Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Nice and succinct, this one! That's the punchline, of course -- we have literally just watched the long drawn out stalking of a main character by (what else) a merman and we think we've got a moment to breath but nope -- ceiling tentacles!

"Don't look at me!"

Poor Amy Acker. Anyway you might think I am using this death scene today because of that "Top 21 Horror Movies of the New Century" I keep yapping about but nope, we're doing this death scene today because it's the 125th anniversary of the birth of H.P. Lovecraft today, and where would tentacles be without HP Lovecraft? No place and nowhere, that's where! (art via)

Hit the jump for links to the Previous Ways Not To Die

Good Morning, World

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Let's get the obvious out of the way: yes 

that's Patrick Wilson, and yes, he's in his underwear.

There is a brief (ha brief) shot in his latest movie Let's Kill Ward's Wife that shoots him from, well, if not his best angle, my favorite angle of his anyway. The movie's got that going for it!

Anyway I assume if you guys know my tastes in movies by now then you know it's hard to offend me - I have suckled upon the teat of John Waters and tasted the milk of filth and it is my sustenance.

But sometimes... sometimes a movie just doesn't feel like it's got a handle on itself, and when you're aiming for something as pitch-black as LKWW and you miss the mark... it's a big fucking miss. It's the kind of "miss" that makes you distrust the good feelings you've previously had for the people involved in the project - especially when the project is an eensy labor of love amongst a group of real-life friends like Let's Kill Ward's Wife is. It's just all incredibly ill-advised. Let's Pretend This Movie Didn't Happen is a better title. Besides the Patrick Wilson in his underwear part of course - that'll we'll stare at some more after the jump. And then we'll pretend the movie doesn't exist.

Put On Your Long Underwear, Patrick Wilson

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Did you know that Patrick Wilson is the brother-in-law of Scott Foley? I did not know this. Patrick's married to the actress Dagmara Dominczyk of course (we've appreciated her PW-stuffed Twitter feed many a time), and apparently Scott's married to her sister. I wanna go to the barbeques at their house! 

Anyway I learned this in this interview with Scott Foley, who's written and directed a movie called Let's Kill Ward's Wife, which stars a bunch of his friends... meaning people like Patrick and all the Sisters Dominczyk and Amy Acker! The movie sounds like the blackest of black comedies too, so this is clearly up my alley. It's out on VOD right now. (Here's the trailer for it.)

In Other Patrick Wilson News (we don't have nearly enough days where there's multiple PW stories, that's for sure) he's just joined the cast of the second season of Fargo! Kick ass! Although we don't entirely know the plot yet I'm guessing he's basically the male lead too, since he's playing the role of Young Keith Carradine, aka the father of Molly, the detective from the first season so wonderfully played by Allison Tollman. Also joining the cast today is Ted Danson, Nick Offerman, and the wonderful Jean Smart. A few weeks back you'll recall we heard that Kirsten Dunst had joined the show; I'm guessing she's basically the Martin Freeman character, aka the person who blunders their way into dangerous circumstances way out of their control. What a cast!

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I Am Link

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--- Tom's Audition - This is "last week news" so it's basically DOA I know but I cannot not address it - none other than Tom Hardy is going to star in Takashi Miike's English language debut! It's called The Outsider and Tom will play a grown-up version of Pony Boy... wait that's not right... it's about a GI who stays in Japan post WWII and becomes a member of the yakuza. I will watch the shit out of that. Twitch points out that they're both very busy so this might take a bit - I counter that Takashi Miike made five movies while you were reading this post, so don't doubt that man.

--- Hail The Hail - Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of Radiohead's album Hail to the Thief, and NME wrote and article in its defense, calling it an "underrated masterpiece." I loved it at the time but it probably is the one I go back to the least, these days. It's not that I dislike any of it - I am mentally incapable of disliking anything that comes out of Thom Yorke's mouth. Anyway I will give it another solid listen right soon.

--- Dr. Coop - It's probably best that this rumor came over the weekend lest I made a fool out of myself for no reason - it was rumored that there were three chaps up for the role of Dr. Who next, and one of them was the one and only Dominic Cooper. (thx Mac) I wasn't sure how I felt about it honestly - more Dom in anything is always a good thing! But I have never watched a single solitary speck of Dr. Who and I was terribly intimidated about jumping into a whole new world of geekery. I mean isn't enough of my brain taken up with Westerosi family trees? Do I need to comprehend the Daleks now too? Anyway today the rumor has shifted - now the tabloids are saying that Rory Kinnear, an actor whose face you'll recognize from stuff like Skyfall, is probably getting the part. Anyway phew, I am relieved. Dr. Who wasn't going to showcase Dom's best asset anyway.

--- Wing Vs Web - Apparently the folks making the Spider-Man movies learned nothing from Sam Raimi's third film and are all set to have about fifty different villains show up to fight Andrew and his amazing elastic buns - Colm Feore's character is probably the Vulture, they say.

--- With Whedon - I was there and it was a delight so I say go ahead and listen to the entire thirty-minute conversation that Joss Whedon had here in NYC at Lincoln Center the other week. What, you have something better to do? Did we all go see Much Ado About Nothing this weekend? And while you're at it here's a 90 minute convo with Pedro Almodovar also at FSLC, about his new flick. I wasn't there for this one, sadly.

--- Lady Beatrice Delights - Filing this away for lunchtime reading - here's an interview with our best geek girlfriend Amy Acker on Joss and Much Ado and all that jazz. She's best in show, for sure.

--- Sir Yes Sir - Josh Duhamel and Lucas Till starring together in an army movie? Yes! Okay it sounds like it's more about PTSD which is decidedly unsexy, alas. Hey but maybe they'l counsel each other with back rubs and soaks in the hot tub and lots and lots of lingering fellatio. A boy can and will dream.

--- Roman's Instinct - Two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz (that is a crazy thing to say) is re-teaming with Roman Polanski (they made Carnage together) for True Crime, about an author whose latest book about murder is eerily similar to a cold case. So it's basically Basic Instinct, with mothballs. Waltz is playing the Michael Douglas, not the Sharon Stone unfortunately. I'd kill for his beaver flash.

--- Di Ver Huh - I keep hearing about this Divergent thing and I literally have no idea what it is, somebody please school me in the comments, I'm feeling lazy about looking it up. There's an image of Downton corpse and pretty young thing Theo James in it, whatever it is. (via)

--- Beat Off - Kill Your Darlings, the movie about the Beats and murder most foul, not to mention Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan getting all frisky, is set to come out on October 18th!

I Love Nothing In The World...

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... so well as Whedon -- is that not strange? It always seems to take a minute, when that Shakespearean dialogue starts sputtering forth, to adjust to the dusty language - the indelible hithers and thithers of it all - and with Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing there's maybe an added note of frisson on board, seeing a who's who of the Buffyverse stomping around a wine country villa tickling Bill's ivory tongue. Fred and Wesley are being so mean to each other! And I have no idea what they are saying! Slowly but surely your ears adapt - I think it was around the time that Clark Gregg showed up, waggling his tongue in a delightfully goofball (at least early on before all the woe is everything's) performance as Elder Statesman slash Daddy Dearest Leonidas, that Joss' take on the material began to feel fruitful, and from there it only snowballed. 

It never quite loses the sensation of being A Very Special Episode Of A Joss Whedon Television Show From Another Dimension - the budget shows - but that's a big part of its charm. It feels like you're at one of those Merry Murder Parties where the guests are suddenly acting out their scenes right around you, only at this gathering they're a bunch of people who had a scene or two on Dollhouse back in the day. (Hey there, Reed Diamond.)

If I'm going to single out anybody for Best in Show I'm going to single out the person Joss has proven his camera and pen to be in love with time and again, and for good reason - Amy Acker absolutely wows as Beatrice; she can do a pratfall with the grace of a perfectly timed gangly disgrace, and her "Oh God, that I were a man!" speech pretty much tears the roof off. Give this woman more work, ye gods of the acting profession! But the delight performance-wise is sprinkled evenly over the whole delightful comic-tragic souffle - Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk make sturdy wit out of their huffing and puffing dimwittedness, Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz brew believable love and heartbreak out of the couple that rends marriage and death asunder, and Sean Maher's sinisterly scored asides, a ridiculous ballet of shadows and foggy sighs, is as funny and pointlessly mean as it needs to be. Really the film just works, in its incorrigibly modest way, so much that this being a one-off, a one-time Whedon-Shakespeare co-production, would be cruel and inhuman - I must now insist that the entirety of Shakespeare's plays, from Romeo to King John, get the Nothing treatment.

Oh and yes as that picture attests Joss Whedon was there at the screening last night, and he was about as Joss Whedony as you expect him to be. He knows how to vibe on a crowd of people there to hang on his every word, and hang we did. I considered taping the thing or taking extensive mental notes and then I realized that the internet lives and breathes his every word and somebody else would do the work for me - click on over here for just one of the many examples I've seen today that proved my laziness more than right. Huzzah laziness!

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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... snuggling with Amy and Fran.

Such is the power of my love for Amy Acker that she's able to invade what's normally a moment for sexual innuendo - while wearing pink pajamas no less! 

I'm especially feeling my love for these two after seeing Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing last night - I'll review that properly in a bit but I wanted to take a moment outside of the review proper to zoom in on one thing...

... specifically that Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing serves as an excellent reminder that Fran Kranz has an astonishing body underneath the nerd slash stoner schtick he always gets saddled with. This body has not been documented enough! Thankfully Joss gives him a lingering out-of-the-pool toweling off scene in Much Ado, which you best believe I will cap as soon as possible. For now, hit the jump to see some other most worthwhile shots...

Much Ado About Much Ado

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Well there's the trailer for Joss Whedon's take on Ol' Bill Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, starring the cast every Whedonite dreams of -Wesley and Fred and Captain Tightpants and Agent Coulson and Topher and Andrew and Dr. Simon Tam, oh my. It's out in mid June, although I know some of you people heading to SXSW will be seeing it much sooner, and to you I say I HATE YOU ALL.

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Pics of the Day

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The Playlist shares four new pictures from Joss Whedon's upcoming Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing, which he shot in his own home with much of his usual troupe of actorly delights, and here are two. Up top there's Captain Tightpants looming large over questionably asexual Andrew, and here's the bad Watcher Wesley meeting and greeting his lost love turned blue god Winifred. I want this movie inside of me.

Much More Ado About Whedon

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Damn I wish I'd known that CBS Sunday Morning was doing a piece on Joss Whedon yesterday! I totally would have watched it. Well I suppose that's what the internet's for - catching us up on shit we missed. And porn. Anyway here's the piece (via) and it's got the first footage from his stocked up with Whedon-regulars Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing that anybody not named Joss Whedon and/or who's not starring in it and/or who's not working on it that the world has seen! (I really should rewrite that sentence to make it somewhat coherent but you get the gist.)

In Joss-related news, has anybody seen this fantastic right-up-our-alley promotional art-work by a person called Fro (there should be a movie called A Person Called Fro, and it should star Pam Grier) for The Cabin in the Woods? Everybody loves charts, and there's a Ways Not To Die shout-out, kind of! (click to embiggen)

Goin' To The Cabin & We're Gonna Get Married

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(Some spoilers ahead) I don't think I could have been happier with The Cabin in the Woods if it had ended with a complimentary handjob from Chris Hemsworth upon exiting the theater. Alright, that's an overstatement... but not as much as it could be, since I felt as good as hand-jobbed by the movie itself! (I really want that to make it onto a poster. "As good as a handjob!" says My New Plaid Pants!) I literally giggled my way through the entire weekend after seeing it, my brain working back through all the happy spots Drew & Joss & Co. took us. Unicorns! Japanese girls with frog spirits! A giant tentacle sweeping away Amy Acker in an instant, practically with a "Yoink!" sound effect! Oh truest bliss, I have found thee.

Could I possibly be fair and balanced talking about this movie when it was created in a lab by awesome scientists (that is, scientists of awesomeness) out of everything I love most to be The Perfect Movie For Me? I cannot. This was the best time I've had in a movie theater in I don't know how long, I guess since Drag Me To Hell, another movie that was so finely attuned to precisely my crazy-person wavelength that it's impossible for me to be rational. Only The Cabin in the Woods even more so, because not only did it give me a fully satisfying horror movie with characters that I cared about (I've heard people complain otherwise, but I do not agree), but it gave me a smart reassessment and deconstruction of that same thing at the same time. It was everything to every-me! And then the movie just slammed its halves together into the funniest bunch of mayhem this side of Blazing Saddles. When I saw the monster boxes I couldn't even dare to dream that they'd all be opening... but they did! They did! And all was good.

I'm having a hard time sitting in my chair right now knowing I could walk out the door, cross a few blocks, and see The Cabin in the Woods again right now. This is a movie I know I'll be finding dozens of things to stare at, ponder, and giggle at anew with each and every viewing. There's layer upon layer at work here - we the audience are the Elder Gods demanding a fresh blood sacrifice! Mermen are slimy! - and never in a pedantic tiresome way. It's done with tons of love, and intelligence, and wit, and bear-traps. What more could I have asked for? I mean besides that handjob from Chris Hemsworth.

Pics of the Day

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I love this - Joss Whedon being interviewed by a fifteen year old girl about Shakespeare and high school and mixing his protein shake with chardonnay. There's also three new pictures from his Much Ado About Nothing movie, two of which you can see here. Click over for the other one that involves our beloved Dollhouse vet Fran Kranz! In related news oh I've missed Amy Acker. I can't wait to see her in this.

I Am Link

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--- Much Ado About Something - If I hadn't had to spend half my afternoon in the doctor's office yesterday because of these damn back problems I definitely would've had more to say about the news that Joss Whedon apparently directed a version of Much Ado About Nothing in his spare time starring a roster of Whedonverse actors like Amy Acker and Sean Maher, but as is, this'll have to do for now. I'm so far behind and I'm on a lot of painkillers, dudes. EW has some pictures already and an interview with some of the cast and Joss himself. This is crazy. Crazy!

--- Speaking of Joss related things, here's a video of the entire Avengers Q&A from New York Comic Con that I told you about in my report.

--- White Flagg - Ben Affleck might end up directing the new big version of Stephen King's The Stand, which seems like an odd choice to me. I guess the studio wants him, but he wants to make a Whitey Bulger movie, so who knows. Who knows! I think Jennifer Garner could make a good Frannie, maybe? Or a great Mother Abagail.

--- Pick A Boo - Paracinema offers up some horror movies that fell through the cracks - here's part one and here's part two - and they're terrific picks all of them that'll get you through Halloween smartly.

--- Bad Naked People - You should only read this story if you've seen Shame already since it lists off a bunch of spoilers whil talking about why it got the NC-17 rating, but it's an interesting take on how the studio plans to sell the prohibitive film despite the rating limiting the way they can.

--- Hunka Burning - Eric Bana is going to play Elvis? That's not a sentence I ever really envisioned writing. I mean physically I can see him pull it off I guess, but I'm most curious about the voice. It's for a movie about him and Richard Nixon, with Danny Huston playing Nixon, and it's going to be directed by Cary Elwes of all people. This is a strange little thing.

--- Old Girl - I guess Rooney Mara's passed on the female lead in Spike Lee's remake of Oldboy. She's probably going to be awfully busy making Dragon Tattoo movies for awhile, isn't she? And there's only so much abuse one person can enact. She'll want to spend her down-time nuzzling puppies.

--- Women Are From Venus - io9 has some pictures of a trashy-looking Scarlett Johansson on the set of her new movie which sounds like a new entry in the Species series, and all of this sounds so awesome to me I can hardly take it!

--- And finally here's the coolest thing I'm gonna read today - my friend Sean annotated the books in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series! It's for a new iPad app and it sounds delicious. Now I just need an iPad, dammit. I'm stealing your iPad, boyfriend!

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The Fran Kranz Can

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The other week we heard from Amy Acker that the Whedon-scipted Goddard-directed and mother-approved movie The Cabin in the Woods - out in just a measly 276 days! - was "a creature feature" stuffed to the gills with monsters and what-nots, whee!

Well another Dollhouse vixen who's in Cabin has just opened up their yammer and lets secrets come tumbling forth... Fran Kranz, aka Topher, had some shit to share at SciFiWire:

"It's got a lot of different scary things... How many different monsters are out there in the woods?

... All I know is that at one point I read somewhere that Joss said it was the horror film to end all horror films. I like that. I think that puts it best. Those are high expectations, but it's pretty out there. It goes for it. It really goes for it, so if it's successful, then I think people will have trouble following in his footsteps.

... Kranz added that The Cabin in the Woods has two different components: There are the kids in the cabin, but also a group of adults (Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford and Acker) in a separate subplot.

"It was like two totally different movies," Kranz said. "The way it was shot or just the scheduling of the filming, I was sort of around. There was about a couple months with all the kids, and then there was about a month or so with the adults. I had a little extra to do, so I was in Vancouver while they were doing that. If you went on set, it was like a totally different movie. It had a whole different feel to it."

The film is complete, and MGM is converting the movie into 3-D. "I know people that have seen it, and it's always a very good response," Kranz said. "I know that they've finished it. I know that they locked picture. I got an e-mail from Drew recently. Everyone's very excited about it. I hear really good things. The script was so cool that it'd be hard to mess up."

And because Topher grew on us all like an appealing fungus as Dollhouse ambled along and by the end we all loved him, here he is in his boxers and a bathtub.

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Quote of the Day

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All that we've known for ages about the Joss Whedon scripted, Drew Goddard directed flick The Cabin in the Woods was... it's about a cabin in the woods. Basically. That's it's a riff on the Evil Dead-ish story of a bunch of people going to (drum-roll please) a motherfucking cabin in the motherfucking woods. And supposedly, since it's a horror movie, shit goes wrong.

But Amy Acker - who is in the film, which is something I'd forgotten, seeing as how it's been forever since we've been given anything juicy on the movie and it's not even out until January 14th, 2011, ugh - went and opened her big yap. Hooray! Via SciFiWire:

"Co-star Amy Acker (Dollhouse) let slip a clue at WonderCon in San Francisco over the weekend.

... Cabin in the Woods is a creature feature. "There's a lot of scary monsters," Acker said in a group interview while promoting the upcoming ABC TV series Happy Town. "It's a scary movie."

The film is officially finished, Acker said: Not the 3-D coversion, but the "picture locked" edit. "I got an e-mail yesterday that it was finished," Acker said. "The cut is finished, so they've got it all, well, 'in the can' I guess is what the terminology was."

She hasn't seen it yet, but her Happy Town bosses have. "These guys are all friends with Drew from Alias [in which Acker also had a role], and they saw it and said that it was awesome," she said. "So that's good."

Is this movie really such a mystery, though? I mean, the title is The Cabin in the Woods. "It is about a cabin in the woods," Acker confirmed. "You've figured it out. Yeah, it's about a cabin in the woods. It does take from the sort of formula of the horror movie of this group of young kids who go away to a cabin in the woods for the weekend, and everything that happens and what you think is supposed to happen."

Ugh 3D conversion.
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Last Night I Finally Got Around...

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... to seeing the last aired episode of Dollhouse,
in case anybody gots anything to say about it.

How much did it feel like a final episode though? A friend of mine who I talked to about the episode before I watched it expressed surprise that there was another episode coming and now, after having watched it myself, I understand what she meant. But I see the need to address the Epitaph future, which is where we're headed, obviously. I gotta go watch Epitaph One this week to refresh my brain.


As for this past episode, I spent 50% of the episode screaming that Amy Acker should be a star and how incredible she is, and the other 50% screaming that Enver is God (the triumphant return of his Topher impression!). So the usual. Oh and another 50% drooling over Olivia's every withering glance, naturally.

Y'all?
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Thinking Dollhouse Thoughts

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Hey you! Yeah, you! If you head over to Low Resolution, you can witness a conversation that took place earlier today between Joe and myself regarding the last episode of Dollhouse. The one where some crazy ass shit happened. Spoilers ho.
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Holy...

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... shit.
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Two Times The Dollhouse Tonight...

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... I'd say that calls for six times the Enver, wouldn't y'all?

Yup, tonight's the first night that FOX starts burning off these last remaining episodes of Joss Whedon's show about mind-erased sluts and the assholes who love them. AICN has the run-down of all the episodes that're left including the dates they'll air (beware spoilers, obviously). After reading that lengthy interview with Whedon yesterday I do have high hopes for the show's finale and a less bitter taste in my mouth over it ending. He seems ready to move on and I am ready to see what he'll bring next. And hopefully Enver and Olivia and Dichen specifically will hang around in his 'Verse. Next show should star Amy Acker, yo.
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