Rob Marshall (Chicago) directed Nine, a musical about Fellini’s 8 1/2, and though it doesn’t open until Christmas, it feels like I’ve been hearing Oscar buzz about this for three months now. Granted, I hate musicals*. It’s not a knee-jerk jock thing, I just don’t understand the impulse. You’re telling someone a story and all of a sudden you decide to break into song? That’s what homeless people do. But even given it’s not my cup of tea, what the hell is this? Really, Kate Hudson singing a song on a catwalk, that’s your Oscar pick? Does this not feel like a commercial to anyone else? You can try to sexy it up all you want, but I kept expecting Maria Sharapova’s dog to show up. Oh Daniel Day-Lewis, first a bum foot, now jazz hands. Will you ever stop faking disabilities for attention? Keep this up and we might have to date.
*Singin’ in the Rain gets a pass
[via Yahoo]
I’m suing the internet for not alerting me of this sooner, but it appears boxer Manny Pacquiao, who beat down Miguel Cotto for a title in his seventh weight class on Saturday night, appears in the upcoming Filipino superhero movie Wapakaman.
The latest picture from Topel Lee, Wapakman stars real life boxing champ Manny Pacquaio as a normal man who becomes a superhero and must battle - in this trailer alone - a woman with supersonic breasts, a man made of lava and, of course, a giant crab. [Twitch]
Short of pterodactyls and lesbians, it would be impossible to improve upon that synopsis. My only hope is that once Pacquiao punches the giant crab to death, he puts his hands on his hips and says, “There. You soft shell now.”
Here’s the trailer for Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton… and Edward Norton. Edward Norton plays his own twin, but instead of being a softball-sized growth on his shoulder that was removed like Andy Garcia, he’s a pot dealer from Oklahoma.
Edward Norton is Bill Kincaid, an Ivy League classics professor, who “returns to rural Oklahoma to bury his dangerously brilliant identical twin brother, only to discover that the brother he believes to have been murdered has lured him home to involve him in a doomed plot against a local drug lord. [/Film]
The trailer begins with Norton as the pot-dealer brother, speaking in a preposterous country accent which seems like the typical, condescending treatment Hollywood gives movies about the country. But considering the positive reviews, and given that Norton generally picks good projects, and director Tim Blake Nelson is actually from Oklahoma, I’m gonna give it the benefit of the doubt and assume there’s more going on here than we can see from this. Also, I think the “grass” in the title might refer to marijuana. Because that’s what old people call it, you see.
[via /Film]
Opening this weekend:
2012 opens this weekend. You know it, I know it, the kids in my rape van know it. I’ve already featured the trailer, the disaster porn version of the trailer, the no-effects trailer, and my favorite, the Raising Arizona music trailer. Anyway, it looks fun, and it’ll probably make a lot of money. Other than that, you’ve got Pirate Radio, which has a great cast but also a guy walking into a lamp post in the trailer, Fantastic Mr. Fox opening in NY and LA, Black Dynamite playing a few more places, and probably some other stuff that I don’t want to look up because it’s Friday. How about you just watch this awesome clip from Bad Lieutenant and we call it a week, shall we?
This is the trailer for Grown Ups, from Dennis Dugan, who previously directed You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, The Benchwamers, and National Security. It stars both Rob Schneider and Kevin James, because God hates me.
