PREPARE FOR A CUMBERBATCHING MOST FIERCE!

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an early frontrunner for the Oscars’ Stiffest Upper Lip award (ensemble), now has a full-length trailer. Directed by Let the Right One In‘s Tomas Alfredson, the Cold War spy story stars Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, and, as if it couldn’t get anymore British, Benedict Cumberbatch, a name I don’t even feel comfortable saying without a powdered wig. FUN FACT: If you shut the lights and say “Benedict Cumberbatch” three times into the mirror, “Yakety Sax” starts playing and you have four minutes to catch the fox before he steals your Yorkshire pudding.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, from Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson, based on the spy novel by John le Carré, premieres at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend, and now the first clip from the film is online. It stars Mark Strong, Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, and Tom Hardy, and the first clip is everything you could ever want in a clip, provided what you want is super-serious British dudes having a gravelly-voice contest. GRR, GUV, DA QUEEN SAYS DA BARRISTAH’S LORRIE HAIN’T BEEN DIS NACKERED IN DOG’S EARS.

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From Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson comes this new adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring pretty every British guy, including Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Colin Firff, Gary Oldman (yeah, he’s British too, I had to look it up), Toby Jones, and King of All Brits, Benedict Cumberbatch. Seriously, I can’t get halfway through typing that name without offering to shoyne someone’s boots.  Set in the 70s, Oldman plays a retired intelligence agent who comes out of retirement to help catch a Soviet mole.  It looks pretty good, but I’d argue that six British dudes trying to catch an actual mole would be just as entertaining.  Especially if we greased the mole and made the Brits wear silly hats.  How come now one asks for my script notes?

For the ladies

Opens November 18th.

Thor opens this weekend, but today Green Lantern dropped a new trailer, almost as if to say, “WE SEE YOUR SKARSGÅRD AND RAISE YOU SARSGAARD.” It opens June 17th, and I know I’ve been sh*t talking this project from the beginning, but as more of the FX works gets done, it’s gradually starting to seem less bland.  Basically, an alien comes down from space and gives Ryan Reynolds a promise ring.  Ryan Reynolds pledges allegiance to a lantern and then gets sucked into space where a big alien with a black guy’s voice beats him up.  Then he comes back to Earth to make out with Blake Lively and it’s awesome because they’re the most ridiculously good-looking couple of all time.  Somewhere along the line, Stellan Sarsgaard gets into Mr. Burns’s nerve tonic and it turns him into Joss Whedon, and Ryan Reynolds has to use his powers to keep him from making more adaptations of Buffy.  Something like that.

DC Comics CCO Geoff Johns Tweefed Saturday that the Martin Campbell-directed, Ryan Reynolds-starring Green Lantern movie had wrapped production in New Orleans. It’s not scheduled for release until next June, but apparently WB is so tumescent with the idea of Ryan Reynolds’ abs in 3D that they’ve already hired a writer for the sequel.  For the first movie, Michael Goldenberg rewrote a script by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim.  WB hired the same trio to write a treatment for the sequel, and now Goldenberg has been hired to write that, presumably to give the other three more time to troll JDate for hot tail.

“Green Lantern” wasn’t cheap, reportedly costing upwards of $150 million. You don’t even need to read the Variety report to figure out what the sequel will be about. Mark Strong, who plays Sinestro, has already said several times — and just recently again — that his character is not a villain in the first film and “Green Lantern” essentially sets up his character as the antagonist in the sequel (Sinestro initially plays the protagonist Hal Jordan’s mentor). [ThePlaylist]

Any time I read the phrase “sets up for a the sequel”, the prickly hairs on my balls stand up as I remember the utterly pointless two-hour prologue that was Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, but perhaps (hopefully) that’s an unfair comparison. I just hope we get something faithful to the original comic book, where an alien comes to Earth and gives his special ring to a muscular youth in spandex tights, and not something super gay.