Thoughts I Had... While Looking at 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' Poster

Thoughts I had while looking at the Age of Ultron Poster as they come to me...

Wow, that's ugly! And since this movie would make a billion dollars even if they advertised with a giant stinky turd as the poster, you'd think they could be a little more creative. You can get away with anything, Marvel, so make it count. Revive the art of the movie poster... it's not like you don't know the important of a good "cover" for your comic books.

And don't make it so obvious that Samuel L Jackson is bored of his role. 

Where's Drew Struzan when you need him? His posters could assemble multiple characters, amplify their already potent iconography, be fun and beautiful all at once. If you love poster art of the 1980s, you should consider buying his coffee table book.

Who knew that the Black Widow was a fan of Tron: Legacy ? 

You can see The Vision floating up near the top. They let him keep that bright yellow cape though we don't know if his skin will be red and his costume green. Seems unlikely. That's a lot of primary colors for a movie! I don't know why but I now equate his relationship with The Scarlet Witch to with Doctor Manhattan & Silk Spectre so if there's not a CGI generated scene co-starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany with a bright red penis, I'm going to be disappointed.

Thor is about to hammer Captain America [ahem]

I hope the robots made of pixels have more character than those nameless alien pixels they battled at the end of the first movie.

I miss The Leftovers (I'm not the only one who was reminded of this). Come back Carrie & Justin

OMG remember The Rapture (1991)? Mimi Rogers was so amazing in that movie and it seems like no one has seen it. My Oscar nominees that year woulda been Foster/Davis/Sarandon/Rogers/Dern with apologies to The Bening! (What? It always comes back to best actress.)

Interview: Introducing Carrie Coon, 2014's Most Exciting New Actress

Carrie Coon at the premiere of Gone Girl in NYCActors who can register potently in all three acting mediums are less common than you'd think. Some movie stars are duds on stage (and vice versa) and, though it's becoming less of an issue as mediums shift and even merge, you can sometimes spot noticeable scale shifts in charisma in the actors who jump back and forth between TV and film as if one is the place they were born to live in and the other a nice place to visit. The lines may be blurring as more and more actors make a habit of doing all three but some actors seem right everywhere. It's not the medium but the acting itself that's their true home.

Carrie Coon is not a superstar (yet) -- "I'm not famous," she insists as we settle into our conversation about her breakthrough year -- but whichever medium you first caught her in, chances are you've already fallen. In a shockingly swift and continuous series of firsts over the past year and a half she's logged her first Broadway show (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tony Nomination 2013) her first series regular TV (The Leftovers, expect nominations any second now) and her first film (Gone Girl, a huge hit, and inarguably one of the most talked about features of the year even if its awards season prospects are still hard to read).

Perhaps it's a case of mutual Midwestern ease but our hastily scheduled phone call feels not unlike meeting a very cool stranger a party who is completely chill and ready to TALK.

Our conversation on Gone Girl & The Leftovers is after the jump...

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Open Thread. What did I miss?

THE LEFTOVERS just gets better and better. how phenomenal is Ann Dowd any way?It occurred to me yesterday while making an exceedingly poor attempt to fully recuperate from TIFF madness (I should have been resting my strained eyeballs but instead I was emptying the DVR) that I had missed two whole weeks of regular news. I joked about this on twitter but I'm 150% sure that I missed something I'd actually like to have known about!

It's easy to miss things, even if you're fully immersed in the industry. (An example: I was talking to Felicity Jones at that Theory of Everything party about her scenes with Charlie Cox, who is so sweetly crush-worthy in the movie, and she somehow hadn't heard that he was the new Daredevil for Netflix!)

What movie things, besides TIFF and the standard Oscar buzz, have been on your mind these past couple of weeks?

Catch me back up. Fill me in.

Stage Door: Two Hunks

Billy Magnusson as "Rapunzel's Prince"If you're looking forward to Into the Woods, you should familiarize yourself with one of its two Prince Charmings. The Observer has a great profile of rising star Billy Magnusson who is in a new play called "Sex With Strangers" with Breaking Bad's Anna Gunn. We heart him here at TFE from the moment we first noticed him in his eventually Tony nominated role in Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike (reviewed). He played Spike in all his shirtless Sigourney's- boy-toy glory. We'd also seen him as one of the dumbest jocks ever committed to film in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress but either he hadn't yet perfected his sleight of hand with this 'type' or you had to be paying closer attention.

He was fun on The Leftovers a couple of weeks back, too, as a man who sold artificial look-alike corpses of your vanished loved ones. And if you've tried watching that show you'll know how surprising it is to call anyone "fun" within its creepy miserabilism. Frankly the show could use more gallows humor like it had during his intoxicating appearance.

I love this observation from the Observer profile:

On Screen and Stage Billy Magnusson often plays what I have started referring to as the Billy Magnusson Character: infectiously high energy, slightly drunk, and constantly hitting on an older woman. Oh, and he's got to take his top off. Just rip the thing off. Seriously like right now.

...What makes the Billy Magnussen Character so compelling is that he'll simultaneous play both to and against type.

I recommend that you familiarize yourself right quick with this Billy Magnussen Character. His Twitter and Instagram are fun too with cameos from co-stars of note like Kathy Bates & this one of Meryl Streep at the first sing-through of Into the Woods a year ago this month.

In other stage sex symbol news, how's this for shameless and thoroughly modern self-promotion....?

You almost never hear about actors from stage touring companies but a dancer named Mark MacKillop who played Riff in a recent West Side Story production, is selling a book compiling every photo taken of himself in hotel rooms on the road when he was lonely.

[NSFW photos after the jump...]

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