Josh Brolin is determined to be a grim dramatic darling, and a mainstream genre star.

According to Heat Vision, Brolin is teaming up with none other than Tim Burton for a new version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Brolin is actually the head man on the project; Burton isn’t committed until he sees a script.

It seems like an unusual choice of project for Brolin.  But he likes to get physical with his performances.  I was one of those who got to hear him slurping through his Jonah Hex prosthesis, and while the make-up had been a practical budgetary choice,  some of it was due to Brolin really wanting to torture himself.   I imagine Hunchback is some Lon Cheneyesque extension of that.

This could be a really interesting passion project.  Hunchback is the kind of book that I’m not sure has ever been adapted well. Most versions opt for a happy ending, for one, and rarely embrace the sheer medieval horror and prejudice of the story. (The 1956 version comes the closest.)  It could be terrifying and tragic in the right hands. Burton, if in full on Edward Scissorhands or Sweeney Todd mode, could be the right fit.

But the last time an intense Method actor decided to tackle his favorite monster story and reinvent it for a modern audience, it didn’t turn out so well.     It did win an Oscar for make-up, though, so I suppose there’s nowhere to go but up!

What is this? Every single day of the week (almost), a new Graboid, a single moment grabbed from a random movie, appears on this site for you to guess the name of the film, share with your officemates, or discuss on our message boards. Sometimes the Graboid will be very easy and sometimes it’ll be as obscure as obscure gets. So read the news, read the reviews, and enjoy a screencap each and every day for your guessing pleasure.

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THE CHICKEN & THE EGG #2 – “The Godfather” by Ben Townsend | E-Mail the author at thechickenandtheegg@hotmail.com

Have a comic that you want to submit for inclusion in The Back Page?  Shoot an e-mail to nicknunziata@gmail.com with the subject “Comic Strip” and a sample of your work!

INCOHERENT LIGHT #4 – “Staring Contest” by Piet Beerends | Click here to visit Piet’s DeviantArt Page!

Have a comic that you want to submit for inclusion in The Back Page?  Shoot an e-mail to nicknunziata@gmail.com with the subject “Comic Strip” and a sample of your work!

I think we all need at least one really nice positive thing about the entertainment business every single day of the year, including weekends. Sometimes it may be something simple, like a video that showcases something fun and sometimes it may be a movie poster that embraces the aesthetic we all want Hollywood to aspire to. Sometimes it may be a long-winded diatribe. Sometimes it’ll be from the staff and extended family of CHUD.com. Maybe even you readers can get in on it. So, take this to the bank. Every day, you will get a little bit of positivity from one column a day here. Take it with you. Maybe it’ll help you through a bad day or give folks some fun things to hunt down in their busy celluloid digesting day.

2.28.11
By Joshua Miller: Facebook Page

Entertainment Weekly

Since the entire point of this on-going column is the spirit of positivity, I must confess that – despite the fact that it is often an integral part of sites like CHUD – I hate snobby elitism in the world of art and entertainment. Having refined and evolved tastes is extremely attractive to me when it comes to the kind of people I want to be friends with, but I also think it is an unattractive quality to bitterly shit on people/things that remain in the middle of the road. For example, I thought Avatar was disappointingly mediocre, but it nonetheless bugs me when people harp on it as a “bad” film. To me, calling Avatar “bad” is at best snobby sour grapes, and at worst a revelation that the guilty party has no understanding of what goes into making a film.

Writing for CHUD it is hard sometimes not to be snobby or bitter when us writers are trying to maintain an air of comedy/entertainment when we write, as there is often nothing more fun to read than a good negative take-down. Last week I kinda shit on Entertainment Weekly. I said it was basically one step above People magazine. I feel the need to makes some amends.

Currently, I have an unhealthy relationship with Entertainment Weekly. I’ve had a subscription to the weekly mag since I was in high school. I used to love it. Live by it. It was my window into the film/TV world. But as my tastes sophisticated (slightly), and more importantly, as the internet overtook print media in the entertainment news sphere, the magazine became increasingly vapid, silly, and irrelevant seeming. But… I can’t look past the fact that it was once an important part of my life.

When I was in high school I wasn’t on the Internet. It existed, but it had not quite consumed the country as a regular part of the regular person’s life. My exposure to the behind-the-scenes world of film and television was confined solely to what I saw on shows like Entertainment Tonight, random TV specials, and the occasional cool interview my mom would clip from the paper for me. There were books, of course, but they were about older films, and often a bit above my interest level at the time. Then one day I discovered Entertainment Weekly sitting in my high school’s library and it was love at first site.

EW was the perfect gateway drug. To a young person starting from bottom, with no older mentors to act as my guide, the magazine turned me onto some great things. It was the magazine’s shameless obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer that got me to finally give what seemed like a retarded “girl show” a chance. It was their review of Mule Variations that got me curious about the album and ultimately turned me into a huge Tom Waits nerd. And more importantly, the magazine was the stepping stone that caused me to start reading “classier” and more in-depth material on film.

There is no doubt for me that my tastes have moved well past EW. In the past four years I’ve let my subscription expire twice, only to panic and get roped back in by some final offer from the magazine. It serves no purpose for me, except for bathroom reading material (in which setting it is admittedly my favorite), but I just can’t seem to quit it. Because deep down… I still love it, I guess. Every now and then they still surprise me with a great piece. Hell, last week’s issue singled out my beloved The Cinefamily as one of the nation’s 10 coolest movie theaters. For me, canceling EW is akin to trying to throw away that ratty old T-shirt you once loved but is now too terrible looking to actually wear out of the house.

I can’t help shitting on EW, yet I also can’t help feeling awkward about it – like a man ashamed of his humble beginnings. EW was my learner’s permit. And for that, I am thankful.

There’s a long history in Hollywood of shelved projects, abandoned franchise dreams, stalled careers, and entire genres that lost favor or profitability. 9 times out 10 these problems and failures are the result of a myriad of complex issues and contributing factors. Sometimes though… Sometimes you can pretty much pin everything on one film that fucked it up for everyone. Whether it’s a movie that killed a rival project, destroyed a filmmaker’s career, squashed some brilliant idea, or took the shine off of an entire genre, this CHUD List will catalog the films that were just total, unapologetic Cockblocks.

———-

Day 1 (Dinosaurs)

Day 2 (Halloween)

Day 3 (Mistress of the Seas)

Day 4 (Brandon Lee’s Career)

Day 5 (Game of Death)

Day 6 (Disney)

Day 7 (Napoleon)

———-

Day 8 (Tod Browning’s Career) 

 

 

Joshua Miller (Email • Facebook)

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THE COCK: Director Tod Browning’s career.

In 1932, Charles Albert “Tod” Browning, Jr., was white hot. After shepherding a string of Lon “Man of 1000 Faces” Chaney films to success, Browning was one of the premiere directors in the horror/thriller genres. He was Carl Laemmle Jr.’s natural choice to helm Universal’s surefire hit adaptation of the Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston’s hit stage play, Dracula. Surefire hit it was. With the freedom to craft whatever the hell he wanted as his next fright-fest, Browning set out to truly horrify his audience…

THE BLOCK: Freaks (1932)

Browning’s adaptation of Tod Robbins’ short story “Spurs,” about a conniving circus trapeze artist who marries then cuckolds the circus sideshow’s wealthy midget. Unlike the make-up covered Universal monsters, the “freaks” of Freaks where actual sideshow performers, many of whom where quite deformed. Audiences and critics were not only scared and horrified, they were revolted. The film itself was treated like a freak – panned and banned around the world, it was not just a flop, it was reviled. Browning went from white hot to absolute zero freezing over night.

How it Went Down:

Tod Browning had lived a life as bizarre and tragic as the characters in his films. While still an actor working in silent films, Browning crashed his car into a moving train, killing fellow actors Elmer Booth and George Siegmann. More relevant, as a young man he had run away from home to fulfill that ultimate early-20th-century cliche – joining the circus. It was no doubt his time spent performing in sideshows that drew him to Robbin’s short story. “Spurs” was Browning’s dream project. Shortly after the story was published, in 1923, Browning convinced MGM to purchase the rights. The project languished, as Browning was unable to convince the studio to move forward with his vision. Sure, he was delivering hits with Lon Chaney, like The Unholy Three, The Unknown, and London After Midnight, but Chaney was of course garnering all the prestige. Browning may have had the clout to get “Spurs” optioned, but he couldn’t get it made. Then Chaney died and Dracula happened.

Dracula was never Browning’s film. For one thing, he didn’t want Bela Lugosi (who starred in the stage version). Browning’s vision – whether misguided or imaginative, we’ll never know – was to have Dracula a mostly off-screen presence. But the studio just wanted an aping of the stage play, and Browning was forced into a more conventional and uninspired approach (uninspired for him). Universal reaped what they sowed here, and were not happy with Browning’s finished product. But Dracula was a monster hit (pun!) nonetheless. Browning could now finally make “Spurs” happen.

MGM’s production supervisor, Irving Thalberg, wanted Browning to make a film out of Maurice Leblanc’s detective hero, Arsène Lupin, but Browning declined. He likely knew it now or never, and he wanted to visit the circus. Thalberg consented, though was very wary of the project. Browning wanted Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow to star in the film, but Thalberg wouldn’t grant him any stars. Undeterred, Browning moved forward with his vision, casting actual sideshow “freaks.” Browning probably should have seen the storm clouds coming, as the “freaks” presence on the studio lot caused an endless tizzy. As legend has it, F. Scott Fitzgerald (while slumming in Hollywood for a paycheck, Barton Fink style), supposedly showed up at the studio commissary hung over one day, when he spotted Freaks‘ Siamese twin sisters and promptly vomited.

Once the film was complete, the true disaster set in. After an initial test screening, the audience was so violently disgusted by the film that one pregnant women threatened to sue MGM for purportedly causing her to miscarriage. The studio tried to make the film less offensive, cutting it down from 90 minutes to a threadbare 64 minutes (this cut footage is sadly all lost), but even with all the juicy moments gone, the real problem still remained: the actual freaks. There was simply no way to remove them. Freaks was box office poison at its most potent. Most audiences were never even given a chance to be disgusted by the film. Theaters simply wouldn’t show it. The film was banned in the UK for thirty years.

Browning was done. He couldn’t get shit greenlit, and this was back in the pre-television days when the studios were pumping out a heroic number of films each year. Creatively caving in, Browning attempted to resurrect his career with what seemed like an easy hit – a remake of one of his biggest Lon Chaney hits, London After Midnight (one of the more notable “lost films” of early Hollywood). But without Chaney the movie had no hook. In the original film, Chaney had played dual roles. Now the parts where split up and played by Lionel Barrymore and Béla Lugosi (whose own career was already slowly dying). Retitled Mark of the Vampire, the film did not re-ignite Browning’s career. After that Browning made only two more films, The Devil-Doll (1936) and Miracles for Sale (1939). Then he slipped into seclusion, living off his ample savings. So reclusive did Browning become that most people were unaware he was still living when he passed away in 1962 at the impressive age of 82.

Bullet Dodged, or Greatness Robbed:

Browning’s legend as a filmmaker has really gone in the shitter over the years, largely due to his most enduring hit, Dracula, which is simply not a great film. Most people consider the Spanish-language version, shot concurrently with Browning’s film on the same sets with a different cast, to be superior. Browning would have agreed. He didn’t think the film was that great either. It is probably every filmmaker’s worst nightmare to be best remembered for a film they don’t think is good.

Browning was certainly no Murnau or Griffith. He wasn’t a stylistic master or boundary-pusher of the cinematic form. He was a journeyman director. But he had a way about him, a stark style and objectively ruthless approach to content that while not necessarily ahead of its time, was uncharacteristic of the theatrical flamboyance of the period. Ironically, these traits frankly made him a poor choice for Dracula, as Universal wanted it.

But examining Freaks, if nothing else, gives hints at a cracked brilliance waiting to be set free. The film is mostly remembered because of its cast, but as a film itself it is quite effective. Cinema had never seen a scene like the notorious “Gooble gobble, gooble gobble! One of us, one of us!” dinner scene, which straddles the lines between horror and comedy with a dead-center perch that really wasn’t seen again until The Texas Chainsaw Massacre offered its own twisted family dinner. And you can’t watch the film’s rain-drenched climax without being impressed by Browning’s creepy staging abilities.

His second-to-last film, The Devil-Doll shows that Browning was a man drawn to fucking weird ideas. If Browning had kept going, there surely would have been at least one or two more genre minor classics up his sleeve.

Verdict: Greatness Robbed.

The Alternate Universe:

MGM embraces Freaks‘ controversial image, bragging about the dangers of watching the film: “You will never be the same!” “It just may drive you mad!” MGM puts Browning on a nationwide tour with the film, allowing him to channel the experience he gained from years in the circus. He warns audiences to watch the film at their own peril, and introduces them to the actors dressed at mental hospital employees, ready to drag them away after what they’ve seen. Browning becomes William Castle decades before Castle perfected the art of the promotional stunt. Freaks becomes a grassroots hit, and Browning is launched as the visionary behind it. Browning producers a few more hits before nearly imploding his career once more with another envelope-pushing banned film. After taking a few years off, Browning is given another chance and is paired with Lon Chaney Jr (himself experiencing major career fall-out) in a gimmick meant to evoke Browning’s partnership with Chaney Sr. Together the two produce a series of minor classics to rival Vincent Price’s output with American International Pictures.

Remains:

Browning sadly did not live to see the second life Freaks has taken on. Like a lot of banned, shunned, and ignored art and entertainment from the first half of the 20th-century, Freaks was rediscovered by the counter-culture movement in the 1960’s and quickly became a midnight movie mainstay in the 1970’s. Now its cultural relevance has sunk deep, well beyond the reach of the film itself, from music (The Ramones), to references in things as diverse as South Park to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Browning would surely have been surprised to see the film that butt-fucked his career selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry in 1994.

Leonardo DiCaprio has long been involved with some interesting run-off from the film, as he has been trying to get a biopic based on the life of Freaks‘ Half Boy (Johnny Eck) made for years.

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Due to a technical mishap, much of this week’s B Movie Column was left on the cutting room floor. So here it is for your reading pleasure.

First – Mike and Rene’s takes on SUPERMAN III.

Rene’s Take

“THIS SCREW? NEVER!”

“I…I CAN’T SKI!!!”

I first saw Superman III when I was in Elementary School. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Superman franchise overall. I like the second one, as well as the third one, and of course the first one is pretty good, but it’s the middle 2 films that are the ones that I really like. The third one has so much silly stuff going on in it, but I really like a lot of the silly stuff. It works.

I’ve read that Richard Pryor only did the movie for the money, but damn if he didn’t utilize his comic timing and qualities to their full potential. He dresses up in a really stupid plaid outfit to dupe a really old looking Gavan O’Herlihy (Mike and I were discussing the other day on how he actually looks younger in Death Wish 3, which was still 2 years ahead) and they get drunk to the electronic country music of Roger Miller/Giorgio Moroder. Pryor even has a HUGE foam cowboy hat.

Pryor also makes plenty of goofy noises and faces. Oh, does the man do a huge amount of goofy faces. When he first arrives in Smallville, and he bumps into Clark Kent, he has this look on his face like he’s about to have a stroke. Then of course there’s the thing even the detractors of Superman III give a thumbs up to. The “Dark Superman”.

When Superman takes hold of the tainted Kryptonite, he begins to act like an asshole. He gets drunk, sports a shadow on his face, and Gets sleazy with Robert Vaughn’s secretary. Then he gets separated from the Clark Kent persona, and they have a face off in a junkyard. This is the big sequence in the film, and they go all out. This is the point in the movie where Reeve really gets to showcase his acting talent. First he’s good Superman, then turns bad (He is quite believable at being the bad guy) then he fights himself.

They couldn’t get Gene Hackman back, but they decided to have another character like him, so they invented Robert Vaughn’s character. He is quite good as Ross, and even though he was essentially Lex Luthor, I still liked him in the role.

Superman III is definitely worth a look, and the hilarious original poster of a straight faced Superman flying with a freaked out Richard Pryor is one of the best posters ever.

Mike’s Take, or How I Discovered My Love for Superman III

I don’t want to go to jail because there are robbers and rapers and rapers who rape robbers.

Blake Snyder, a screenwriter who had his hand in such essential classics as Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Blank Check, wrote a book called Save the Cat, one of the few screenwriting advice books that’s considered above and beyond just an encyclopedia. In it, he suggests as an idea for those who are struggling with a case of writer’s block: start writing down every lame idea that comes to you, and somewhere in all of your nonsense lies something that’s an honest-to-god plausible and possibly good concept.

Superman III is one of those hogwash gusts of hot air that’s supposed to be the sort of random and horrific thing you flush down your creative toilet. In comparison to the job that had been done on the first two films, the thing is an utter joke whose sole purpose is to get a rise out of any person who steps foot into a comic book shop or tried to achieve a homemade Richard Donner director’s cut of Superman II on two VCR’s well before we actually got the real thing.

I had never seen Superman III for this very reason—the fact that it was just universally shit on and ignored as if the Museum of Modern Art had decided to run a year-long Police Academy retrospective exhibit. Having just experienced the film the other night, all I can say is that while I was probably wise to wait until I could appreciate something as stupid as this film is, I was totally wrong about my conceptions of this film. Dead. Fucking. Wrong.

The reasons this shouldn’t work are endless. It should have ended up the same way other asinine brainstorming sessions ended up—one of my favorites is in the 90’s when a live-action Curious George film with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Man in the Yellow Hat was actually a distinct possibility of happening—but as insipid as Superman’s big threat being moronic con artist Richard Pryor trying to assist Robert Vaughn in his world-domination plot, the film is a masterpiece in being inept and not realizing at all what the fuck you’re doing. Watching the franchise burn up all its energy in 125 minutes with its lazy blue screen effects, ZAZ-esque slapstick comedy and sight gags, and unwanted comedic material somehow works because it’s too hilariously staged to be bad and too ludicrous to be good.

Naturally, Richard Pryor is the star of the show here. Gus Gorman is the sort of scoundrel that thrives on Pryor’s comedic sensibilities. He’s sucked the teat of unemployment completely dry, and then, by either a miracle or a case of Hollywood coincidence, he finds redemption in a computer-programming job which allows him to discover his true calling as a white-collar criminal laureate who gets in way over his head. Essentially, Pryor’s performance here is a send-up of his similar and disdainfully underrated turn (might I add: should have been nominated for an Oscar and won) as a fed-up factory drone in Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, and it’s often brutally funny. Seriously, when Pryor dons an outlandish plaid suit, Colonel Sanders tie, and a massive foam cowboy hat akin to the one Norm Macdonald wore as Burt Reynolds in one of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! skits, then gets Gavan O’Herlihy drunk so he can continue throwing the world into financial anarchy, is a laugh-out-loud scene that I’ll be more than happy to argue is funny without having a lick of irony. Likewise, the part where Gorman skis down the skyscraper in a moment that may have been unceremoniously lifted many years later in Ghost Rider.

Sadly, however, Gorman ended up in the wrong film. If he got his own vehicle without anything to do with Superman and it hit earlier than 1983, when Trading Places was making a killing, the thing might have been a genre benchmark. The reason why Pryor catches slack for his role here is twofold: one, he’s a likable and intriguing enough character to demand himself as the protagonist, and secondly, Gorman is not someone who was remotely near the Superman mythology. Anyone who had begrudgingly dealt with Gene Hackman’s unwillingness to shave his head had no tolerance for ol’ Supes going up against a buffoonish fish out of water played by a guy who was *too* funny for a source material that possesses a strong sense of lightheartedness.

Pryor isn’t the only good thing. The film’s plot allows for Christopher Reeve to have some fun as both the real Superman and Evil Superman, a half-assed Bizarro (again, in terms of the source) who drinks, smokes, doesn’t shave, and doesn’t give a fuck. Case in point: Evil Superman has the same code of ethics as Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights in that he’s just an asshole who gets his kicks by simply fucking with people’s heads and getting all his narcissistic, sociopathic catharsis from that. Evil Superman’s most heinous act is straightening out the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is utterly hysterical and leads in to Superman exorcising this demon of apathy in a mind-numbing climax involving robot people and a ton of crazy shit flying around.

Evil Superman is the personification of Superman III—it doesn’t give a flying fuck about appeasement or equaling the first two films in any way. The Salkinds were assholes, and Margot Kidder bailed out almost entirely for their dickery, but in the end, we got the rare guilty pleasure that actually works when there’s a hundred reasons it shouldn’t.

Much like Nick Pulovski, right now, I can’t think of one.

The fact we chose Superman III sent Rene on a tangent on bad sequels…

But he likes them.

RENE: EVEN BAD SEQUELS HAVE SOMETHING GOOD IN THEM

Sequels almost always get a really bad rap. Sequels are also usually looked upon as inferior to the first entry. There are rare exceptions. The biggest being The Godfather: Part II, Star Trek II, Evil Dead II, Aliens.

Then there’s films like Alien3 that get extra footage to flesh out the film, and become solid sequels.

I’m no stranger to liking sequels. I’m one of the biggest champions of Robocop 2, and probably the only one who says he likes Robocop 3.

This week’s B-Movie Column entry is one movie in particular that most dismiss, and they shouldn’t. It’s a sequel that has lots of great comedy in it. In this day and age, where every superhero needs to be “Nolanized” ie. Darker and more realistic, it’s nice to go back a couple of decades, and see that a Superhero movie could be silly.

The movies that usually get sequels are more often than not, horror movies. It’s because horror movies can be like a floozy. Cheap and fast. Recently, the Saw franchise reached 7 entries. Although because of the diminishing returns, they decided against doing the proposed 8^th entry, and stopped with the 7^th one. It may eventually be rebooted, like most franchises. Some would say the entire franchise is worthless.

I caught every entry of the series, most on video, but several, including the last one, in the theater. The traps are arguably the reason anyone goes to see these things. Even if they hate the “plots” of these movies, that even I will say got ludicrous as they went along (although part VI was a nice jab at the healthcare industry)

The Friday The 13^th films are infamous for sending Jason out of the woods, and into New  York (for about 20 minutes) and then into space. The gimmicks of those films were enough to get me to see them. I’ll even cop to seeing the space one, Jason X in the theater. It was laughable to say the least.

The Nightmare On Elm Street films are a seesawing set of movies. Everyone loves the first one, but a lot hate the follow up. Some insane folks like myself like the second one for still being an atmospheric horror movie that still had a scary Freddy Krueger. Er, and some other more “Coloful” elements in it. Then it went from teens fighting Freddy in their dreams, to him wanting to be reborn, to him being “killed” to finally wreaking havoc in the real world.

There’s tons of movie out there with sequels that are “bad”, but I’ve always been one to give them a chance. Even if they turn out to be like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Sequels started out as cheap knock offs of the first entry just so the company/producers could line their pockets with more money. Then filmmakers started to get the idea that sequels could be as good as the first entry, and sometimes even better. Even though sometimes those flimmakers don’t realize their dreams of making a superior sequel, the films usually still end up with some kind of sparkle of what could have been, and is usually enough to give the movie a look, and can be enough to have something good, in a bad sequel.

As far as we know, he’s not going to be hunting mutants, but Sentinel Prime has recently been revealed on the cover of the upcoming Empire Magazine, with scans provided via TFW2005.  The character is described as “a big brother and mentor to Optimus Prime.”  There’s reportedly also a new Decepticon named Dreadbox, who gets around as a Ferrari.  There are some spoilers that are provided by a TFW2005 board member that you can check out by clicking the link.  You can also click the images below to enlarge.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon comes out on July 1st.

Bleeding Cool got some babelfished Franco “Django” Nero quotes from movieplayer.it It seems Nero dishes solid on his next project and that appears to be a spaghetti Western – though one not necessarily made in Italy. What this next project is was not entirely made clear, but it will supposedly involve Keith Carradine, Treat Williams, and Quentin Tarantino. This has led to more information leaking and leaking.

From this other sites extrapolated that Tarantino’s next will be a western. Jeremy Smith at AICN took it a step further and confirmed that Tarantino’s next is a Spaghetti Western. What is known is that Tarantino is in working mode, and that many of the projects he’s mentioned over the years (like the Vega brothers or Kill Bill Volume 3) he would need a time machine to make. Tarantino likes dabbling in genres, and the Western is something that could be both exciting and new to him – perhaps after Inglourious Basterds doing period pictures is where he’s at  – and it does eliminate some of the most banal criticisms leveled against him (his pop culturisms).

Jeremy/Beaks also confirmed one cast member: Christoph Waltz. Tarantino always threatened that he would make a movie with each of his four leads from Pulp Fiction, with Jackie Brown being Samuel L. Jackson’s film, and Kill Bill Uma Thurman’s, but I believe Bruce Willis was supposed to be attached to Basterds at some point, and that didn’t come to pass. That doesn’t mean we won’t likely see some returning cast members from his earlier work, but whatever sense of Tarantino’s troupe has mutated over the years (wither, Tim Roth?)  But that doesn’t mean a great role or cameo wasn’t written for – say – John Travolta, Bruce Willis or Samuel L. Jackson. Or, for that matter, Eli Roth.

If this is gearing up, it will could be a situation like Basterds where everything came into play shortly after he delivered the script. Tarantino had a dithering period between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, but the last couple have come at a steady clip. And after Basterds – if he can make this film at a price – I’m sure he’ll be left alone and given final cut. It’s hard to know the Weinstein’s involvement at this stage (his normal home), though after The King’s Speech heavy Oscaring last night they may very well be back. More as it comes in.

SpiderMedia has two new character posters for Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming X-Men: First Class.  In them, we get some liquid portent of who James McAvoy’s and Michael Fassbender’s characters of Charles and Erik will become in thefuture.  The poster taglines go hand in hand with the previously released synopsis for the film:

Before Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time. Before they were archenemies, they were closest of friends, working together, with other Mutants (some familiar, some new), to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known. In the process, a rift between them opened, which began the eternal war between Magneto’s Brotherhood and Professor X’s X-Men.

Other stars include Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, January Jones as Emma Frost / White Queen, Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert, Nicholas Hoult as Dr. Henry “Hank” McCoy / Beast, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven Darkholme / Mystique, Morgan Lily as a young Raven Darkholme, Oliver Platt as The Man in Black, Ray Wise as the Secretary of State, Zoë Kravitz as Angel Salvadore, Caleb Landry Jones as Sean Cassidy / Banshee, Lucas Till as Alex Summers / Havok, Edi Gathegi as Armando Muñoz / Darwin, Jason Flemyng as Azazel, Álex González as Janos Quested / Riptide, Andy Callaghan as a member of the Hellfire Club, Tony Rich as Thomas.  X-Men: First Class opens on June 3rd.

Thanks to Brian as always for the tip.