The Playlist Joins IndieWIRE

The Playlist is all grown up, packing its bags and moving. Starting today, you can get all your movie news and updates at our new home at IndieWIRE.

What to expect? Pretty much the same coverage you know, just on a different channel. We're excited to joining the IndieWIRE team and blogging alongside the venerable likes of Anne Thompson, Peter Bogdanovich, Leonard Maltin and the rest of IW's talented crew. The move will allow The Playlist to reach a wider audience than ever before, get better access and maybe even try a new thing or two. It's the grand experiment of 2010 and a new adventure if you will.

The Playlist has always evolved. We were a music e-zine in 2000, a film soundtracks blog in the mid aughts and we've basically grown into the site you know and semi-love today (and/or gripe about on occasion, that's OK too, we'd be boring if it were simply a love fest now wouldn't we?). Maybe we'll finally turn into a food snob blog one day.

It's an exciting (and nervewracking) time for us, but we couldn't have done it without our faithful readers and we thank you for your support over the years. Onwards and upwards, and don't forget to update your bookmarks, etc. (and tell your friends and grandma). Facebook and Twitter feeds will redirect you in the right way if you get lost and sign up for our new RSS feed. So yeah, don't come to this blogspot URL anymore, we'll only be publishing stories now at our new IndieWIRE home.

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Watch: New Trailer For Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'Biutiful' Starring Javier Bardem

A distribution deal now freshly inked with Roadside Attractions, Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Biuitful" is ready to enter the Oscar fray with a brand new trailer, putting an emphasis on Cannes Best Actor winner Javier Bardem.

The film follows Uxbal (Bardem) -- who can communicate with the dead, has an uneasy relationship with his bi-polar ex-wife and is juggling a handful of slowly spiraling black market deals -- in his last days as he tries to set things right before he passes away from terminal cancer. Yeah, this is grim, depressing stuff despite the misleading sort of thriller motif the first half of the trailer suggests. While we didn't particularly care for the film at Cannes, other members of the Playlist have seen it and liked it a bit more and everyone can agree that Bardem is solid in the lead, turning in a great performance.

The film will open in limited release on December 29th and expand from there. Official synopsis and trailer after the jump (or watch it in HD at Apple):

Biutiful is a love story between a father and his children. This is the journey of Uxbal, a conflicted man who struggles to reconcile fatherhood, love, spirituality, crime, guilt and mortality amidst the dangerous underworld of modern Barcelona. His livelihood is earned out of bounds, his sacrifices for his children know no bounds. Like life itself, this is a circular tale that ends where it begins. As fate encircles him and thresholds are crossed, a dim, redemptive road brightens, illuminating the inheritances bestowed from father to child, and the paternal guiding hand that navigates life's corridors, whether bright, bad - or biutiful.

Biutiful Trailer
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New Look At 'A Dangerous Method' Starring Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley & Michael Fassbender

Some brand new stills have landed for David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," a film that is quite easily shaping up to be one of our must-sees for 2011.

Based on Christopher Hampton's acclaimed 2002 play "The Talking Cure," the film will center on the relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Russian-Jewish patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who ultimately causes a rift between Jung and mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) but also catalyses strong findings in regards to Jungian psychoanalysis. Vincent Cassel and Sarah Gadon also co-star.

What else can we say about these pics except that they look great, and that Knightley looks particularly fierce here. In case you missed them, you can check out some of other smaller snaps from the film here. No word yet on release dates but with the film now in post-production, it's a fine candidate for the early 2011 festival season and no doubt Sundance, Berlin and Cannes will be wooing the filmmakers to premiere the film. More pics after the jump.

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John C. Reilly Joins Roman Polanski's 'God Of Carnage'

With his legal troubles more or less behind him (though he will forever be plagued by them) Roman Polanski is getting back in the business of making movies and has added one more actor the solid lineup he has assembled for his next film.

John C. Reilly is joining Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster and Christoph Waltz in "God Of Carnage." The film will be an adaptation of the hit play by French writer Yasmina Reza ("Art"), and the New York set story (a location the helmer can't film in, for obvious reasons, and will instead shoot in Paris), follows two sets of middle-class parents who meet for dinner after their children get into a fight at school. Reilly replaces Matt Dillon who was scrubbed from early casting news surrounding the film. Perhaps it's because he needs to make "Armored 2."

No word yet on the couple pairings but it's a formidable set of actors who will be tackling some strong material. Filming will begin in January in Paris and is it too much to expect a late 2011 release? Will Polanski go from legal woe to Oscar glory? [Deadline]

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Remake Of Psychosexual F*cked-Up Classic Given PG-13 Treatment: 'Hellraiser' For The Kiddies!

PG-13-ifying adult-centric horror classics doesn't necessarily mean debasing what made the original so great. Given the MPAA's weird post-millennial bloodlust, releasing John Carpenter's original "Halloween" today could probably earn the film a PG-13, provided those damaging bare breasts were concealed. And it's more exciting to consider scares without an explicit focus on blood and gore, so a hypothetical PG-13 remake of something like "Friday the 13th" would sound both incredibly dumb and slightly interesting, given that the restrictive rating might promise a new emphasis on ideas, concepts, and scares that last beyond opening night.

"Hellraiser" is not one of those concepts. Adapted by Clive Barker from his own series of short stories "The Hellbound Heart," the original film saw release in 1987. It dealt with a lead character, unfulfilled by his ritualistic S&M practices, who then finds an ancient puzzle box that tears his soul apart. When a former lover moves into his abandoned house with his brother, he returns to the flesh, desperate for victims to feed upon to regain his humanity. However, a council of leather-clad elders for all things debauched and disturbed, the Cenobites, are aware of this disturbance in the natural order. His suffering, they promise, will become legendary.

So yeah, freaky sex, bloodletting, supernatural monsters. Everything about the blood-soaked original (and the underrated second film) screams R-rated. Not to The Weinstein Company though, who now view this long-in-development property as appropriate for a teen audience. They have hired director Christian E. Christiansen to helm a PG-13 take, despite previously flirting with Pascal Laugier and the team of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, the French filmmakers behind grisly Gallic bloodbaths "Martyrs" and "Inside," respectively. Christiansen is about to make his American debut with "The Roommate," the Minka Kelly/Leighton Meester thriller that looks like eight hundred other PG-13 teen-horror permutations starring pretty people with hateable faces. We actually saw the trailer basically get booed off the screen at New York Comic Con.

The "Hellraiser" series is an unusual case, in that it's receiving the big screen treatment as it continues to have a strong shelf life on the, well, shelf. The Weinsteins purchased the property, which has spawned eight sequels (the last four direct-to-DVD), but their remake hopes were dashed by a poor development period, resulting in the need to make a new film, or to lose the property. The Weinsteins being stingy as always, have commissioned "Hellraiser: Revelations" to hit disc sometime in 2011, keeping their remake hopes alive, though it wouldn't be a surprise if that were more watchable than seeing Baby Pinhead bludgeon his victims with pool noodles.

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Bradley Cooper Denies He'll Play 'The Flash'

Even with his post-"Hangover" buzz leading to the critical disasters "All About Steve" and "Case 39" being unceremoniously dumped into theaters, Bradley Cooper is still riding high.

The "A-Team" star was recently rumored to be the frontrunner for the role of D.C. Comics' adaptation of "The Flash," but Cooper himself seems to be in the denial phase of accepting the role. "I've never heard anything about it ever in my life. It's funny," he was quoted as saying to SuperHeroHype.

Like all casting ideas rumors, it's possible Cooper is simply on the top of some early studio wishlist and he and his agents haven't been contacted yet because the script is not yet complete (apparently the script, written by the same trio that wrote "Green Lantern," will be turned in around December).

It's also possible Cooper is playing the same card he turned over when confronted about starring as Face in this past summer's "A-Team." At first Cooper denied that he would appear in the TV remake, but of course later on he actually starred in the Joe Carnahan film (maybe he should have denied it in real life too). With "Harry Potter" about to end, Warner Bros. cash-cow genre franchise is about to expire so the studio will be looking to get deep into the D.C. archives. "Green Lantern" will be the first shot, D.C.'s "Iron Man" if you will, and if all goes well "The Flash" will follow. With or without Bradley Cooper, who of course was a "Green Lantern" casting finalist. Clearly studios think the actor has a superheroic look.

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Disney Buys Distribution Rights For 'The Avengers' & 'Iron Man 3' From Paramount; 'Iron Man 3' Slated For May 3, 2013

Even though last we heard it was still at least a few years away, Disney is making sure their $4 billion buyout of Marvel starts paying back some of that investment sooner rather than later.

To that end, the studio has purchased the distribution rights for "The Avengers" and "Iron Man 3" from Paramount for a relatively bargain price of $115 million. The money will be owed on the release dates for the films, May 4, 2012 for the former and well, no release date yet for the latter. In fact, this is the first time there has been any release news on an "Iron Man 3" since last we heard it was still a few years away from happening, but now its been scheduled with a May 3, 2013 release date.

But when it does happen, don't expect Jon Favreau to return to the director's chair as relations between the director and the comic company have soured considerably.

As for Paramount, they are still on board to release "Thor" and "Captain America" as planned next year and they will also be releasing Favreau's next film, "Cowboys Vs. Aliens." [Deadline]

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