Breaking the Line

Seriously, Fuck Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

I'm not generally a fan of the "worst of the year" category in film polls, since there's no honest way to respond. "Movie I hated most" would be more accurate, since the worst are almost invariably not worth commenting on. But when Vulture asked for my vote, I couldn't resist the chance to take one final shot at Tim Burton's abysmal Alice in Wonderland. My colleagues had some similarly seething resentments to get off their chests, and while I don't agree with all of them (I, uh, kinda liked Predators), there are some particularly sharp and well-deserved brickbats thrown. Consider yourself lucky the fewer you've seen.

Ron Perlman: Fighting Demons and Dressing in Drag

I'll go out on a limb and say that Ron Perlman's role as Nicolas Cage's sword-swinging sidekick in Season of the Witch won't go down as one of his signature performances, but it provided a welcome excuse to talk to the well-traveled character actor about some of his other roles. After Cage cancelled our scheduled interview as well as most of his other press, Perlman wound up shouldering the bulk of the promotional efforts, which meant we had rather less time than I woudl have liked, but our A.V. Club interview still touches on his long-running relationship with Guillermo del Toro, who in the Hellboy movies gave the former Beauty and the Beast heartthrob his first leading role in decades, and his collaborations with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, including the fantastic City of Lost Children. As the A.V. Club's commenters have pointed out with no small degree of umbrage, I didn't get around to his role in FX's Sons of Anarchy, but I did manage to squeeze in a question about working with Uwe Boll, often called the worst director in the world, on In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, so I call that a win.

Stellan Skarsgard: "The Penis Has No Importance in This"

That's frequent Lars Von Trier collaborator Stellan Skarsgård on gender-based interpretations of Trier's Antichrist, one of a goodly number of films he touched on in our interview for the A.V. Club. The occasion for our talk was A Somewhat Gentle Man, his third collaboration with director Hans Petter Moland, a black comedy in which he plays a taciturn ex-con reluctantly re-entering society after 12 years on a murder rap. But he graciously allowed me to range far afield, taking in his long working relationship with Trier, his experience making and re-making the two Exorcist prequels, and playing the villain in the English-language remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which he's currently shooting with David Fincher. Skarsgård's performances are almost universally intense, but one-on-on his remarks are leavened with sharp wit and the flawless command of English so annoyingly common among Scandinavians. More evidence of that tomorrow.