Earlier this morning, my partner in LA film festival crime, the lovely Ms. Allison Loring, posted her list of Most Anticipated Films from this year’s upcoming AFI FEST presented by Audi. Of course, many of our choices overlap (Shame, Butter, Rampart), but we part ways when it comes to some of the smaller films at the festival. For all the big, Oscar bait flicks (J. Edgar) or the wang- and soul-baring Fass-outings (Shame again, always Shame), there are a few films that I’ve been positively rabid to see (Alps, Michael) that might not yet have the cache value and audience awareness of those other films. From the festival’s incredible list of 110 films, I’ve narrowed down my list to ten films that are my bonafide Most Anticipated Films of the festival. Like any list, I am sure that some of you perusing it will be displeased, weighing in on titles I’m a fool to miss. But hold your wrath for a few days, because many of the best titles of the fest are ones I’ve already seen, and those films might just crop up in an unexpected place (like, oh, another list). AFI FEST will run from November 3rd through the 10th in Hollywood, with all screenings taking place at The Chinese, the Chinese 6 Theatres, and the Egyptian Theatre. Tickets for all screenings are free (and available starting today, October 27, right HERE). The complete schedule grid is now online for the festival, which you can check out HERE. After the break,

With AFI FEST presented by Audi just one week away, fellow FSR-er and AFI FEST attendee Kate Erbland and I went through the impressive list of films on the schedule and selected the ones we are most looking forward to seeing. To the credit of those putting together this year’s AFI FEST, I found myself practically highlighting the entire schedule grid as I saw film after film that had already been on my “to-see” list. From films I have been anticipating for the past few months (Shame) to ones I had not heard of until now (Butter), this year’s AFI FEST looks to be one of its strongest lineups yet. AFI FEST will run from November 3rd through the 10th in Hollywood, with all screenings taking place at The Chinese, the Chinese 6 Theatres, and the Egyptian Theatre. Tickets for all screenings are free (and available starting today, October 27, right HERE). The complete schedule grid is now online for the festival, which you can check out HERE. After the break, check out my list of my top ten most anticipated films of this year’s AFI FEST. Which films are you planning on seeing at this year’s AFI FEST?

Fans of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” books will remember Haymitch Abernathy as the drunken battle-to-the-death survivor who is chosen to mentor young Katniss Everdeen as she is forced to participate in the same brutal games that Haymitch won. He’s a character who starts off as comically inept, but who darkens, develops, and is revealed to be quite capable in his own way over time. When it was announced that Woody Harrelson had been cast in the role, I opined that he was a perfect choice, seeing as he was an actor who could merge humor with danger and make it seamless. In a recent interview that the actor did with 24 Frames, he talked a little bit about his approach to the character and revealed that he too thinks that he’s the perfect actor to correctly play both the comedy and the drama inherent in this role. Harrelson said, “It was my objective to give the character as much comedy as I could without it seeming not to fit. I tried to take a certain comedic aspect and give a sense, through that, that he’s been through a lot and is anesthetizing himself as a result of that.” I like his use of the word “anesthetizing” there. When we first meet Haymitch we see him through the eyes of Katniss, who sees him as nothing more than a pathetic lout. But he’s a character who has been though quite a bit and survived, so he couldn’t have always been such

The world has descended into chaos. An artsy, color coordinated chaos to be sure, but still, society has taken a turn for the worse. To combat it the world’s government bans all firearms in an effort to quell the escalating violence. The result is a fusion of the Old West and the Far East as disagreements and feuds are handled solely through fisticuffs, swordplay, and a strict code of honor. Two strangers ride into town, not on a horse, but on a train. The Drifter (Josh Hartnett) is looking for a card game and Yoshi (Gackt) is here at his dead father’s request, but both men also have a secret purpose involving the town’s big boss, Nicola the Woodcutter (Ron Perlman). Their dueling quests will bring them in contact with each other, but it also finds them crossing paths with The Bartender (Woody Harrelson), Yoshi’s hot cousin Momoko (Emily Kaiho), the mysterious Alexandra (Demi Moore), and Nicola’s red-suited army led by Killer #2 (Kevin McKidd). What follows is a storybook tale with an arresting visual style that brings comic book pages to life on a stage-like setting. It’s theater for a new age that works as often as it doesn’t depending on who and/or what is onscreen, but even when it fails as an engaging narrative it often manages to delight the senses with a barrage of imagery both broad and specific. It’s a genre movie in cotton candy trappings, and while it runs a bit too long it’s a

I’m not going to go on too long here. I’ve already written pages about how excited I am about the casting process for Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me. Leterrier and company started out strong by casting Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role, then in rapid succession they added names like Mark Ruffalo, Melanie Laurent, Morgan Freeman, and Isla Fisher. This movie about bank robbing magicians has a next level cast, and it just keeps getting better. Variety is reporting that Woody Harrelson is the latest name to join the ensemble. Harrelson, one of the most delightful to watch and underrated actors in Hollywood, will be playing the role of Merritt Osbourne, a hypnotist and mentalist who can pull Jedi mind tricks on people. He used to perform for the Queen of England, but some sort of vaguely violent incident has forced him to relocate to Las Vegas where he becomes a member of the Four Horsemen, Eisenberg’s group of bank robbing magicians. Well, that about takes care of that; best movie ever.

Guy Moshe‘s live-action cartoon, Bunraku, lives or dies by its cast. The poppy world Moshe created calls for a specific type of acting, and not an easy one. The film requires a sense of unrealistic cool. Josh Hartnett plays a silent, but suave cowboy, and he has to spout out some dialog you would never hear a normal human being say. With Lucky Number Slevin, The Black Dahlia, and his brief scene in Sin City, Hartnett’s done that style of acting before. Here, he went about it differently. Instead of worrying about finding a grounding, as Hartnett says below, he wanted to embrace the odder tonal aspects. It bridges on cheesiness. But when one’s acting against Woody Harrelson cracking jokes or Ron Perlman looking the way he does in the film, it’s understandable that Hartnett would want to fit in with that scenery-chewing gang.

The cinematic doppelganger effect seems to happen on a cyclical basis. Every few years, a pair of movies are released whose concepts, narratives, or central conceits are so similar that it’s impossible to envision how both came out of such a complex and expensive system with even the fairest amount of awareness of the other. Deep Impact and Armageddon. Antz and A Bug’s Life. Capote and Infamous. Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Observe and Report. And now two R-rated studio-released romantic comedies about fuck buddies played by young, attractive superstars have graced the silver screen within only a few short months of each other. We typically experience doppelganger cinema with high-concept material, not genre fare. To see two back-to-back movies released about the secret life of anthropomorphic talking insects, a hyperbole-sized rock jettisoning towards Earth’s inevitable destruction, a Truman Capote biopic, or a movie about a mall cop seem rare or deliberately exceptional enough as a single concept to make the existence of two subsequent iterations rather extraordinary. Much has been made of the notion that Friends with Benefits is a doppelganger of No Strings Attached (the former has in more than one case been called the better version of the latter), but when talking about the romantic comedy genre – a category so well-tread and (sometimes for better, sometimes not) reliably formulaic that each film is arguably indebted to numerous predecessors – can we really say these films are doppelgangers in the same vein as the high-concept examples, or

Bunraku premiered almost a year ago at the Toronto Film festival, and since then, nothing but mixed things have been said about it. Based on this trailer, the love it or hate it reaction the film has received up to now makes even more sense. What director Guy Moshe seems to have done is taken a sizable budget with a respectable cast, and make a film that will appeal to, at best, five people. Count me in as one of those people.

I think of all of the things I would consider myself (an underestimated athlete, occasionally decent word maker-upper, deceptively intriguing coffee maker…), a connoisseur of the modern romantic-comedy is probably not amongst them. I’ll admit to stopping upon a Matthew McConaughey flick from time to time on a basic cable channel while I fold my laundry, cut my nails, or other things that really make me not sound very masculine. In my defense, I only do those things whenever a rom-com is on and so I blame the estrogen emitting from my television.

The point is, I purposely don’t watch many romantic comedies and when I do I really don’t pay much attention. It isn’t because I inherently don’t like them, it’s because they unfortunately have a very, very strict formula that’s about as predictable as the average American Friday date night. “What do you wanna do? Dinner and a movie? Okay,” equates to “Hi. I like you but I don’t know it yet. I know it now. You made me cry and run away. You ran after me? I love you, kiss my face.”

When it was reported that John C. Reilly was being courted to take on the role of the drunken lout Haymitch Abernathy in the upcoming film version of The Hunger Games, I let out a squeal of delight that probably would have been more appropriate coming from a tween girl hugging a poster of Justin Bieber. Haymitch is maybe the most fun character in the books, a hopeless drunk who is haunted by being the survivor of one of the past Hunger Games that ends up getting tasked with training the new recruits for the deadly Games from District 12 Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). That’s not very good news for the kids because not only does Haymitch not really care about anything; he also spends the entirety of his days too drunk to function. Reilly would have been perfect for the role as he is hilarious whenever playing the inebriated fool, but he also has the dramatic chops to pull off the dangerous edge of a man who has survived a battle royal to the death. After hearing his name mentioned for the role, I imagined that I would be extremely disappointed if anyone else ended up getting it. The new news is that John C. Reilly won’t be playing Haymitch after all, but they went and hired maybe the one guy who doesn’t come off as a disappointment to me at all. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Woody Harrelson has officially signed on for

Didn’t we just do this? More than most Deep Impact/Armageddon-style movie releases, the double dose of emotionless sex comedies has felt eye-rollingly boring. Fortunately, this trailer for Friends With Benefits makes it clear that this particular emotionless sex comedy takes things in a far more mad-cap direction than the Kutcher/Portman pairing. Justin Timblerlake busting some Kriss-Kross, Mila Kunis mocking Katherine Heigl movies, Patricia Clarkson doing some light S&M roleplaying, and Woody Harrelson stealing laughs as a gay man (who presumably can’t jump). It’s all here without even a hint of LOVE getting in the way of SEX. Not in this trailer at least:

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film so in love with it’s perception of how cool it thinks it is. Bunraku really thinks it’s cool. It’s the hot high school kid in the leather jacket who lights his cigarettes under a dark shade, but when it comes to talking to girls all that comes out is, “…….I’ve got jock itch…..” Only when Bunraku says it it isn’t funny. It’s tragic.

Josh Hartnett plays a drifter (that cool kid in the leather jacket, except not wearing that. He has cigarettes though) in search of a man named Nicola (Ron Perlman), a ruthless killer who employs nine decreasingly less ruthless killers to do his bidding. His Killer number 2 (named Killer #2) is played by Kevin McKidd who may be the most fun character in the piece if not for Woody Harrelson as the bartender who isn’t written nearly as fun as a Woody Harrelson bartender should be, especially considering we know how hilarious a Woody Harrelson bartender can be. Rounding out the cast is Japanese actor Gackt (yes, real name) also on the trail of a man with a specific medallion. I won’t spoil who that is.

This category is stacked with talented gentleman representing films of varying quality. I can honestly say that I think all five are very talented actors, but not since the category was introduced in 1936 has an actor had this award so in the bag. So ladies and gentlemen I give you the nominees for best actor in a supporting role.

Just as Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass will introduce us to psychotic children in masks and costumes, fighting crime despite their clear lack of any super-powers, Peter Stebbings’ Defendor will do the same for adult wackos.

Want even more zombie perfection from Zombieland? Have we got a deal for you!

The star of The Messenger talks about losing loved ones, his X3 disagreements with Brett Ratner, and the film he turned down five times.

Oren Moverman’s domestic war drama is, put simply, one of the most powerful experiences to be had at the movies this year.

Kevin Carr heads out to the movies this week, making a stop in a fox hole with the Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then moving on to the end of the world.

Last night we sent Dr. Cole Abaius off to behold the 3-hours of destruction porn that is Roland Emmerich’s latest film, 2012. Which means that he was witness to some wicked destruction, some of which we’re now bringing to you.

Kevin Carr takes a look at this week’s movie releases, including Zombieland, Whip It and Capitalism: A Love Story.