It seems Shia Labeouf might soon be taking a much-deserved break from doing terrible movies.  According to the LA Times, LaBeouf and Tom “Captain Handsome” Hardy are both attached to The Wettest County in the World, a John Hillcoat project based on a super-violent book about 1920s bootleggers.  Hillcoat’s BFF Nick Cave will be adapting. (side note: if Nick Cave and Joss Whedon had a headbutting contest, who’d win?)

Cave will be adapting Matt Bondurant’s “novel based on a true story” about Bondurant’s own family history, which mentions his great uncle surviving having his throat slit by robbers, and a magazine writer who shows up to write about the place and finds at the local hospital a man with “legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip” and another “castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine.”

Uh… yes, please.

TOM HARDY: My goodness!  The robbers castrated you?
SHIA LABEOUF:  Sure did.  Cut off mah pinkie too.

Well this is a fun story.  Joe Penhall adapted Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for the film. He recently published an essay in the Guardian about what it was like attending a private screening in Albuquerque, for which McCarthy himself had driven his silver Cadillac up from Santa Fe (sounds like a Bugs Bunny premise, doesn’t it?).

Finally the three of us sank into the leather armchairs, a discreet distance from one another, and the film began. Immediately, McCarthy began scribbling notes on a reporter’s notepad. [Director John] Hillcoat and I eyed each other nervously. By the end, he had pages of the damned things. He stood up and stretched, yawned and said absolutely nothing as the credits rolled. Finally Hillcoat asked: “Well?” “I have to go to the restroom,” was the impassive response, and he was gone.

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Granted I have a bit of a thing for curmudgeonly old men, but in this recent, rare interview with The Wall Street Journal, No Country for Old Men/The Road/Blood Meridien author Cormac McCarthy provides plenty of evidence of his own awesomeness.  That’s not an opinion, it’s objective fact.  Here are some of the highlights, although I’d recommend reading the whole thing.

WSJ: People have said “Blood Meridian” is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story.

CM: That’s all crap. The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary. [Editor's Note: I always thought Blood Meridien seemed much more movie-adaptable than The Road]

Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.

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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a hell of a book, the kind of thing you wish they’d make more movies out of instead of crap like The Lovely Bones.  It’s about a man and his son (who never get names) wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cannibals and roving bands of outlaws. Though so far, reviews of the John Hillcoat-directed movie adaptation have been sort of mixed.  I wasn’t a huge fan of Hillcoat’s last movie (The Proposition), but Viggo Mortensen is perfect casting.  That dude has looking like the survivor of an apocalyptic cataclysm down pat.

It also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. I don’t know much about this kid other than that he clearly has a couple of a-holes for parents. Really? It wasn’t enough to stick him with a hyphen, you also had to make his first name a misspelled version of crappy name to begin with it? AND you put an ‘I’ at the end? Was he supposed to dot that with a heart? You only had nine months to come up with something he wouldn’t have to drag around like wheelbarrow full of cement his entire life, so well done. Might as well have named him Stealmylunchmoney McPussy. Then again, that was my nickname, and look how well I turned out.
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(Don’t worry, Viggo, someday you’ll be a butterfly.)

At long last, we have the first trailer for The Road, John Hillcoat’s (The Proposition) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s pulitzer prize-winning novel, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.  McCarthy also wrote No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, and critics have often described his work as “gnarly as f*ck.”

The Road is the epic post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. [TrailerAddict]

It opens in October, and my guess is that it’s going to be pretty good.  For one thing, no one can look like the survivor of an apocalyptic event like Viggo.  For another, skulls mounted on sticks in the trailer.  Think about it, have you ever seen a movie that had skulls mounted sticks in the trailer that wasn’t awesome?  Is the answer yes?  Congratulations, you’re a liar.

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