This doesn't suck, at all!

Two new posters for Rush:





I've watched recently the BBC documentary "Hunt vs Lauda: F1's greatest Racing Rivals" about the 1976 season. It was amazing, I can totally see how Ron Howard was inspired to make a movie about this. I wonder how many of the various twists and turns will be in the film. Personally I hope for a re-enactment of a photo of Hunt shirtless and wearing a kind of a chain leash, which was accompanied by this story told by Alaistar Caldwell, the McLaren F1 team leader:

We had to get up early in the morning to go out to the warm-up. And he came down... dishevelled with this lady... obviously had, you know, anyway, dishevelled might be the best way of putting it... staggered off to the race track, won the race!

Heh.

I also loved the bits about James and the McLaren sponsors - Marlboro:

(cough cough) Excuse me, I've beent training for my new sponsors.

Turning up to a dinner party in black tie and flip flops was, to James, pretty normal. And because he had this, what the British call savoir faire, he was able to sort of carry it off.

It was the first and probably only example of the sponsor being molded by the driver and not vice versa.

There were RPSy bits as well:

Niki, he spent time in our pits. He was always visiting us. [...] For sure Niki was in awe of James' good looks and personality. You know, James was the good-looking playboy, and Niki was the small Austrian that looked like a rat. [...] They were good friends. Though on the racetrack, of course, no quarter given.

Can't wait to see these examples of the racetrack insanity:

(about the Great Britain Grand Prix) James' car vaulted on the left front corner, but being a McLaren, it didn't break. And being James, with two pints of adrenaline, he didn't stop. He charged off with two front wheels splayed out like this.

(about the Japan Grand Prix, when the track dried out causing James' wet weather tyres to overheat) Eventually he wore all the rubber off them, all the canvas, down to the air, and he had two flat tyres. Because he had two flat tyres we couldn't jack the car up very well, [...] so it took us like 24 seconds or something to change the tyres.

So, after finishing the race:

James Hunt came into the pits in a rage. And as the McLaren team gathered round, James got out of the car, pulled off his crash helmet, started to rant and rave at them.

It took them a while to get through to him with the news that he won :-)

Rush has a new trailer:



Driven by each other :snicker:

Showdown between you and Niki is all anyone wants to see. Hee!

News round-up:

• Thor 2 got a new composer.



• Cyber continues being filmed in LA, but there are more and more exotic locations to come being announced. Most recently Kuala Lumpur.



• Cillian Murphy joined In the Heart of the Sea - They are certainly making up for the totally unappealing to me subject matter with the casting :-)

There were some new stills from Thor 2 in the newest Empire. I love this one:



Digital Spy had some worrying news about the film, though.

Apparently the composer has been changed, which is confirmed. More worryingly it was also reported that the director was forced on a long leave of absence. This has not been confirmed, so I hope is not true. Not that I'm a big Alan Taylor fan, but if the director gets all but fired at this point, there is very little chance the film will not turn out to be a hot mess. And while I already knew that Thor 2 being good was a long shot (what with it being a sequel and having a different director than the first film) I was hoping it at least wouldn't be awful...

It didn't take too long after the news from last week for the Save Thor initiative to pop up.

Personally, I still can't feel too emotional about the prospect of Thor being recast for Avengers 2. I mean, in the first Avengers Thor was on the screen for maybe half an hour, and for most of that it was to stand in the background and look god-like. He might as well have been stuck in the glass cage for good right after he provided the exposition about Loki's plans for all the impact he's had on the story. There's nothing to suggest it wouldn't be more of the same in Avengers 2 :shrug:

That having been said, I don't see how Marvel can think Thor 3 without Chris Hemsworth could possibly work. Recasting is far easier to do with a character that either wears a cowl, is not the hero but just supporting cast, or if the film is a reboot instead of a continuation. So no, Marvel, you can't pull it off. This is Thor:

I should be in bed, since I'm one of the poor suckers who actually have to go to work tomorrow (honestly, what is it with people insisting to be paid even when there's a bank holiday?! Completely unreasonable if you ask me.) Anyway, I don't feel very sleepy since Tumblr has again made me giggle like crazy. It seems the Thor 2 trailer being shown in front of Iron Man 3 has made quite an impact on the unsuspecting audience. Check these pearls of wisdom:

“Ladies, can you please restrain your Thorgasms until the end of the movie?”
— My friend’s reaction to the Thor 2 trailer

Heh, yeah, easy to say, harder to do :-)

“Chris Hemsworth is CGI. He’s actually Andy Serkis.”

I... can totally see how one might reach that conclusion ;-)

and an unrelated gif set:









Hee! Unfortunately Superman has already been cast...

Ok, now that I've had some time to take it in and fix the embedding (honestly, how do they expect me to concentrate with Thor looking this hot?!) here are my thoughts on the trailer.

It actually looks much better than I'd hoped. Makes me interested in the story. I love the fighting scenes, particularly the Mjolnir slam (triangle circle! I'm afraid after playing the Thor video game so much I'll be mentally translating all of Thor's moves into PS3 controller commmands ;-)).

It looks like this time Jane might actually be relevant to Thor's story, though I do hope it's going to be in more ways than just by serving as the damsel in distress. Oh well, at least Sif looks as fierce as ever.

I LOVE that Thor has finally stopped being a push-over when it comes to Loki. Although I have to admit that his line "when you betray me I will kill you" is as heartbreaking as it is bad-ass, because he finally realised that it's not a question of "if"...

Also, way to make Loki look as haggard as possible. Amazingly I have still seen posts gushing about his hotness in the trailer. Sometimes fandom can really be hillarious :-)

OT: Red Dawn is coming to UK cinemas tomorrow. By all accounts it's a really bad film, but honestly?



I don't care ;-)

A whole lot more pictures from the Empire photoshoot have been released, so feast your eyes:



( cut for more )

And here are some gifs:









I do love that they did the photoshoot so close to filming Thor 2, because it's most almost like a photo session with the actual Thor ;-)

Happy Valentine's Day, flist! Have a valentine from Thor :-) Keep in mind Tony Stark admitted he hadn't explained the concept of the holiday to Thor very well...