Here’s Paul Giamatti on the set of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, in which he plays The Rhino. I assume he’s doing some sort of motion capture work here, though he seems a little overdressed for it (MORE SPANDEX ONESIES!). We all know Paul Mr.-Academy-Award-Nominee-for-Cinderella-Man Giamatti is widely regarded as one of the best actors in town, but does he have the thespian chops to compete with Sir Andy Serkis when it comes to wordlessly evoking the inner humanity of a fantastical creature? I guess we’ll see. |TheSuperficial|

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MORNING LINKS
Listen To A Dark, Twisted (And Shout) Beatles/Kanye West Mashup, ‘Southside My Dear’ |UPROXX|

The ‘Arrested Development’ Season 4 Character Power Rankings |Warming Glow|

Dane Cook Is Still Crop Dusting Us In The New Trailer For Disney’s ‘Planes’ |Film Drunk|

Here’s UFC’s Anthony Pettis Hilariously Beating Up Regular People |With Leather|

This Homemade Lightsaber Is A Pyromaniac’s Dream |Gamma Squad|

Chicago’s Closing 50 Schools, Opts To Spend $100 Million On Basketball Arena |Smoking Section|

Tyrann Mathieu Hollered At An Underage Girl On Twitter |Kissing Suzy Kolber|

Cartoon Action Heroes Based on Movies of the Late ’80s |Mental Floss|

Here’s Ben Affleck looking like a big ol’ dork. IS THIS A HAAHVAHD BAH? |Videogum|

5 Celebrities You Won’t Believe Were Badass Soldiers |Cracked|

Food and Beverage Pairings for Broke Ass College Kids |College Humor|

21 Stock Photo Models Who F*$%ing Love Smoothies |HuffPost Comedy|

Five Super-Important Life Lessons From Philosopher-Stars Will and Jaden Smith |Grantland|

Why Sherlock Holmes Superfans Are Wrong About ‘Elementary’ |Flavorwire|

The Awkward, Incredibly Unsexy Early Years of the Leading Men from Fast and Furious 6 |Pajiba|

8 films with Confederate protagonists. |ScreenJunkies|

Homemade ‘Back to the Future’ Clock Tower Scene |Clip Nation|

Ranking the most obnoxious corporate buzz words. |Ranker|

This Banjo Cover of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ is Rather Excellent |Brobible|

“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.

[via Vulture]

MORNING LINKS
JJ Abrams to direct Star Wars VII |Film Drunk|

Frotcast 136: Tarantino Stories with Justin Halpern, Killer Joe |Frotcast|

Vince will be doing some comedy next week for SF Sketchfest and next month at the Hollywood Improv.

Won’t parents teach their children about the dangers of moonwalking? [via Awesomephilia]

Is ‘SNL’s History With Rap As Bad As Everyone Assumes? |UPROXX|

Amy Poehler Wants Bill Murray To Play Pawnee’s Mayor On ‘Parks & Rec’ |Warming Glow|

White Folk Falling: The Best Of Segway Fails |With Leather|

This Church In France Is Crawling With Sci-Fi Gargoyles |Gamma Squad|

100-Word Review: Toro Y Moi’s “Anything In Return” |Smoking Section|

A Company Is Selling Temporary Kaepernick Tattoos |Kissing Suzy Kolber|

Lindsay Lohan Hooked Up With Pauly D. Of Course. |The Superficial|

Remember The Time Beyonce Grinded With Aaron Cater?! |Buzzfeed|

The 25 Largest Movie Ensembles |Film.com|

A ‘Party Down’ Reunion Is Happening, But There’s A Catch |HuffPost Comedy|

Gwyneth Paltrow Forces Cameron Diaz To Give Up Sex (Normal Friend Stuff) |Videogum|

15 Temporarily Banned Episodes of Popular TV Shows |Mental Floss|

Yuck: The 10 Grossest Comedy Movie Scenes Ever |NextMovie|

If Alcohol Had Mascots Like Cereal |College Humor|

When Internet People Make Fake Vaginas |Holy Taco|

Bane Almost Looked Like a Gimp in TDKR |Unreality|

Scottie Pinwheel! |Clip Nation|

8 Actors Who Aren’t As Famous As They Should Be. I Can’t Imagine Why. |Pajiba|

Zombie Acting Tips With Rob Corddry |Screen Junkies|

The 36 greatest super-villain musical numbers of all time |Fark|

Daniel Radcliffe’s First Sex Scene Is With A Dude |IDLYITW|

A Dramatic Surprise On An Ice-Cold Day |High Definite|

Is This the Most Badass Ad Campaign of All Time? |Brobible|

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Brooooooooood!

R-Pattz ponders existence and sh*t

The heads exploding in Scanners. The compound-fracture forearm splintering in The Fly. The guy with his jaw blown off, the rough sex on the stairs in a History of Violence. When I think David Cronenberg, I think of the visceral – lurid, memorable scenes of glorified sex and gore. As you might expect of a guy who once filmed James Spader having sex with a vulva-like scar on Rosanna Arquette’s leg (Crash, 1996), Cronenberg is fascinated by the human body, and he excels at shooting it. Dialog? Not so much. Remember the parts of History of Violence without the sex or the violence that felt like a weird, stilted after-school special? The last thing you want to see him do is make a movie that’s ninety-five percent people standing around and talking, which is what Cosmopolis is. There are isolated moments of genius, but they’re like Easter Island isolated. Yeah, geography, bitch, what.

Based on the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, Cosmopolis is a shaggy dog story centering around Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a billionaire asset manager on a trip across Manhattan in his limo to get a haircut on the same day that the president comes to town and sparks an anti-capitalist riot by rat-toting anarchists. There are a couple short, action-ish sequences that were nice (the rat-toting anarchists, mainly), but for the most part, it’s a game of musical chairs, with Robert Pattinson sitting in different places talking to different people, about, like, the nature of existence and stuff. “Dude, like what does it all mean or whatever?”

As soon as Robert Pattinson opened his mouth I knew I was in for a long movie. Part of the problem is the source material. I haven’t read Cosmopolis, but I’m otherwise familiar with Don DeLillo, and one DeLillo hallmark is dialog that’s stylized to the point that it’s almost Shakespearean, in that exists unto itself moreso than the physical world. His characters converse in existential, hyper-verbose, hyper-articulate, disconnected circle-speak – think Beckett, or Joseph Heller, or Flannery O’Connor. His dialog never seems intended to convey the way real people actually speak, it’s more a tool to present elaborately braided paradox. That’s not a knock on it, it’s smart, but polarizing, overwrought mostly in a good way. But that DeLillo’s scenes are built in your mind and often don’t seem to involve recognizable people presents some obvious problems for actors trying to present this believably, burdened as they are by their basic real peoplehood. I don’t know if DeLillo’s fetishized doubletalk ever works in a visual medium like film, but I can tell you that Robert Pattinson sure as hell isn’t up to it, at least not without better direction than this. I don’t doubt for a second that it’s hard to play a detached character, but R-Patts (who I haven’t minded in other stuff) never gets past high school theater club “hard boiled.” Squint, purse lips, furrow brow, squint some more, can you squint harder? Try anyway, repeat.

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The 68th Venice Film Festival begins tomorrow, and the 11-day event will be highlighted by tomorrow’s highly-anticipated premiere of The Ides of March, a political drama starring George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, and a few thousand pairs of moist panties. Clooney and Baby Goose will hit the red carpet in Venice for the debut, and they’ll be followed by co-stars Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who will undoubtedly be pelted with rotten vegetables for being so damn unattractive.

Ides will be up against 22 other films for the festival’s Golden Lion award, but there’s no chance that any of them will have a cast as handsome as this. Even if Brad Pitt played every character in Moneyball, it wouldn’t hold a candle to The Ides of March. People keep talking about Madonna’s directorial effort W.E., starring James D’Arcy, but he sure as hell couldn’t break up a fight over artwork in the middle of a street.

Sadly, us ugly people can’t see Ides until October 7, so we’ll just have to hope that when the beautiful people step outside to have their rings kissed and velvet capes stroked, they’ll tell us of the spectacle that they witnessed, undoubtedly in something called 5D, since they were given 7 senses by the gods. Oh to be beautiful. In the meantime, I’ve included the trailer after the jump, and you can feel like royalty as you watch it while drinking a St. Ides Special Brew. Pinkies out.

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