Guess which one’s an Oscar winner

With lots of new films hitting DVD today, there’s something for every discerning fan of cinema.  Besides The Paperboy (pictured above) we’ve got new films with Jake Gyllenhaal, Patton Oswalt, Danny Trejo, and Olivia Thirlby.  There’s films about universal soldiers, imposters, fat kids, phone-sex workers, and samurais.  There’s warriors of witchcraft and witch’s brew, and even one of this year’s Oscar-nominated films.

The DVDs:
End Of Watch
The Paperboy
Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning
Nature Calls
Death Race 3: Inferno
Searching For Sugar Man
For A Good Time, Call…
Nobody Walks
The Imposter
Officer Down
Tai Chi Zero
Fat Kid Rules The World
Hara-Kiri: Death Of A Samurai
Hansel & Gretel: Warriors Of Witchcraft
Night Of The Templar
Derby Dogs
Hold Your Breath
Dead Sushi
Witch’s Brew
Zombie Ed

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

Can’t remember which one of these films is an Oscar-nominee?  Continue reading to find out.  Want to know why nobody walks?  Maybe it’s because fat kids rule the world, but you should continue reading just to be sure.  If you don’t really care and just want something to stream on Netflix, click the link above, but you’ll be missing out on a movie that gets the Dove Seal of Approval, despite featuring attempted vehicular manslaughter and scenes of people being covered in human excrement.  The choice is yours. Read the rest of this entry »

I missed my local press screening of The Paperboy, which is a shame, because any film where Zac Efron gets dramatically peed on sounds like a must-see. It opens today, and luckily, Deadspin‘s Will Leitch did get to see it, and quickly discovered what many of us already suspected: that Lee Daniels might be a lunatic. Daniels managed to con the world into believing that Precious was about a Very Important Subject, and thus above criticism of its hilariously over-the-top schlock (misspelled credits!), but without a sheen of Bringing Important Issues to Light, his nuttiness is that much more visible. Leitch, meanwhile, does a smart job giving us the only thing we really wanted out of a Paperboy review – a catalog of the crazy. Excerpted below.

Zac Efron. Efron spends this entire film lying around in his underwear. All right, there are maybe three or four scenes in which he is wearing a shirt, but otherwise, it’s just him in tighty whities, throughout the whole movie. There is no reason for this to be happening; it’s hot out, but everyone else seems to find a way to put on some pants from time to time. He also mimes masturbating to Macy Gray. We’ve all been there, brother. The High School Musical heartthrob also calls a black character the N-word in as nasty a way as you can imagine. Oh, and at one point he has to lie still while Nicole Kidman pees on him.

John Cusack. [...] There’s one scene, however, when Cusack is forced to masturbate over his prison pants while staring at Nicole Kidman’s crotch. Daniels, of course, makes sure to cut to a closeup of Cusack’s semen staining said pants.

Nicole Kidman. Hoo boy. All right, so whatever your thoughts about Nicole Kidman—I think she’s a terrific actress; some find her too chilly; some just think it’s terrifying that she was once married to Tom Cruise—she certainly goes, to paraphrase Tropic Thunder, Full Whore. Daniels basically asks her to be the trashiest, looniest, most pathetic, most oversexed blowsy noir blonde you can imagine, and boy, does she deliver. The best way to describe Nicole Kidman’s crazy-ass performance is that the time you get a closeup of her crotch while she’s peeing on Zac Efron is the second wildest thing involving Kidman. I’d say the first is when you get an extreme closeup of her crotch—like, nearly Sharon Stone-level extreme—as she has an orgasm while sitting 10 feet away from Cusack. These are not isolated moments; Kidman goes all-out as a loony dimwit sex bomb. She never once shies away from the extremes Daniels asks her to go to. Lemme tell you: She should have. They all should have.

Obviously, there’s more in the full review, but I don’t have much to add to this. I look forward to triumphantly climbing up the Google rankings for “Cusack semen.”

Michelle Rodriguez has made a career out of being spicy and Latin (and dying in every movie), and the way she’s cast is no accident – she’s a real hot tamale! She was recently at an amFAR event at Cannes, where a reporter for Vulture asked her about The Paperboy, the movie where Nicole Kidman showers Zac Efron in a visible pee stream, which Rodriguez had just seen.

The following quote is what happens when you mix booze, reporters, Nicole Kidman’s pee, and Latin spice:

“I loved The Paperboy!” she told us. She wasn’t daunted by some of the pans for the Lee Daniels–directed movie? “I say f*ck them because they don’t get it,” Rodriguez replied. “He’s so good at keeping me entertained. When I don’t like the dialogue, I’m amused by the visuals. And when I don’t like the visuals, I’m amused by the dialogue. It’s always switching up senses. I’m intrigued by his ability to capture me in a theater. It’s not easy to capture me in a theater — I’m ADD like that.” As for those outrageous Paperboy scenes where Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron and arrives at a very loud hands-free orgasm, “I f*cking loved it,” Rodriguez enthused. “One of my friends said, ‘She’s going to get nominated for an Oscar for that.’ I was like, ‘Nah, man. She’s not black!’ I laugh, but it’s also very sad. It makes me want to cry. But I really believe. You have to be trashy and black to get nominated. You can’t just be trashy.“

Aw, poor MichelleRod. She’s going to get a lot of crap for that quote because it sounds like she means that black actresses get some kind of special treatment. But that’s not what she meant. Actually it’s almost the opposite. Luckily for you, I’m well-schooled in PC clichés, so I can break this down for you: what she meant was the oft-repeated accusation that the Oscars only reward black actors for playing “demeaning” roles. (The usual dumb cliché that white washes a lot of nuance, like that Mo’Nique in Precious and Denzel in Training Day were really good at playing villains and deserved to win; and the fact that the corollary character, the “dignified black” or the “magic negro,” is just as racist and twice as pervasive). I’m pretty sure she was trying to say that if you’re a black actor, acting trashy helps you win awards, but it doesn’t have the same effect if you’re white, because the world is racist and Oscar voters don’t like watching white people act trashy and blah blah blah. More tiresome than offensive, really, if she’d said it right. Which she didn’t. Basically, that quote is what happens when you get high school dropout actors trying to parrot half-assed grad school essays. The consequences can be disastrous.

[pic via WWTDD]

It’s funny that after the success of Precious, people seem to think of director Lee Daniels as Oprah’s innocuous little buddy, because the guy’s pretty twisted. Like, having-AIDs-and-two-retarded-babies-from-your-dad twisted. The first movie he directed, Shadowboxer, has a scene where Cuba Gooding Jr. is having fairly graphic sex with Helen Mirren, which is intercut with another scene of Gooding murdering a guy. Which is a little bit of background to bring us to today, when Daniels’ new movie, The Paperboy, premiered in Cannes. Apparently, this one has a scene that involves Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron. Nice, that was always my favorite Nicholas Sparks novel.

The movie casts Kidman as a small-town vamp whose tacky sensuality proves mesmerising to the fresh-faced youth played by Efron.

When Efron’s character Jack is caught in a bank of jellyfish, Kidman shoves aside a gang of girls about to urinate on his stings — as received wisdom would dictate — and proceeds to do it herself.

“I’m not here to please everybody — I’m here to tell truth,” Daniels said when quizzed about the sequence, suggesting the buzz of amused disbelief it caused on the Internet was because people “have a fetish about it”.

“Jellyfish cure is by urinating on the skin, that is just the way Pete Dexter wrote the book, I executed the vision,” Daniels told AFP after a press screening of the film, which he based on a novel of the same name.

“He is frustrated because he can’t get his girlfriend, he wants this woman, he goes out to swim because he’s furious, he’s swimming off his frustration… and half way through he is attacked by jellyfish.”

Matthew McConaughey, who plays Jack’s crusading reporter brother Ward in the movie, chipped in a word, saying: “That is, practically, what you are supposed to do for a jellyfish sting!” [AFP]

Adds Vulture: “And yes, you get a close-up of the stream.”

Oh thank God McConaughey was there to put things in perspective. “Hey. Y’all should know: peein’ on Zac Efron is illegal. …But ah think ah see a lotta lawbreakers out here tonight.”

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