Matt Damon Likes Saddle Sores And Dirt In His Mouth

Variety says Matt Damon will jump aboard the Coen Brothers' True Grit alongside Jeff Bridges and Josh Brolin. Bridges will play Rooster Cogburn, the role made famous by John Wayne in the original True Grit, while Damon plays the lawman La Boeuf (casting Shia would've been too obvious plus he's way too much of a pansy for a Coen Brothers Western).

By the way, this is not a remake of the John Wayne movie. It is a completely new adaptation of the book upon which that movie was based. So don't go calling it a fucking remake or I will have to shoot you in the fucking head with an air gun designed for killing cattle.

Coen Brothers plus dusty macho guys last equaled No Country for Old Men, so this has a chance to be pretty good though horribly grim and depressing.

Woody's New (Scarlett-less) Flick Has A Title

I've lost track of how many movies Woody Allen has made in his long, increasingly-less-interesting career. The last one he finished, Whatever Works, is currently wending its way to my residence courtesy of Netflix. His next to go before the lens will be entitled You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger will concern the "tangled love-lives" of a crazy family, and will star Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts. Even for Woody Allen, that's a wacky cast.

Note that, like Whatever Works, the new film will lack the presence of one Scarlett Johansson. Woody's former muse has not gotten any work from him since she went all diva and was left behind by the Vicky Cristina Barcelona Cannes contingent. Woody said then that he was "disappointed" in Scarlett. I guess the rift between them is permanent.

Aw darn.

Some Bitches Never Learn

Diane Lane must've known even before Josh Brolin got caught cheating that he was a no-good dirty dog, but that long experience, plus the public embarrassment associated with his being outed as a philandering piece of shit, are evidently not sufficient to convince her she should get her fine fanny out of that relationship. Yes, Diane is sticking by him. In Touch says it's because Barbra Streisand, Josh's stepmom, convinced Diane she needed to tough it out, for the children. So now Diane is moving to New Orleans where Josh is shooting a movie, to keep her eye on him.

First off, why is Streisand butting in? And why is she taking sides with Josh - who's not even her real son for cripes sake - against a woman who has clearly been wronged, and is clearly too addle-minded to know what's right for herself? What happened to sisterhood, Barbra?

I actually feel sort of sorry for Josh in all this. If he'd cheated on, say, Jessica Biel, all the gossiping bitches would've laughed and perhaps even applauded. But he fucked with their girl Diane Lane - the girl whose shitty fantasy movies about Tuscany help them through their own tribulations (the drugs help as well). That's like fucking with the Pope in front of a bunch of Catholics. There's gonna be a beatdown. Josh must know there's no way for him to win, which is probably why he keeps fucking around. He just figures fuck it. Plus he's got Barbra on his side.

Diane really should just dump him - better for her, better for him - then tell Streisand to go fuck herself if she can still find her vagina after all these millennia.

Josh Brolin-Jeffrey Wright Arrest Video

Video has surfaced of actors Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright being manhandled by Shreveport, LA cops after some bar incident that happened while they were shooting the movie W. Eh...who gives a fuck really? They're little candy-ass actors. Do them good to get cuffed around some by redneck cops. Toughen them up. They can draw on it later when they're acting. Sorry but I just can't muster any outrage over this.

Man-Love

Psst, Josh...didn't you hear what Mickey Rourke said? Sean hates that kind of stuff. It makes him uncomfortable about his manhood. He only took the Harvey Milk role because he wants to make everyone think he loves gays. He is a world-class phony baloney motherfucker. He actually thinks Hugo Chavez is a legitimate world leader and not a two-bit thug. And he had the poor taste to actually marry Madonna. Dear Sean, you don't have to marry skanky pop stars and get in fights to make everyone think you're 100% hetero. In fact, that kind of stuff only makes everyone suspicious. Come out of the closet Sean. It's okay.

Racial Slur Involved in Brolin Bar Fight

The Shreveport bar brawl that resulted in the arrests of W. stars Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright apparently began because some beer-swilling locals took offense at a bunch of tea-sipping Hollywood liberals attacking their guy George Bush (whose spotty career is the subject of the Oliver Stone-directed biopic). This wanton display of redneckery pissed off Mr. Brolin, who has shown a lack of anger management skill in the past, and fists started flying. Wright, who in case you weren't aware is African-American, tried to break things up, but a racial invective hurled his way caused him to get sucked into the fracas as well. Police were finally called, and reportedly had to taser Wright and then pepper spray both him and Brolin to get them to cooperate.

KTBS in Shreveport is now also reporting that a cell phone camera recorded some of the action...but, unfortunately, TMZ was unable to intercept it before it found its way to a lawyer representing Brolin and Wright. There are also sketchy reports that it was a cop who used the racial slur on Wright, and that the actor was "repeatedly tasered and pepper sprayed as he lay prone on his stomach in the street." Guess Louisiana is still Louisiana.

Josh Brolin Arrested

Josh Brolin and several other cast and crew members of the Oliver Stone-directed Bush bio W. were arrested in Shreveport last night for getting drunk and rowdy in a bar. The fracas was touched off when a lighting technician on the film refused to leave the bar when ordered. Cops were called, and Brolin and several others impeded them and were arrested. Brolin was charged with a misdemeanor and released on $334 bond. Noted actor Jeffrey Wright was among those taken in.

Brolin is bald, by the way, because he wears a wig in his role as George W. He looks pretty bad-ass in that pic. This will definitely help his street cred. Actors hate it when people think they're prissy. Shia LaBeouf should definitely try shaving his head - then he wouldn't seem like so much of a pansy when he gets nailed for being a nuisance at Walgreens.

No Country For Old Men

The theme of this movie is how the world is going to hell in a handcart and old upstanding grizzled farts like Tommy Lee Jones can't do shit to save it. It's a grim-ass thing too - cause if Tommy Lee Jones can't save us, who the fuck can?

I actually read this book (amazingly, since I almost never bother reading, as you could probably guess by the "depth" of my insights). It was good. There was lots of hard-scrabble lyricism and descriptions of arroyos. I looked up "arroyo" and it means "a dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain." "Gulch" is a good word too by the way and so is "creosote." Books filled with words like this always feel very poetic and spare and beautiful. Then Cormac McCarthy - guy who wrote the book; Oprah interviewed him awhile ago after apparently threatening to kill him if he didn't agree to do it - describes these horrifically violent shootings and stuff, and the thought that pops into your head is, "Wow, this would make a really great movie. Hell, you wouldn't even have to write a script, you could just use the book as your script."

So the Coen Brothers came along and made the movie, and I think they basically used the book as their script, cause I can't think of another movie that ever followed a book so closely, except for a few bits where they took some of the sheriff character's letters and wrote that into the dialogue to avoid having a lot of dopey narration. This is not one of those funny Coens movies by the way. This is more toward the serious, realistically-rendered end of things, like Fargo except without that little snarky wink caused by trying to be hip about people from Minnesota. There's lots of detail, like the boot-marks all over the tile floor after a guy has gotten strangled to death, his feet kicking as he struggled with the killer. And there's tons of grimly sardonic dialogue again lifted almost verbatim from the source. This is all in Tommy Lee Jones's wheelhouse. He plays this Texas sheriff who can only cope with how messed-up the world is by being bitterly ironic about everything. But Tommy really only trails the main story which concerns this dude played by Josh Brolin who finds a bunch of drug money and tries to keep it, and is hunted down by an incredibly evil, ethnically indistinct guy named Anton Chigurh, who murders people with an air-gun.

Chigurh is the creepiest character since Hannibal Lecter (I mean the original Lecter from Silence of the Lambs, not one of Anthony Hopkins's whorish subsequent Lecter performances). Javier Bardem plays him without a hint of human warmth; he's like a robot programmed to believe that all existence is pre-ordained and he's just some kind of instrument of fate who has no choice himself (he occasionally lets his would-be victims off by flipping a coin and letting them call it; this is his one concession to the notion that destiny can be altered). What makes this guy so creepy is how polite he is. He reminds me of certain bullies I knew who would get you to do what they wanted by speaking in a gentle voice, asking you to "please" do this or that, then when you did it some horrible thing would befall you and they'd stand there laughing. Except Chigurh doesn't laugh, but places his air-gun gently to your forehead and impales your brain with the little rod that shoots out.

Chigurh is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for an evil that has crept into the human world, that is going to systematically and dispassionately annihilate all the good folks. Nothing can stop Chigurh - he can't be reasoned with or bought off; he can't even be locked out because he'll just take his air-gun and pop the lock. His advantage over all us regular folks is his knowledge of human nature. He knows that if he talks to certain people a certain way they'll do what he wants, and then he can kill them. He doesn't operate this way because he needs to necessarily, but because it makes life easier for him. Evil, the movie tells us, likes things tidy and convenient. If Chigurh were a manager at 7/11 it would be the best-run 7/11 in the history of the world, and you can bet none of his employees would mouth-off.

I'm glad the Coens made this movie, cause honestly, after that piece of shit with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones I thought they were done. Turns out they only needed a good piece of material to get them going again. This movie makes you think good and hard about the evil in the world and whether there really is some great tide of blood and shit about to sweep over us and destroy us all. I don't know if it's true, but if the coming evil has as bad a haircut as Chigurh, at least we'll all have a good laugh before we're shuffled off to the death-camps. I have to give this movie four Chips Ahoy out of four because it's clearly a work of art and when it was over I felt icky about the universe for a good fifteen minutes.