Thank you sir, may I have another…

Jason Statham (with nary a stick-bug in sight) was in London tonight, probably on a break from filming Hummingbird just up the road, at the BFI IMAX for the European premiere of Boaz Yakin’s Safe.

Looking resplendent in a grey suit, eschewing a tie and leaving his Hollywood hipster shades in place, The Stath and his manly-muscled head greeted fans and signed autographs on the red carpet and didn’t look miserable doing it.

Safe is already open here in the US. The movie, by the way, actually lives up to the hype. It’s a cut above your usual mayhem filled, martial-arts and bullets Statham actioner. The Stath gets to be both all-Stathy and vulnerable too, and he’s great with Catherine Chan who plays Mei. “It’s good business.”  The film opens in the UK on Friday May 4. (They have all seen The Avengers already. Europe has to have something to watch this weekend!)

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Cheerful Weather for a Wedding screened at Tribeca last week to weak reviews. I kinda don’t care. This is right up my alley and I plan to see if it I can find it.

The film stars Felicty Jones (Like Crazy and the currently filming The Invisible Woman for Ralph Fiennes) as Dolly Thatcham, a young woman in England between the wars who is about to make a mistake and knows it.

“England, 1932. Today is the wedding day of Dolly Thatcham, and her family is arriving at the manor house with all the cheerfulness, chaos and grievances that bubble to the surface at such gatherings. Trouble soon appears in the shape of Joseph, Dolly’s lover from the previous summer, who throws her feelings into turmoil. Dolly’s mother will not allow her carefully laid plans for her daughter’s future to be threatened, and as the clock ticks, the bride can’t decide whether to run away with Joseph or start a new life in Argentina with her husband-to-be.”

Lovely costumes, English country houses, droll Brit humor delivered with accents…what's not to like?

A new clip from the film has now gone online, courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival’s website:

Clip 2

Written and directed by Donald Rice, making his feature film debut, the film also stars Luke Treadaway, Elizabeth McGovern, Mackenzie Crook, Zoe Tapper, Fenella Woolgar and Ellie Kendrick. There are no release dates as yet. I’m sure the UK will get it at some point, not so sure about the US. Hopefully we’ll at least get VOD.

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This is your first look at Emily Blunt in Rian Johnson’s Looper. Not often do we see the genteel Ms. Blunt doing anything as boorish and barbarian as wielding a shotgun (wearing a flannel shirt no less).

We also have a couple of new looks at Joseph Gordon-Levitt. From what he told us in one of last week’s teasers, it took more than three hours in a makeup chair every morning to get Gordon-Levitt to resemble a younger version of Bruce Willis. Kinda creepy.

Time travel will be invented, but it will be illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they send their target 30 years into the past, where a “looper”—a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)—is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good. . . until the day the mob decides to “close the loop,” sending back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination.

Looper is written and directed by Rian Johnson and also stars Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Garrett Dillahunt and Jeff Daniels.

The film is set for release in the US and the UK on September 28. I can’t wait.

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I just brought you the first trailer for HBO’s The Newsroom yesterday and there is already a second one out. It moves forward to the ramifications of Will McAvoy’s (Jeff Daniels) mid-life crisis that we saw in the first one.

Clearly based on Keith Olberman’s exit from MSNBC and subsequent arrival at Al Gore’s Current TV (It was once thought that Olberman would be a consultant for The Newsroom but apparently that ain’t happenin’ any more than his Current  TV show), the trailer does give us a good look at the behind the scenes team, with a brief introduction to characters played by Alison Pill, Dev Patel, Thomas Sadoski, Charlie Weirauch and Thomas Matthews.

Yesterday I mentioned that Will McAvoy’s meltdown had shades of Howard Beale in Network. Today, I think it’s only fair to point out that The Newsroom owes a debt to Broadcast News (1987). You’ll notice that its influences are film and not television.  This is not Sorkin’s first foray by any mean, into that latter medium, but this is his first on a cable network at all, let alone one that embraces cinematic production values. I can’t wait for this!

The Newsroom, also starring Sam Waterston, Emily Mortimer and Jane Fonda premieres Sunday June 24 at 10pm.

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Who loves you people more than I do? (the correct answer is no one) So what do I have for  you lovelies this Monday (blech) morning?  How about some fresh hot Fassbender? C’mon…You know you want it.

Michael Fassbender’s gorgeous mug stares out from the cover of the June issue of Esquire Magazine UK (on sale Thursday May 3) and the mag’s Michael Holden had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Fassy, a self-described “sociable person”. Yeah…

Here are some excerpts from the interview in which our man talks about the pleasures of a good drink, dancing, partying with his parents and that the next cloak he’s designed for himself is that of scriptwriter:

On his love of socialising:
“I like to go out. I wouldn’t say I don’t enjoy a drink. As I say, I’m a sociable person.”

On his love of dancing:
“I like to dance. Ha! You know, I enjoy myself when I go out. When we were in Berlin and I went out with my parents, we were out till three in the morning, we were all out dancing.”

On his secret hangover cure:
“I still listen to Slayer, man! I just put them on the other day, still listen to Metallica. AC/DC brilliant…If you’re a little bit hungover, put on AC/DC, it’s like there’s no room for [the hangover] any more, the anxiety’s all gone.”

On now having to consider his behaviour since becoming famous:
“The thing is I don’t like to filter my behaviour, but I have a feeling that might be the case now…I don’t want to be in the newspapers. I just want to keep what I do on screen and that’s it.”

On being seduced by the trappings of fame:
“It would be wrong of me to say that I don’t get seduced by certain things. That things don’t become tempting.”

On his temptations:
“Well, you know, sort of, money! How much money does one need? Let’s start with that, that’s a pretty good one. Greed, things like that. Vanity, believing the hype. You have to keep an eye on those things.”

On keeping grounded:
“There’s another side of me that’s very simple. I keep my lifestyle pretty simple and my possessions are pretty simple.”

On his self-imposed hiatus:
“You have to see it clearly as looking after yourself. There is the danger of burning out here and getting lost and just becoming uninterested.”

On his next challenge as a scriptwriter:
“The next thing is to develop, make your own stories with writers, gather a pool of creative people and develop stuff. So it’s not the fact that I’m waiting for someone else to hire me or I’m waiting for a really good script to arrive, I’m actually trying to make that script.”

Sigh…   

Fassbender will of course, next be seen in Sir Ridley Scott’s Prometheus which opens in the UK on 1st June and June 8 here in the US and Canada. After that, he’s got a slew of projects lined up (after he takes that break he’s been talking about). First among them will either be a reteaming with Sir Ridley for The Counselor or Steve McQueen for Twelve Years a Slave.

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My first reaction to the new UK trailer for Sir Ridley Scott's Prometheus? WHOOOOAAA! At nearly three minutes in length there is a lot of footage from the previous trailers, but there is also a LOT of new footage, footage that gives us the clearest idea yet of what we can expect when this movie finally opens.

We also get a our first real insight into Meredith Vickers, the character played by Charlize Theron. Seems she's the "company" rep who not only knows what her crew is going to find but thinks she can control whatever it is and take it back with them. Sheesh, there's one in every crowd.

In the distant future, two superpowers control Earth and fight each other for all the solar system's natural resources. When one side dispatches a team to a distant planet to terraform it for human colonization, the team discovers an indigenous race of bio-mechanoid killers.

Ridley Scott, director of 'Alien' and 'Blade Runner,' returns to the genre he helped define. With PROMETHEUS, he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.

Prometheus, written by Damen Lindelof and starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba and Logan Marshall-Green, is set to hit theatres on 1st June in the UK and June 8th, in the US.

Director Sam Mendes, Naomie Harris, Daniel Craig, Berenice Marlohe, Ola Rapace, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson attended a photocall today Sunday April 29 in Istanbul Turkey to cast mark the start of filming in the Turkish capital on the next segment of the 23rd Bond film, Skyfall.

The makers of this latest film in the Bond franchise have come under fire for revealing that Bond will enjoy a Heineken rather than his usual martini. (Although do you know anyone who ONLY drinks one thing?)  While fielding questions at today’s press conference, Craig assured reporters that some things about the spy's image on screen won't change. Asked to describe Bond's love life in Skyfall, Craig smiled. "It's very rich," he said. "We're making a Bond movie, so that kind of speaks for itself."

Addressing concerns that this Bond won’t be as action oriented, Mendes shot down the notion but also pointed out that "Some people sometimes forget in the cliche of Bond, which is the international playboy, and someone who's always untroubled, and almost never breaks a sweat, that actually what (Fleming) created was a very conflicted character."

Color me stoked.

Skyfall will be released in the UK on 26^th October and November 9 in the US. Enjoy the pics. Dan actually smiled! *thud*

By the way, that gorgeous backdrop is a former Ottoman palace, the Ciragan, on the European shore of the Bosporus. It was built by Sultan Abdulaziz circa 1863 and is now one of the world’s most expensive hotels. 

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I’m sure you remember the stories of Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan (among others) having their homes broken into and all of their prized possessions stolen etc etc.  Writer/director Sofia Coppola has taken these incidents and turned them into her next movie, The Bling Ring starring Emma Watson and we have your first look.

Inspired by actual events, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers use the Internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their homes.

(Law & Order: LA, before it was unceremoniously yanked off the air, also did an episode based on this group.)

Coppola has again assembled a talented and eclectic cast (which has become her trademark). In addition to Watson as Nicki, Leslie Mann is Nicki’s Mom as well as Nina Siemaszko, Gavin Rossdale and Taissa Farmiga (American Horror Story – sister of Vera). Kirsten Dunst who starred in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is rumored to have a role. (The film is still in production so we don’t know if it’s true yet.)

Speaking of “still in production”, there are recent reports that the film may have put the actual court case from the 2008-2009 incidents in jeopardy. Coppola hired a working LAPD officer, Brett Goodkin, as a technical advisor, but Goodkin's testimony is likely to be critical in the trials of the three accused.  He never notified prosecutors about his work on the movie.  Oops.

The Bling Ring does not currently have a release date other than 2013. We’ll keep you posted.

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