Tony Danza plays Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s father in Don Jon, and while I suspect he’s there mainly to provide Italian-guy cred to make it seem more okay that the rest of the non-Italian cast are basically doing blackface-level Italian impressions, as you can see in this special Father’s Day clip, he also seems to be displaying some long-forgotten acting chops. I’d be interested to see what the rest of the movie looks like, because in this 54-second clip, he crushes it.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt already debuted his full-length writing and directing debut, Don Jon (formerly Don Jon’s Addiction), at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to solid reviews, but most of us simple folk hadn’t seen much of it until the first trailer was revealed yesterday. Starring JGL and Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon is about a New Jersey bro who seems to be pretty obsessed with porn and working out, so I’m a little confused as to whether this is a comedy or a documentary.

A New Jersey guy dedicated to his family, friends, and church, develops unrealistic expectations from watching porn and works to find happiness and intimacy with his potential true love.

ScarJo plays the true love, and she wears really tight dresses, so my $12 is already set aside for Don Jon, but they’re also joined by Julianne Moore, Tony Danza and, you guessed it… Channing Tatum. Only, things go awry for the two heavy-accented lovers, when ScarJo discovers her man jackin’ it to porn on his laptop.

Honestly, that may be the most ridiculously unrealistic thing that I’ve ever heard of. She’d have to be playing a nun with the body composition of a Barbie Doll for this to work.

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S’up, nerds, hope you like speculation. So Zack Snyder’s Superman movie, Man of Steel opens June 2013, with WB hoping that it will pave the way for their own Avengers-style superhero supergroup movie in 2015, Justice League, earning them boatloads of sweet, greasy, nerd money. A key component of that supergroup is obviously Batman. Trouble is, Chris Nolan is pretty much done directing superhero movies, so they don’t know exactly where that story line is going. But according to our friend Drew at Hitfix, in the confusingly question-mark-headlined “Is Joseph Gordon-Levitt already set to play Batman in ‘Justice League’?”, Joseph Gordon-Levitt will ‘absolutely’ be Justice League‘s Batman.

Certainly, the ending of “The Dark Knight Rises” hints at a possible future for the franchise, and there has been much speculation about whether or not they’ll work to connect the end of that film to the larger world of DC properties that Warner is so desperate to create.  Over the last couple of weeks, that speculation seems to have turned into conversation, and that conversation seems to be solidifying into a plan.

According to sources, Joseph Gordon-Levitt absolutely will be appearing in “Justice League” as the new Batman.

But wait, didn’t they make a big thing about JGL’s name being “Robin” at the end of Dark Knight Rises? (Spoiler alert). Robin is Batman now? How does that work? (And please, don’t explain).

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“What did the ten fingers say to the South?”

Steven Spielberg is in full Amistad mode in Lincoln, and if nothing else, it’s nice to have his take on history once again unhoofed from a magical pony. It’s been a few years since ’97, so you may have forgotten how much the Speelzman enjoys him some semi-arcane historical political maneuvering as it relates to the legality of slavery. But boy does he! It fascinates him! For Spielberg, this is actually a good thing. On the rare occasion that Spielberg actually gets criticized these days, it’s usually on account of being a gooey hokey schmaltzy cheeseball. Nothing wrong with that, not everyone’s going to make films as subtle as Sofia Coppola, and thank God, but the biggest problem with cheesy hokum is that it can feel impersonal, like a director’s just telling the audience what they want to hear. And that becomes too broad, lacks personality, starts to feel like it was aimed at a composite of a person instead of a person, glossing over those little details and idiosyncrasies that give people, and movies, their individual charm. The best (and most surprising) thing about Lincoln is that it lets Spielberg indulge his more esoteric side, and it makes you remember that, oh right! This Steven Spielberg, he’s an actual person, and not just a series of focus-tested camera tricks, a chimera built of horse magic, child-like wonder and John Williams scores.

Rather than a broad biopic, Lincoln focuses on the final days of the Civil War, when Abe was trying to force the 13th amendment through a constipated House. Now, here’s where it gets complicated. Lincoln had already sort of freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. The problem with that – as Daniel Day-Lincoln explains during a meeting of his advisors – is that the emancipation was a war powers act, resting on the legal assumption that the president has the right to seize property from enemy nations. That assumption was in turn problematic because for one, it de facto legitimized the notion that slaves were property, and for another, it supported the Confederacy’s disputed notion that the Confederacy was a sovereign nation. Not to mention that the emancipation didn’t apply to the border states or territory already reclaimed by the Union, and once the South was part of the Union again, as everyone hoped it would be, the emancipation did nothing to outlaw slavery there. The emancipation was mostly a big F-you to the South that only freed about 50,000 of the country’s four million slaves. Furthermore, many border staters’ and northerners’ only interest in outlawing slavery was as a way to crush the South’s will^† and end the war. If Lincoln didn’t get slavery outlawed before the end of the war, he worried that it’d never be resolved. With the 13th Amendment already through the Senate, Lincoln is the story of Abraham Lincoln horse-trading and cajoling the House to pass an amendment it had already rejected less than a year earlier.

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"Sup, ladies. My car just took its top down, hint hint."

In the Future, Miatas are Cool

Okay, first things first, Looper is a really hard film to review. It’s nearly impossible to discuss in any meaningful way without spoiling the whole thing. I generally ignore the chicken little, virulently anti-spoiler, review-commenting H8RZ, and some films can’t really be spoiled – The Master, say, which is ninety percent mood and visuals. But with Looper, you spend most of the film collecting little story threads from different times and places in the hopes that at the end, you’ll be able to make yourself a nice soft logic quilt, and that the figure-eight, infinity loop of the plot universe will close unto itself with all cause and effect still intact, so that the little dudes on rollerblades can skate around it super fast. (That’s us, bro, rollerblading around the figure 8 of LIFE). And in Looper, like a Christopher Nolan movie, the what or why of an action happening onscreen is usually justified retroactively, rather than set up in advance. So to question a plot point’s importance or believability necessitates revealing its outcome and thus removing an element of suspense (which, even for a critic, is sort of a dick move). But beyond all talk of what I did or didn’t like or what subplots did or didn’t come together in the end, the biggest takeaway is this: Rian Johnson is trying to blow your mind, and this is important.

What we already know from the trailer: It’s 2044. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but in 30 years, it will have been. It’s outlawed, but controlled by criminal organizations (WHEN TIME TRAVEL IS OUTLAWED, ONLY THE OUTLAWS ETC ETC). When they want to kill someone, they send the victim back in time to 2044 to be dispatched by specialized assassins called loopers, whose only skill seems to be the ability to aim giant, one-shot shotguns called blunderbusses at people, and then go home to play with their future motorcycles and classic Mazda Miatas. One such looper, obviously, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt in weird makeup, who one day comes face to face with his future self, who is Bruce Willis (explaining the weird makeup). Except for being able to see his face, this is how the looper arrangement is supposed to work. They sign on for 30-year contracts, in the process killing their older selves and “closing the loop.” Thus, when JGL and future JGL encounter each other, the conflict is whether future JGL (Bruce Willis) can convince present JGL to sacrifice his comfortable present for the possibility of a longer future (“no, dude, seriously, it’s mega-cool here, you’re gonna love it!”). Conversely, JGL has to convince his older self to go quietly to his early grave so that he can keep the dub-step Miata gangbang going without complicating it with a bunch of mob dudes trying to kill him. We’ve all had similar hangover dreams starring the ghost of liver-health future, I’m sure.

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