What is Casting Couch? Today it’s the whitest casting round-up you know. Even though everyone knows that Godzilla is the true star of any Godzilla movie, there usually has to be some sort of human element on the ground to give the fire-breathing lizard’s destruction some sort of context. So Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla reboot is in the need of a principal actor, presumably a young and fresh-faced one, because Deadline is reporting that the newest actor they’re courting for the job is Aaron Taylor-Johnson. In addition to having the whitest name on the planet, you know Taylor-Johnson from recently blending into the wallpaper in Savages and shrinking into the background of Anna Karenina. Let’s hope that if he gets the Godzilla gig he’s able to rekindle a little bit of that spark he showed in Kick-Ass, because he certainly didn’t come out of 2012 looking like the next big thing.

Submarine is the coming-of-age tale of a cold, calculated, and pretentious teen by the name of Oliver Tate. Oliver, like Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, could easily come off as a downright off-putting and self-absorbed kid. He starts off as an arrogant and creepy kid dealing with what seems to be the weight of the world on his shoulders. Oliver’s romance that comes out of seeking pure lovemaking turns into something genuine. His parents’ love is dying, and he can’t fix it. Through nearly all of this, Oliver stays near-emotionless and blank. His transformation and revelations are shown through writer-director Richard Ayoade‘s unique visual eye, which also never sugarcoats Oliver’s oddness. Ayoade has crafted a young protagonist that while many will love many others will question his sanity… a rare type of lead these days. Here’s what Richard Ayoade had to say about not writing too much style, the moral ambiguity of the film’s characters and, of course, Oliver Tate.

Richard Ayoade’s Submarine is a much-needed corrective to the twee adolescent indie dramedy. The film maintains many of the recognizable bells and whistles of that exceedingly tired subgenre, but like the potential available in any catalog of clichés, Submarine finds a way to make them work. Instead of simply presenting us a socially outcast teen protagonist who speaks and thinks like somebody possessing cleverness and insight far beyond his years, Submarine provides specific reasons why its protagonist is so articulate while still giving us plenty of evidence that he is indeed an inexperienced teenager who has a lot to learn. Instead of assembling random visual quirks into a Jared Hess-style landscape in which decades of fashion are collapsed into one oppressively ironic and ahistorical moment, the setting and style of Submarine is (mostly) consistent in presenting a historical moment informed by nostalgia, even if we don’t quite know when that moment is (but we don’t really need to). In short, Submarine is refreshingly sincere. It’s an all-too-familiar coming of age tale, but the film gives us plenty of reasons to give a damn – its story in particular.

Walking down the street in Austin one fine afternoon, I made the remark that I wasn’t sure how to feel about a film that just played Fantastic Fest because it had a happy ending. “No one was raped or killed, I’m not sure how to feel about that.” I’m not an advocate of raping and killing (except when they really, really deserve it), but the vast majority of films I saw this year dealt with those themes heavily. Seeing something happy and cheery actually threw me pretty hard. Luckily, Red White & Blue from writer-director Simon Rumley was there to bring me right back down into a pit of despair and make me want to give up on life. Red White & Blue follows a trio of Austin residents as their stories intersect and collide with unfortunate events. Erica (Amanda Fuller) is a promiscuous girl down on her luck who finds something close to a relationship developing with the off-kilter Army veteran Nate (Noah Taylor). Rock-n-roller Franki (Marc Senter) has a brief fling with Erica and the results of said fling have ramifications for all.

Simon Rumley’s Red, White & Blue is a film about grey areas. There are no heroes or villains in the unforgiving landscape of this film, a landscape featuring characters that make life-altering bad decisions or knowingly do unforgivable things. It’s a dense, serious study of unfortunate happenstance, one which implements a brooding quietude throughout.