if you love movies, at least one of these casts should cause you to jizz in your pants.

I have only the slightest ideas what the upcoming films THE EXPENDABLES and MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? are about, but plot seems entirely besides the point. All that matters is this question: which film are you more pants-jizzingly excited to see based purely on the cast and talent behind it?

THE EXPENDABLES, written and directed by Sylvester Stallone, starring a ridiculously ripped Stallone*, Jason Statham, Forrest Whittaker, Sir Ben Kingsley, Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, and Dolph Lundgren (the last two of whom will be sharing a fight scene). With a possible cameo by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing himself, hopefully still kicking ass.

Or...

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? Directed by Werner Herzog, starring Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny, Michael Pena, Brad Dourif, Bill Cobbs, Udo Kier and Grace Zabriskie. Oh, and it's being produced by David Lynch.

Don't make me chooooooooose, I already love you both!


*Mom refuses to believe that's not Photoshopped. But then again, she also refuses to believe that's Ricardo Montalban's real chest in STAR TREK II. Old people can't be ripped!

Zack Snyder interview... and is the end of WATCHMEN (mostly) faithful after all?

I'm packing for tomorrow's bus journey to NYC, where I shall be performing for hippies in exchange for crash space. But before I go, I had to post this video of WATCHMEN director Zack Snyder, interviewed by my favorite joyless bastard, Devin* from CHUD.com:

Zack Snyder Interview from devincf on Vimeo.

The main reason I thought this noteworthy is Snyder's description of what the original, more-Hollywood style WATCHMEN script was like... in which he includes something which I already thought was *in* the final movie. Namely, the thing I spoiled in my whole "I've read the ending of WATCHMEN" post back in October. I'd heard reports that had corroborated that this was the case for the final movie.

So... does that mean the ending is actually faithful now? I mean, give or take the squid (which may, it seems, actually still be in there in some mysterious capacity!). I cared less about that than I did the bloody added fight scene between two characters, ending with a certain character's death. So that's gone now? We're back to the real, complex ending?

If what I read wasn't the final draft, it was certainly close to it, because it didn't match up with any of Snyder's other descriptions for the old draft (it being PG-13, sequel-able, modern day, etc.). Here's hoping I was mislead!

So far, buzz on WATCHMEN from people who've actually seen it has been uniformly blown-away. The next few weeks will be extremely interesting, for those extremely interested in such things.



*In another perfect example of my love-hate relationship with Devin, I've been resisting the urge to waste an hour writing up a thoughtful and pointless rebuttal to his "Superheroes are very, very bad, they're like 50 year old hookers chainsmoking on the corner: used up, their best days behind them, appealing only to the most debased, most awful people, and I welcome the death of superhero comics with open arms" essay. Really, there's just no point.

Ultimately, I do agree with him on one point, though: I very much hope DC and Marvel lose their strangehold on comics (although how much of it do they really have these days compared to the old days?) and that sequential art becomes a much richer field. I look forward to the day when there's as much variety of form, style, and content in comics as there is in film. Superheroes included.