Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

I’ve had a boner for Seven Psychopaths ever since it was announced, and now we’ve got the first pictures (courtesy of EntertainmentWeekly, obvi). Writer/director Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to In Bruges, it stars Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, and Woody Harrelson, stepping in for Mickey Rourke, who apparently wanted too much money and now says of McDonagh “he can go play with himself.”  But Harrelson or Rourke, I would definitely go pick up high school chicks with these guys. Oh, and the movie sounds pretty good too.

A savage gangster (Woody Harrelson) goes on a rampage after his beloved shih tzu Bonny goes missing, snatched by an out-of-work actor (Sam Rockwell) who pays the bills by helping a professional dognapper (Christopher Walken) pick up pooches and return them for the reward money.
Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter who struggles to find the handle on his script, called Seven Psychopaths. He gets drawn into the dognapping escapades of his friends (played by Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken).
“The comedy elements in this one are probably stronger or more to the forefront than In Bruges,” says McDonagh, who got an Academy Award nomination for that script. (He won an Oscar for the 2005 short Six Shooter.)
Harrelson’s character, Charlie, “adores his shih tzu,” McDonagh says. “Really, we all adore Bonny!” (That’s the real name of the dog, which was adopted from a shelter in real life, and now lives with its trainer.) “He loves that dog more than anything in the world and would do anything to protect it.”

Wait, it gets better!

Tom Waits turns up as Zachariah, a rabbit-petting weirdo who offers up strange stories from his past for the Seven Psychopaths screenplay. [EW, Deadline]

A lovable rogue’s gallery fighting over cute, fuzzy animals, as written with brutal violence by a vulgar Irishman? My God, this is so in my wheelhouse it’s stupid.

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I don’t know if the world is ready to recognize how awesome Your Highness was yet, but in the meantime, director David Gordon Green has a new movie out called The Sitter, which just released a red-band trailer. I’m a bit torn. See, I love watching Jonah Hill cuss out little kids. Hell, I could watch little kids getting cussed out all day, Jonah Hill or not. But the entire second half of the trailer seems to be Jonah Hill and the kids trying to fit in at an urban pool hall, and watching a chubby Jewish guy try to prove how down he is with the brother man just feels a little too “hangin’ with Brett Ratner” for my tastes.

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Boy, this is sad news. Every time Mickey Rourke drops out of a movie, the baby Jesus cries and my Ganesha statue stops drinking milk. The clay-faced tough guy with a heart of gold and a soft spot for whores, tiny dogs, kids with cancer, and Eric Roberts is the perfect addition to any cast, but apparently his soft spot doesn’t extend to Irish auteurs, because he won’t be joining In Bruges director Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths. Which is a shame, because Seven Psychopaths was once set to star Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, and Christopher Walken, a cast so amazing it makes the Justice League look like four hobos pissing on a trash fire.

Now Mickey Rourke is out and Woody Harrelson is in, and Rourke says McDonagh is a “jerkoff.”

Back in October, it was reported that Mickey Rourke dropped out of ‘The Expendables 2′ so he could negotiate to appear in Martin McDonagh’s ‘Seven Psychopaths’ with Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell. About that: “The director was a jerkoff. He wanted a whole lot for nothing,” Rourke told Moviefone late last week during an interview for ‘Immortals.’ When asked to confirm that he won’t appear in the thriller, Rourke had this to say about McDonagh (‘In Bruges’): “He can go play with himself.” [Moviefone]

If anyone ever stops Mickey Rourke from being totally candid at all times, I vow before my colleagues and creator that I will fight that person. Hollywood needs inappropriate Uncle Mickey to keep shooting from the hip, if only to remind everyone else how completely full of sh*t they are 98 percent of the time. Anyway, it’s a bummer that Mickey’s out, but Woody Harrelson’s okay too, I guess. He’s no Mickey, but I could never be too disappointed with Pepper from The Cowboy Way.

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Any film where Colin Farrell karate chops a midget I’ll watch out of principle, but In Bruges was pretty good to boot. It was written and directed by Martin McDonagh, and now CBS Films is in talks to distribute his latest, Seven Psychopaths. Needless to say, it sounds awesome.

The film reunites McDonagh with his In Bruges star Colin Farrell, who plays a screenwriter who struggles to find the handle on his script, called Seven Psychopaths. He gets drawn into the dognapping escapades of his friends (played by Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken). Once the beloved Shih Tzu owned by a psychopathic gangster goes missing, the screenwriter finds himself fueled with all the drama he needs for his screenplay, if he can stay alive long enough to write it all down. The film’s produced by Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin, with Tessa Ross set as executive producer. CBS Films executive vice president Scott Shooman will oversee it when it shoots in Los Angeles this fall. [Deadline]

Yep, Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, and last we heard, Mickey Rourke was also in it (MICKEY ROURKE F*CKING LOVES TINY DOGS!). Not only would I watch the ever-living hell out of that movie, I’d also like to commission a velvet painting in the style of “Dogs Playing Poker,” with those guys as the dogs, and a midget waiter walking around with a platter of cocaine and a revolver in his belt in case things go south. I would hang that on my wall, possibly my tombstone.

Cowboys and Aliens is an absurdist pastiche of overused action movie tropes (Bourne in the old west! With aliens!), which is occasionally compelling, if only for the sheer audacity of plot choices. That is to say, it’s ridiculous. And I’m a big fan of the ridiculous (see also: Lieutenant, Bad; Werner Herzog version of). I just wish Cowboys and Aliens‘ preposterousness wasn’t so couched in pre-fabricated stories and characters. It’s a lot like Lost, but even black smoke monsters and polar bears seemed more fresh than Cowboys, Indians, aliens, rocket hands, and amnesia. It plays like a producer brainstorming session that never got edited, which makes it all the more shocking that no one turns out to be a vampire or a hot cyborg lesbian (spoiler alert).

It’s hard to believe Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof had five co-writers, because the whole thing reeks of black smoke musk, from the character daddy issues driving every single plot point right down to the fat-faced kid with a dog who seems totally unnecessary to the plot. I imagine the writers meeting went something like this:

Alex Kurtzman: Cowboys!

Robert Orci: Indians! Aliens! James Bond! Indiana Jones–

Steve Oedekirk: (*loud gurgle, extended fart sound followed by terrible stench. the rest of the gang rolls his wheelchair outside before continuing*)

Lindelof: Amnesia! Religious themes! Re-incarnation–

Iron Man writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby: [together] ROCKET HANDS! (*they smash their beer steins together, down the rest, and stomp off like the Bushwhackers*)

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