But, to be fair, if you are going to have only one girl...

Happy Tuesday to ya, bloggites. Not a whole lot truly movin' and shakin' today. Mostly a lot of still and motionless. That doesn't mean we can't find something to talk about! Like, for example, Joss Whedon told Moviehole that there will be more than one set of lady parts in The Avengers. And no, not because it turns out Robert Downey Jr has extra equipment. Basically, there's only one gal known to be among Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and that's The Black Widow.


And, really, if you HAVE to stop there, you have enough divine lady-ness to probably muddle through, especially given her outfit. Thankfully, Whedon is not content with that, given that he traditionally writes bad-ass women doing bad-ass things. So what he's saying is that although we're not likely to see more superheroines, we may see more heroines, which is super. Who do I think this means? Well, I think it means we're going to see SHIELD folks like Maria Hill, more girlfriends like Sharon Carter, or more villainesses like The Enchantress, who Alice Eve is rumored for.

This is all speculation, but that's all I've got for you today. Speculation and images of Scarlett Johansson and Alice Eve. That should be good enough for a Tuesday, right?

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Ryan's Junk Drawer

Hola blog-migos. Congratulations on having lived to see my junk again. Here's hoping it's not all you were holding on for, and now you feel you can pass to the other side. That would be incredibly sad. I'm not feeling 100% at the moment, so let's see if I can't get moving a little faster than usual. Someone start the clock.

I say junk but I mean movie tidbits too small for whole blog posts, but tidbits isn't a well-known euphemism for genitalia (unless you're a Smurf). We start by looking at the creepy image above that's supposedly a junk drawer, from Highlights Magazine FOR CHILDREN, but appears to have been drawn by an artistic ax murderer. We pick an item from above and write a goofy story about it. And by we, I mean me, I use the royal we for no reason sometimes. Today's item is the green and red blob on the right side. Barksy was a mostly a good dog but was sometimes a pain in the ass. Her favorite chew toy, a Christmas elf, was the perfect tool through which to teach the little shit a valuable lesson. One day when Barksy went for the bark/bite/pee trifecta, her master told her an elaborate story about where elves go when they die, while all Barksy heard was "wawawawawawawa." Sadly, the meaning was lost, as the pup lamented her lack of thumbs the only way she knew how: she barked, bit, and peed twice as much. Let this be a lesson to you, you can't fix a creature that only cares for its elf.

Okay, that's enough, let's get to it!

1.) Aw hell, boy - Guillermo del Toro set up Hellboy 3 in the sadly, madly underrated Hellboy 2 (yes, I still love it, it's better than Avatar). Seriously, look at just the poster and tell me the film wasn't beautiful.

Yeah, see how wrong you are in your memory of that film? I thought so. Unfortunately, getting the third film is proving a bit difficult. He told MTV, "I would love to do it. But the heartbreak for me is that I know how it ends and I don't know if I want to see that ending. But I would love to do it.

As the creator of Hellboy, Mike Mignola, elaborates: "The problem is, what del Toro's talked about to me is that 'Hellboy III' would be the end of Hellboy. And here's where we have the big conflict. My version of Hellboy in the comics is a finite story, but it's going to take me 15 years to get to the ending. If he makes 'Hellboy III' and it's the death of Hellboy, I'm left doing the comic going, 'But I'm not done yet. My Hellboy is not going to have kids. My Hellboy is going to die, but I want to be the one who does that. And if del Toro does my ending, there won't be a lot of surprise when I get to the end of the comic."

Personally, I don't think it would be all that crazy to end the cinematic series without ending the comic series, as anyone who is interested in either of them is (A) smart enough to know the difference and (B) going to read/see both anyway. What I'm saying is, GIVE ME HELLBOY 3 with total armageddon and the death of Hellboy before Ron Perlman is so old more makeup will be spent keeping his moobs up than his horns on.

2.) This is kind of how the game felt to me - Y'all know how I feel about JJ Abrams, so it's only fitting I'm about to talk about spending 7 minutes in a closet kissing. I don't remember playing that particular game very often, but I was with a particularly chaste group of young people at the time. We liked comics for God's sake, 7 minutes in heaven meant being locked in a vault with some great back issues. JJ Abrams has a different take, as he and buddy Jack Bender have a new thriller based on a simple premise: Two kids go into a closet to neck and when they come out everybody is dead. I know that it's like a slasher-movie premise, and they mean everyone at the party is dead, but I wish the world was dead and it was more like a "Twilight Zone" episode. How funny would that be? At any rate, it sounds interesting, don't it?

3.) More on that Battleship business - Maybe I wasn't clear yesterday but this lady is going to be an actress now.
That's Brooklyn Decker, and her talents are pretty much all on display right there. She's joining Rhianna and Taylor Kitsch from the fantastic "Friday Night Lights" in Battleship, a movie that's going to fail. It's not just plummeting because the best actor announced so far plays a high-school football player on a direct-to-cable show, but because it's (A) based on a board game, (B) going to take place in the water, which notoriously means problems shooting, and (C) now involves aliens. With every bit of casting and news about the movie, I become more convinced that the film is a giant joke, like it's actually a fake movie they're making in "Entourage" or something. If you want to look at it positively, that lady above is going to be shown on as huge screen. I guess it's not all bad.

4.) Eve ruins everything again - Comicbookmovie.com is on the case of "ruining my mood" today. Why? Well because their sources told them that the reason the lovely lass below, miss Alice Eve, left the cast of X-Men First Class wasn't because they booted her or because January Jones is a better corset-stuffer.
NOPE! It's because she read the script and rabbited. That's not a good sign. Marvel still likes her and wants her for something in The Avengers (my guess is the enchantress) but the fact that she bolted from a sure-fire money maker when reading the script both raises my opinion of her and lowers my expectations for the movie. This is not sounding particularly good for mutantville. They will probably address this problem by casting another voluptuous hottie.

5.) Trailers, Parked - Did I mention that the trailer for Black Swan came out yesterday? Because it did. That's the movie with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis making out. I may just run this every day until the movie comes out, who's to say? Either way, you should watch it in all it's brilliance right now. And then watch it again. And again.



I'm Still Here is the documentary/mocumentary/nobody-knows-what about Joaquin Phoenix's attempted rap career. I've now seen the trailer...and still have no idea what's going on, other than that appears to be Nick Nolte giving Phoenix advice of some kind. That's not even a good idea in a fictional way.

Sorry if I wasn't on my game today, but I'll do better next week. Get to workin' and I'll see you tomorrow for a grand Friday send off.

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Frosty day

As could be said for almost any production out there right now, the cast of X-Men First Class is shaping up to be more attractive than the best combined features of all the people you've ever met in real life. James McAvoy is playing a young Professor X (burning question: with hair or without?), Michael Fassbender is 'lil Magneto, and Benjamin Walker is Beast. Now comes word that Marvel has cast the superhero whose incredible powers are to resist frostbite while wearing little more than a tattered bedsheet.

will be played by

Just to be clear, that's Alice Eve from She's Out of Your League playing the White Queen. That's fine and all, but can we talk for just a minute about how Emma Frost is in this? I never did read the comic book "X-Men: First Class," but what I know of the lore of the men of X suggests to me that Hooters McGee up there didn't start overpowering lords of evil with her hoo-ha until far after the "first class." She'll come in incredibly handy though, what with her amazing talent at being leggy and jiggling in the right parts. Look, I hate Emma Frost for the most part, because her power set (which is actually telepathy somewhere less than Professor X and Jean Grey and the inexplicable ability to turn into a giant diamond...yes, I'm serious) always seemed redundant and pointless. Her whole schtick too of the "sexy-but-powerful woman" is almost always downgraded to "sexy woman" and usually to "how little clothes do we legally have to draw on her." I get that men (and some women) like to see women with tiny socks turned into whole wardrobes, even if it's just a drawing, so having her in a movie where she's all visible flesh and semi-tangible blood seems great. She's just a mediocre character to me with little to offer and I want this to be a good X-movie. Yep, I'm the guy who isn't excited about this news.

Ryan's Junk Drawer

Well helloooo again. I somehow have survived until Thursday this week, which I wasn't entirely sure was going to happen. Being that I was off my blogging game for about a week there, we've lost a decent chunk of my viewing audience. I can only hope that promises for them to see MY MASSIVE JUNK will bring them back. For those of you who have been here before (and really, who could resist returning once they've tasted the sweet succulent nectar of my junk juice), you obviously know that by "junk" I mean movie news that isn't big enough to warrant its own post. I call it that so that people think they're about to see something tastier than movie tidbits. We also start each edition of my junk drawer by examining the creepy-ass picture above from Highlights Magazine FOR CHILDREN. We pick an object and make up an insane story about it just for funsies. Today's item is the blue cylinder with the lightning bolt on it. Although it pained him to do so, Kevin knew that he must keep the proton capacitor from being reinserted into Kerplong, his best friend and android companion. Although the two had shared wonderful adventures together, stopping the rebellion on the planet Steepnort and helping create a new galaxy, Kerplong's cameras never stopped recording. This meant that not only did Kerplong know what Kevin had done to that creature from the Nerblon galaxy, he had evidence. Kevin loved Kerplong, but he wasn't about to go back to Galactic Jail for nobody.

Okay, enough already, let's get on to the week's movie nuggets:

1.) I heart Aziz Ansari - Aziz Ansari's "Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening" is perhaps the funniest stand-up routine I've heard in a few years. Check this clip out, it has some salty language, but it is HILARIOUS and worth it. Fine, don't watch it at work if you're one of those annoying people who doesn't use headphones but rather giant desk speakers so that everyone else is forced to listen to whatever talk radio nonsense you endorse.

Seriously, hilarious right? Rumor has it that Ansari will star in Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less, which features a script that had made the prominent "Black List." It's an R-rated comedy about a pizza delivery dude who gets a bomb strapped to his chest by two criminals who make him rob a bank for them (PS - this kind of actually happened). Ansari will play that dude's friend. Obviously, the lead role is just begging for a Seth Rogen type, but I hope they go weird on it. I hope they pick someone like a Ryan Gosling to play the lead, not the expected scruffy-faced chubby guy. I mean, where's the joy in seeing Jonah Hill do this sort of thing...again? Unless he explodes. Then I'm down. For the record, although I've heard some interesting things about Ansari's personality (people have said he's a douche), I've never met him and his CD is hilarious, so I'm going to see whatever he's in (everything except "Parks and Recreation" that is...still not funny to me). If he'd like to invite me to hang out with him to prove he's not a douche, I'm down with that too.

2.) Marvel comics: Making movies the tight-ass way - I know that movie stars make so much more money than is fathomable by us mere mortals, and I'm not trying to say that we should feel sorry for the Richie McRichRich folks out there...but Marvel is known for straight low-ballin' their cast. They made Samuel L Jackson sign a 9 picture deal. NINE movies. Granted, that's one year of work for Sam, but for a regular actor that's like a decade. Plus, they paid him $25. That number may not be right. Point is, when Marvel first announced the short list for the role of Peggy, Captain America's girlfriend, it included Keira Knightley and Emily Blunt, two well-known actresses. E! Online now says those two are out in favor of someone whose top grossing movie didn't clear $40 million, meaning they likely lowballed the shit out of this role. So instead of people we know, we get Alice Eve.
As you can see, she's a hideous she-beast with a hunchback and leprosy. Okay, fine, she's gorgeous. What bothers me isn't that they've swapped one hottie for another, it's that Marvel seems to be paycheck casting and not actor/actress casting. If you want to pick the better actor/actress and they happen to be cheaper because they aren't famous, I admire that. If you want to go unknown, I admire that too. If you want to run down the sliding scale of fame until you find someone willing to take your money, I have a problem.

3.) Swamp Thing that Old Spice can't cure - Slashfilm has a great write-up on the path of Swamp Thing that now winds its way through Vincenzo Natali, whose film Splice is going to light shit up this summer from what I hear. I know Natali (not personally or anything) from Cube, which remains to this day one of the most surprisingly good movies I've ever seen. The director, who has long toiled off the studio grid, has made some great comments about wanting to "sell his soul" to the studio now. He also seems to be more interested in the Alan Moore version of the character, rather than the original monster-style Bernie Wrightson stuff. Upon hearing this, Alan Moore spewed out some near-pornographic exclamations and summoned the demon that lives inside his murder-beard to haunt Natali in his sleep.

4.) The only lasting element of Hot Tub Time Machine - I wanted Hot Tub Time Machine to be funnier, but it wasn't. Instead, we did get a breakout performance from Rob Corddry, who is now set to take over for Jim Carrey in a major project. Wait, what? The LA Times is reporting that Corddry will star in Butter, another 2008 Black List script that is a satire of the 2008 Iowa caucuses featuring a butter-carving competition. Corddry will play a womanizing butter-carving champ who is forced to give up his title, so his wife runs against a talented young upstart. Obviously this is Bill and Hillary versus Obama, so I'm there. This sounds brilliant. Not to mention the fact that one of my glorious top-5 ladies is in it.
Oh, Jennifer Garner...I even watched part of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past on HBO for you. That's love, people.

5.) Trailers, parked - Okay, we have some fun ones this week.

First up is Dinner for Schmucks. I know that it's not really all that original, but if you put Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell, and Zach Galifianakis in a movie together, I'm going to see it and I'm going to laugh. Also, as wrong as it sounds, I find the concept hilarious. Also, the McCartney quote/mousterpiece comment is enough to warrant its inclusion here.


Next up is a creepy one, Splice looks like my favorite types of sci-fi/horror movies. It is making an interesting point about genetic tinkering, and also looks to be a pants-shitter. I know it kind of looks and sounds like Species, but that's okay. I love it anyway.


Finally, I wish I didn't want to see this movie...but I do. The A-Team looks to be as dumb as the dumb show I loved in my youth. I'm there.


Okay, that's it for my epic junk. Go tell your friends about it.

This much I know: I will NOT be Captain America

Oh, hi there. Call me old fashioned...okay, now I have to show "The State" clip. It's short.



Hi, I'm back. Where was I? Oh, yes. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that when you make a movie that largely centers around one character, you should have a good idea of what you're looking for in the actor to play that character sooner than a few weeks before shooting. Oh, and call me old fashioned, but I believe when you make a "short list" you shouldn't ADD actors to it. You should only cut the "short list" down to one. On both of these points, Marvel could not disagree more. When it comes to Captain America, Joe Johnston (the director) said that casting needed to be complete by March 1 (uh oh), that the main star wouldn't be that well known (uh oh), and that they were "narrowing things down" (uh oh). Well, it's March 16 and we've added several high-profile actors to the mix. List one was: John Krasinksi, Scott Porter, Mike Vogel, Michael Cassidy, Patrick Fleuger, Chace Crawford, and Garret Hedlund. Then we heard that all but Krasinski were cut. Then we heard that Vogel and Hedlund WEREN'T cut but that Krasinksi WAS cut. Then we heard that Chris Evans and Wilson Bethel were added to the list. Then Ryan Phillippe was added. Now, Channing Tatum was added. I've said it before, and I'll say it again...I have no idea what a Channing Tatum is. So, as near as I can tell. The requirement to play Captain America consists of the ability to pee standing up. I am still reluctantly supporting Ryan Phillippe for this list, although now that they've widened things, I recommend considering Ryan Gosling, who is actually a good actor. The rest of the people on this ever-expanding list kind of suck or at least are totally underwhelming. Now, the second part of the news today is that they are putting out feelers for the female role of Peggy. If you're unfamiliar with the comic, Peggy is the person who is dating Steve Rogers when he becomes Captain America, and she then waves goodbye as he goes to war. Yes, her role is a rich, deep one, consisting of both crying when he says he wants to go to war and then waving when he does go to war. How can any one actress possibly live up to these standards? Clearly, what they're going to do over at Marvel is conduct some kind of exhaustive search based on talent and potential to mine the depth of character. Here are the three choices (so far):

Kiera Knightley
Alice Eve

Emily Blunt

Yes, three British women of suspect talent but inarguable hottitude are being sought to play a weepy American. I'm beginning to think this movie is being cast on some kind of dare or at the very least it's being done by drunks.

Movie Review: She's Out of My League

Here's another review, only this time I DIDN'T EVEN WRITE IT. That's how lazy I am this Monday. I impress even myself sometimes.

Channeling Apatow
Few surprises in comedy’s bargain bin
Justin Senkbile

With director Jim Field Smith’s She’s Out of My League, we’re seeing more evidence of where Judd Apatow’s brand of middlebrow sex comedy has taken mainstream movies. It’s as crude and broad as the lowest of the genre, but with a sensitivity and sweetness that would’ve been hard to imagine before The 40 Year Old Virgin. It’s by no means as good as any of the Apatow films, but League is at times just as clever and refreshing.

Lowly airport security worker Kirk (Jay Baruchel) is living under particularly difficult, confidence-smashing circumstances. His parents adore his fickle ex, Marnie (Lindsay Sloane), and her new boyfriend; his thick-skulled older brother Dylan (Kyle Bornheimer) brutalizes him like an eight-year-old; and his group of friends, although they mean well, incessantly pelt him with abuses.

So it’s quite a surprise when the successful and attractive Molly (Alice Eve) reveals her crush on Kirk. For those around him, the universe seems to have shifted to a position where nothing makes sense. Things are finally turning around for Kirk, but life still isn’t getting any easier.

Mid twenties disappointments with time-tested teenage fantasies and crotch jokes is the recipe here, and it’s one that most of us have tasted at least a few times. The jokes, although often funny, are the same ones we’ve heard before, and the characters, mainly Kirk’s group of friends, are nothing new and are just as one-dimensional as usual. League is too full of cheap, easy laughs for one to really take seriously, which it seems to want us to do. Still, there is some measure of light touch here that makes this movie undeniably charming, and not an entirely tedious trudge through the usual motions.

Most will recognize Baruchel from his small role in Knocked Up. As our leading man, he snivels his way through this picture, like some irreparably emasculated version of your average Michael Cera character. His work is nothing particularly memorable, but he deserves credit for being the punching bag for the entire audience, playing out all of our worst, most embarrassing nightmares.

She’s Out of My League is just as cheesy, dumb and sloppy as its trailers suggest. What’s surprising is the amount of emotional honesty and the thought that writers Sean Anders and John Morris might be more interested in the feelings than the farts.

Grade: C+

Just for fun, here's the girl that they want us to believe in any world gets together with Jay Baruchel.
This actually reminds me of what I think is the unspoken Apatow-theme: Unattractive loser gets to nail a hot chick who lowers her standards because he's moderately charming. Let's face it, if you've seen Knocked Up, there is NO reason Katherine Heigl would stay with Seth Rogen. She shouldn't have, really. By the end, at his best, he's only slightly less of a loser and at no point exhibited any characteristic that showed him worthy of her. Same can be said in a number of cases. I think this is based on the fact that Apatow and Adam Sandler have gotten hot chicks despite being stoners who are unattractive. They fail to realize this is because they are enormously successful. I'm guessing if you put Sandler or Apatow as manager of a Blockbuster, actresses aren't slobbering over them. Just saying. Anyway, good review, Justin.