christopher Nolan-produced Superman movie starring Amy Adams and Henry Cavill, with Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner as Superman’s adopted gay dads. Zack Snyder rightly got a lot of flak after Sucker Punch for his penchant for excessive slow motion and ridiculously over-stylized everything, but now that he’s making a Superman movie and not a weird, thickly-veiled allegory for child rape, all the epic affectations actually seem like they fit. This is… a pretty badass trailer. I kind of want Russell Crowe to narrate my life now. And if Michael Shannon manages to be half as scary as General Zod as he was as that Jew-drowning psychopath on Boardwalk Empire, this is going to be amazing and small children will pee their pants when they see it.

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If I’ve learned anything in all of these years on this crazy spinning rock, it’s that the Internet is a place of many, many, many, many (a million times more) different tastes, and rather than try to understand them all, I should just accept most of them. That’s why when I fell into a Deviant ART wormhole the other day and ended up browsing through something called “morphs” before taking a strange turn into Fat Hollywood, I just said, “F*ck it” and rolled with it. Pun sort of intended.

I don’t really know how to describe this strange exercise in photoshop other than by pointing at the banner pic of an obese Megan Fox and saying, “That.” Basically, from what I can tell, there are a lot of people out there who appreciate the true beauty of some of Hollywood’s most famous and talented actresses, but they’d prefer them to have a little more meat on their bones.

To each his own is what I say, because life is short and we should enjoy whatever makes us happiest. At least that’s a new philosophy I’m trying to embrace these days. So I gathered some of the morphs and FAToshops (trademark pending) of my favorite gorgeous actresses so that we could all see their beauty from a new, well-rounded perspective.

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Here’s an Oscar-themed edition of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, starring Christoph Waltz, Anne Hathaway, and Amy Adams, in which Galifianakis asks Waltz:

“Have you ever considered changing your name to ‘Christoph Breakdance?’”

“Do you say the N-word more in Django Unchained, or more in real life?”

He also calls Amy Adams “Cinnamon Muff.” I have nothing to add to this.
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People like to badmouth the choice of Zack Snyder to direct Warner’s Superman reboot, Man of Steel, but if you throw out Sucker Punch, which was indeed terrible, he did a decent job with The Watchmen, and if you can handle Dr. Manhattan, it seems to follow that you should be able to handle Superman, who’s just Dr. Manhattan with underpants. Anyway, here’s the latest trailer for Man of Steel, screenplay by David S. Goyer and Christpher Nolan, starring Henry Cavill as Superman, Dianne Lane as Martha Kent (way too attractive to be named “Martha”), and cameos from Kevin Costner as Pa Kent, Russell Crowe as Jor-El, Michael Shannon as General Zod, and Amy Adams as Lois Lane. There don’t seem to be any Justice League hints, thank God, but neither does Zod flog himself or drown any Jews a la Boardwalk Empire. Call it a wash.

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The Master is the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, critically-beloved auteur of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood, a roman á clef about Scientology starring Joaquin Phoenix as a drifter named Freddy Quell that’s sure to be debated for years to come. For instance, is Quell more of a gas-huffing pussy lover or a pussy-loving gas huffer? It’s a rift that will tear apart families, pit brother against brother.

The Master is polarizing, because like Drive, it’s largely an atmospheric movie. There’s no real political or religious message that you’re supposed to take away from it, and it’s not a thrilling tale of plot-driven intrigue – you mean Xenu was really dead the whole time? Whoooaaaaoooaaa. There’s no scene where Phoenix’s character accidentally kills a townie and Philip Seymour Hoffman plugs him in the back of the head on a riverbank while telling him stories about all the tits and pussies on the planet Kolob – red ones and blue ones and green ones! – as an angry mob approaches. A writing teacher once told me that the heart of every story is people and place, and that’s what The Master is. It’s nothing so much as a meditative, rotating series of historical portraits – who are these people and what do they do? – mostly straightforward and matter of fact, without the fart-sniffing pop-psychology you get with most indie films. It’s more concerned with enjoying who Joaquin’s character is than trying to figure out what’s his problem. It’s beautiful to look at, and Joaquin’s snarl-lipped, sex-obsessed simpleton is endlessly entertaining. When I’m enjoying what I’m watching this much,  BUT WHAT’S THE ARTIST TRYING TO SAY!??! never much enters the equation.

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