“Bye movie!”

Hey, remember earlier today when Vince was all, “Gavin O’Connor is replacing Lynne Ramsay as director on Jane Got a Gun because she completely no-showed on the first day of filming and everyone was like, WTF lady”? But then the movie people were like, “Chill out everyone, we’re going to be fine because we already lost Michael Fassbender before and we replaced him with Joel Edgerton, but we still have Jude Law and Natalie Portman, so this movie is going to be just fine”.

Well… about that.

While the troubled independent feature Jane Got A Gun got a new director this morning in Gavin O’Connor, fallout continues from Monday’s abrupt exit of helmer Lynne Ramsay. I’m told that Jude Law has formally withdrawn from the film. It is because he signed on to work with Ramsay, best known for the edgy drama We Need To Talk About Kevin. The producers of Jane Got A Gun have tried to hold its cast together when Ramsay stepped out, and this is the second significant star to drop out in the past few weeks. (Via Deadline)

What is still the strangest thing about this maligned film production is that Ramsay hasn’t broken her silence about why she just said, “F*ck it” and decided to bail. Fassbender’s excuse was that the production interferes with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is clearly more important (even though they’ve cast Booboo Stewart, which is just bullsh*t). And Law’s excuse is that he thought he’d be working with another director, which is kind of a cheap shot at O’Connor, but a guy should be able to choose his boss, right?

So what’s Ramsay’s excuse? There are whispers that maybe she was forced out by the producers, but who knows? Well, I don’t have word from the disappearing director herself, but I do, in a super FilmDrunk exclusive, have the next best thing…

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Our standard image for ‘Jane Got Her Gun’

With director Lynne Ramsay yesterday pulling a no show on Jane Got a Gun, her follow up to We Need to Talk About Kevin starring Jude Law, Joel Edgerton, and Natalie Portman, producers today hired Warrior director Gavin O’Connor to replace her. No one knows exactly what happened, but since the producers have been doing all the talking and Lynne Ramsay hasn’t said anything, most of the stories have been painting Ramsay as some irresponsible crazy person who selfishly ruins productions and no one knows why. Take that with a grain of salt, obviously.

Considering how fragile independently financed productions can be, this is fairly remarkable that Scott Steindorff and his fellow producers including Natalie Portman and Aleen Keshishian have managed to keep this picture from falling apart, and prevent the cast and crew from leaving the Sante Fe set and scattering to the winds. [Deadline]

Heroes! The story was first broken by Deadline, who got the tip from Steindorff, by the way. “Scott Steindorff is a hero, says guy who Scott Steindorff emailed!”

As Deadline revealed exclusively yesterday, the production endured what has to go down as the worst first day of shooting in movie history, when Steindorff was forced to gather the crew and castmembers Portman, Joel Edgerton, Jude Law and Rodrigo Santoro to tell them that after nine months of developing the project, the director wasn’t showing up after a series of negotiating twists and turns took place over the weekend. [Deadline]

Aw, don’t fret, you guys, it could be worse. You could be doing literally any other job in the world. Those poor lambs probably just had to stand around eating free food and bullshitting with each other. Can you imagine? Someone should call OSHA.

Her exit was the talk of the town yesterday and no one I spoke to could recall an example of a helmer dropping out in similar circumstances, as this was akin to being stood up at the altar. [Deadline]

“Other folks I talked to told me they’d just discovered analogies! One producer said his heart, which is like a pump, was broken, like a dish, over Ramsay making like a tree and leaving the production.”

Anyway, Lynne Ramsay should probably say something soon, because otherwise the only story out there is from the jilted producers and Deadline’s Chicken Little keyboard monkeys. Incidentally, there’s actually an interesting story behind why we may not have heard from her yet:

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I meant to get this review up Friday to coincide with the release, but I did not. Mea culpa.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay Side Effects is that immediately after it was over I wanted to see it again. I barely feel comfortable reviewing it having only seen it once, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had that feeling. In movies, as in life, it’s rare to actually be treated like an adult these days (…he said as he wrote on his blog wearing nothing but Cheetos crumbs and underpants in the middle of the day). We’re so used to every plot point and expository story nugget being slammed into our numbed brains with a fungo bat, that when a movie actually requires careful attention to detail and deductive reasoning, suddenly we feel ill-equipped. We find ourselves spitting out mouthfuls of slobbery milk duds to ask our seat mates what the hell just happened. (That’s right, “we,” just go with me here). I’m saying, Side Effects is like that, the rare movie that treats us Milk Dud eaters like we’re smarter than we are.

I don’t mean Side Effects is confusing in the way that Chris Nolan movies are confusing, where relentless, deliberate subterfuge is the dominant narrative device. Side Effects can be hard to follow, but it doesn’t feel like Soderbergh trying to confuse you. It feels more like he’s just a step ahead of us and he’s a little too excited to tell what comes next to play catch up. It’s an honest thriller. You follow along, and then surprising things happen, in such a way that at the time it seems so out of left field that it might take half a scene to catch up. There’s a way to confuse the audience in a way that feels sloppy, and a way to confuse us in a way that’s intriguing. Side Effects does the latter, like some of Eminem’s old singles, where he’d say something that almost sounded like complete gibberish, but you’d rewind or hear it a couple times and go, holy shit, all of that actually made sense. It wasn’t just a cheap trick. Sadly, I don’t get to rewind at movie screenings, a fact that security has been over with me in great detail, but it seems important that I’d want to.

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“Damn boo, u fart?”

In case you don’t have a giant chart on your wall that tracks the success of Channing Tatum films like I do, our favorite rec center savior had three films that topped the $100 million mark. Those films – The Vow, 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike – allowed C-Tates to show off his chops as a romantic lead, comedian and big ol’ dong shaker, respectively, and even with a shortened role in next year’s GI Joe: Retaliation, he’ll still be able to spray paint “Blockbuster Action Star” on his backwards acid-washed overalls as well.

Now, it seems that the hardest workin’, twerkin’, lay it down, flip it and reversin’ it baller/playboy/actor/producer/baller in $how BizzzNa$t33 is adding suspenseful thriller to his Linked In profile with the new film Side Effects, co-starring Rooney Mara and Jude Law. Tatum plays Mara’s papi, and someone gets killed. That’s pretty much all I took away from the new trailer, but you can take a look for yourself.

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After the jump, I’ve got the trailer for Anna Karenina, adapted from the Tolstoy novel by director Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jude Law, Keira Knightley, and Kick-Ass‘s Aaron Johnson. I got through about 30 seconds before I realized there wasn’t any vampires, parkour, or cannon fights, then I threw my laptop out the window and melvined a nerd.

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