(The first rule of gay fight club? You don’t even wanna know, dude.)
Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, comes out Christmas Day. I’m cautiously optimistic — it could be good, or it could be sort of meh, like Guy Ritchie’s body of work since Snatch. But that’s the thing about Hollywood: they don’t even wait for the goose to lay the golden egg before they start pumping it full of hormones and jamming a shoehorn up its ass* nowadays.
Three months ahead of the release of its Robert Downey Jr. action pic, Warners is developing a new installment. The studio is poised to bring on Kieran and Michele Mulroney, the scribes who are penning its “Justice League: Mortal” [barf] tentpole, to pen a draft of the new tale. Brad Pitt has had discussions with producers to star as Holmes’ nemesis Moriarty in the new pic, say people familiar with the project, though there is no deal in place for him to take the part.
Guy Ritchie helms the pic, and Downey stars as the title character; Jude Law plays protege Watson, and Rachel McAdams stars as love interest Irene Adler. Much of the talent is expected to return in the new pic, as could Ritchie as director. [THR]
“Is expected…” “Could return” — these are the key words. Basically, the studio thinks Sherlock Holmes is going to do well, so they want to make sequel. But getting the cast and director locked down is a complicated process with lots of negotiation about salary and scheduling and stuff. So they’re starting the process early, by paying two guys who had nothing to do with the original script a lot of money to write a script for the sequel, which they’re probably going to throw out and re-write as soon as Ritchie and the rest are locked down and they bring in writers they like. But as they say in Hollywood, you gotta piss money down the toilet for no reason to make money.
*a butthorn?
(Squinting at the guy on the left, Pitt thought, “Pfff, you think you can sneak an Asian stand-in past me? I bang my girlfriend in front of a Cambodian kid.”)
Waiter? I’ll have a kickass movie with my 8-ball, please.
Inglourious Basterds is the tongue-in-cheek WWII epic Tarantino would’ve written in ’95 or ’96 if he’d been doing more coke back then. Which is to say it’s classic Quentin –- ballsy, bloody, eccentric, with multiple interconnected stories coming together just so –- but not without the excessive talk that almost ruined Kill Bill 2 and made Death Proof his least enjoyable movie to date. (I’d rather date Jackie Browne, she puts out). The dialog isn’t excruciatingly mundane this time, but just because the words are smart and thought provoking doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been less of them. Tarantino is a savant in the way that he can nail certain aspects of human nature, even within an intricate, whacked-out plot (without being able to spell! How the hell does he do that?). But at times it feels like he deals with self-editing the way an autistic deals with spontaneity.
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CinemaBlend and TrailerAddict posted eight new clips from Inglourious Basterds. I’ve embedded a few below. The first two clips feature Christoph Waltz’s creepily charismatic performance as a Nazi detective nicknamed “Jew Hunter”. He won Best Actor (or “Bestest Acter” as Tarantino would say) at Cannes for this role. And on the other end of the potential-Oscar-winner spectrum, we have Mike Myers in prosthetic makeup doing a British accent in the third clip. I just can’t get enough of Mike Myers in prosthetic makup doing an accent. He should have played Virginia Woolfe in The Hours, not Nicole Kidman.
~ robopanda
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Tarantino went on Stern earlier today, and, as usual, frankly revealed a veritable line of facts, many kilo bytes of information. And after the bump — er, jump — you can watch a video that’s making the rounds today of Tarantino’s favorite 20 movies of the past 17 years. He picked some movies that really rock.
Anyway, here’s one of the items Quentin told Stern:
Pitt recently told Bill Maher he no longer smokes weed, for the kids’ sake. Was he telling the truth?
“Quentin said that things eventually ended and he went to his hotel. He said that Brad had this big brick of hash and he was going to give him some for the night. He said that Brad whipped out a knife and cut up a big sliver for him and the stuff was pretty good. He said that he asked for a pipe to go with it and Brad handed him a Coke can to use instead. Quentin said that would make for a great scene in a movie and he may have to use that.”
Oooo, well look at Mr. Fancy Shmancy with his brand name soda can bong. Back in my day we had to settle for a Dr. Thunder bong out of the quarter pop machine at Walmart.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the other things Tarantino revealed on today’s episode of TMI, with Quentin:
Apparently there was a running joke on the set of Inglourious Basterds, whereby if a castmember was caught sleeping, they would get their picture taken with a giant purple dildo. And that giant purple dildo was named Gerry. (I would’ve called it “Danny Masterson.”)
Actor Michael Fassbender admits he was one of the only castmates not to make the board - because he found ways of sleeping in secret. He tells WENN, “Big Gerry was a giant purple dildo, very large in girth and length. Basically, anybody that was caught going to sleep would get photographed with Big Jerry the dildo somewhere near their face and put up on the Board of Shame. The idea was three strikes and you’re out. This kind of really worried me because I have a tendency to nap. If I have 10 or 15 minutes you’d find me in a corner underneath something but I never got caught. Brad (Pitt) was up there once on the Board of Shame, Gedeon Burkhard got caught twice, Diane (Kruger) was on the board… There was a lot of people on that board.” [ONTD]
Well isn’t that cute. It’s nice to see that even people living the dream, making the kind of movies most people can only dream of making, with some of the biggest stars in the world can still find the time to have fun. Heartwarming, really. It’s kind of like how sometimes I shower just to put on pajamas, and only because I can’t stand the smell of myself. Blogging is so glamorous. Hey, know who else has a wall of dildos? You guessed it, your mom.
