Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

I’ve had a boner for Seven Psychopaths ever since it was announced, and now we’ve got the first pictures (courtesy of EntertainmentWeekly, obvi). Writer/director Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to In Bruges, it stars Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, and Woody Harrelson, stepping in for Mickey Rourke, who apparently wanted too much money and now says of McDonagh “he can go play with himself.”  But Harrelson or Rourke, I would definitely go pick up high school chicks with these guys. Oh, and the movie sounds pretty good too.

A savage gangster (Woody Harrelson) goes on a rampage after his beloved shih tzu Bonny goes missing, snatched by an out-of-work actor (Sam Rockwell) who pays the bills by helping a professional dognapper (Christopher Walken) pick up pooches and return them for the reward money.
Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter who struggles to find the handle on his script, called Seven Psychopaths. He gets drawn into the dognapping escapades of his friends (played by Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken).
“The comedy elements in this one are probably stronger or more to the forefront than In Bruges,” says McDonagh, who got an Academy Award nomination for that script. (He won an Oscar for the 2005 short Six Shooter.)
Harrelson’s character, Charlie, “adores his shih tzu,” McDonagh says. “Really, we all adore Bonny!” (That’s the real name of the dog, which was adopted from a shelter in real life, and now lives with its trainer.) “He loves that dog more than anything in the world and would do anything to protect it.”

Wait, it gets better!

Tom Waits turns up as Zachariah, a rabbit-petting weirdo who offers up strange stories from his past for the Seven Psychopaths screenplay. [EW, Deadline]

A lovable rogue’s gallery fighting over cute, fuzzy animals, as written with brutal violence by a vulgar Irishman? My God, this is so in my wheelhouse it’s stupid.

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Wagner Moura with the FilmDrunk Seal of Approval

UPDATE, 11-11-11. Elite Squad 2, now called Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, opens today in New York (gradually spreading to more cities through December). As a reminder, I’m reposting my original review from Sundance. Yes, it’s true, I was probably desperate for a good film at that point in the festival, but I think the hyperbole was warranted. I dare you to see it and dispute me.

Oh my God.  You guys, excuse me if I gush.  It’s just that, when you come to the Sundance Film Festival, you go in expecting a certain type of film.  You expect to see, as David Sedaris once wrote of student films, “grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtlenecked men slogged the stony beaches, cursing the gulls for their ability to fly.”

What you do not expect to see is a two-hour, Brazilian The Wire on steroids.  Again, excuse me if I gush.  I should really wait until I have some emotional distance from this experience before I try to write about it, to reflect a little first, but I don’t care. I’ve been standing in lines behind farting, greasy-haired weirdos and riding muddy, stinking buses all day long, and it was all worth it, because an hour ago I watched Brazilian director José Padilha choke out Michael Mann with his own nine-foot dick  (Padilha’s dick, that is). Without resorting to cheap hyperbole, I can report that it kicked my balls up my ass and shat them back onto my chest while two-hand tapping an Eddie Van Halen solo.  If that doesn’t make sense to you, you haven’t seen this movie. 

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Here’s the new video for They Might Be Giants’ new song, “Can’t Keep Johnny Down,” which features 80-year-old Rip Torn bare-knuckle boxing some young shirtless punk. Hold on, let me get this straight, They Might Be Giants… Rip Torn… shirtless guys boxing… My God, this is relevant to ALL of my interests.
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Any film where Colin Farrell karate chops a midget I’ll watch out of principle, but In Bruges was pretty good to boot. It was written and directed by Martin McDonagh, and now CBS Films is in talks to distribute his latest, Seven Psychopaths. Needless to say, it sounds awesome.

The film reunites McDonagh with his In Bruges star Colin Farrell, who plays a screenwriter who struggles to find the handle on his script, called Seven Psychopaths. He gets drawn into the dognapping escapades of his friends (played by Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken). Once the beloved Shih Tzu owned by a psychopathic gangster goes missing, the screenwriter finds himself fueled with all the drama he needs for his screenplay, if he can stay alive long enough to write it all down. The film’s produced by Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin, with Tessa Ross set as executive producer. CBS Films executive vice president Scott Shooman will oversee it when it shoots in Los Angeles this fall. [Deadline]

Yep, Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, and last we heard, Mickey Rourke was also in it (MICKEY ROURKE F*CKING LOVES TINY DOGS!). Not only would I watch the ever-living hell out of that movie, I’d also like to commission a velvet painting in the style of “Dogs Playing Poker,” with those guys as the dogs, and a midget waiter walking around with a platter of cocaine and a revolver in his belt in case things go south. I would hang that on my wall, possibly my tombstone.

From what we hear, the movie adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary has been finished for more than a year, just sitting around waiting for a release. It’s finally set to open October 28th, and now it has a trailer. And not a moment too soon. Johnny Depp was dangerously close to becoming permanently known as “that guy from the Bruckheimer movies with all the accessories.” Anyway, it’s nice to see him back drifting towards anarchy, poverty, and craziness, trying to live a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat and all that.

Directed by Bruce Robinson, the cast is pretty insane, starring Depp as the newbie ex-pat Puerto Rican journalist Kemp, Richard Jenkins as Lotterman, Aaron Eckhardt as Sanderson, Amber Heard as Sanderson’s fianceé, and Giovanni Ribisi as Moberg (a character who gets blackout drunk and the next morning locates his car by smell — a man after my own heart), who I hear steals the show. So, from what we know, a real movie with a real cast and a real story. It’s nice to see that someone finally got around to actually releasing it between movies about explosions, aliens, and the military. The book it’s based on is quite popular, and I’m told there’s even a climactic rape scene that they reenact every year at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. What? I kid, I kid.

BOOM. MOTHERF**KIN BEDAZZLED TORTOISE, SON!