A couple of casting headlines for you today:

• Paul Dano (Looper) will join Hugh Jackman (Real Steel) and Jake Gyllenhaal (End of Watch) in the vigilante thriller, Prisoners, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Incendies).
• Ron Perlman (Hellboy) has joined the psychological thriller, Angry Little God, from director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism).

Hit the jump for more on these casting assignments and the movies themselves. 

Let’s take a look at some recent casting news, shall we?

• It looks like Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries) will be joining Matthew McConaughey (Magic Mike) in The Dallas Buyer’s Club, a drama about the AIDS epidemic directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y.).
• Ron Perlman (Hellboy) will join Savage Mutts, a criminal action thriller written and directed by Nika Agiashvili (Tbilisi, My City).
• Word has it that Jack Black and director Richard Linklater, who previously collaborated on School of Rock and the 2012 indie Bernie, will reunite for a bowling movie that may have been inspired by colorful PBA champion, Pete Weber.
• Finally, the ensemble cast of August: Osage County has added Julianne Nicholson (Kinsey) as well.  The film currently stars Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor and Dermot Mulroney.

Hit the jump for more on each casting note.

This week, Sons of Anarchy gave the club — and us viewers — some time to mourn, regroup, and refocus.  Jax wants to move to club away from “the shit that’s killing us” and try and get back into business with girls instead of guns and drugs.  The dealings with Pope have caused the club to reconsider itself, which is certainly a good thing.  The “blood for blood” retaliation that they were focused on under Clay has seen its day, and it was a great little moment when Chibs and Jax put their guns down to prevent a “hood war.”  As Chibs sagely said, “we’ve got to stop killing each other over a bit of gash.”  Speaking (derogatorily) of women, they were at the forefront of “Stolen Huffy” and did not get the good side of anything, but what else is new in Charming?  It’s a dangerous place to be a bit of a gash.  For more on that and why everyone seems to have a Gemma-sized problem right now, hit the jump.

With only two more seasons left, following this current one, to tell the show’s story, things are getting very, very real on the hit FX drama series Sons of Anarchy.  Never one to shy away from going there when the story calls for it, show creator Kurt Sutter did just that, in the game-changing episode “Laying Pipe,” opening up emotional ramifications for the rest of the season.

During this recent interview to discuss the events of that episode, executive producer Kurt Sutter talked about when he knew the character’s fate and how the actor found out, the motivations for the character’s actions, the mood on set while shooting that scene, how it will affect Jax’s (Charlie Hunnam) leadership and the emotional relationships of the club going forward, what’s to come for Juice (Theo Rossi), whether audiences will ever soften to Damon Pope (Harold Perrineau), whether a confrontation between Jax and Clay (Ron Perlman) is inevitable, and why seven seasons is the right amount of time to tell this story.  Check out what he had to say after the jump, and be aware that there are spoilers.

Since I have to save the heavy, spoilery shit until after the jump I’ll start off by taking a moment to comment on some of Sons of Anarchy‘s lighter fare, which amidst everything else actually got a little screentime in this episode.  Something that has been sorely missing from the series in its last few seasons is the trademark humor that made it so uniquely engaging to begin with.  We got hints of it tonight, with Juice “graduating” and Gemma beating the crap out of Ashley Tisdale from Disney’s High School Musical (file that under dark humor, and how many women has Gemma assaulted at this point?)  Sons continues to get darker and darker, and with it, much of the weird fun has been snuffed out.  Remember when Bobby was really Bobby Elvis?  And Tig was afraid of dolls? (one of my favorite recurring plot points) and Gemma took Half Sack’s girl out with a skateboard?  Those were the days.  Maybe they weren’t as big a part of things as I seem to think, but they made such an impact I remember almost every one.  For other unforgettable moments that you’ll wish you didn’t see, hit the jump.

Things certainly quieted down this week in Charming (if by quiet one means car chases, fights with police and visits to porn sets, and I do).  SAMCRO is still struggling with some of the remnants of last season with Tig’s inadvertent murder of Veronica Pope and the wrath of the Niners, as well as the club’s involvement with the Galindo cartel, the Irish and the CIA.  Then of course there are the new threats of the break-ins and the RICO case that Otto brought upon them (plus whatever Clay has up his sleeve, and you know it’s something).  SAMCRO really can’t catch a break, but just as too many chefs spoil a broth, too many open-ended threats to the club make the show more about running from place to place then about the relationships among the characters we’ve become so invested in.  For more on that and why nothing says true love like capital murder, hit the jump. If you missed our review of season five of Sons of Anarchy, get caught up here. 

Well that certainly opened with a bang. There were many of us in the SAMCRO fandom who feared the series was beginning to lose some of its luster during its meandering third season spent partially in Ireland. But not all who wander are lost — enter Season Four, which had the best cold open of any to date for SOA, and brought things (mostly) local again, focusing on club politics and betrayals (some of them quite severe). The end of the fourth season was compelling (Jax taking the clubs’s reins with a totally badassed-up Tara in support, a direct callback to Gemma and JT), but what made it even better was all that it set up for Season Five. Clay, The King, is not dead, the club is not rid of outside influences (in this case, the CIA via the Galindo cartel); they’re still running guns and drugs, and the members themselves, and their families, are in constant danger. Though there was no time jump from the end of last year’s run to the start of this one, things are already incredibly busy and incredibly dark. For a reminder of where things left off last year and a look at how things kicked off with the new season, hit the jump.

Tonight we’ve got our first look at a trailer for the interesting project, Tbilisi, My City.  The ambitious feature is actually a collection of twelve short films from various writers and directors in the nation of Georgia.  The trailer gives us glimpses of each of these independent stories that take place in the capital city of Tbilisi.  We also get snippets of scenes with Malcolm McDowell and Ron Perlman, who are the most recognizable names in the project (at least here in the states).  Hit the jump to check out the synopsis and trailer for Tbilisi, My City.

The first trailer and poster for the comedy 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom have landed online.  Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids), and Lizzy Caplan (Party Down) star in the pic which is described as “a comedy about two brothers a girl with a broken heart, a sex tape, an angel and a pig.”  Though this could very well delve into farce territory, the ridiculous situations in the trailer are actually pretty funny thanks to the innocent charm of Hunnam and overall stupidity of O’Dowd.  We also get the chance to see Ron Perlman playing a transvestite, so there’s that.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer.  Written and directed by Jordan Roberts, the film also stars Chris Noth, Whitney Cummings, and Nora Dunn.  3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom will be available on iTunes starting September 10th and will have a limited release on October 12th.

As most of you know, I recently did an epic hour-long video interview with director Guillermo del Toro, and every day this week I’m posting part of it.  For today’s installment I’ve got del Toro talking about DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians and co-directing the 3D stop-motion animated iteration of Pinocchio with Mark Gustafson.  Here’s some of the highlights from what he said:

• Rise of the Guardians is the first DreamWorks Animation film that del Toro was able to work on from inception.  He came into Puss in Boots in the middle of production.
• Del Toro and the other people involved were giggling when they watched the opening to Guardians because they couldn’t believe they got away with putting “a dark, moody, and poetic piece” in a big studio movie.
• The images that have been released for Pinocchio are from when Gris Grimly was in charge of production, so del Toro is going to redesign some of the characters now that he’s co-directing. However, the character of Pinocchio will remain the same.
• They’ve already started puppet construction on Pinocchio and del Toro now has to get Nick Cave to start writing the songs for the film.
• He hopes to begin voice recording by January or February of 2013.
• The script is in its fourth or fifth draft, and del Toro has to do one more pass himself then they’ll start casting the film.
• His dream casting is to have Tom Waits as Geppetto.
• Ron Perlman will play a character named Mangiafuoco, who in the Disney version was called Stromboli.

Hit the jump for more.

Even though it will probably never happen, but Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman would still like to make Hellboy 3 a reality.  Previously, Del Toro had seemed resigned to the fact that because the first two movies had failed to light up the box office, a studio probably wouldn’t be interested in paying for a third one.  However, when asked at Comic-Con about bringing Big Red back to the big-screen, Del Toro responded, “I can say publicly that now [Perlman and I] are together in trying [to do Hellboy 3].”

Hit the jump for more, and click here to see Perlman be awesome by putting the Hellboy make-up back-on for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Thomas Jane put together one of the most fun surprises of Comic-Con.  Jane recruited director Phil Joanou to make a new short based on The Punisher—titled Dirty Laundry—on the down-low and screened it at the panel for his RAW Studios.  That was in a small room, so few actually saw the short.  But Jane and Co. posted Dirty Laundry online for all to see, and you can now watch it after the jump. Ron Perlman also makes an appearance in the short scripted by Chad St. John and produced by Adi Shankar.  Check out our recap of the panel here.

Do you know the difference between justice and punishment?  Thomas Jane does and he proved it to the relatively small audience gathered at a Comic-Con panel for RAW Studios.  In an intimate setting in a small convention room that wasn’t titled Ballroom 20 or Hall H, Jane ran the show for the independent studio presentation.  Their projects included a Bad Planet videogame adaptation of their comic series with gaming company Red Fly Studio (check out the awesome early footage on their Kickstarter page), a short conceptual film for a Western they’re producing called A Magnificent Death from a Shattered Hand and, to the delight of Punisher fans in the audience, a fantastic short film featuring Jane as the Marvel anti-hero.  That was awesome enough, but a special guest star also joined the presentation: Ron Perlman, who recently proved how great a human being he is, had a small cameo in the film.  Hit the jump for a recap of the Punisher short film featuring Jane and Perlman.

Guillermo del Toro is an established, Comic-Con favorite, but that doesn’t mean watching him participate in a panel gets any less entertaining.  The guy is incredibly affable, genuinely funny, and he curses like a sailor.  It’s been four long years since his last directorial effort (Hellboy II), but he’s finally back with a new film, and it’s a biggie.  Pacific Rim is a true monster movie, as the pic centers on a battle between gigantic, human-manned robots called Jaegers and massive creatures called Kaiju.

We got our first look at the truly epic footage Saturday in the 6,500 seater Hall H at Comic-Con 2012.  Hit the jump to read my full recap of the panel.

The trailer and Comic-Con poster have gone online for Charles de Lauzirika‘s psychological noir Crave.  The film stars Josh Lawson as a crime scene photographer who begins to fall deeper into his dark fantasies about becoming a vigilante who can save the world from evil.  Judging by the trailer, I like the contrast between Lawson’s gentle, everyman look (he comes off as a guy you could chill out with at a party), and the violent, aggressive character he’s portraying.

Crave will have a panel in Hall H tomorrow, July 11th with de Lauzirika and Lawson presenting the trailer along with an exclusive 7-minute clip from the movie.  Attendees will also be getting the limited edition Comic-Con poster while supplies last.  Hit the jump to check out the trailer and poster.  The film also stars Emma Lung, Edward Furlong, and Ron Perlman.  Crave will world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal on July 24.  Click here for all of our Comic-Con coverage.