Set in 1950s Los Angeles, Passion Play involves an angel trapped in a carnival sideshow at the mercy of a ruthless gangster. The angel is saved by a down-and out trumpet player. Mickey Rourke plays the trumpeter, and it’s obvious from this shot that Megan Fox plays the angel. Bill Murray plays the gangster determined to keep them apart. The film debuts in Toronto next month and you can read the official TIFF description after the cut.

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Brian C. tips us to the Black Swan trailer. Thanks to Jordan for the embed. (the HD youtube version after the cut might play better for some of you).

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A smaller cropped and grainier version of this shot appeared in this week’s Fall Preview issue of Entertainment Weekly. slashfilm has delivered a high-res version that’s worth swiping and posting.

(click for greater grandiosity)

Sexiest throne pose since Xerxes?
The slick articulate production design of Mad Men continues to be one of its greatest pleasures.

Any episode that has Don pick up a bottle of booze and say, with irritation, “Why is this empty?” and get back a divinely simple “Because you drank it” is already a winner – no metaphors or deeper meaning needed.
(Spoiled Bastard, Tim Goodman, San Francisco Chronicle)

Share your reactions to Season 4 so far.

Contemporary relationship movies don’t normally come equipped with enough Deeper Meaning to propel them into Oscar territory. Especially, god forbid, if they dare to have any humor or recognizable practical attitude. Almost as if any pair of partners we might meet on the street aren’t eligible for an Oscar because real life situations are too familiar and not screwed up enough to generate sufficient drama. Surprisingly few movies featuring relatively normal people looking for love ever come close to Academy standards — Sideways, Juno, (500) Days of Summer. I’m not counting Up in the Air, because George Clooney’s fascination with his own navel in that film doesn’t qualify as a relationship.

This season, looks like we have three such movies percolating to the surface. So far I’m not dreading any of them because the excessive hard-sell contender drum-beating hasn’t reached annoying volume yet. So before our open-minded optimism begins to sprout furry patches of mold from the sickly sweetness, how about some blind speculation regarding the Oscar prospects of this season’s batch of Real People Love Stories Not Involving Jailbait, Rape or Nazis. Which of these four star-power tales of true romance do you think has the best chance to entrance the Academy?

One of the best things about winning an Oscar is the new-found strategic power a filmmaker has at his disposal when he’s shooting from the hilltop. From that high ground stronghold, Danny Boyle took his certified prestige to leverage an unlikely project that might never have been green-lit without the fortified clout the Academy can confer.

The advantage we got with the [Slumdog Millionaire] success we had was that you had an opportunity to do something with it, and I’ve wanted to make this film since 2005…I didn’t want to do it like Touching the Void, because that was so wonderful and I didn’t want to do it like a documentary. I said I wanted to do it where you are part of the experience, and where the audience is trapped with [Aron Ralston] for the whole 127…Without that [Slumdog] success, we wouldn’t have gotten to make it. Because what you saw in the teaser trailer is the good bit, the fun bit – and after that he’s stuck there.

Boyle framed the wordless conflict by regarding the boulder as a stone-cold Evil Wilson:

The bit after you saw him getting trapped in the trailer has him trying, for hours, to get out. Now we’d fixed it so he couldn’t move the rock; but by God he tried! He tried to rip that set apart. So we had two cameramen every day, because we didn’t have a villain – except for the rock, but it’s inanimate – but we’ll have two cameramen and change them so it gives him something different to do.

Here’s a clip of Boyle at Movie Con in London. Credit to slashfilm for finding this item from Empire.

After the cut, Boyle explains the cinematic handicap that attracted him to the story, and how camcorder culture inspired his approach:

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(thanks to Monica & Monkey)

Rooney Mara will be “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Columbia Pictures confirmed on Monday. Rooney nabbed the highly covered role of edgy hacker Lisbeth Salander in the American big screen adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s literary set, The Millenium Trilogy.

The actress, who is up next in theaters in “The Social Network,” alongside Justin Timberlake (and directed by David Fincher), reportedly beat out a field of contenders that, at one time, included Natalie Portman, Ellen Page and recent Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan. Last week, just Rooney, French actress Lea Seydoux and Australian actress’ Sarah Snook and Sophie Lowe, were reportedly left in the running, before Rooney was ultimately cast as Lisbeth.

“Dragon…” will begin shooting in Sweden in September. (Access Hollywood)

(Thanks to Bill for the quick catch.)

The New York Film Fest will open with the Social Network and close with Hereafter, thus putting them front and center in the 2010 Oscar race. Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours will close the London Film Fest, it was recently announced.

From Indiewire:

“Hereafter”‘s NYC premiere marks Eastwoods’s fourth visit to the New York Film Festival. Eastwood’s film, from a script by Peter Morgan (“The Queen”), tracks the lives of three people who are haunted by mortality in different ways.

“As so beautifully evident in ‘Hereafter,’ Clint Eastwood continues to make the most daring, provocative films in America,” Richard Peña offered in a statement. “With his returned appearance here in the New York Film Festival, the director has showcased an Opening Night film, a Centerpiece film and now this year’s Closing Night with Hereafter, a hat trick of which we are especially proud.”