David Gordon Green provided a nice return to form with his latest film, Prince Avalanche.  However, that was an incredibly small production that was shrouded in secrecy.  Nevertheless, after the comic misfires of Your Highness and The Sitter, it looks like he’s returning to thoughtful drama with Joe and now Manglehorn.  According to Deadline, Al Pacino is in talks to play A.J. Manglehorn, “an aging, ordinary guy in a small town who nurses his sick cat, squeezes out a conversation with the local bank teller every Friday, and eats at the same place every day.”  But it turns out Manglehorn is an ex-con with a dark past who deeply regrets giving up his dream girl for a big score.  Green describes the picture as “a love story, the choices you make in your youth and the situations you set up for yourself,” but adds “there is a beautiful humor in this.”  Green definitely found that kind of “beautiful humor” in Prince Avalanche, and I hope he finds it again with Manglehorn.

Pacino will next be heard as one of the voices in Despicable Me 2.  Green’s Joe, starring Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan (Mud), is set to debut on the fall festival circuit.

The first image and a new synopsis have been released for David Gordon Green‘s upcoming southern thriller, Joe.  Nicolas Cage stars as the titular an ex-con who “becomes the unlikeliest of role models to 15 year old Gary Jones (Tye Sheridan), the oldest child of a homeless family ruled by a drunk, worthless father.”  Green delivered one of his best films in years with Prince Avalanche (click here for my review), and it looks like Joe will continue the director’s return to form.  I’m curious to see how Sheridan’s performance in Joe compares to his excellent work in Mud where he also plays a kid from a broken home who embraces a criminal as a role model.

Hit the jump to check out the image and synopsis.  WestEnd Films is handling international sales and will be shopping the films to buyers at this month’s European Film Market.

One of the more interesting movies I saw at this year’s 2013 Sundance Film Festival was director David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche.  One might think that a movie from the director of Pineapple Express and starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch would be a big, brash, laugh-a-minute comedy, but Prince Avalanche is a surprisingly subdued and touching dramedy that consists of only 4 characters and takes place entirely in the woods.

While at Sundance promoting the film, Green recently participated in a couple of interviews where he dropped some interesting information about upcoming projects.  In addition to revealing that his horror remake Suspiria is stuck in legal woes at the moment, Green said that he wants to do three more Prince Avalanche remakes in the future.  Hit the jump for more.

Director David Gordon Green broke through with indie films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls, and then seemed like he would make a strong transition to larger budget features after the success of Pineapple Express.  However, the quality of pictures decreased as the concepts increased.  The stoner medieval comedy Your Highness was painfully disappointing, and the mean-spirited The Sitter was even worse.  His new film, Prince Avalanche, is a welcome return to form as it puts Green back inside an indie budget but lets him hold onto the goofy humor of Pineapple Express and Eastbound and Down (he has directed ten episodes over the course of the series).  The result is a quiet, sweet, and funny picture about loneliness featuring noteworthy performances from stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch.

While David Gordon Green‘s directorial work on Eastbound & Down has been superb, his recent feature films, Your Highness and The Sitter, have fallen dreadfully short of what we’ve come to expect from the talented filmmaker.  Green recently finished shooting the “secret” low-budget indie comedy Prince Avalance starring Emile Hirsh and Paul Rudd, and it looks like the director plans to return to more dramatic fare with the gritty, southern drama Joe starring Nicolas Cage.  Today, Deadline reports that a bizarre project might be getting added to Green’s slate with Sony Pictures’ adaptation of the Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s semi-autobiographical novel series Little House on the Prairie.

Hit the jump for more.

Worldwide Entertainment announced today that they will finance and produce director David Gordon Green’s (Pineapple Express) gritty, southern drama Joe.  Moreover, Nicolas Cage has been cast in the lead role of Joe, an ex-con who “becomes the unlikeliest of role models to 15 year old Gary Jones, the oldest child of a homeless family ruled by a drunk, worthless father.”  The story takes place in small town Mississippi and is based on the book of the same name by Larry Brown.  Green’s Eastbound and Down cohorts Danny McBride and Jody Hill will executive produce the adaptation.

Hit the jump for more, including an update on Green’s Suspiria remake.

Opening this weekend, in limited release, is director William Friedkin‘s controversial thriller Killer Joe based on the play by Tracey Letts.  The NC-17-rated film centers on a son (Emile Hirsch) and his father (Thomas Haden Church) who hire a cop moonlighting as a hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to murder their mother in order to get her insurance policy.  The film also stars Juno Temple as Hirsch’s sister and Gina Gershon.  Loaded with great performances and an insane third act, Killer Joe is definitely worth checking out.  For more on the film, here’s the trailer and a clip.

The other day I sat down with Emile Hirsch here in Los Angeles.  We talked about how he got involved in Killer Joe and his initial reaction to the script, favorite movies, how he prepares for a role, and he talks about director David Gordon Green‘s comedy remake Prince Avalanche, which he filmed completely under the radar in Austin without word getting out.  He says “it’s based on an Icelandic movie called Either Way and it’s going to be, I think, awesome.  It’s a story about these two guys who work on the road crews in Texas after these horrible fires.  It’s just a small movie about these two guys, but it’s going to be really interesting.”  Hit the jump for more.

Kenny Powers is not dead…in more ways than one.  He wasn’t dead at the end of what was supposed to be the series finale after faking his death and coming back to be with his estranged love April and their child Toby.  And now he lives on back at HBO again as the cable network has picked up a fourth season of Eastbound & Down with Danny McBride back as everyone’s favorite foul-mouthed, morally questionable ball player.  I guess that explains why the network was so hellbent on calling the last episode of Eastbound & Down a season finale rather than a series finale.

It’s not clear whether this fourth season will actually be the last now, but Variety says it will have eight episodes just like the previous third season.  I don’t know how HBO convinced Jody Hill, David Gordon Green and McBride to do another season as they seemed pretty keen on ending on a high note, but it’s happening.  The question is where will the series go now that Kenny Powers is supposed to be dead?  I can’t imagine he’ll go back to baseball again, but that always took a backseat to his personal problems anyway. As a big fan of the show, I supposed it’ll be nice to have McBride back as Kenny Powers, but I was already fine with the way the series ended, so I hope this won’t be a sad encore for the hilarious comedy series.

Well here’s something that rarely happens anymore:  director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) has just wrapped production on a secret remake of the Icelandic comedy Either Way.  Twitch reports that Green’s iteration, titled Prince Avalanche, stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, and he filmed the whole thing in Austin without word getting out about the project.  The Icelandic film centers on two men who spend the summer painting lines on the road, but “noon the barren wilderness becomes a place of adventure, disaster and discovery as both men find themselves at crossroads in their lives.”  Hit the jump for more, including a trailer for Either Way.

The first time I met Thomas Jane, he was swaggering barefoot through a hall at Comic-Con, answering questions for an hour after the midnight screening of his film, Give ‘Em Hell, Malone.  During our first interview, last year at the Saturn Awards, he told Joel Silver and Sylvester Stallone to go shoot themselves before lamenting some of the lesser films he has been a part of and promising to only make projects he wanted to make from now on.  “If someone’s gonna screw it up, it should be me,” said Jane.

But it doesn’t look like he’s screwing anything up just yet.  Yesterday afternoon, I got on the phone with Jane (The Punisher, Hung) and his Raw Studio’s compatriot, Tim Bradstreet (Eisner Award-winning cover artist for, Hellblazer) to discuss their company’s new digital distribution deal with Comixology and their premiere release, a graphic novel adaptation of Jane’s directorial debut, Dark Country.   During our exclusive interview, the pair discussed the future of digital comic books and how it relates to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jane’s next directorial effort, The Magnificent Death, why boutique companies have an edge on the majors, a proposed Alien Pig Farm movie that has David Gordon Green attached, Vampire: The Masquerade, a whole slew of upcoming comic books, the importance of patience, and much, much more.   Hit the jump for our exclusive interview and some art from the duo’s upcoming projects.

Director David Gordon Green’s remake of the 1977 horror film Suspiria is finally set to get underway later this year.  The Pineapple Express director has been talking about the project for years now, with a previous start date planned for 2010 after he finished Your Highness.  Obviously that didn’t happen, and Green instead chose to shoot the comedy The Sitter with Jonah Hill.  Now Crime Scene Pictures announced today that they will produce and finance Suspiria, with filming set to begin in September.

Dario Argento’s original Suspiria centered on a young America student who travels to Europe to attend a world renowned school, but after a fellow student is brutally murdered and other ominous homicides occur, she begins to suspect that the school is a front for something much more sinister.  Argento’s iteration took place at a dance academy, but it’s unknown if Green will be keeping that aspect of the pic.  The press release notes that Green will “brilliantly update the world,” so make of that what you will. Casting is currently underway for the lead role of Suzie.  Hit the jump to read the press release and to watch the truly terrifying trailer for the original film.

Ten years ago David Gordon Green was one of the most promising independent filmmakers. Last year he made two studio comedies: Your Highness and The Sitter. Both of which bombed at the box office. It’s likely this isn’t the final chapter of Green’s career, but perhaps he will move on to non-comedies at for a while. The Sitter stars Jonah Hill as a college dropout who takes a babysitting gig, only for everything to go crazy when his girlfriend wants him to stop by a party so they can have sex for the first time. It’s got just enough weirdness and transgression not to be painful, but The Sitter isn’t that funny. Our review of the film follows after the jump.

The ratings are in, and Super Bowl XLVI just barely edged out last year’s game to rank as the most watched program in television history. Nearly 111.3 million people tuned in to watch the Giants vs. Patriots match-up and, subsequently, a whole lotta advertising. Last night we brought you a compilation of all the movie-related spots that ran during the game (including an extended version of The Avengers ad, which is fantastic), and today we’d like to bring your attention to the actual commercials. While most of us are looking for the cleverest or most laugh-inducing spot when judging these super-sized budgeted ads, quite a few notable filmmakers were actually behind many of last night’s spots.

After the jump you’ll find a compilation of ads directed by Peter Berg, Todd Phillips, David Gordon Green, Craig Gillespie, Bobby Farrelly, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., Lance Acord, Joe Pytka, Jake Scott, Fredrik Bond, Chris Smith, Miguel Arteta, Wayne McClammy, and Noam Murro.

Opening tomorrow is director David Gordon Green‘s (Your Highness, Pineapple Express) The Sitter.  Starring Jonah Hill in what’s essentially an R-rated version of Adventures in Babysitting, the film centers on the events of one night in New York City with three kids and the world’s worst babysitter.  The Sitter also stars Max Records, Ari Graynor, J.B. Smoove, Sam Rockwell, Method Man, and a few other familiar faces.  Here’s the red band trailer and five clips.

Anyway, the other day I got on phone with Gordon Green to talk about the film.  During the interview we talked about how he ended up making Hollywood films from the indie world, how The Sitter came together, casting, improv and deleted scenes, what will be on the DVD/Blu-ray (he says an extended cut with eight additional minutes is coming), and how he approaches short films.  In addition, with Green producing the Untitled Todd Rohal Project which features Patrice O’Neal’s in his last film role, we talked about O’Neal’s role and how he started working with Rohal.  We ended the interview talking about his time-travel/love story Q movie which he recently signed on for and what else he’s developing.  Hit the jump for more.