My Dinner with A-Holes

For younger people, people younger than 45, say, I suspect all I’d have to say about Roman Polanski’s new film Carnage is that it takes place entirely within two rooms of an apartment building and the hall, and they’d stay away in droves. You kids with your short attention spans and your facetime and your f*ckable iPads, that’s an immature and close-minded reason not to see a movie. But in this case, luckily, there are also plenty of others.

Based on the play God of Carnage, by French playwright Yasmina Reza, Carnage follows two sets of parents, played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster, and Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, who meet to discuss a fight between their sons in a civilized manner. But as the day wears on, they become increasingly childish themselves! That’s… well, that’s pretty much it, really (feel free to make your own joke here about the guy creating an idealized vision of youthful innocence being Roman f*cking Polanski). It’s the kind of film that a certain sect of the older generation considers “classic drama,” that they’re going to try to sell to the rest of us, because people just don’t appreciate real stories without robots punchin’ each other anymore, gall durn it! Fair enough, but 12 Angry Men this ain’t. It’s important to make a distinction between a “scathing critique of contemporary society!” and characters obnoxiously bickering about contemporary issues in an unrealistic way.

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Iron Sky is a partially crowd-funded indie (technically, isn’t anything produced by a corporation ‘crowd-funded’?) that recently released a trailer in advance of its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Not only does it have space Nazis, it was directed by a Finnish guy, and as I think we’ve already seen from Grotesco and Creed Shreds, Scandinavians make the best parodies.

Towards the end of World War II the Nazi scientists made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity. From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.

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James Franco released the trailer for his possible web series, Undergrads, cryptically and with little fanfare on JamesFrancoTV, so it’s a little hard to tell yet just how much and how deeply we’re being dicknosed. What we do know is that there’s a trailer, which Franco introduced by saying “My new show #UNDERGRADS.”

The trailer says it plays Thursdays at 8pm (on the web, presumably), and it shows college kids drinking and getting laid, and talking about drinking and getting laid, set to montage editing and pop music. Basically, every show on MTV. But knowing James Franco, it will probably also be a proto-meta, hyper-autobiographical pseudo-meditation on the very nature of self-referentiality, invoking interrelational aestheticism and an inclusion of the viewer vis a vis the viewed in a Nicolas Bourriaudian cross examination of patriarchal subjectivity. But I mean, that’s just a guess.

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"Hurry! Back to the repetitive joke machine!"

In case The Hangover 2 left you with nagging questions like, “Why does Justin Bartha get the short end of the stick each time?” or “Were there any jokes they didn’t repeat from the first Hangover?” then you are in luck. Warner Bros. is sticking its debit card in the Todd Phillips ATM one more time, because the studio is currently in negotiations with Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis for a third installment of the Wolfpack franchise.

And it looks like the three best friends are about to get paid.

Sources close to the negotiations say Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms are asking for $15 million each (against backend) to reprise their roles, and they now are likely to get it.

That’s a big raise from 2009’s The Hangover, which was made for about $35 million and paid the headliners under $1 million each (Cooper made the most because he had the biggest name recognition at the time). When the R-rated bachelor-party comedy unexpectedly grossed $467 million worldwide, the studio found itself without talent deals for a sequel. Negotiations were heated for The Hangover Part II, released last May, with the three principals each scoring around $5 million, according to a source, plus back-end compensation that raised their haul into the mid-teens (and counting) when the movie grossed $581 million worldwide. (Via The Hollywood Reporter)

First of all, good for them. They deserve to be paid A-list money for a third installment because as you just read, The Hangover movies are cash cows. But let’s not kid ourselves, the only positive outcome of The Hangover 3 is their payday. So let me save Phillips and Co. a little time and make a few bold predictions…

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It seems a little sketchy that this story was uncovered by the “Alien Disclosure Group,” but even if you don’t believe the alien angle, at the very least the kid is a real-life mutant. Nong Youhui here lives in a village in southern China, and was born with bright blue eyes. Aside from being lucky that they weren’t green (or else Lo Pan would be all over his ass right now), Nong can apparently see in the dark, which he demonstrated by completing a test underneath a stairwell while Chinese journalists “used blankets to block out most of the light.” While Chinese journalists aren’t exactly known for strict adherence to the scientific method, this is clear evidence that the alternate future predicted by the X-Men movies is almost upon us. If I were this kid, my X-Men name would be “Peeping Tom.”

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LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (formerly Tony Vilar, as Adam Corolla is so fond of pointing out) this week signed into law an ordinance requiring porn performers to wear condoms on adult films shot within the city of Los Angeles. Obviously, this rule will be easily enforced, impossible to get around, and obeyed by all porn performers. (*shoots Peter North load of sarcasm*)

There are a couple of potential loopholes in the ordinance, however. The city ordinance does not apply to filming that occurs on certified sound stages that don’t require film permits. And porn studios, which often use homes in the Valley and backyards to film, could opt to move their shoots into L.A. County’s other 87 cities or in unincorporated areas of the county.

Shocking. The LA Times calls the bill a “landmark” and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who sponsored it, are hailing it as a huge victory. Even though, well, it doesn’t really do anything, and the problem it’s solving seems to be entirely imaginary.

The mayor’s approval was a huge victory for the L.A.-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has waged a lonely battle for years arguing to protect the health of porn performers. Porn production across the industry has been halted several times over the last decade following concerns that adult film performers have been infected with HIV. Two porn performers who were infected with HIV have since become vocal proponents of a mandatory condom policy. [LATimes]

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation forced the issue after gathering enough signatures to get the ordinance put on the June ballot. They were able to gather those signatures because of the PR push they got from an HIV case that shut down the porn industry back in August, a case mentioned in both the LA Times’ and Time‘s coverage of the new law. What neither mention is that the case in question actually turned out to be a false positive.

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