If you’re wondering who Corey Stoll is, you may recognize him as the best part of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. The actor played Ernest Hemingway in that film, and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Now, he’s joined Netflix’s first original television series “House of Cards,” alongside some other fantastic talent. David Fincher is set to direct the pilot, and Kevin Spacey is playing the lead in the rehash of a 1990 British TV series. More on the plot of the show and Stoll’s role after the jump.

The political thriller will see Spacey playing Frank Underwood, the Majority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives. When someone else is awarded the position of Secretary of State instead of him, Underwood comes up with a scheme to bring down the new president. According to Deadline (via The Playlist), Stoll “will play Patrick Russo, a loose-cannon, womanizing three-term Italian-American congressman, divorced with two kids, who is having a torrid affair with his secretary (Kristen Connolly). When Russo gets caught driving drunk with a call-girl passenger, Underwood intervenes to save him from the scandal — but at a high cost.”

The pilot is written by Beau Willimon (The Ides of March). “House of Cards” is committed to at least 26 episodes, and the show will begin airing in late 2012.

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Horrible Bosses is now available to pre-order from Amazon on: DVD | Blu-ray

New Line and Warner Home Entertainment will release Horrible Bosses on DVD and Blu-ray October 11th, 2011, with the “Totally Inappropriate Edition” offering a new 106-minute-long extended version.

The movie, released in July, has made $170 million worldwide and stars Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudekis as best buds who plot to kill each of their bosses (played by Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, and Colin Farrell).

Here are the Blu-ray features:

- My Least Favorite Career
- Surviving A Horrible Boss
- Being Mean Is So Much Fun
- Deleted Scenes
- Making of the Horrible Bosses soundtrack

Horrible Bosses is now available to pre-order from Amazon on: DVD | Blu-ray

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It’s more rated-R hijinx at theaters with Horrible Bosses. And here’s what the feature gets right:

Jennifer Aniston is finally doing something different (and sexy). Jason Bateman’s face looks as if he was constipated during the entire shoot. Charlie Day is put in a position where he can do what he does best. When you add in the all-star cast of cameos and supporting players, the audience should be able to settle in for a Harlem Globetrotters type performance…
Too bad they get the Washington Generals. (Conclude positives)

This comparison has been used before somewhere in my history of reviews, but this is 93 minutes of a comedian struggling on stage. The failsafe? Start swearing and being all angry during every scene. That practice worked out well for Michael Richards and Tracy Morgan didn’t it?

“Oh my God this sucks” says one of the three leads about halfway through when they realize they aren’t able to pull off the caper in killing each other’s bosses (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell & Jennifer Aniston). And I couldn’t agree more. Sure there’s a few “shots of intelligence” in this over-blown skit. And seeing Jennifer Aniston loosen up (pun intended) was actually one of the highlights. (What does that tell you?)

The assembling of Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day and Jason Bateman looks great on paper. Sudeikis and Day were dynamite together in last year’s Going the Distance. Wedging Bateman between these two turned out to be a worthless ploy. Bateman looks out of place this time around and you can see it in his face (and during the outtakes in the credits) that he’s not sure why he’s here. Being a fan of Charlie Day’s approach (again, really dug him in Going the Distance), director Seth Gordon flaunts too much of him, riddling him to an annoyance rather than an anticipated punch-line. Everyone here is also mumbling through their lines, too. The only lines they truly nail are ironically when coke is involved. The Vegas wake-up drug comes into play because Colin Farrell’s balding; short-sleeve wearing douche-bag persona is addicted to it. Sadly, this angle, along with his talents, goes to waste due to limited screen time. In fact, all his funny scenes are in the trailer.

Kevin Spacey plays a corporate president, who is drunk with power, and believes it’s a privilege for others to be in his presence. When he’s mercilessly riding Bateman’s character, things look promising; but where the comedy is heading is always predictable. Everything is telegraphed minutes before the gag happens throughout this fast-moving, unbalanced misfire. This can be tolerated if the dialogue is timed correctly. Timing blunders become evident when the hit man angle is explored. Ioan Gruffudd, while a solid actor is not a cameo draw. His sequence with the boys comes across unrehearsed and shallow. The main cameo is completely wasted unless you put stock into giving someone a funny name and then repeating it over-and-over again.

And that’s the source of the problem with this piece; jokes are too articulate (like my reviews at times) and/or dragged out way too long. There’s a nice and relatable concept with taking out your boss, yet the writers fail to capture the over-the-top fun in doing so. Acting on these realistic notions worked in flicks like Hall Pass and Old School. HB is trying to stay within the novice approach the unskilled characters would naturally have and for continuity reasons, it makes sense. I guess what it boils down to is that this college-dorm room planning tale just came across as lame.

Overall, Horrible Bosses missed an opportunity to advance itself. The staff behind this annoying, tedious product was under-qualified to handle the exceptional talent at their disposal. To be fair though, some of the employees missed the mark on their characters, too. My father always used to tell me (still does actually ha-ha) “work first, play later.” With regards to this messy execution, these guys clearly switched the first and third words around.

RATING: 1.5 out of 5

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Yahoo! got themselves a new poster for The Men Who Stare at Goats. The film stars George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, J.K. Simmons and goat (who’s real name cannot be revealed due to an ongoing legal dispute between the Goat Actors Guild and the Association of Hoofed Beings).

The film is ‘inspired by a real story’ and follows reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) who is in search of his next big story when he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a shadowy figure who claims to be part of an experimental U.S. military unit. According to Cassady, the New Earth Army is changing the way wars are fought. A legion of “Warrior Monks” with unparalleled psychic powers can read the enemy’s thoughts, pass through solid walls and even kill a goat simply by staring at it. When the programme’s founder, Bill Django (Bridges), goes missing, Cassady’s mission is to find him.

Click here to watch the trailer!

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George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, and J.K. Simmons are in a movie together. It’s called The Men Who Stare At Goats, and it looks quite good. The film is ‘inspired by a real story’ and follows reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) who is in search of his next big story when he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a shadowy figure who claims to be part of an experimental U.S. military unit. According to Cassady, the New Earth Army is changing the way wars are fought. A legion of “Warrior Monks” with unparalleled psychic powers can read the enemy’s thoughts, pass through solid walls and even kill a goat simply by staring at it. When the programme’s founder, Bill Django (Bridges), goes missing, Cassady’s mission is to find him.”

If you look closely you will see Stephen Lang, who plays Col. Quaritch in Avatar, and Glenn Morshower who played General Morshower in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Nice bit of military typecasting there.

The Men Who Stare At Goats will be released on November 6th in the US and January 22nd in the UK.

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Last August, I joined a Facebook Group started for Aaron Sorkin (writer of The West Wing, Sports Night and A Few Good Men) by his assistant Ian Reichbach. Ian was internet savvy enough to manage the Sorkin Facebook presence as Aaron poked around the social networking site so he could better write a Facebook movie for producer Scott Rudin. Vulture confirmed with Rudin that Sorkin wasn’t crazy and there was such a movie in development.

Cut to: yesterday, when a Variety story filled in some of the gaps for this mysterious project:

Columbia Pictures is in advanced talks with David Fincher to direct “The Social Network,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted film for Columbia Pictures about the formation of Facebook.

The film will focus on the evolution of Facebook from its 2004 creation on the Harvard campus by sophomore Mark Zuckerberg to a juggernaut with more than 200 million members.

Scott Rudin and Michael De Luca are producing with Trigger Street’s Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti.

You’re probably picturing what I’m picturing: West-Wing-style walk-and-talks with Fight Club/Panic Room style CG tracking shots through floors, walls and keyholes. Which actually sounds kind of nauseating, but if you’re David Fincher and you need to make dialogue visually exciting, that might just happen.

What was not reported while the internet erupted in a simultaneous cry of “this is stupid” is that The Social Network is actually based off a non-fiction book titled The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by author Ben Mezrich, who also wrote Bringing Down The House, the book that would spawn the film 21…also produced by Kevin Spacey.

Logic would suggest that Spacey and producer Scott Rudin got their hands on an advance copy of The Accidental Billionaires and decided to option the project a year before the books publication date (us normals can buy our copies starting on July 14th), slapped Aaron Sorkin on the job of adapting it, tossed Sorkin’s script to Fincher, added some yeast and they’re ready to go later this year.

The book’s official description goes like this:

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order. Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.

Call me crazy for not hating this project, but if both Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher can safely put their names on it, shouldn’t I not dismiss it just because, up until today, it was “The Facebook Movie?”

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