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We've already explored the history of 2012 here on Cinematical and what you need to know to see the movie (hint: the world might blow up!), but here's what 2012 stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, and Woody Harrelson and director Roland Emmerich have to say about the end of the world. Do they believe the world will end with a whimper or a bang, T. S. Eliot-style? Will we go out in fire or in ice? Do they even believe the world will end in 2012? Let's find out.

Roland Emmerich: It's always great if you find some sort of belief people have and put it in your movies, as fantastic as they may be. For example, Independence Day, I used Area 51 and centered my whole story around Area 51 because I found out in my research that people really believed in it. And in this movie, as we discovered the phenomenon of 2012, because some culture, the Mayas, gave the end of the world a date. An exact date. The 21st of December, 2012. And that's just so incredible and so interesting that a lot of people are fascinated by it and there's believers; there's people like you [who] just find it fascinating. I hope it will not happen. But when you research it a little bit deeper, you kind of find a lot of other cultures [that] believe the same thing. They only don't put an exact date to it, but they have other predictions which all point to 2012. It's quite eerie...

The MacManus brothers are back with guns blazing in the long-awaited sequel to The Boondock Saints. The Saints are living in Ireland with dear old dad (Billy Connolly) when they get word a priest in Boston has been killed in a way that sets them up to be the fall guys. Long-haired and bearded from the Irish winters, they shed their hair (and their clothes) to head back to Beantown to set things straight. They're joined by a new Saint, Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr. with a sweet mullet), along with the trio of cops from the first movie. And although the unforgettable FBI Special Agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) is nowhere to be found, Special Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz) is on the case, full of piss and vinegar just behind that sweet Southern smile.

Who's behind the murder? Why do they want to lure the boys back to Boston? You'll have to see The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day to find out. Meanwhile, Duffy spilled the beans on the legions of diehard Boondock fans, including his femme fanbase, his critics, and what he thinks women want from men these days. Read on after the jump ...

Cory McAbee is not your average indie filmmaker. He's more of a self-taught Renaissance man who paints, writes, composes music, and also directs mind-bending films. At Sundance earlier this year, I had a slot to fill in my schedule and I thought Stingray Sam sounded interesting. Science fiction meets the Western? Sign me up.

What I didn't know was that I would be treated to a bizarre musical that was sliced up into a serialized format, complete with dance numbers, elaborate 60-second long handshakes between partners, and social commentary on everything from the U.S. prison system to tobacco companies. It's great stuff, and the songs will stick with you long after the movie ends.

Cory is no stranger to film festivals, having been at Sundance with three different films. I spoke with Cory at Fantastic Fest, where he was screening Stingray Sam. Check out the full interview after the break.

Tim League founded the Alamo Drafthouse with his wife Karrie in Austin, Texas back in 1997, and since then it's become a mainstay for mainstream films with a brisk sideline business for film geeks who require a steady diet of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, Asian, cult and ... the plain weird flicks. They've become known for their offbeat programming as much as they are for the fact that you can get a cheeseburger and a pint of beer during the movie, and this week marks the start of their fifth annual Fantastic Fest film festival.

Besides being the owner of the Alamo Drafthouse, League founded the fest with Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, Matt Dentler, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, and Tim McCanlies. These days, League is usually busier than "an octopus with hives," as my uncle used to say, but we caught up with him during the relative calm before the hurricane of film geekery and all-day screenings begins. Read on after the break for the full interview, and of course stay tuned to Cinematical for all of your Fantastic Fest news.

After just a few short years in Hollywood, Eli Roth has managed to create a genuinely multifaceted career, not only as a writer and director, but a producer, and most recently, actor as well. After a few small roles in his own films and a brief appearance on both sides of the camera in Grindhouse (he not only directed the fake-trailer Thanksgiving but played one of the guys getting Jungle Julia drunk in Death Proof), Quentin Tarantino enlisted Roth to play Donnie Donowitz, also known as "the Bear Jew," in his WWII opus Inglourious Basterds. If appearing in a second Tarantino film wasn't enough, this time he's sharing the screen with a literally international cast, headed up by none other than Brad Pitt, with whom he shares the majority of his screen time.

Cinematical recently spoke to Roth in an exclusive telephone interview, where he acknowledged his good fortune thus far. In addition to talking about his role in Inglourious Basterds, Roth talked at length about how playing Donowitz rekindled his creative fire behind the camera, and he also reflected on what makes the horror in horror movies last once they've left the screen.

Cinematical: In Hollywood, directors don't usually say, "what I really want to do is act."

Eli Roth: I'm actually at a photo shoot, so I'm going from director to actor, now a model, and what I'll end up as is a waiter.

Sometimes being a journalist is a pretty sweet gig -- literally. Bear in mind that before the folks at Sony filled the bellies of a handful of film and foodie writers, I had already written about Julie and Julia for another publication in anticipation of a strong movie written and directed by one of Hollywood's funniest and smartest rom-com directors, Nora Ephron, starring two formidable talents, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep.

Julie and Julia is two parallel stories about blogger-turned-memoirist Julie Powell and her hero Julia Child. Powell, an NYC writer fed up with her day job and yearning for a way to get back to her creative writing roots, starts The Julie/Julia Project, a blog chronicling her adventures cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's classic cook book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Streep transmogrifies into Julia Child for her half of the story, which follows her transformation from a French foodie in Paris to chef and author as detailed in her bio My Life in France, which she co-wrote with Alex Prud'homme.

The event I attended included cooking demos by chefs from Le Cordon Bleu and Julie Powell, juicy details from food stylist Susan Bode, and a roundtable with Ephron and Powell. And food. Let's not forget the food. Questions and answers from Nora and Julie, plus an exclusive photo from the movie, after the jump.

Peter Sarsgaard made his big-screen debut in 1995's Dead Man Walking as the murder victim Walter Delacroix, but his breakthrough performance was in 1999's Boys Don't Cry as John Lotter, one of the killers of transgendered man Brandon Teena. Since then, he's become famous for his nuanced performances in a wide variety of films like Shattered Glass, Kinsey, Jarhead, and the upcoming An Education.

If you have missed the ubiquitous and creepy posters for his new movie with Vera Farmiga, Orphan, let me give you a quick synopsis. After Kate Coleman (Farmiga) has a stillborn baby, she and her husband John (Sarsgaard) decide to adopt Esther, a deadly serious Russian orphan who wears ribbons around her neck and wrists and old-fashioned ruffly dresses played by Isabelle Fuhrman. But things keep going wrong when Esther's around... hence the tagline in those ubiquitous and creepy posters with the tagline "There's something wrong with Esther."

After a long weekend of interviews and roundtables, Peter Sarsgaard was kind enough to talk to me over the phone about his favorite horror movies, the Orphan protests, and much more -- right here at HorrorSquad!

Harold Ramis is the comedy writer and director everyone's cribbed from, from Sandler to Apatow. After leaving "Second City TV," Ramis went on to write, direct, and occasionally star in comedic touchstones like Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes, Groundhog Day, and of course, Ghostbusters, which have starred a slew of loveable losers fighting to get their sh*t together in the army, on the golf course, or in the middle of a war with supernatural beings. After taking a few years off, Ramis is taking it back to the beginning with this summer's Year One, which stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as loveable loser cavemen who, when Black's Zed accidentally burns down the village, find themselves in the middle of a very familiar holy war. Read on and find out what the big daddy of buddy movies had to say about evolution and self-improvement, male full frontal nudity and the lack thereof, and what the heck is up with Ghostbusters 3.

Year One opens nationwide this Friday, June 19th.

Cinematical: How much more stressful is it to deal with marketing a summer blockbuster and competing with the other movies that are out?

Harold Ramis: You know, it's the same level of stress every time you make a movie, because you've pinned all your hopes and dreams on it and you've fantasized what success will be like, but at the time you can't escape fantasizing what failure will be like. [laughs]

I conceived this movie on a big scale, to do a Biblical epic comedy. I knew it was ambitious and when the studio said "Yes, we'll do it," and it became real, I thought, "Oh my God!" [laughs] It's one thing to fail small, but to make a big movie that doesn't work is so risky.

Writer-director Rian Johnson burst onto the scene when his high school-set noir riff, Brick, took home the Originality of Vision prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Now, after bouncing around Summit's release slate like the proverbial beach ball, his follow-up -- the romantic, romanticized con man caper, The Brothers Bloom -- is finally receiving a NY/LA bow this Friday before rolling out to more markets in the weeks to come.

Johnson obliged us to do a follow-up interview this week to complement our original chat from last November, and between the two, the filmmaker discusses everything from making the festival rounds and absorbing critical response to the glory of talking monkeys and just where he likes to stick his tea kettle...



Download Part 1 (31 mins.) by clicking here



Download Part 2 (12 mins.) by clicking here

-Score samples by Nathan Johnson, the film's composer and the director's cousin.-

At 21, High School Musical star Zac Efron's old enough to drink ... and, well, old enough to roll around in the mud for some grungy cheesecake photos for Interview magazine. The pics accompany a story by director Gus Van Sant for the magazine's March 24 issue, in which Van Sant appreciates Efron's "well-scrubbed young mannishness."

Efron's obviously working hard to transcend the teen-dream persona that's made him a star, and it looks like it's a shaky transition. The next HSM film will feature a whole new stable of Disney-fresh teen faces, and while Efron's too old for the tween set, he's still stuck acting younger than his age -- his next films will be 17 Again, an abominable sounding comedy in which he plays a magically rejuvenated Matthew Perry, and Me and Orson Welles, a period comedy from Richard Linklater about a teenager who's cast in a Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar, circa 1937 (read our review here).

An excerpt from the Interview piece is available online, and it's notable for two things -- Mikael Janssen's hunky photos, reminiscent of Bruce Weber's 1980's Calvin Klein pin-up boys, and that Van Sant is, unsurprisingly, far more interesting than Efron.

VAN SANT: And so the play that they're putting on in the film is Julius Caesar?

EFRON: Yeah. Orson Welles was doing Julius Caesar, but he had a unique adaptation. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but Stalin was Julius Caesar in the Orson Welles adaptation, so it put a whole new practical spin on the play at the time, which was really neat.

(...)

VAN SANT: How old is Orson Welles in your movie?

EFRON: He's in his mid-twenties, but he's got the wisdom and the presence of a 50-year-old . . . Well, you know, a 30-year-old guy. [laughs]