Also in this Friday (Friday!) edition of The Broadsheet: Vince Vaughn could join Neighborhood Watch … the synopsis for Prometheus tells you nothing… the best movie trailer of the last calendar year is effing special… and more ahead.
Steven Soderbergh is retiring. Eventually . Of course, before he does ride off into the sunset the Oscar winning director will release five films: Contagion (recently moved up to early September), Haywire , Magic Mike , The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Liberace . In other words: there’s plenty of Soderbergh left, cinephiles! The second of his final five films to hit theaters is Haywire , and a first image from the action thriller has hit the Internet. Say hello to MMA fighter Gina Carano… and her Uzi.
X-Men: First Class wants to be five movies at once, and it occasionally succeeds at being a few of them: One minute it’s a stylish James Bond-style retro pleaser, the next a bitter-edged revenge melodrama, the next your boilerplate “embrace individuality” empowerment brief. It is also, of course, a movie based on a comic-book franchise — in this case, Marvel’s long-running, multi-tentacled X-Men saga — and for that reason alone, it comes with a million other expectations attached. I don’t know what director in his right mind would want to take on such a project, but I admire Matthew Vaughn for trying.
Exciting X-Men: First Class news arrives on the eve of the Marvel comic film’s premiere: cast members Michael Fassbender and Zoe Kravitz are dating! At least that is what Us Weekly is reporting , and, why not? How could sparks not fly on that sexually-charged set ? In honor of this new duo, let’s brainstorm nicknames for First Class ‘s first (alleged) power couple.
Hungry actors on the cusp of stardom take note: if you really want to become the next big thing, consider delivering wordy monologues in German. After starring in X-Men: First Class and Ridley Scott’s non-Alien Alien movie Prometheus , Michael Fassbender is now reportedly in talks to join Danny Boyle’s new art heist movie, Trance .
If Elizabeth Taylor, who died Wednesday at age 79 , was both a great star and a wonderful actress, she was also the frequent object of gentle, or not so gentle, ridicule. She is survived not just by her children and friends, but by lots of old jokes about her vast collection of husbands and diamonds, by the Saturday Night Live parody of her super-soft-focus “White Diamonds” perfume ad, by the legacy of being one-half of a famous couple (twice!) that even the New York Times casually refers to as Dickenliz. How does an actress hang onto her own identity, with so many people appropriating bits of it for their own aims?
Unless you have a Google Alert set for “Antonio Banderas, Sam Elliott, James van der Beek, Snoop Dogg, Autumn Reeser and missing stripper” you probably haven’t heard of The Big Bang . That’s OK, because your official introduction to the dark thriller — due in theaters May 13 — awaits you ahead and, thankfully, this feature promises to be nothing like the similarly-named CBS sitcom.
That didn’t take very long at all. Fans of Japanese Magna Akira are already up in arms about the report that Warner Bros. is looking to cast the film from a list of Caucasian actors that includes Robert Pattinson, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Joaquin Phoenix and Michael Fassbender. Who could have seen this one coming?
When the trailer for Bruno debuted in 2009 , Universal tried to sell audiences on the critical love for Sacha Baron Cohen’s previous summer comedy, Borat . It didn’t work. Cut to 2011, and here comes Warner Bros. using a similar strategy in the first teaser for The Hangover Part II (it looks like those Roman numerals are part of the official title), which uses quotes about the first film to fill up much of the trailer’s length. Is this highly anticipated sequel doomed to face a Bruno -like box office fate?