Ending months of furious speculation, Warner Bros yesterday sent out an official press release announcing that Michael Shannon has been cast as General Zod in Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot.  He’ll star opposite Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, and Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as the Kents.  Shannon is an American actor perhaps best known for his role in the Boardwalk Empire episode “The Drowning of the Jew.”

“Zod is not only one of Superman’s most formidable enemies, but one of the most significant because he has insights into Superman that others don’t. Michael is a powerful actor who can project both the intelligence and the malice of the character, making him perfect for the role,” Snyder said.

Zod, like Superman, is from Krypton, where he commanded its armed forces. The character appeared in both 1978’s Superman and its 1980 sequel Superman II, where he was played by actor Terence Stamp. [THR]

Shannon also has the ability to still look scary even while he’s masturbating, a feat managed only by brilliant character actors and great white sharks, so he’s a great choice for the villain.  Zod was always a bad ass character because he has all the same powers as Superman, but instead of a cape and knee-high, red F-me boots with his underwear on the outside of his leotard, Zod has a ponytail and wears a grandmotherly robe lined with vinyl.  Man, and we say the Japanese are weird.  Anyway, Superman and Zod are always fighting each other, which is silly, because they’re both basically invincible, and the only thing they seem to accomplish is breaking lots of stuff.  Gosh, I wonder if any of it will be filmed in slow motion.

Big news on the Superman front today, as Amy Adams, that little fiyah crawtch with the see through brar in The Fightah, has been officially announced as the new Lois Lane in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Superman movie. That means that despite Lois Lane traditionally being a brunette, she’ll probably be a redhead, just like Mary Jane Watson, Jean Grey, Black Widow, and Pepper Potts.  Man, it’s almost as if Hollywood is run by Jews or something.

Snyder remarked, “Second only to Superman himself, the question of who will play Lois Lane is arguably what fans have been most curious about.”

I sincerely hope you never had an actual argument about that.

“So we are excited to announce the casting of Amy Adams, one of the most versatile and respected actresses in films today. Amy has the talent to capture all of the qualities we love about Lois: smart, tough, funny, warm, ambitious and, of course, beautiful.”

Well of course, beautiful.  We couldn’t very well have a list of all the attributes we pretend to care about without the one we actually do care about, now could we? She has everything we want: cupholders, satellite radio, wifi, a four megapixel camera, and of course, tits.

Amy Adams will star opposite Henry Cavill, who plays the new Clark Kent/Superman in the film. The main cast also includes Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, as Martha and Jonathan Kent. [ComingSoon]

I kid, but it’s hard to upset about this casting.  Who knew a superman movie would actually get a real actress?  A two-time Oscar nominee, no less.  I mean, nothing against Kate Bosworth, but… name two Kate Bosworth movies. And no, she’s not the one from Save the Last Dance.  As long as Zack Snyder doesn’t get his hands on the musical choices, this might actually turn out okay.  Put it this way, Sucker Punch had “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, “Where is My Mind,” and “White Rabbit.”  If he makes a Superman movie without “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” and that Three Doors Down song, it’ll be a miracle.

Sucker Punch: A movie set entirely within that sleazy alternate future from Back to the Future 2

Before I get to bashing it, let’s remember that the fact that a movie like Sucker Punch can still get made these days is a triumph.  (I don’t necessarily like his movie, but the fact that he’s making it?  I respect that.)  It wasn’t based on a graphic novel or comic book, it hadn’t been, God forbid, a board game or a children’s toy, and it wasn’t a sequel, prequel, remake, or reboot of anything already popular.  There was no “built-in audience” upon which the financiers could hang their toupees.  It was simply the brainchild of Zack Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya, a surrealistic stand-alone epic like Inception on a smaller scale ($82 million budget vs. $160 for Inception).  To their credit, Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures (the same people behind Inception, incidentally) seem to have given Snyder the freedom to let his freak flag fly.  The finished product, sadly, makes as fervent case for creative oversight as Inception made for the auteur. To put it another way, Zack Snyder is great at a lot of things. Self-editing is apparently not one of them.

Let’s see if I can recap: Baby Doll’s mother dies (communicated in a funeral scene that seems to be a shot-for-shot recreation of the Watchmen funeral), leaving her and her sister alone with their evil step father, who’s jealous and angry about being written out of his wife’s will.  We can tell he’s angry because he screams to the heavens in slow motion and angrily chugs vodka directly from the bottle while backlit by the moonlight (strange that you never see this kind of rage-drinking in liquor commercials considering how prevalent it is in movies).  After getting good and drunk in his study, bald, ugly Dad (EVIL!) walks down the hall to go beat up, or molest his cartoonishly innocent stepdaughters (GOOD!).  It’s never clear that his intention is to rape them, but while trying to barge in Baby Doll’s bedroom, he tears from her shirt a single button, which we watch fall to the floor in a super slow-mo extreme closeup.  And slow-mo close-ups of torn-off buttons DO tend to imply rape, the same way smoldering dolls imply civilian casualties.

The slowly-twirling button of implied rape

Defending her sister, Baby Doll (pillow-lipped Emily Browning) steals his pistol and tries to shoot her stepdad, accidentally killing her sister instead (under logistically dubious circumstances).  This two-minute sequence becomes the setup for the entire movie.  The dead sister is all the evidence Baby Doll’s stepdad needs to commit her to an insane asylum (in terrifying BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT!), where she’ll summarily lobotomized, and he can take over her inheritance.  As dad fills out her asylum paperwork, we find out that Baby Doll is 20 years old, which makes it odd, both that she dresses like a pig-tailed porn caricature of a 15-year-old, and that an adult in the eyes of the law had inexplicably chosen to live with her creepy, rapey, no-relation stepdad.  But by making it clear that the girl is of age, the filmmakers can avoid criticism of sexualizing a minor, despite the fact that the story doesn’t really work if she’s not a minor.  Point being, there are only so many narrative discrepancies you can tolerate on the grounds of “because it looks cool.”  …Especially if it’s not that cool.

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This is the newest trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch (opens March 25th).  It’s fun to watch the trailer for Endhiran (that’s the Indian movie featuring the giant snake made of robot men that slithers around eating cars) because it’s foreign and you can’t understand the words, which creates a nice cognitive distance from which you can say, “Man, foreigners.  They are bugf*ck insane, amirite?”  But let’s have a little perspective here.  Imagine you’re an Indian dude watching the trailer for Sucker Punch.  It has, in order of appearance:

• A fire-breathing dragon
• A WWI-era German army of the undead
• A tank
• A robot samurai
• A robot German
• A robot of indeterminate origin with an exploding face
• Giant samurai now shooting a gatling gun

And that’s just the first half before the quick cuts start.  (This version of the trailer doesn’t even show the dinosaurs).  It’s like Zack Snyder snuck into Michael Bay’s dreams and filled a movie with his secrets. Right about now you’d be rubbing your magic beads and muttering a prayer to a cobra or whatever those people do.

Much like Sucker Punch‘s protagonist who fights a war inside her own mind, I like to imagine that in Zack Snyder’s head, he’s the hero of an epic movie where everything he does happens in super slow-mo, but in reality it’s just him making whooshing sounds with his mouth while he peels an orange.

There’s a good chance you know by now that 27-year-old British actor Henry Cavill (The Tudors) has been cast as the lead in the upcoming Superman reboot from WB and Zack Snyder.  I didn’t know who he was before today, but I can’t deny that he’s pretty dreamy.  Will he be able to fill Christopher Reeves’ crotch bulge?  Only time will tell.

The 27-year-old actor was reportedly on the shortlist for “Superman Returns” when McG was to direct it, but when Bryan Singer took over the project he went with Brandon Routh instead. [Yahoo]

[said Cavill of that experience] “When McG was working on a script with them. I don’t know how close I came. I understand it was very, very close and sadly the movie was cancelled because McG didn’t want to fly. He certainly had a big fear of flying at the time; I think he’s since overcome it. He wanted to shoot in New York, they wanted to shoot in Australia for obvious reasons. He said, ‘I can’t do it,’ and they moved on. These things happen. It’s the nature of the business.” [ComicBookMovie]

As GammaSquad points out, this means we now have a British Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman, and a Canadian Green Lantern (and as commenter Jessica points out, an Australian Wolverine).  Americans might be pissed about that, but the truth is, we have only ourselves to blame.  When all our young actors have been recruited from sitcoms on the Disney Channel, you’re pretty much screwed unless you’re casting for the reboot of Little Women.