A Deathstroke of Hotness

Couldn’t play a SEAL, after all?

No prob – he’ll play a supervillain.

Joe Manganiello has been tapped to play the villainous Deathstroke opposite Ben Affleck in the solo-Batman project the Oscar-winning multi-hyphenate is getting ready to helm. The Magic Mike head-turner confirmed the news today, nine days after Affleck teased the character’s imminent arrival on the scene.

Of course, it’s entirely possible and plausible that the Manga-beast could pop up in next fall’s Justice League. You know how the people thinkin’ up the DC Comicsverse like to overstuff their cinematic offerings.

Photo: DailyMail.co.uk.

Magic Vegas

Giddy up that pony!

Looks like before Magic Mike takes Broadway, he will take the Strip.

Indeed, Channing Tatum went Live on Facebook for the very first time yesterday, to announce that the most immediate follow-up to last summer’s Magic Mike XXL will be Magic Mike Live, a new Vegas show that he is co-directing and that will take over the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino starting next spring.

Are your eyes popping yet?

Oh, btw, horny ladies and gents who like gents: The actor wants feedback.

“We want to change what male entertainment has been for years...make it better,” Tatum said in his announcement. “We got to...make it more of a conversation. We really want to hear from you.”

You being the readers of Cosmopolitan, for instance, since the magazine is one the proposed show’s partners. So keep your eye on it, too.

And on like, Tatum’s social media and whatnot.

“If I’m ever in shape enough to actually do the show again, I will absolutely step on stage,” he said. “I’m sure there’ll be a lot of crazy cameos.”

I can hear opening week selling out now.

Photo: Tumblr.com.

Complicitous Much?

The Manga-beast is going for the funnies.

Joe Manganiello is joining Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek in Drunk Parents, a new comedy about a couple who go wild after dropping off their daughter at college. Now word on the nature of the role the Magic Mike XXL star will play in the movie, but its story reportedly will include a very bad decision, a kidnapping, and some light mistaken identity.

And there ya go.

Photo: StoryChick.com.

2015: The Year in Review, Pt. 1

Who knew!

Certainly not me, that 2015 was going to go down as the year in which I didn’t, in which I couldn’t.

I didn’t watch all the films and movies in a timely, efficient fashion – because I couldn’t. Madonna occupied more head space than ever, and rightfully so (long live the Queen!). The competition from live music (Taylor Swift! Janet Jackson!) was fierce, but not as fierce as that of TV, which offered a whopping 21,000 options, the lot of which did draw my curious attention (alright, so I am exaggerating on that number, but, then again, there was a heckuva lot of s--- to watch on the tube and beyond this past year...).

And I, honestly, had better, cuter, realer entertainment in my life this year, so there: No regrets at all that I haven’t yet seen Carol.

Here’s the first part of what I thought stood out in the year that almost was. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Best Duo: Mistress America’s Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke

Best Hair: Rose Byrne’s in Spy

Best Line: “Chewie...we’re home,” said by Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Best Look: Blake Lively’s in The Age of Adaline

Best Presence: Sam Elliott in I’ll See Your in My Dreams and Grandma

Best Trend: Female directors doing it for themselves (Pitch Perfect 2’s Elizabeth Banks, By the Sea’s Angelina Jolie Pitt)

Worst Trend: Bypassing theatrical releases in favor of iTunes or On Demand. Hollywood, if a movie gets made, release it how it’s meant to be seen, at least for two weeks to give us ample opportunity to see it

Best Use of Amber Heard: The Danish Girl

Most Eh Use of Amber Heard: Magic Mike XXL

Cutest: BB-8 (#obvs)

Let’s: Keep featuring minorities in leading or featured roles!

Let’s Not: Have Emma Stone play a minority she has no business playing, like in Aloha

Most C’mon!: Biopics that skimp on the bio parts (Steve Jobs)

Most Confounding, Yet Eye-catching: The heels Bryce Dallas Howard wears in Jurassic World

Most Disappointing: Avengers: Age of Ultron

Most Surprising (tie): Room’s Jacob Tremblay and women of a certain age (I’ll See Your in My Dreams’ Blythe Danner, Grandma’s Lily Tomlin)

Most Ubiquitous: San Francisco (really, the City by the Bay was in just about every other movie this year – and last, if ya think about it)

Most Welcome to the A-List: Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Danish Girl)

Most Welcome: Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man

Most Welcome Back: Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa

Most Come Back to Us, Honey: Jennifer Lopez (The Boy Next Door was totally beneath her)

Most Who Knew He Could Act: Trainwreck’s LeBron James

Most Who Knew He Was So Funny: John Cena (Trainwreck, Sisters)

Most Whoa!: Chris Hemsworth’s...big contribution to Vacation

Should’ve Had a Better Year: Chris Hemsworth (Blackhat, Vacation, and In the Heart of the Sea did not work)

Can’t Wait to See More of – Female (tie): Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) and Daisy Ridley, from Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Can’t Wait to See More of – Male: John Boyega, from Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Worst Movie (tie): Hot Pursuit (for being patently bad) and Aloha (for not being better)

Photos: NewYorker.com (Mistress America); Collider.com (Pitch Perfect 2); Universal Pictures (Steve Jobs); Fandango.com (Ant-Man); Sony Pictures (Aloha).

Becoming Who She Was

There is something so incredibly...confounding about The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s fine take on the story of transsexual Danish landscape painter Einar Wegener, one the first men ever to undergo operations to become a woman back in the 1930s.

For one, the second-in-a-row showcase of Eddie Redmayne’s Academy Award-winning talent hardly belongs exclusively to him. It Girl Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) co-stars opposite the Theory of Everything revelation, and while she is being campaigned in the Supporting Actress category this awards season (for her leading-caliber turn as Gerda Wegener, the unwavering portraitist-wife of Einar), the film is just has hers, if not more than Redmayne’s.

Vikander brought it. She is in The Danish Girl to win it (gf came to play!), and she easily steals the film away from her leading man. Like, she is the one referred to as the Danish girl, this story is that much about her (too).

Not that Redmayne doesn’t show up. His nuanced, if shtick-y dual portrayal of a loving husband in chaos with himself, and, later, of Lili Elbe, a blossoming woman misunderstood by a society that absolutely thought her gender identity crisis was a perversion but who was nevertheless bravely determined to live as her truest self, is the stuff of Oscar-nomination dreams.

Lucinda Coxon’s adaptation of the David Ebershoff novel that gives the film its name and marching orders, however, translates into something that draws a mostly by-the-numbers performance from Redmayne, for he is completed unaided by Hooper’s penchant for tight close-ups. Can’t the Academy Award-winning director of The King’s Speech allow his talent some room to breathe?

He really should because his style, which arguably worked on an ensemble akin to that of Les Misérables – ergo the praise lavished upon Anne Hathaway, for instance – can grow tiresome fast when imposed onto one or two actors. Worse, it can betray their bag o’ tricks.

It is aggroying to see how Redmayne clicks in and out between Einar and Lili in certain scenes (he does this blink-y, focus-y thing...). It is almost as distracting as having to have to accept the hair and make-up that Vikander sports in the film. Her wig is just so obvious, and during one of Lili’s earliest, most pivotal scenes, the actress looks or is lit to look as if she just stepped out of the spray tan booth.

I mean, WTF.

That Vikander manages to transcend these poor production values is a testament to her commitment to her work and, perhaps, to her smart recognition that the role of Gerda Wegener was a starmaker.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. So what is this about Gerda and Lili having an early scene together, how did that go?

See, the film spins its yarn in a matter-of-fact way. We meet Einar and Gerda. They’re artists living in Copenhagen; he’s the toast of the town, while she’s the struggling artist in the family. They’re super-tuned to each other until one day, she asks him to pose for her, as a woman, so she may finish the piece on which she’s been working (the model, a bon-vivant-dancer-friend of theirs winningly portrayed by Magic Mike XXL’s Amber Heard, is running late, you see). The seemingly innocuous moment awakens something in Einar, though – something very real he knows has been dormant.

Long story short, Gerda is not against having Lili around the house or the studio: Lili, with whom Gerda speaks and essentially girlfriends around town for fun, turns out to be quite good for her business (Copenhagen and then Paris fall for her portraits). Alas, Einar begins finding it increasingly more difficult to tame Lili’s desires. He tests his and her own boundaries with a dalliance with a suitor played by SPECTRE’s Ben Whishaw, and for the second half of the film, lives out loud as Lili (well, as loud as he can be in the privacy of his old home with his trying-to-be-understanding-and-supporting wife).

The Danish Girl deftly explores the conflict that Lili brings into Einar’s and, especially, Gerda’s life, yet it is structured in such a traditional manner that mirrors more “classic” propositions. Much as in Redmayne’s last awards-baiting offering, a love triangle of sorts develops when Matthias Schoenaerts enters the scene as a childhood friend of Einar’s who takes a shine to not only Lili but Gerda as well. It eclipses the anguish and abandonment that colors the dissolution of the Wegeners’ marriage, but it discreetly helps bridge Gerda’s own transition from wife to friend to leftover. From beginning to end, she comes off the most fully realized.

Ultimately, the film falls on this side of working thanks to Vikander, albeit in a minor way, as far as filmmaking is concerned, and a major way, as far as telling an Important Story to Tell is concerned. The transgender movement is hot right now, and rightfully so, so it is imperative that more and more people witness what it was like once upon a time. Einar and Lili, they put themselves through the ringer to try to live in the authentic way the lot of us take for granted.

For that, this one deserves attention.

Just try to forget that Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow were once attached to star. That will trip you up for a while...if you let it.

My Rating ***

Photo: Focus Features.

Boys Fight

It’s like a catfight, but with boys.

At last, we have a reason for why Alex Pettyfer wasn’t invited to strip again in Magic Mike XXL: Franchise star Channing Tatum don’t care for hime.

This, according to Pettyfer, who also recognizes it’s all partly his own fault, given his crap rep, his personal social anxieties (he, evidently, was quite...reserved, to put it kindly, on the set of the original Magic Mike), and his poor coping mechanisms to face certain issues in a level-headed manner (after a death in his family, the British actor failed to take care of a matter that kinda sorta became an issue with/for Tatum).

What...an unexpected mea culpa.

Will this turn the tide for Pettyfer and the state of his IMDb page?

Only time will tell.

Photo: HollywoodReporter.com.

Hot Tycoon

Matt Bomer will stream.

The American Horror Story: Hotel guest and Magic Mike XXL eye candy has been tapped for the lead on Amazon’s The Last Tycoon, a new drama based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel.

Bomer will play Monroe Stahr, a wunderkind-studio-executive-character inspired by film mogul Irving Thalberg (there’s an honorary Academy Award named after him; look it up). The drama will be mined from the show’s 1930s setting, and from the violence, sex, and ambition of the era.

Mmm...you had me at Bomer. Picturing him in some fine-looking ’30s styles, well.... That’s giving me thoughts.

Photo: Zimbio.com.

Sporty Sally Time?

Speaking of Gwyneth Paltrow, her Mortdecai co-star, Olivia Munn, is also thinking diversification.

The woman who will be Psylocke is setting her sights back on TV for a project for Comedy Central The CW.

Indeed, the erstwhile Daily Show with Jon Stewart correspondent is fixin’ to executive produce a currently untitled dramedy about a young journalist in 1974 New York, who is hired by an ambitious news programming chief as a publicity stunt revolving around her being one of the first female on-air sports reporters in the history of the medium.

Gender politics will abound during the show’s run, should it get picked up.

This could be Munn’s Magic Mike moment, people! After all, she herself used to be on the sidelines once upon a time.

Photo: LaineyGossip.com.

Step Back In, Taylor Kitsch!

Rumor has it Channing Tatum may not be playing Gambit, after all. This in spite of the warm welcome he received at Comic-Con earlier this month (here he is, shaking Stan Lee’s hand on stage after a panel that gathered the lot of the Xverse).

See, the Magic Mike XXL star was tapped to star in a stand-alone movie about the mutant that’s scheduled to come out next fall, taking over a role that Taylor Kitsch originated in 2009’s much-maligned X-Men Origins: Wolverine. However, it seems that Tatum and the powers that be are not seeing eye to eye at the negotiating table.

Which begs the question: His deal wasn’t signed, sealed, and delivered?

Guess this means Gambit may not be teased in next summer’s X-Men: Apocalypse, huh. At least, maybe, not with Tatum as the card-throwing Remy LeBeau.

Your move, Taylor Kitsch. Pull a Cookie Lyon and get what’s yours, man.

Photo: Zimbio.com.

Pulling an Anna Kendrick Much?

So Magic Mike XXL was a bit of a dud – but Matt Bomer seems to be coming out on top.

Mmm...pause to picture that.

Anyway. Bomer has scored an unlikely hit with the cover of D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” he sings in the movie and its soundtrack, and the single is climbing, climbing, climbing ’em charts. How oh-so-Anna Kendrick of him, huh (remember how she charted with “Cups” from the original Picture Perfect a few years ago?).

As of yesterday’s, Bomer’s cover was No. 8 on the Top 10 Spotify list of viral tracks.

Well look at that.

Photo: Collider.com.

Boys Gone Wild Yet Again

They pretty, but they talk too much.

That (!) is the lesson from this weekend’s eagerly awaited Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to the summer 2012 pleaser of crowds, Magic Mike.

Actually, that little nugget of knowledge began to sink in while watching the movie, a rather terrible thing to have happen, for it completely takes ya outta the moment. And I do mean it gets in the way of enjoying all the T&A (thrusting and abs) that the marketing department behind the production have been selling us.

This is a movie about strippers – pardon, a movie about male entertainers. It ought to be fun and definitely not necessarily lesson-imparting.

Not that Channing Tatum & Co.’s second working of the pole ain’t a romp (at times). It absolutely is...when his back-from-retirement Magic Mike and his sexy bros are, in fact, dancing and shaking it, not when they’re trying to make us care about them. Ahem, we want pecs, not the rich inner workings of Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello).

See, much as it was the case with the original, helmed by Steven Soderbergh (who, btw, has remained involved with the bound-for-Broadway franchise, serving as an executive producer on Magic Mike XXL and as its invaluable cinematographer), this part deux suffers from a sort of split personality disorder. It obviously wants to be everything skinstastic it has been promising and an effective indie-esque story about getting yourself out of a funk (lemme just say things haven’t exactly turned into a Norman Rockwell painting for our protagonist).

That plot-against-thongs conflict was more easily overlooked three years ago because Matthew McConaughey was on board stirring things up for Mike (and Tatum). McConaughey’s oily Dallas owned the joint in which our guy danced, and, thus, he kinda owned the budding furniture designer by day, man o’ fantasy by night. Given the twangin’ actor’s Academy Award-winning McConaissance, Magic Mike XXL has to go sans Dallas (Alex Pettyfer’s newbie stripper’s gone, too), and without an antagonist, which is NBD since this one is all about this huge stripper convention in Myrtle Beach that, just like a siren, calls upon those good ol’ Tampa boys we made it rain for before.

Mike is lured back into the fold for one last hurrah, resolves outstanding animosities with the crew, especially with the more-fleshed-out-as-a-character Ken (Matt Bomer), and, because this is a sequel that requires more, more, more! and bigger, too, he recruits an old and special acquaintance played by Jada Pinkett Smith and tWitch to join in, as well as Amber Heard, Andie McDowell, Elizabeth Banks.

The result is yet another movie that’s not quite sure what it really wants to be, and an enjoyable-enough time at the movies.

For hot time, this one’s much too not for its own good, which so makes me doubt the possibility of a threequel titled Magic Mike 3-D.

My Rating **1/2

Photo: MTV.com.

The Right Fit

Matt Bomer is one of the new faces of Giorgio Armani’s Made to Measure initiative.

That is all.

And remember, everybody: Magic Mike XXL opens on July 1!

Photo: TheFashionisto.com.

Dope Is the Word

Dope.

It’s the third must-see indie of the summer season.

This one’s opening this Friday, people, so get. I mean, it’s busy out there, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is already out, vying for your attention.

And before you know it The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s coming in August.

And you know it all will take a backseat to the bad boys of Magic Mike XXL as soon as the first rippling set o’ abs is flashed on July 1....

Dope, btw, centers on Malcolm, a geek (Shameik Moore) trying to make it through life in a tough neighborhood and how his life changes after he gets a chance invite to an underground party, which leads him and his friends into a great L.A. adventure.

Zoë Kravitz, Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Kimberly Elise, and Forest Whitaker co-star.

Photo: Fandango.com.