Jon Hamm is ready to become a movie star

Here's Murtada with news on what's next for Jon Hamm post-Mad Men.

He finally won his much deserved Emmy and now that Mad Men is behind him, it seems Jon Hamm is set on becoming a movie star. This week came the announcement that he’s joining Ansel Elgort, Lily James and Jamie Foxx in Edgar Wright's next movie Baby Driver. He’s reportedly playing “a former Wall Street trader turned cop killer” ie. the big baddie.

Driver is one of a few upcoming Hamm movies. Already in the can is the comedy Keeping Up with the Joneses alongside Zach Galifianakis in which he plays a government spy hiding in the suburbs. Maintaining the espionage angle he’s set to play a US diplomat working with a CIA agent (Rosamund Pike) in 1970s Beirut in High Wire Act which was announced a couple of months ago but who knows if it’s still happening. He’s currently shooting Marjorie Prime in which he plays a holographic recreation of an ailing woman’s (Lois Smith) dead husband as he looked in his 30s.

An intriguing mix of movies, genres and lead/supporting parts. Perhaps chosen to compensate for the failure of his first foray into leading man territory with last year’s box office bomb Million Dollar Arm. He’s got the talent and he’s got the looks. Lines between TV and movie stardom are getting more blurred everyday with more actors and directors straddling both mediums. Still a bonafide movie star has much more clout than even the most successful TV star. Hamm seems to want that as he pointedly has chosen not to work in TV. Understandably, there’s nowhere to go on TV after the huge succes and endurance of an iconic part like Don Draper.

Do you think Hamm has what it takes to become a big crossover star a la George Clooney?

Women's Pictures - Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Let's be honest: as of 2014, the vampire sucked. Over its 150+ year history, the vampire has evolved from the exotic, erotic monster of Le Fanu's Carmilla and Stoker's Dracula, to Lugosi's low budget lothario, to the dangerously sexy rebels of The Lost Boys, to the brooding romantics of Anne Rice and Joss Whedon, to the defanged teenage fantasies of American preteen girls.While I don't begrudge girls their sexual fantasies, the fact remains that the vampire, in its current glittery form, is a far cry from the symbol of sexuality and otherness that it had been at its inception. With notable exceptions like Thirst and Let the Right One In, vampires have spent the last 30 years getting weaker, whiter, more often male, and very American. With A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian American writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour is here to change all that.

It's difficult to define A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night as just one movie: it's a vampire flick, a spaghetti western, a love story, a feminist fantasy, and an allegory about Iran. The plot is fairly simple to describe: a young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) living in a corrupt city in Iran (known only as Bad City) falls in love with The Girl (Sheila Vand), a streetwalking vampire who preys on drugdealers and beggars. But don't dismiss this as a weak narrative film.

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Why I Love Carrie Fisher

The Film Experience would like to wish Carrie Fisher a very happy birthday. Here's Kyle Stevens, author of a new book on Mike Nichols on why he loves her...

For various reasons, I’ve never cared for the use of “asshole” as an epithet. However, calling Carrie Fisher a “jerk” or “irreverent” plainly misses the point. She can be an asshole, and that’s why I love her. 

My favorite evidence of this fact comes from her DVD commentary for Postcards from the Edge, the film adapted from her memoir-cum-novel of the same name. I’ve written elsewhere about the brilliance of this film, how Mike Nichols and Meryl Streep use Fisher’s story (and her personal narrative as daughter of Debbie Reynolds) to dramatize the shift from the old Hollywood star system, in which audiences liked to think that they really knew the star (and to see them play similar roles again and again), to a contemporary kind of stardom, where stars are celebrated for being convincing in a range of different kinds of roles. That’s what I appreciate about the film. But there is much to love about the film that is all Fisher, like the tragically plausible names of Suzanne’s past, vacuous movies (for example, “The Night of a Thousand Shoes”). 

Early on in Postcards, Suzanne’s mother Doris throws her a very unwelcome welcome home party. Suzanne is complaining about the fact that she doesn’t even know anyone at the party to her friend Aretha (played with a voice like dark corn syrup by the wonderful Robin Bartlett), when the two are interrupted by a member of Doris’s staff, a maid, who informs Suzanne: "Your mother wants you inside to cut the cake."

Gif provided by Adam Sass (@TheAdamSass)

Fisher cast her personal cook, Gloria Crayton, as the maid, and the level of apathy with which Crayton delivers her line is astonishing. It is presumably the culmination of the evening’s festivities, and she could not care less. Crayton’s delivery is devoid of all feeling, seemingly evidence that the actress struggled simply to disgorge the line. 

But this is where Fisher’s Wildean assholery comes into play.

We had a whole campaign about Gloria. We ran it in Variety nominating her for Best Supporting Actress. We got quotes from [Richard] Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss’s quote was “It’s the finest one line walk-on since Richard Dreyfuss in The Graduate…[There were] quotes from Meryl, Gene Hackman…”

On one hand, Fisher and crew are thumbing their noses at the Academy Awards, and the whole system of campaigning for Oscars. On the other, this gag makes us wonder about what makes a performance compelling or convincing. Why would a servant care about the party? Who wouldn’t be dead tired after working for Doris and her persnickety guests? While it might ultimately be impossible to tell whether Crayton is playing nonchalant or is talentless, it might just be the case that she has given us one of the most convincing and accurate portrayals in the history of cinema. It’s this sort of clever foolishness that makes Fisher the kind of asshole I can get behind.

Chris Rock is Your Oscar Host ...Again

Kieran, here. It was officially confirmed earlier this morning that Chris Rock will host the 88th Academy Awards. This will be Rock's second stint as Oscar emcee after his gig at the 2004 Oscars (held in 2005...get it right). I want to first say that I am a Chris Rock fan. His social commentary, particularly about race in America, is incredibly incisive. That being said, I can't say I'm super eager to see Rock as host again. If you hold Chris Rock up against the people who have hosted since he first did, he'd rank him somewhere in the lower middle; he didn't reach the gold standard that was Hugh Jackman in 2008 nor was he the abysmal basement that was Seth MacFarlane in 2012.

With many eyes on the annual announcement of the Oscar host, we wonder why more attention isn't paid to who's actually producing the show. They're the ones determining the architecture of an Oscar telecast much more so than the host. Jackman was a terrific host but Bill Condon really deserves a lot of credit for hiring great writers and coming up with that simple yet cohesive structure of the show. On the lower end of the spectrum, Anne Hathaway has a better Oscar hosting gig in her than what we saw -- blame the writing and the production (and James Franco) for that show. 

The Chris Rock announcement is unsurprising (save for their earlier buzz that we'd have two hosts... perhaps a duo turned them down?). AMPAS often retreats to someone familiar after they experiment with a frisky choice and it (arguably) doesn't go well. Think Billy Crystal in reaction to Franco and Hathaway and Ellen DeGeneres in reaction to Seth MacFarlane. After Neil Patrick Harris' hosting gig received mixed response at best, I suspected that a familiar face, most likely a stand-up comedian would get the job. Fingers crossed that Rock has learned his lesson and doesn't make an ill-timed "Who is Michael Fassbender?" joke. 

Are you excited to see Chris Rock return as host? 

Yes No Maybe So: Nobody Owes "Joy" Anything...

It's been amusing for months now to see Oscar pundits fall all over themselves declaring Joy and Jennifer Lawrence frontrunners sight unseen. Unbroken anyone? It's never smart to declare frontrunners sight unseen. But now that we're finally getting more of a peak at the actual movie --  though it's still anyone's guess as to the final quality and perceptions thereof -- It does have the making of an entertaining 2 hours at the movies. So bring Christmas on. Deck the halls. Etcetera.

The new trailer beautifully sequelizes the conceit of the teaser, in which Joy's grandmother (I think) lectured to her. Now Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is the one imparting wisdom... to her daughter. Of the every-man-for-himself cynical variety but still. Yes No Maybe so breakdown after the jump... 

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