“I HAAATE MERLOT!!!”

According to a number of very important, very legitimate news sources that report only the Earth-shakingest of scoopy scoops, Paul Giamatti is in talks for the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man, in which he’ll be playing a villain called “The Rhino.” The Rhino wears a suit that gives him super strength and super speed, and has a big horn on the top of his head. And now, I’m guessing, he’ll also have some kind of crippling neurosis.

Paul Giamatti is in talks to join The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as the villain known as The Rhino, and Felicity Jones is negotiating for an unspecified role.
The duo would bolster an already impressive cast. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are back as Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, Jamie Foxx is portraying bad guy Electro, Shailene Woodley is Mary Jane Watson, and Dane DeHaan is Harry Osborne.
The Rhino first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #41 in 1966 as a thug from a Soviet Bloc country who wore a superhuman suit that made him invulnerable while giving him superstrength and superspeed. It also had a deadly horn on top.
In more recent comics, he became a sympathetic figure who found himself allying with Spider-Man. [HollywoodReporter]

Sony plans to rush into… er, begin production next month. I hope they write a really good motivation for the villain in this one, like they did for in the last Spider-Man. “Hey, what if he tried to turn everyone else into rhinos and then climbed a bridge for some reason? That’d be cool, right?”

I’m okay with the absurd motivations, but why not go all out with it? They keep trying to make the bad guy this disgruntled scientist who starts out a genius and then goes wrong, and then he has this incredibly convoluted master plan for world domination, and his plan doesn’t really make sense, but then the movie and everyone in it has to pretend like it does. Why not just go full crazy? Why does he have to be a sane madman? Like, maybe the bad guy kills a whole bunch of people at a football stadium like Bane, but instead of making a big speech he just goes out there and starts shoving bananas up his ass because he likes the attention. They need more people like me in these focus groups.

Like Crazy: The painfully-honest relationship movie 500 Days of Summer wanted to be

Like Crazy pulls a dirty trick. It makes you fall in love along with two cute little college students, then tears them apart, and spends the rest of movie dangling their perfect, mutually-adoring relationship just out of reach. DAMN YOU, LIKE CRAZY! CAN’T YOU SEE THESE ATTRACTIVE CAUCASIANS WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER?! THEIR HAPPINESS IS ALL I’VE EVER WANTED!

It’s totally manipulative and obnoxiously effective, but somewhere in the midst of watching two lovelorn honkeys fight desperately against time and geography to recapture the magic of the honeymoon period of their relationship (are we soul mates? were we just young and stupid? is it true love or hormones? are we in love with each other or just youth?), is something absolutely true and timeless and affecting about the nature of relationships. It hurt to watch at times. It hurt to write that. Frankly, it turned me into a big ol’ girl, and that’s no small feat when you’re a burly lumberjack.

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Drake Doremus’ film Like Crazy won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in January and opens in limited release this October. It stars Anton Yelchin (CURLY-HAIRED MEN ARE TAKING OVER!) and Felicity Jones as two college kids who fall in love and then struggle to maintain a relationship. They say it’s a love story, but to me it looks more like a mystery. The main mystery being “WHAT THE F*CK ARE THEY SAYING?” Seriously, I watched that twice and understood maybe 65% of the dialog.

The Grand Jury prize went to Like Crazy, starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as a young couple who fall in love in college and struggle afterward to maintain a long-distance relationship. Directed and co-written by Drake Doremus (Douchebag), the film was largely improvised.
“We had a 50-page outline and rehearsed for two weeks and let things happen organically,” Doremus said. “The key was to do 30-minute takes for the five weeks we shot.”
The story is not clear-cut — intentionally.
“I wanted it to feel gray,” Doremus told a Sundance audience. “I wanted you guys to decide for yourselves.” [USAToday]

Oh boy, I can’t wait to watch a meandering narrative where I get to be the guinea pig who decides whether it’s actually about anything. Like Crazy? More like Like Lazy.

HD available at Apple.