Yes, No, Maybe So: Centurion

Lately it seems like I should maybe be retitling this blog The Fassbender Experience. And here we go again with the staring. But he gives good (movie) face. Fish Tank is still in select theaters but the next feature on the way and it's called Centurion.



All violent period epics are now required to emulate 300 or Gladiator so this one's got some Gladiator lighting and opening forest mayhem and it's got two of 300's stars, Fassbender and Dominic West.

YES. Michael Fassbender on the run. Run, Fassbender, run. While watching Fassbender running I suddenly flashbacked to Chandler and Joey's Baywatch obsession. Always with the running. Run, Michael. Run like the wind!

I should probably admit that as much as I've been obsessing over Fassbender this past year, I don't actually remember him in 300. Or which one he was. I hope he isn't the one that got beheaded. That was so gross.

NO. Which brings me to a lot of "no" here for me. I hate to get left behind in film culture but I swear to god the movies are getting too bloodthirsty and sadistic for me. It seems like it escalates every year. Pretty soon even romantic comedies will have to amp it up. Maybe their slapstick falls could end with broken bones piercing through flesh? The other no here for me is the bad catchphrases masquerading as dialogue "We live united or die divided!!!" This movie is from Neil Marshall, the director of The Descent (which I liked quite a bit) and Doomsday. I tried to watch the latter once after reading an amusing piece on it at fourfour but I couldn't make it through. Too bloody for me. I could never have been a doctor.

MAYBE SO. Here's my thing with warrior women. Love them... BUT... I also kinda hate them when they're too male fantasy. If you look at James Cameron's warrior women, they're not without sex appeal but they have considerable edge. You can't imagine them as male-malleable fantasy centerfolds is what I'm saying. So I'm not sure about these Maxim girls with swords. That said Olga Kurylenko was pretty good in Quantum of Solace so... maybe.

I think I'm a no. But then there's Fassbender. So...
Which way do you lean?
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Olga's House of Pain!

by Erich Kuersten of ACIDEMIC JOURNAL OF FILM & MEDIA


The Russians are coming and the cat women are here! This being an actressexual site, I thought I'd shout out to Ukrainian model Olga Kurylenko. For one reason, my ex-roomate dated a girl who ALMOST got the part in Hitman that went to Kurylenko. Second, she's slated to appear in Quantum of Solace, so her hour has definitely come, and third: sexually aggressive Eastern European models are scary! They're taking over Manhattan nightlife and have become figures of great anxiety for many of us and she's great at playing them. My friends, beware the Russian model! She comes, she takes and leaves her victims broken, shattered, aching. She's voracious! (I'm beginning to sound like the announcer at the beginning of Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!)


If you've ever seen a 1970s Euro-horror film or been to a party full of models or read Lacan, you know that the scariest thing in the world is to suddenly have a Russian model hit on you. Yeah, yeah, you think you can handle it. Trust me, you can't; you'll run for the exit. Lacan writes that this sudden fear is a result the "over-proximity of the objet petit A or in the English translation: "too much too soon." After years of poring over the pages of Vogue, suddenly a 6 foot tall 110 pound, Chanel evening dress-swathed babe is in your lap, drunkenly whispering obscene proposals into your ear while dropping ice cubes down your neck, and what do you do? You find yourself hyper-ventilating and running away like a little bitch. We never imagine that the object of our lust might lust back at us twice as strong; that's a nightmare, not a dream!


Even the bravehearted Timothy Olyphant had this problem in Hitman - and he drugs Olga unconscious rather than allow his perfect bald head to be corrupted by her maddening wiles. And now in Max Payne, Marc Wahlberg kicks her out of his apartment when she's lying on his bed with her legs aggressively uncrossed, beckoning him hither (she only laughs derisively as she walks out).

Kurylenko is the ideal for this feral nympho party girl; she's got a weird canine kind of look and an ease with her body that makes you believe she could sleep with a room full of men (and women) and they'd all go home wrecked empty shells while she strode arrogantly on to the next orgy, oblivious to anything but her own decadent pleasure. Goddamn those Eastern Europeans with their great genes and inherited sense of Nietzscheanity!

Read her latest statements to the press about being a Bond girl and not a bimbo here