It was reported a few days ago that production on Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 has been put on hold due to some major script discrepancies. MTV Movies Blog recently sat down with Willem Dafoe about his new film Daybreakers and one of the topics of discussion was the next Spider-Man. Check out what Dafoe had to say below. Read the full story

Lionsgate | Australia/USA | 98 min.

A vampire film with considerable bloodwork and vicious characters that also contains genuinely original ideas? That’s a nearly impossible thing to find in this now overpopulated genre, but Daybreakers is a rare exception. It’s not a great film as it contains a few underwhelming problems, but at least it’s ambitious, original and ultimately an entertaining experience. Read the full story

Apparition | USA | 118 min

By the traditional definition The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is not a good movie, but as the last few years have taught us with films like Crank, Gamer, Crank 2, Bad Boys II, and most recently Ninja Assassin, sometimes that traditional definition does not apply. Writer/director Troy Duffy has delivered a film that packs a punch of stylized violence and offensive yet still comical (in their own sadistic way) one liners to make anyone who was already a fan of the brothers happy and anyone who was on the fence have an enjoyable experience with the movie. However, anyone who despises the first film will not find anything that will change their opinion of The Saints. Read the full story

By “those kind of movies” I mean those films that are pseudo-smart and pseudo-deep, presenting paper-thin messages as an excuse for rampant style and gratuitous everything: sex, violence and the like. Films like Lucky Number Slevin, Running Scared, Smokin Aces and many more. It’s style over substance through and through, but the filmmakers wouldn’t have you know it, because they do not know it themselves. These are all passionate films made by passionate artists, much like those modern artists who mess up a bed and are proud to call it art or stream a 30-second film reel continuously while obstructing the viewfinder with objects (like a tree branch or something) to distort and abstract the cellulite on display. It’s kitsch and style and pretension personified, and the thought process behind goes as far as the art itself, no matter how deep the passion.

Which brings us back to The Boondocks Saints, which, for this moment in media, serves as the kingpin of those kinds of movies. As a matter of fact, it’s been the kingpin of those kinds of movies for some time. Since the infamous box office failure of both the film and the filmmaker (one Troy Duffy), Saints has gathered a cult following worthy of its own religion (which is ironic when you consider the skewed Catholic plot elements, but I digress).

The film itself is a fun-to-watch, poorly shot, decently written, haphazardly directed little action thing that offers its art in only one color: blood red. There’s nothing deep about the tale of two Irish “brudders” presumably called by God to murder all the criminals of Boston, jumping off a line a priest utters in the opening scene of the film, that the worst kind of evil is “the indifference of good men.”

These men are certainly not indifferent. And neither are they good. They are murderers and they murder brutally, creatively and passionately which, in a way, is a metaphor for the way Duffy handles his own material on screen. His cuts are incoherent and his lines heavy-handed (full of “fucks” and “cunts” and gay jokes and stereotypes, no matter how clever they’re delivered) and the timeline of his beloved story jumps from past to present and back.

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My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, USA/Germany)

Werner Herzog had never been an easy director in a narrative sense, and that’s a large part of the grandeur that sits behind some of his greatest films, i.e. Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. And while My Son, My Son revels in absurdity far more the those two classics, the quarrelsome search for identity its hero (Michael Shannon) takes on is nearly as jarring and effective.

Shannon feels perfect for the role of Brad, a strange young man who kills his mother with a sword and then takes hostages in his L.A. home (don’t worry, all of this is revealed early on). This incident is a frame for the rest of the film, which attempts to explain Brad’s actions the same way Eugene Ionesco tried to explain existentialism – by being very existential.

Which is to say this film will be hard to sit through for most. There are many laughs at supposedly serious scenes and wonderful visuals where there perhaps should not be any (at an airport in Calgary for example). But then that’s always been Herzog’s way – to find wonder everywhere and anywhere amongst the travesty that is human life. Big words, sure, but not for this director. The film is also “presented” and produced by David Lynch, so do not be surprised by double the strangeness that goes on with both auteurs at the helm.

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You might have heard that Lars Von Trier’s new film Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, opened this week at the Cannes Film Festival to controversy, boos and possibly one of the most hostile press conferences in the history of the Festival.

Well, controversy continues to sell and indieWIRE is reporting that IFC has picked up the rights to release the film in the United States. No specific release date has been given, but presumably we’ll be seeing the same film that was screened in France.

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