We started writing about Lawless here back in 2010, when it used to be called The Wettest County in the World. At one point, names like Ryan Gosling, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, and Paul Dano were all in talks to join, but despite development struggles over the years, Australian director John Hillcoat finally found enough funding to pull the project together. A true story about three bootlegging brothers, the finished product has a terrific cast that includes Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska. The first full trailer has arrived online, so check it out after the jump and let us know what you think in the comments.

Lawless hits theaters on August 31st, 2012.

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The only non-Transformers movie Shia LaBeouf has appeared in over the past couple of years was Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, but the actor is stepping out of the shadow of giant robots and heading back into the spotlight. He’s got the upcoming John Hillcoat movie Lawless (formerly The Wettest County in the World) hitting theaters later this year, and right after that, he’s prepping a passion project called The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. Now, two big name actors are coming on board to join him: Oscar-winner Melissa Leo and Inglourious Basterds star Til Schweiger.

Here’s the synopsis:

Charlie Countryman (LaBeouf) was just a normal guy…until he fell in love with the one girl who will probably get him killed.  When Charlie meets the absolutely irresistible Gabi she’s already been claimed by Nigel, an insanely violent crime boss with a gang of thugs at his disposal.  Armed with little more than his wit and naïve charm, Charlie endures one bruising beat down after another to woo Gabi and keep her out of harm’s way.  Finally his exploits of blind valor create such a mess that he’s left with only one way out; to save the girl of his dreams, must Charlie Countryman die?

The roles of Gabi and Nigel will be played by Evan Rachel Wood and Mads Mikkelson, respectively. According to Variety, Schweiger will play Darko, a Serbian gangster/strip club owner who relocated to Budapest to avoid a war crimes trial. Leo will play LaBeouf’s late mother, who appears occasionally and offers advice.

I’m a huge fan of this premise, and the addition of two more excellent actors just adds to my desire to see it. This movie is slowly climbing my list of most anticipated films of 2013. Are you looking forward to seeing The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman?

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In the past few years of writing about movie news, one of the films I’m most disappointed never made it to the big screen was D.J. Caruso’s adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan’s excellent comic Y: The Last Man, starring Shia LaBeouf as the protagonist, Yorick. To simplify the story to one sentence, it follows Yorick, an escape artist, and his pet monkey, Ampersand, as they search for Yorick’s girlfriend after a global event decimates the male population, leaving them as the last two male mammals on earth. It’s a fantastic series, and a perfect entry point for the average moviegoer looking to get into comics.

But even though Caruso’s version never progressed past the script stages, New Line hasn’t given up on the adaptation yet. The studio has hired Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia to take a crack at the script, proving that they still have an interest in seeing this amazing story transition to the big screen.

The Hollywood Reporter brings us the news, which points out that these new writers (who, frankly, I’ve never heard of until now) are pretty new to the game, having only written Zorro: Reborn for Sony in the feature world. They were writer/producers on some television shows including “Human Target,” but other than that, they’re fairly untested at this point. Fair enough – I’m glad they’re getting their shot, but this is obviously a property I hold dear, so I really hope they don’t screw this up. It’s a project with an epic, worldwide scope, so it’s going to be really tough to cram the whole story into one film. (Caruso and his writer, Carl Ellsworth, were planning a trilogy.)

And for all you LaBeouf haters out there, settle down – the actor left the project a couple of years ago fearing Yorick was too similar to his Sam Witwicky character from Transformers. That comparison bothers me a little bit, but I guess they’re close enough that he wants to avoid being typecast. (Though I swear this is the perfect role for him.) It’s going to be tough for any film to live up to the hype of the comic, but let’s hope that Federman and Scaia are the guys to make it happen. Do you still care about a Y: The Last Man movie? (Or did you ever?)

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Thanks to a scheduling conflict with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, it didn’t look like Shia LaBeouf was going to be able to star in a passion project of his, The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. Zac Efron took over, but now the role is back in LaBeouf’s hands and it looks like it’s moving along nicely because two more have just joined the cast.

Evan Rachel Wood (The Wrestler) and Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) are attached in key roles. The story follows Charlie (LaBeouf), who travels to Europe after his mother’s death. He meets a Hungarian girl named Gabi Banyai (Wood), whose father dies on the plane next to him, and Charlie falls for her. But the problem comes when Nigel (Mikkelsen), Gabi’s estranged and violent husband, steps in to make sure Charlie and Gabi never get together.

Billed as a “gritty pulp romance,” I’m really looking forward to this one. Mikkelsen was a highlight of Casino Royale for me, so we already know he can play the threatening bad guy role with ease. I’ve been a LaBeouf fanboy for a long time, so I’m excited for any opportunity to see the actor step out of the Transformers shadow.

Matt Drake (Project X) wrote the script, and filming starts later this year. What do you think about the concept and the cast so far?

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After Matt Drake’s script for The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman landed on the 2007 Black List (the list of best unproduced screenplays of the year), it caught the interest of Shia LaBeouf. But the Transformers franchise ate up most of the actor’s time, and Zac Efron stepped in to take his place. As often happens in Hollywood, things fell apart yet again, and now LaBeouf is done with his robot-related commitments and re-attached as the lead here. So what is this movie even about? Hit the jump to find out.

Variety reports commercial director Fredrik Bond is set to direct the “gritty pulp romance” that, despite that description full of Hollywood buzzwords, actually sounds pretty fantastic.

Here’s the full synopsis from Collider:

Charlie Countryman (LaBeouf) was just a normal guy…until he fell in love with the one girl who will probably get him killed.  When Charlie meets the absolutely irresistible Gabi she’s already been claimed by Nigel, an insanely violent crime boss with a gang of thugs at his disposal.  Armed with little more than his wit and naïve charm, Charlie endures one bruising beat down after another to woo Gabi and keep her out of harm’s way.  Finally his exploits of blind valor create such a mess that he’s left with only one way out; to save the girl of his dreams, must Charlie Countryman die?

LaBeouf will appear next in John Hillcoat’s highly anticipated bootlegging drama The Wettest County with Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, and more. He’s also got Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep in post-production, with a phenomenal cast including Sam Elliot, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, Brit Marling, Terrence Howard, Susan Sarandon, and Redford himself. Pre-production has begun on The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, with filming scheduled to start in Eastern Europe this May.

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Update: Amazon has now made the movie available to pre-order on : DVD | Blu-ray

With Transformers: Dark of the Moon having a mammoth runtime of 155 minutes it’s hard to imagine there was much left on the cutting room floor for the DVD and Blu-ray release, but in a recent interview Shia LaBeouf said there’s “hours and hours” of footage that didn’t make the cut. Most of it involves talking.

From MTV:

“Because we’re 3-D, you’re shooting digital all the time,” LaBeouf told MTV News. “The beauty for us is, let’s say I’m doing a scene with [John] Malkovich or Frances [McDormand] or [Patrick] Dempsey or even Rosie [Huntington-Whiteley] — we’d just riff. You’ve got hours and hours of all that … where you’re just riffing and ad libbing and trying to come up with lines.”

One short scene that was cut featured John Malkovich’s boss as he leaves a meeting with LaBeouf, Huntington-Whiteley and a few Autobots.

“It was just a little tiny thing where I go back to Rosie after I leave the apartment and try to get her number,” Malkovich explained. “That’s the kind of thing that could be true to the character and could not be true to the character — hard to say — but is utterly superfluous to the forward movement of the film.

“You’re a figure in someone else’s dream, and however their dream plays out is the way it is,” he added.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon has only just been released so talk involving the DVD and Blu-ray is a bit premature, but it is likely Paramount will set a release date for the end of the year. The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen DVD/Blu-ray contained lots of extra features, so we can expect the same for Bay’s final Transformers movie.

Update: Amazon has now made the movie available to pre-order on : DVD | Blu-ray

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Dark of the Moon is not only the best entry in Michael Bay’s Transformers saga, it’s also one of the best action movies of the year. Bay does what he does best – make stuff look awesome – but more importantly, the story and characters actually feel important to the film instead of ancillary functions of a purely CGI-driven creation. Ehren Kruger’s script is a perfect match for Bay’s directing style, balancing just the right amount of story with terrific action beats. Though it clocks in around two hours and forty minutes, the last hour is one of the most action packed segments in recent film history.

Let the record show that I believe Michael Bay is a brilliant filmmaker. Allow me to be clear: the man doesn’t necessarily make brilliant films (OK, never), but he’s a craftsman of the highest order who is able to accomplish things that no other director in Hollywood can. He has made an art of shooting helicopters, explosions, chase scenes, and destruction. He uses his actors as chess pieces in a larger game, and if you’re willing to play that game along with him, you’re going to have a hell of a good time.

One of the many reasons the second film, Revenge of the Fallen, didn’t work that well for me was because (and I realize this may sound crazy) there was an overabundance of robots. It was nothing but gnashing metal and mechanisms, a soulless piece of work that reeked of problems due to the then-in-full-swing Writers Guild of America strike. Dark of the Moon corrects all of these issues, boiling down the number of Transformers to the essential players and avoiding unnecessarily complicated mythologies.

The action in this film is jaw-droppingly impressive. The opening scene, an epic (and I don’t use that word lightly here) battle between the Autobots and Decepticons on their home world, rivals any space battle from any of the Star Wars films in the realm of size and scope. Much of this credit should be given to ILM for creating the visual effects, which, aside from being gorgeous, are easy to comprehend and immensely complicated. I normally don’t put much stock in the Oscars, but if the Academy fails to acknowledge the incredible effects work done in this movie, they truly are an irrelevant organization.

The reason I believe the action works so well in Dark of the Moon is because Bay essentially took scenes from the original Transformers and improved upon them. There is a fantastic highway car chase sequence (among the director’s best, an accomplishment in itself) that’s basically a more involved version of a similar scene in the first film. Same goes for the final 20 minutes, in which Shia LaBeouf runs through a huge city against all odds toward a piece of alien technology. Though some may find this a bit repetitive, I have absolutely no problem with it: since these scenes are all bigger and more bombastic than the first film (there are District 9-type alien ships floating above Chicago this time, and FAR more destruction and chaos in the streets), the movie doesn’t feel like a poor imitation of something we’ve already seen. Bay’s use of live action 3D here is phenomenal, and best used in a base-jumping sequence that was shot practically with the same technology that James Cameron invented for Avatar.

Rosie Huntington-Whitely is a step up from Megan Fox, and even though Rosie’s character isn’t quite as involved as I would have liked, she’s still a tenfold improvement from Fox’s Mikaela Banes. Rosie is definitely a “Michael Bay girl” (women in his movies should have their own classification, like Bond girls) and therefore isn’t relied on as much as the male protagonists, but for what it’s worth, I liked her a lot. She gives Sam Witwicky added motivation for self-improvement, and her presence seemed to insert a jolt of energy into what could have been a tired performance from Shia (who I’d imagine is getting sick of this character by now). And as a longtime LaBeouf fanboy, it should come as no surprise to that I was a big fan of his schtick here. He’s a true movie star in my mind – tremendously watchable and easily foreseeable as the next big A-list powerhouse in line with DiCaprio.

Dark of the Moon also succeeds in pulling together a strange collection of character actors to fill in the human roles in the movie, including John Turturro, Frances McDormand, Ken Jeong, Patrick Dempsey, Alan Tudyk, and the always-entertaining John Malkovich. I’ve heard complaints that the comedy didn’t work for many people, but I laughed a lot and found almost everyone enjoyable to watch. The exception, surprisingly, was McDormand, an actress I normally like, but found severely annoying after her first five minutes on screen. Even Ken Jeong was fun to watch, though he was acting as an amalgamation of every character he’s ever played.

In my review of the original Transformers, I wrote that I had “never seen so much debris in my life,” and now it falls on me to update that statement: Dark of the Moon now holds the record for the most debris of any film I’ve ever seen. Even if you’re not in it for the whole thing, the last forty-five minutes stands as one of the most impressive visual spectacles to hit theaters in a long time. Every other summer action film – Thor, Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class, Super 8, even Fast Five – must bow down to Michael Bay as the king of the summer blockbuster. When Bay is at his peak, nobody does it better. Until next time…

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Transformers: Dark of the Moon will be released later this week and is expected to make a stupid amount of money. In case you aren’t one of those currently planning to be a spectator to some robot warfare this weekend Paramount have released a new trailer to get you pumped. There’s quite a lot of new footage, but it only lasts a minute long and there’s nothing spoilery.

Watch below:

Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, and John Turturro are back for the third outing, with Peter Cullen returning as the voice of Optimus Prime and Hugo Weaving returning as the voice of Megatron. Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley will be replacing Megan Fox as the female lead, playing Sam Witwicky’s new love interest Carly.

In this movie, the Autobots and Decepticons become involved in a perilous space race between the U.S. and Russia, and once again human Sam Witwicky has to come to the aid of his robot friends. LaBeouf, who admitted he wasn’t impressed with the second film, said “there’s going to be a lot of death, human death. This time, they’re targeting humans,” and says “It’s going to be the craziest action movie ever made, or we failed.”

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When it was announced that Megan Fox wouldn’t be returning for Transformers 3 a few weeks before filming was set to begin there were conflicting reports as to why. Did Michael Bay fire the actress, or did Fox walk? We’ve heard bits here and there over the past year, but now Shia LaBeouf has given a pretty frank and honest explanation.

From the L.A Times:

“Megan developed this Spice Girl strength, this woman-empowerment [stuff] that made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael, who some people think is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women,” LaBeouf said. “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality. It’s summer. It’s Michael’s style. And I think [Fox] never got comfortable with it. This is a girl who was taken from complete obscurity and placed in a sex-driven role in front of the whole world and told she was the sexiest woman in America. And she had a hard time accepting it. When Mike would ask her to do specific things, there was no time for fluffy talk. We’re on the run. And the one thing Mike lacks is tact. There’s no time for [LaBeouf assumes a gentle voice] ‘I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees.’”

Fox must have become tired of being told to lean suggestively over different modes of transportation. It was pretty clear what Bay’s ‘style’ was when he started test-screening for Fox’s replacement. They were all models. He wasn’t interested in acting talent, it was all about looks.

I think people should give Rosie Huntington-Whiteley a shot (don’t judge a book by its cover and all), but the fact Paramount haven’t shown much of her speaking and acting in the trailers isn’t encouraging. Fortunately Whiteley seems to be good at all the other stuff she’s asked to do, as Shia explained:

“Rosie comes with this Victoria’s Secret background, and she’s comfortable with it, so she can get down with Mike’s way of working and it makes the whole set vibe very different,”.

I’m sure there many who don’t mind seeing aesthetically pleasing females rolling around in their summer blockbusters, but there’s something quite sad about an actress having to quit a film because the director just wants her to ‘be looking fine’. But then again, Fox did decide to play a prostitute in Jonah Hex.

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We heard earlier today that the world would be getting Transformers: Dark of the Moon two days earlier on June 29th, and now Michael Bay’s official website has released a new trailer for the film showing off some of the potentially cool 3D scenes. It’s similar to the theatrical trailer, just with some new action-filled footage.

Watch below:

Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, and John Turturro will be back for the third outing, with Peter Cullen returning as the voice of Optimus Prime and Hugo Weaving returning as the voice of Megatron. Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley will be replacing Megan Fox as the female lead, playing Sam Witwicky’s new love interest Carly.

In this new movie, the Autobots and Decepticons become involved in a perilous space race between the U.S. and Russia, and once again human Sam Witwicky has to come to the aid of his robot friends. LaBeouf, who admitted he wasn’t impressed with the second film, said “there’s going to be a lot of death, human death. This time, they’re targeting humans,” and says “It’s going to be the craziest action movie ever made, or we failed.”

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