Two regular Joes off to detect some stuff; a cat named Audrey; NBC is what goes bump in the night; The Stallone of Rage; I’M MATT DAMON; We know what you did, and we don’t care; butter biscuits with racism jam; and nobody puts Shonda in a corner. This week’s Caller is a Careless Whisper.
For better or worse, for drunk fighting or for sloppy kissing and burrito belches, Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell are your next two stars cast for HBO’s runaway hit, True Detective. We can admit in hindsight that the first season as a whole was better than it had any right to be. We can also admit that fact lies squarely on the shoulders of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson whose character portrayals brought the entire show to life with their keen ability to transform themselves into two men full of bitter, broken, angst and mesmerizing melancholy that you just can’t see any other two actors being able to replicate — their performances were just that nuanced and cinematic. This is why HBO finds itself in such an interesting place in handing the leads off to two new actors with the bar set sky high. It’s rather funny now that it’s not a feature film that will be the biggest test for Vaughn; it will be this show. That’s mostly because as of late Vaughn has been content to hunker down in the Adam Sandler, Kevin James realm of low brow comedy where the challenges have been few, but the paychecks have been plentiful. This new casting has made us have to reach back into our memories for a time when Vaughn was seen as something akin to a formidable actor. Not an easy journey. The issue with Farrell, though, isn’t so much about his lack of ability; it’s mostly his lack of staying power. Like fellow former “one to watch” actor, Clive Owen, until recently we’ve simply lost track of their performances. Not that they’ve been bad, per se, just not resonant enough, and that makes us doubtful when, as we’ve seen with McConaughey and Harrelson, the need for total convincibility is essential for Nic Pizzolatto’s writing to jump off screen. We’re curious to see how it all shakes out. It could be a “Make or Break” moment for both actors and the fledgling series itself. [Vulture]
There are two things of note here: 1) Lifetime has turned itself into some sort of “Laughable at First Glance” movie conglomerate 2) Audrey Plaza playing a deadpan cat is probably the most boring thing that can ever happen to her career. The network is planning something called “Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever” based on a viral cat meme. How does one create an entire movie about an irritable cat (That’s not Garfield, natch) based solely on a meme? Who knows?! It’s not our job to figure out how these internet whirligigs work, it’s just for the cheese-eating masses to consume and then live tweet about when it happens, yes? Yes. Seriously, it’s so meta that we can’t even comprehend it. And for Plaza its a bit of apropos casting, sure, but not the kind that really challenges her to be anything more than a dour caricature. But maybe it’ll be fun in a “let’s make an entire television movie based on an internet happening, and then once we’ve produced it, splash it all over social media in nonstop marketing, so that all the bloggers and sit-at-home-joke-therapists can tell nonstop hashtag funnies while Audrey Plaza smug-mumbles a bunch of lines as a cat that hates the world and all the people in it” kind of way? Merry Christmas, Sheeples, we’ve brought you irascible cat humor. It was always foretold everything would end in cat gifs. [Variety]
Originality Hellscape, NBC, has decided that it likes the look of FX’s American Horror Story so much that it would like to try its hand at turning sad, sad people who have signed on, into viciously mediocre storytellers. So a “Horror” Anthology will be launched. And by horror we mean probable sloppy feats of visual eye-rolling. “The stories will be inspired by true events, and in the vein of The Twilight Zone, each episode will be a stand-alone.” Oh, God. So that means those with haunted house/people stories have sold them to NBC with the hopes that they’ll churn out Stephen King worthy tales of fear and fright. What will probably happen is NBC will make a series of barely needle-moving yarns that would have been done better and scarier on another network. But maybe we’re wrong. That Hannibal show has its moments, right? Uh-huh. We saw fifteen minutes of NBC’s Mysteries of Laura and wanted to ram our heads into the wall. That counts right? [Deadline]
Speaking of horror, Sylvester Stallone’s face putty has decided that it’s not content to just stare at movies while it puddles and re-hardens anymore. It thinks it should be back in the game reformed on its host body in a state of perpetual grimace as it tries to form words in Balboa-Speak. Stallone is planning to make a fifth and final Rambo movie called, what else, Last Blood. In this last installment, a Mexican cartel will find itself going up against Rambo’s ninety-year-old arm loaves while Rambo screams the scream of an arthritic Barcolounger full of the ripples and puffed out limbs that comes with lifting Winnebagoes and stacks of polyester lounge pants for a half century. “I’m starting to work out,” Stallone told Vulture back in August. “I’m going to be appropriately vicious and all that stuff, but intellectual. A killer with a heart.” That sounds horrifying. Like a walking mound of strained veins all coalesced to wind themselves around the heart muscle of a monster-sized drug dealer hopped up on cocaine and the fuel cell of an electric trolley car. This is the movie that will probably create an audible pop in all of Stallone’s fifty-seven triceps. We fear this movie. This movie needs a Valium. This movie needs a few episodes of the Golden Girls out on a lanai in a warm Florida sunbath while sipping on a Mai Tai in a Jupiter sized retirement village. You’ve all been warned. [Movies With Butter]
Apparently no one ever told Matt Damon that he should “never say never” because when we’re talking about the movie industry, you don’t just throw your iconic film roles into the proverbial shitter along with whatever you were doing with Greg Kinnear eleven years ago when you played a befuddled conjoined twin. No, you just don’t do that. This is what Damon planned when he said that he wouldn’t come back to do another Jason Bourne movie. Basically he said that once Bourne wakes up, “well, there’s no longer a story.” And the rest of us said, “Hell there isn’t, Matt!” “Do you know how many Bourne books there are, Matt?” There’s like a dozen. So while you’re off buying zoos and boring us into a coma with movies about you wearing a transformer attached to your clavicle to save humanity, and/or going on field trips with George Clooney to save art from war or whatever, while noble, your fan base thinks you should probably make a thing out of this whole super-operative persona you channeled in the Bourne movies to great success. Because, yah, we want our Matt Damon broody and kickass, not love oozy with sunshine erupting from his heart cockles. So, stop wasting time with touchy-feely rabble about zoos and father/son angst and, we dunno, space odysseys, and get your Muay Thai going so you can magazine-beat the bad guys in a franchise that suits you. We mean, unless you’re busy doing the requisite, “White Guy in Asia” movie…um, yeah, you are. Despite that, because ugh, Damon has apparently listened to us and he’ll be back in another Bourne sequel. Was it really that hard, Matt? [Deadline]
From out of the $3.99 DVD bin at a Target in Fargo, North Dakota, where it lay lovingly nestled between Single White Female and I Can’t Hardly Wait, is 1997’s hit, I Know What You Did Last Summer. This is important because some obnoxious person who when not combing the theatrical fare located at discount marts across the country, obviously laments the failure of Ryan Phillippe’s movie career, and has thus decided that IKWYDLS didn’t get its fair share of accolades and appreciation when it was released as a 90’s slasher flick amid a jumble of similar suck ass movies. So now, silly movie house and crawfish mausoleum, Sony Pictures, will be rebooting the movie for a legion of fans who wouldn’t just stand in the middle of the road shouting at the Gods(?), the killer(?), John Meyer(?) “What Are You Waiting For, Huh?!” but would instead send a text, “Wut R U W8ng 4, Huh? Killer B Cray.” Because what every self-possessed teenager in the last seventeen years has cultivated is the uncanny ability to creep around a fishing town looking for dudes with hooks on their hands or some such. No, not at all. Pretty much our teenagers would use their cracked iPhones as switchblades and slice all the finger pads right off any would-be killer. Haha! No, that also wouldn’t happen. What’s happening is this is a movie based on the erroneous premise that someone in 2015 or beyond would care that a be-shrouded weirdo knew what they did last summer. The answer would most assuredly be, “Well, definitely, DON’T YOU FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM?!” “I took a picture of my sandwich and in the background this creepy guy photobombed my pic and I caught him killing a bunch of people. #sadkiller.” [Deadline]
And now speaking of sandwiches, one of its disciples, the incoherent, blabbling Butter-Savior and Racist Biscuitmonger, Paula Deen, is trying to reinvent herself, or maybe she’s trying to serve herself up as a much maligned and misunderstood antebellum South bubble-headed nanny-shrugger who doesn’t understand what it means to be a racist. Sure, whatever, Paula. We totally believe that it never entered your itty, bitty Crisco-fried brain that making black people use the back entrance at your restaurant could be totes considered “teh racist.” Recently she made an appearance on the Today show to talk about something insane called the Paula Deen Network, which will be a “digital venture” wherein she’ll show reruns of her carb-loaded Food Network cooking show, while also making new memories of arterial death with episodes from a soon to be launched show called, “Fat to Death Makin Cheese Aortas with Blood Sugar Syrup Cakes.” But more to the point, she wanted to sit down with Matt Lauer to discuss her current state of affairs as a cooking pariah! diabolical racist foil! butter-denied discrimination queen! so that the masses would see that she’s still the kindly, old fuddy-duddy who once shoved a can of beer up a chicken’s ass, and that, friends, means that she is no longer the cold-hearted, money-motivated shillster who would treat her employees like cattle while she flirted shamelessly with the American public with the implication that she was a sweet, single-mother who just wanted to make you the best tuna casserole off the backs of her employees and the money from her supporters. Mmmm-hmmm, y’all. [Today Food]
You know what you don’t do? You don’t mock or insult the temple of Shonda. She who is a deity of primetime soap gospel. There is no one like Shonda. Say it with us, New York Times. THERE IS NO ONE LIKE SHONDA. The New York Times, which has a reputation of being a standard-bearer in honest reporting went on the record and said Shonda Rhimes is an “angry black woman” who likes to cast other angry black women in her television programs like a veritable she-beast sorority that only caters to women who have perfected the neck-snapping, eye-cutting, weave-flipping mojo that no one other than a Tyler Perry fictional character could ever aspire to — and that means by definition that it is something “other” to the world of television and should be scrutinized like a deficient cell of DNA sloughed off from its body corpus making it an irregularity to the television rank and file. Huh, what, New York Times? Well, let us tell you that we’re not going to stand for that hogwash. So a whole bunch of stars have rallied around mega-producer Rhimes and re-framed the article with adjectives that they believe better represents her. For their part, the New York Times has gone on record with the requisite apology-non-apology while also touting in essence that the experience should be used as a “teachable moment for us all.” Shut the Eff Up, NYT, says everyone else, everywhere. [Vulture]
More Caller News and Castings in Short
One zombie says to another zombie: “Hey, you ever want to get out of here and eat some people in Fresno?” AMC announces plans for a Walking Dead spinoff that would see how other places are handling the zombie apocalypse. [Deadline]
Jump Street to enter its mid-twenties with yet another sequel called 23 Jump Street. [Variety]
Everyone at CNN who knows how to work the fancy touch board may have a shot at Fox’s planned Minority Report series. [Variety]
A Married with Children spinoff is in the works centered around “The Buttwagger B”. [THR]
The National Lampoon’s Vacation sequel is getting its family in order for the big WAGONQUEEN FAMILY TRUCKSTER ride into hell and misery. Leslie Mann has just joined the cast as Audrey Griswold. Ed Helms has already been cast as Rusty with Christina Applegate starring as “Debbie Griswold,” ostensibly Rusty’s wife. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo are onboard to also appear. [Variety]
New Hollywood Rite of Passage — The Western. Denzel Washington is sizing up a remake of The Magnificent Seven. [Screen Rant]
Zany broads, Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette, will be starring in a Rom-Com called Miss You Already, directed by Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”). Oh, great. [Variety]
While actor, Ben Affleck, will be playing a bi-polar superhero and a probable wife killer — director, Ben Affleck, will be at the helm of a scripted adaptation of the Dennis Lehane period novel Live By Night with stars, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana and Elle Fanning. Leonardo DiCaprio will serve as a co-producer. Hmmm, maybe an Affleck/DiCaprio movie could happen, then? Is it physically safe to throw any and everyone with ties to Boston into one movie? [Deadline]
There will be another Magic Mike. Matthew McConaughey will not be in it. Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello will be. And so will Andie MacDowell!, we imagine to bring, Sex, Lies, and Videotape full circle. OMG! Remember James Spader was in that! [Variety]
Don Jon try-hard actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in talks to play Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s vision. [Vulture]
Peter Dinklage is thinking about playing a bounty hunter in a Western period thriller called The Thicket. Naturally he’ll play “Shorty” a “grave-digging alcoholic son of an ex-slave and a street-smart prostitute. Yes, naturally. [Vulture]
