Robert Mapplethorpe was an openly homosexual, 60s era artist whose provocative work was very controversial in its time. So, of course, people have been saying for quite a while now that James Franco should play him in a movie. I mean, that’s kind of Franco’s bag, isn’t it? Johnny Depp puts on stupid wigs in Tim Burton movies and Franco plays historical gay figures from the 60s. It’s what we’ve become comfortable with, and what we will remain comfortable with, because THR is reporting that Franco is now finally attached to play Mapplethorpe in an upcoming film.

Oh, James Franco, you make the most fun decisions! According to THR, actor-author-writer-director-unsatisfied Oscar host-student-man about town-seeker-performance artist-soap star Franco is in negotiations to star in MGM’s adaptation of Neil Strauss‘s The Game, a “part memoir, part how-to guide” on how to land chicks. Not content to stay in any sort of performance box at all, Franco won’t be starring as the Strauss surrogate, but as Mystery. You know Mystery. Even if you don’t know Mystery, you know Mystery. Mystery is better known as “The Pick-Up Artist,” the self-declared title he uses to shill his lady-getting techniques, the very same that he taught Strauss on his mystical, magical journey to be a dude in demand. Mystery even had his own VH1 reality show! Called, you guessed it, The Pick-Up Artist! Oh, also, he’s not attractive in the least and looks as if he shops almost exclusively at Spencer’s Gifts. I know that men bemoan that they don’t know what women want, but I can clearly declare, as a woman, I don’t want Mystery. But what I may want is Franco in the role, because it sounds just a little bit too funny and too perfect.

Usually I’m quite cynical about end-of-year lists, as they demand a forced encapsulation of an arbitrary block of time that is not yet over into something simplified. I typically find end-of-year lists fun, but rarely useful. But 2011 is different. As Scott Tobias pointed out, while “quiet,” this was a surprisingly strong year for interesting and risk-taking films. What’s most interesting has been the variety: barely anything has emerged as a leading contender that tops either critics’ lists or dominates awards buzz. Quite honestly, at the end of 2010 I struggled to find compelling topics, trends, and events to define the year in cinema. The final days of 2011 brought a quite opposite struggle, for this year’s surprising glut of interesting and disparate films spoke to one another in a way that makes it difficult to isolate any of the year’s significant works. Arguments in the critical community actually led to insightful points as they addressed essential questions of what it means to be a filmgoer and a cinephile. Mainstream Hollywood machine-work and limited release arthouse fare defied expectations in several directions. New stars arose. Tired Hollywood rituals and ostensibly reliable technologies both met new breaking points. “2011” hangs over this year in cinema, and the interaction between the films – and the events and conversations that surrounded them – makes this year’s offerings particular to their time and subject to their context. This is what I took away from this surprising year:

There are a couple biopics about famed porn actress Linda Lovelace in the works, so let’s not get confused. Lovelace isn’t the one that was supposed to star Lindsay Lohan but then picked up Malin Ackerman because Lindsay Lohan is Lindsay Lohan; that one is the Matthew Wilder-directed Inferno. Lovelace will be directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Howl), and has Amanda Seyfried replacing the originally-rumored Kate Hudson as the titular performer. I’ve seen these two movies have actors that are appearing in one being attributed to the other or downright get referenced as being the same film before, so I want to be clear. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s look at the casting news. Way back during this project’s humble beginnings, James Franco was rumored as being the choice to play Chuck Traynor, a pornographer and Lovelace’s longtime husband. That probably had something to do with his experience working with the directors in Howl. That bit of casting didn’t work out though, and the role eventually went to the equally-as-sleazy-as-Franco, Peter Sarsgaard (see An Education, yuck). Apparently that wasn’t the last of the Franco on Lovelace rumors, however, because Variety’s Showblitz is now reporting that the actor may be making a cameo in the film as Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. That sounds like the sort of fun, low commitment gig that I could see Franco being into, so I’d say the chances of him appearing in this film are once again good.

The newest development in Selena Gomez’s career is by far the most insane. According to MTV, she’s going to be working with director Harmony Korine on his next film Spring Breakers. If you don’t know who Gomez is, she’s the sugary sweet teen idol best known either for coming out of the Disney factory of loud-talking and sassy tween actors or for dating a twelve-year-old kid named Justin Bieber. If you don’t know who Harmony Korine is, he’s the certifiable weirdo who’s responsible for directing movies like Gummo and Julian Donkey Boy, films that could be described as shock fodder at best, and pure exploitation at worst. Korine is always digging into the darkest facets of the human psyche and them gleefully shining a spotlight on the sick behavior that he finds. So, you know, this is pretty much a match made in heaven. Spring Breakers is about a group of college kids who rob a restaurant to get money to go on spring break, but eventually wind up jailed and at the mercy of a skeezy drug dealer. According to Gomez, “It’s a different character than I have ever played before. It’s a different kind of vibe I think than people are used to seeing me in. What you’re going to see is more raw, I think. It’s going to be raw and more about acting.” Of course, to Gomez’s young eyes this looks like a chance at credibility, but for us more seasoned film aficionados it looks more [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Modern American design and its history have become major preoccupations within contemporary cosmopolitan circles. Gary Hustwit recently finished his third documentary on the subject, Mad Men makes us nostalgically long for clean copy and clear utility, and the death of Steve Jobs brought forth considerations of the important connections between user-friendliness, sleek aesthetics, and the construction of products around human intuition. Making the case that we have still yet to exhaust what continually proves to be a fascinating and increasingly relevant subject, Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey’s historical documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter traverses the fascinating life of a couple whose contributions broadly determined what modern postwar American life looked and felt like. As narrator James Franco romantically points towards the beginning of the film, Charles Eames was an architect who never got his license, and Ray Eames was a painter who rarely painted. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their influential lives was that they rarely operated within the confinements of either of these titles. They couldn’t be pigeonholed as architects, marketers, filmmakers, etc,. And as such, their work reflected an impending new world of convergence where art, commerce, and visual culture all became deeply related during the second half of the twentieth century. The many lives they influenced can be evidenced by the occupational variety of well-regarded professional people who lend their sound bites to the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Eames including filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and architect Kevin Roche.

It’s starting to become pretty clear that James Franco loves two things: bleak novels with gruff colloquial dialogue and announcing that he’s going to be directing movies. He first started merging his two passions by announcing that he would be taking on the herculean task of adapting William Faulkner’s depressing, action free road tale “As I Lay Dying.” Before we even saw the fruits of that labor, Franco then moved his focus over to a slightly more contemporary author, but one just as concerned with simple plots and homespun prose in Cormac McCarthy. He had big plans to adapt one of McCarthy’s most beloved books, “Blood Meridian,” a sweet tale about a gang of Indian killing scalp hunters. Recently, Franco talked to some folk in Toronto, and it’s looking like plans have changed on the “Blood Meridian” front. According to We Got This Covered, when asked about his planned production of the McCarthy novel, Franco said, “We shot a 20 minute test of it (Blood Meridian) that turned out pretty well… we were gearing up to do the feature but that for various reasons is on hold, but we are going to make a movie based on his (Cormac McCarthy’s) third book ‘Child Of God’.” This is bad news for me because I’ve read “Blood Meridian” and was all set to talk about it intelligently when news started coming out about its production. I haven’t read “Child of God.” so now I’ve got another thing to pile onto my to-do list. Thanks a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the movie website equivalent of stuffing a turkey with three chickens and an eel. News of all shapes and sizes finds itself among some strange bedfellows here even if you can’t sleep. We get things started with a metric ton of images and information about The Muppets. If you’re willing to brave the spoilers, /film has everything from character descriptions to photos to trivia. Or, you can let the burning questions wash over you. Why is Kermit behind bars? Does it have anything to do with inter-species sex laws? Why wouldn’t it?

Warning: this editorial contains spoilers for Rise of the Planet of the Apes (and, for that matter, the original Planet of the Apes). Consider yourself warned, you maniacs! The original Planet of the Apes lends itself quite readily to allegory. 1968, the year of the film’s release, was the peak of one of the most tumultuous eras in American social history. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in April of that year, and Robert F. Kennedy’s death followed a mere two months later. Student resistance and campus demonstrations grew increasingly violent in their opposition to the Vietnam War, the Chicago DNC broke into an all-out war, and racial discord mounted. Of course, none of this had happened yet when Planet of the Apes went into production, but the intersections of intent and circumstance that permit the film to be read so heavily, so variously, and so often in allegorical terms enrich the original film and its sequels with resonance that outlives whatever else may date it. Beyond entertainment value, the Planet of the Apes series has lingered in the popular imagination not because of any strong connection to a specific associative meaning, but because of the many possible allegorical readings it is capable of containing. One of several reasons that Rise of the Planet of the Apes succeeds where previous reincarnations of the series did not is its reclaimed capacity for allegory.

Like a Johnny Depp casting announcement for a Tim Burton movie, there’s no real surprise that Bruce Campbell is going to be in Sam Raimi‘s Oz: The Great and Powerful. The actor revealed as much through twitter on Thursday, stating: “I. Am. In. Oz. Sam Raimi refuses to tell me what character I will portray. Just know that the role is PIVOTAL.” That’s great news, especially for Campbell diehards, but his use of the word “pivotal,” (even in all caps!) should be taken with a huge chunk of salt. He made similar claims about his roles in the Spider-Man films, which turned out to little more than cameos, so don’t be surprised when he shows up as a man that sells Pivots to James Franco. But, who cares? It’s Bruce Campbell. Thus, it should be awesome.

Tim Burton‘s failed reboot/remake/whatever it is lacked everything that made the Apes series fun and interesting. His cheesy actioner was all about Mark Wahlberg running through empty set-pieces. The Apes franchise isn’t just the Statue of Liberty and Charleton Heston doing his awesome Charleton Heston shtick; they were morality tales loaded with social commentary. They were cynical films that declared human beings to be monsters, with exceptions being far and few between. For awhile, it seemed the franchise was dead in the water, and had nothing left to say. Fortunately, Rupert Wyatt has come along and made a real Planet of the Apes film. There’s a real darkness and cynicism to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I spoke to Wyatt a few ago months about Rise, and he labeled the film as being “hopeful.” That’s a questionable idea for a film that doesn’t close on the brightest of notes and is, basically, a symbolic horror film at times. There’s certainly some hope, but it’s still inherently bleak. But in a world of forced happy endings, you have to admire a summer tentpole that willingly sets out to wipe away and/or enslave humanity.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr heads into a lab to liberate some apes, but they rise up, beat him down and fling their poo all over him. He washes up and heads home to his family, secretly longing for the swinging lifestyle of fellow FSR staffers like Neil Miller, Robert Fure and Rob Hunter. But since he doesn’t get a chance to pee in a fountain with any of them, he doesn’t get a chance to switch bodies with them, a la The Change-Up. This is probably a good thing because few people can take the awesomessness of his body.

I’ve never been much of a fan of prequels. The idea of exploring in depth a series of events which we’re already at least loosely familiar with has always seemed superfluous. Give me an original story, show me what happens next, take the story someplace new… And then 20th Century Fox released X-Men: First Class, which for all its flaws remains a fantastic film and the best comic-book movie of the summer (with Captain America a very close second). It took characters and events whose detailed destinies were already known to us and made them feel fresh, alive, and interesting again. It succeeded so well in fact that I’d prefer to see further X-Men stories with those characters/actors than see a return to the ones who made up the original trilogy. But surely that was a fluke, a rare case of synergy between director, writers, and cast that would not happen again anytime soon. Especially from a studio like Fox. And yet I’m happy to say I was wrong, again. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a prequel of sorts to the classic 1968 Charlton Heston original and gets right just about everything Tim Burton’s 2001 reboot got wrong. It’s smart, thrilling, and challenging entertainment that takes the familiar trope of man’s hubris paired with a story whose outcome is all but inevitable and manages to create an engaging, visually spectacular tale with a very strong human heart… that just happens to be beating beneath one incredibly hairy [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

While everyone else on the web continues to lose their marbles over the new Harry Potter trailer, which I still haven’t seen, a far more surprising and interesting trailer has hit the web: a 60-second international ad for Rise of the Planet of the Apes. What’s so damn cool about this trailer is that it mostly focuses on Caesar’s perspective. You’d think Fox would stick to James Franco‘s point of view, but thankfully they’ve put out something a little more ambitious.

The last time I reported on Noah Baumbach’s next project, While We’re Young, it was with the unfortunate news that James Franco and Cate Blanchett had been forced to drop out of the film. At the time I held out hopes that Baumbach might be able to easily replace the actors with Jesse Eisenberg and Greta Gerwig, and it’s looking like at least half of my hopes and dreams are probably going to come true. While We’re Young is about a couple in their forties who are feeling alienated by their normal set of friends because they haven’t had any children, so they befriend a younger couple who kind of teaches them to rekindle their youth. Now that I know more about the plot of the film, having Gerwig replace Blanchett’s character wouldn’t make much sense age wise, but they seem to have found a different, equally awesome choice to fill her role that does work.

James Franco has been a busy guy lately, hosting the Oscars and getting involved in just about every high-profile project in development. But did you know that he also does direct-to-DVD psycho-thrillers? I didn’t, either. But apparently he does. In Shadows & Lies, Franco plays William Vincent, a quiet and mysterious criminal. When he falls for a New York gangster’s (Josh Lucas) favorite call girl (Julianne Nicholson), Vincent is forced to flee the city, threatened with death if he should ever return. But after four years in exile, Vincent secretly returns intent on rescuing the woman he loves from her dangerous fate. In this clip, which we are pleased to present exclusively, we see the moment when the quiet criminal, having just stolen a wallet, meets gangster Josh Lucas in a chance encounter. I suspect it won’t be the last time.

James Franco has another project in the works. Somebody sound the Franco Alarm! It will be for a film where author Stephen Elliot makes his directorial debut filming a script that he co-wrote with a former porn star named Lorelei Lee. Don’t pretend like you aren’t familiar with her work. Cherry tells the story of a bright-eyed young girl who moves to San Francisco, enters the world of pornography, and presumably then has a great time working a fulfilling job in an industry where everyone is stable and well adjusted. Or maybe they’ll go another route, and the opposite will happen to her. Regardless, the role of the 18-year-old girl has not yet been cast, but several others have. For his part, Franco will be playing a coke-addicted lawyer that the girl becomes involved with. Lili Taylor (High Fidelity, Six Feet Under) will play the girl’s mother, who shockingly has a drinking problem. Heather Graham will be an ex porn star/current porn director who becomes obsessed with the young girl, and Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel will play the girl’s best friend, who is secretly in love with her. Probably once she starts blowing dudes on camera he will have some sort of existential crisis. Also, it sounds like whomever they find to play the female lead is going to have to be ridiculously charismatic to justify having all of these people falling all over her. What do you think? Are you ready for another movie about the porn industry? As [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that wishes it could recreate the world using Legos. It would begin with the cast of Community and Rachel Weisz. It would then have them play one of the most epic games of paintball ever! Sal Mineo can come, too. Rachel Weisz may be doing more than taking a trip to Oz with James Franco and Sam Raimi. Word on the street is that she may also land a leading role alongside Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Legacy. In other news, I enjoy leading off my nightly columns with pictures of Rachel Weisz.

Waterstone Entertainment is a brand spanking new production company that has been put together by producer Jeff Kalligheri (Lake Placid) and a Texas real estate developer named Steve Bowen. I know the questions you’re asking, and I’ve got the answers. Firstly, no, the new company’s logo doesn’t include Texas longhorns anywhere in its design. And secondly, yes, they are launching their brand by making a movie starring James Franco. The Stare is set to be directed by Jay Anania (who previously worked with Franco in Shadows & Lies) and to star Franco and Winona Ryder. Perhaps piggybacking on the momentum of Ryder’s role in Black Swan, The Stare will be about a playwright whose mind begins to slip off into crazyland while she’s working on her next project. Over the course of the film things get so bad that she loses track of whether she is just having paranoid delusions, or if she really is at the center of a manipulative conspiracy. Franco will play one of the performers in her upcoming play. The film itself is set to begin shooting in New York on May 6. No word yet on whether or not producers will have Ryder get knocked up by one of the grips during the lead in to next year’s Oscar race. Source: Deadline Lubbock

Even with a single teaser trailer, director Rupert Wyatt has already laid further waste to Tim Burton’s abomination. While that’s not exactly a tough thing to do, Wyatt looks to have made a genuine Planet of the Apes film. Burton and co. missed out on what made the Apes series interesting: social commentary. Rise of the Planet of the Apes seems to be another man abusing science fable, and it fits perfectly into the Apes mold. With further hating on Burton’s Apes “film” out of my system, Rise of the Planet of the Apes looks to be what the fans want. Judging by the trailer, it isn’t about explosions, it has a doom-ridden atmosphere, and looks to be one of those films that builds up to a real bang of a climax like the other (good) installments. I recently had the chance to discuss all this with director Rupert Wyatt, along with the trailer reaction, getting to make an inherently dark studio film, returning to social commentary, the hopefulness in the film, and how Justin Bieber is lending a helping hand to the end of cinema: