I Am Link

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--- Stroking Joe - This had been a rumor for a bit, but now it's actually a rumor that has become a real and true thing! Those are so rare nowadays! Joe Manganiello is playing the villain Deathstroke in Ben Affleck's upcoming standalone Batman movie. (Which is maybe called The Batman?) Deathstroke is a super-strong assassin, or something. He wears a dumb mask. Anyway this will be Joe's second comic book villain, after playing king of the douche-brahs Flash Thompson in Sam Raimi's third Spider-man movie.

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--- After Gravity - Alfonso Cuarón is finally making another movie! It's been three whole years since Gravity came out, so it's about damn time. This one's on a much much smaller scale, and sounds possibly autobiographical - it's a drama about a middle-class family in Mexico City in the 1970s. It'll be nice to have him back in Y tu Mama territory.
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--- Lucky In Love - The cast for Steven Soderbergh's triumphant return to movie directing (as if we ever believed he'd actually quit it for good) Lucky Logan is pretty incredible already (we'd just ogled Daniel Craig and Adam Driver on the set recently, but it also stars Channing Tatum ) but it just got a face we really enjoy looking at tossed into its mix - Bucky Barnes himself, Sebastian Stan!  He's playing a NASCAR driver which means lots of snug little jumpsuits, I'm sure. No word on if he'll re-use his naked gymnastics routine from The Bronze but we're sure hoping him and Tatum have a routine in mind for us.

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--- It Takes A Cronenberg - I've missed all of the casting news on Sarah Polley's forthcoming television series adaptation of Margaret Atwood's book Alias Grace apparently, because yesterday when I clicked on an article stating that director David Cronenberg has just joined the cast (yes as an actor, which he's done before - cough Jason X cough - but not often enough) I saw a whole bunch of other names that were treated as after-thoughts but popped my eyeballs out. Besides Mr. Existenz the series will star Sarah Gadon and Anna Paquin! In my best Canadian accent - heck yeah!
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--- School's Out - The idea of a Heathers remake should be just terrible. I should cringe, and fuck myself with a chainsaw, at the thought of it. And yet here we are and Leslye Headland, the writer-director of my beloved Bachelorette, is making it into a TV series, and not just that but the spin on the original is actually potentially awesome:

"Set in present day, the outcasts of the past have become the new Heathers. Heather McNamara, for example, is now a black lesbian; screenwriter Jason Micallef (Butter) has written Heather Duke as a male who identifies as gender-queer whose birth name is Heath; and THR compares Heather Chandler to Martha Dumptruck from the original film."

Y'all know how much I love Queer Creeps, and it sounds like this show might just go there full-throttle. There's kind of nothing I hate more than panderingly Good Gay Representation -- I want sneering Vincent Price monsters and assholes, dammit. Go for it, Leslye! Offend all sensibilities!
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--- And Speaking of TV remakes of beloved movies Peter Weir's stone-cold classic 1975 horror film Picnic at Hanging Rock (which was one of my five favorite movies from that year when I recently listed them) is being turned into a multi-part mini-series for Aussie TV. They say they want to follow the original book closer than Weir did - has anybody read it? I wonder if I should read it. Anyway this series doesn't have any director or writer or actor attached yet so I'm side-eyeing it more than I am Heathers.
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--- Stick Jesus - Jeremy Davies was phenomenal on... well, everything that Jeremy Davies has been on, basically. But I was going to say that Jeremy Davies was phenomenal on Hannibal -- remember how good he was on that? So the news that he's joined the cast of Bryan Fuller's new show American Gods is good news indeed! And not just that - he's playing Jesus. No, not Lourdes Leon's father - the other Jesus. Wowza. This show is gonna be so bonkers.
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--- Laura's My Lady - The first trailer for Certain Women, Kelly Reichardt's new movie starring Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, and Kristen Stewart, arrived this week -- click on over to The Film Experience for their take upon it. I mean if you're gonna watch a trailer for a movie that heavy-hitting actress heavy, TFE is the place to do it. I don't even need to watch the trailer though - you saw Laura Dern, I say how high motherfucker.
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--- Oh Silvio - The Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino's ten-episode series The Young Pope with Jude Law airs pretty soon in Italy (it won't air on HBO here in the US until February) but he's already set on making his next "shock the home-crowd" piece with a bio-pic about former Prime Minister and all-about cad (that's being nice) Silvio Berlusconi. The film will be titled Loro, which means "Them" in Italian. Back to The Young Pope for a second though - a trailer for that was released this week and over at The Film Experience it got the run-down, check it out.
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--- And Finally, you have all seen the stunner A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night by now, right? I should certainly hope so - I'm actually overdue for a re-watch. (Here's my review from way forever back when.) Anyway director Ana Lily Amirpour's next movie just played Venice and people seemed pretty wowed by it - it is titled The Bad Batch, and it stars amongst others Jason Momoa...

... Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Suki Waterhouse, Diego Luna, and Giovanni Ribisi, and it's a love story set during a cannibal apocalypse... which sounds like something that'd wow one! Anyway the film doesn't have a release date yet so we assume sometime in 2017, but we don't have to wait for footage - two clips have been released, including this one involving more beefcake than the eye can even begin to handle:
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