It’s not too surprising to learn many movie bloggers aren’t fans of Mad Men. They’re movie geeks, not TV viewers, and they probably spend their Sunday nights re-watching favorite horror flicks and Dark Knight DVD extras. That’s why a lot of sites commenting on the news that Jon Hamm is joining Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch focus on the movie and the Watchmen director more than on the actor. Which is fine for now, even if it makes the casting decision seem questionable, because ultimately this career move is going to help Hamm acquire fanboy fans, and that’s one thing he needs in order to truly become the next George Clooney.

After all, Clooney’s first major film role after becoming a star on TV’s ER was Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s vampire picture From Dusk Till Dawn. And Snyder’s movie isn’t too far off, regardless of the fact none of us really know what Sucker Punch is going to be like other than maybe a Return to Oz knockoff. That movie will bring Hamm to Comic-Con, which will potentially gain him more followers who think he’d be perfect for a Superman movie (Clooney played Batman soon after FDTD). And so on.

Many Mad Men fans might prefer for Hamm to concentrate on dramatic roles as he segues into a movie career, but like Clooney, Hamm is likely better suited for genre films and silly comedies first. He certainly has shown he enjoys and can do comedic acting via 30 Rock, SNL and a FunnyorDie sketch that already got the geeks’ attention with his portrayal of Lex Luthor. Might he try being cast in a Coen Brothers film next? Or should he reconnect with the makers of The Ten and make David Wain & co. his goofball collaborators instead?

The only Clooney career step I’d like Hamm to avoid is the big budget, non-geek-centric action movie. He doesn’t need a Peacemaker or a Perfect Storm, and we kinda hope he got that sort of thing out of his system with The Day the Earth Stood Still. Plus, Hamm is already entering the film biz later than Clooney. When he was Hamm’s age, Clooney’d already made two of his best films, Out of Sight and Three Kings.

Let me know what kind of films you’d like to see Hamm do and what you think would be good for him to do. Before commenting, though, check out what some other film bloggers are saying about his latest film choice after the jump:

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Having seen the trailer for the Ken Kwapis’ cast-of-a-thousand stars self help book dramatization He’s Just Not That Into You many, many times (I watch a lot of SoapNET, Lifetime and, uh, MSNBC), I felt reasonably certain going in that I knew exactly what kind of film it was going to be: a wacky, light romantic comedy of mating manners, set in an alternate universe in which otherwise cosmopolitan adults can’t figure out how to use MySpace, and in which all normal and abnormal interpersonal neuroses and difficulties with intimacy are transposed into total paralysis over text messaging. I hope that someday soon, someone in Hollywood makes the film that He’s Not That Into You Was advertised as, because that’s sounds like the exact kind of science fiction that I really enjoy. But He’s Not That Into You is definitely not that film. The question is: what the hell is it?

That Into You fails to fit neatly into assumptions bred by its advertising and its genre makes it somewhat more interesting, if only because it forces us to contend with what our expectations actually are when we go to see a romantic comedy, and what it would actually mean to subvert them. Screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein seem to be very aware of contemporary romantic comedy conventions, as well as a certain tradition of final inning moral clean-up that dates back to the very earliest examples of the genre produced under the Hayes Code. But they have no interest in depriving a mass audience of the crack hit of cinematic junk food that they were promised by the promos. The film’s ultimate willingness to pander to expectation may make it a disappointment on a critical level, but I’m not sure making the audience conscious of the way their guilty pleasure works before letting them have it is something for which the filmmakers should be reprimanded.

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• Apparently Keanu Reeves can play an 18th century Japanese warrior in Universal’s samurai epic 47 Ronin because he’s “half-Asian.” Specifically, he’s half Hawaiian-Chinese, which is only the same as Japanese in the disappointing sort of Orientalism still practiced in Hollywood.
• Ben Affleck may follow up Gone Baby Gone by directing Arizona, the true story of an investigative journalist killed while uncovering political corruption. This could be Affleck’s third work as a director if he’s still helming The Town, which he was linked to back in September.
• New trend in Hollywood: kid writers. While Paramount’s got that 12-year-old food critic film, Fox now has the rights to 9-year-old love expert Alec Greven’s advice series How to Talk to Girls.
• I wonder if Columbia’s untitled bounty hunter project starring Gerard Butler as a man hired to retrieve his ex-wife (played by Jennifer Aniston) will be more like It Happened One Night or His Girl Friday or neither of the above.
• Another YouTube documentary: this one details the online love affair of an Australian and an American whose relationship played out on the video site for all to see. Wait, so why do we need the film?
• The Dark Knight score has now been deemed eligible for an Oscar. Why doesn’t the Academy just announce that the film has already prematurely been nominated in all categories and get it over with.

Forget about Don Cheadle replacing Terence Howard as James Rhodes / War Machine in Iron Man II, which smells a lot like the “we’ll threaten to replace Tobey Maguire with Jake Gyllenhaal” tactic that Sony used for Spider-Man II –– Hollywood has been doing this for years. It was bad enough back in the days of television with Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched, but now it’s becoming pretty commonplace for producers to replace actors in iconic roles. Although now it’s more common due to monetary concerns, which seems to be what has taken Howard out of the War Machine suit, it’s also common to see an actor ankle a role because they don’t like the source material, or the direction the character is taking. We’ve put together several different re-castings, which all happened for a variety of reasons: money, dissatisfaction with the script, test audience reactions, and actors just growing tired of playing the same character. Check them out after the break.

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• Here’s another reason for the Academy to heavily nominate The Dark Knight: it may just be the incentive potential viewers need to make sure to convert their TVs to digitial in time for the Oscar telecast, which airs only five days after the big signal switch occurs. At least there’s already a good excuse in place, though, in case the show’s ratings are a disappointment.
• The effects of Black Monday included media company stock plunges, but there doesn’t seem to be too much worrying at U.S. movie studios. The Indian film industry, however, appears to be feeling a major crunch.
• Ben Affleck has found his directorial follow-up to Gone Baby Gone in an adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s crime novel “The Prince of Thieves.” Affleck will rewrite and also star in the film, retitled The Town. Hopefully he’ll also find room to cast his brother and Donnie Wahlberg, who narrated the “Prince” audio book. Also: Cheech Marin has finally found his directorial follow-up to Born in East L.A.
• No longer to be pegged as simply a rom-com star, Katherine Heigl enters the next phase of her career by signing on for an action-comedy (with some rom-com elements, however) titled Drawn Together.

• Ben Affleck will probably star in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy follow-up, Extract. The film “centers on a flower extract factory owner (Jason Bateman) who’s dealing with workplace problems and a streak of bad luck, including his wife’s affair with a gigolo.” Affleck play not the gigolo, but “an ambulance chasing lawyer.”
• Orphaned by the demise of Warner Independent, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire will now be distributed jointly by Warner Brothers and Fox Searchlight.
• Screenvision, a company previously noted for screening baseball games and opera performances in movie theaters, is bringing a BBC adaptation of the classic girls novel Ballet Shoes (one of my favorites at age 7) to US multiplexes. The film stars three veterans of the Harry Potter franchise: Emma Watson, Gemma Jones and Richard Griffith.
• Heaven’s Gate superfans, take note: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is going to help MGM preserve the MGM/United Artists archive.

• Fox has brought a lawsuit against Warner Brothers, claiming that the latter studio does not have the right to release Zach Snyder’s Watchmen movie, because the former studio never full gave up their rights to the property. The movie’s supposed to come out on March 6, and though a court could decide that Fox should be cut in on its eventual profits, apparently that studio would prefer if the film was shelved altogether. Why did they wait until the film was finished in order to take action? Your thoughts, please.
• Josh Brolin, Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron and Morgan Spurlock are among the celebrities expected to “either cross paths with or interface with such politicians as Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and assorted other city, state and national elected officials” at the Starz! Green Room at the Democratic National Convention next week.
• The Coen Brothers have hired “Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony-nominated actor with little experience in front of the cameras, and Richard Kind, a character actor best known for his role on ABC’s Spin City,” to star as brothers in their upcoming period comedy, A Serious Man.

Brendan Fraser will be in two big mother movies this year, Journey to the Center of the Earth (opening Friday) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. He belongs to a curious list of actors in Hollywood who keep showing up in big movies, despite the fact that they’ve never really made good on the promise of becoming good actors.

It goes like this: A young actor, in his/her first or second movie, shows so much promise they’re touted as The Next [insert famous actor name]. “Despite being only 19 years old, Brendan Fraser has exploded on the scene in School Ties blah, blah…” Then, in spite of of a string of movies like Blast From the Past, every single summer these actors show up in another overly hyped movie.

Below are five top call actors that inexplicably keep starring in big movies. In making this list I noticed a couple hallmarks to spot actors who fit the criteria. One, if they weren’t reading lines when we see them onscreen, you get the sense they’d sound dumb. Also, think about roles they’re famous for, then switch out–say–Ben Affleck as oil-driller-turned-astronaut in Armageddon with Brendan Fraser. Would the movie have really changed? At all?

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Speaking of Jean-Claude Van Damme, it’s been a long 15 years since John Woo came to America to direct the Muscles from Brussels in Hard Target, and I’m ready for the action auteur’s return to Chinese cinema already. In the last decade and a half, Woo has delivered some embarrassing work while in Hollywood (I know, except for Face/Off, we all agree). But now he’s back with Red Cliff, an epic Chinese film costing about $80 million, which makes it the most expensive Asian-financed film ever.

The film, which takes place in the 3rd century (China’s Three Kingdoms period), was partially brought to the Cannes film market, where more than 8 minutes were shown to buyers. And now, courtesy of Trailer Addict, we get to see a bootleg of the reel (visit the site for a much bigger version). Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell if it’s actually going to be worth the wait and the money (this past weekend showed us, with the release of The Children of Huang Shi, that not all China-set epics are good). Nevertheless, it is interesting and exciting to see what Woo has been doing back on his native soil. And who doesn’t enjoy watching Tony Leung over Ben Affleck?

The following comment came in last night on my post about the National Board of Review’s annual honors. It is anonymous, so don’t, like, bet the farm on it (although I don’t know why you’d be betting your farm on SpoutBlog comments anyway. Take your farm more seriously!), but I thought it was interesting:

I’m a member of the NBR (sort of, well, student, even though I’m not anymore… long story) and I’m consistently left in horror by the comments, questions and tastes of our unimaginative membership, most having been cloistered from the real world in there upper west side four bedroom apartments for millenia, rushing from Q&A’s to meet their 7pm reservations at Isabella’s to discuss just how uplifting The Great Debaters was. Anyone remember how Blood Diamond was the third best film of the year last year!? I promise you, the average membership is so old, feeble and generally unsavvy, that Ben Affleck is the only new director they can remember from the past 12 months.

I should also note that I wrote that post based on a partial list of the honors published by Variety. The Reeler has the full list, which includes the NBR’s Top Five Documentaries and Top Ten Indie Films (”indie”, in this case, seems to translate as “an excuse to lump A Mighty Heart in the same bucket as Once.”)

When you take into account Reverse Shot’s reputation for consistently bursting the bubble on over-hyped art house darlings (I became an Andrew Tracy fan after he called Pan’s Labyrinth “dreck” last year), for taking challenging and/or unfashionable positions on filmmakers and stars (see Justin Stewart’s analysis of Colin Farrell’s performance in Miami Vice here), and for just generally being contrarian, the most surprising thing about their latest issue is how closely many of the pieces hew to the critical party line. No one needs Reverse Shot to tell them that the Farrelly Brothers have “suck[ed] all of the soul and much of the meaning out of The Heartbreak Kid,” or that Across the Universe is a “disastrous…pawning [of] the Sixties as nostalgia to a younger generation,” while “I’m Not There is great art.”

But where the new releases section falters a bit, the issue’s main thrust, a symposium on Gus Van Sant, restores faith. Justin Stewart, in particular, saves the day, with two pieces on films sprung from the grey matter of Mr. Ben Affleck.

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• Ben Affleck was secretly an auteur, even when blingin’.
• Why The Hills is more like L’eclisse than The Truman Show.
• David Cronenberg–the video tribute.
• Darren Aronofsky has fallen far.
• David Lynch has a shoe fetish.
• Ze Frank returns to assess the writers strike.
• Jack Nicholson talks about the trilogy that he wanted to make but didn’t. No, it’s not Batman.
• Kevin looks at a list of “entertainment geniuses” and finds, “Our priorities are thus: first, drugs, then the Internet, then money, then the Simpsons, then the abolition of racist regimes.”
• Amy Taubin tried to revive the Mumblecore backlash. Karina poked holes.
• On this week’s podcast, we track Tom Cruise from teenage pimp to midlife crisis.
• Kevin wonders if there’s a Bob Dylan that Todd Haynes left out of I’m Not There: corporate shill.
• Lions For Lambs: Tom Cruise puts the media in its place. It’s just as laughable as it sounds.
• Steal a Pencil For Me: A documentary about love in a concentration camp.
• The director of Xanadu complains about boobs on Fox News.

Emma Forrest’s defense of Ben Affleck/glowing review of Gone Baby Gone in Friday’s Guardian is more than just your standard, short celebrity puff/think piece; it’s the short celebrity puff/think piece Forrest has been sitting on for years. There are four mentions of Affleck in the first fifty pages of Namedropper, Forrest’s first novel, which was probably the best thing to happen to teenage girls and the adults who are enamored with them since My So-Called Life. The mention that I remember most vividly comes from a passage in which the 16 year-old heroine, Viva, is explaining why she rebuffed an opportunity to meet with her estranged mother:

Last time my mother came out of the Buddhist retreat, she tried to set up a reunion with me. But I didn’t want to meet her. She’d been in a Buddhist retreat for five years. I know she wouldn’t have heard of Ben Affleck and that it would just annoy me.

The idea of knowing Ben Affleck comes up again and again in Namedropper, which was published a couple of years after Affleck won an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting. Viva’s friends and nemeses either don’t know who Affleck is or can’t remember his name, which is just one element of the pop-culture obsessed heroine’s sense of isolation.  Forrest’s new appreciation of Affleck would seem to stand as Viva’s vindication. It contends that the former J. Lo consort “had this film in him” but was forced to keep it hidden “all the time that MTV had on heavy rotation a yacht-shot video of him caressing his bling fiancee’s ass.” In other words: what Forrest/Viva knew all along has now been revealed to rest of us. Read more here.

CHICAGO – It wasn’t that long ago when Ben Affleck was an unknown. Fortune eventually smiled upon him and along came quality performances in independents and an Academy Award for screenwriting.

Then came “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and a series of nauseating tabloid stories involving something called “Bennifer”. Affleck’s public image as either a true filmmaker or a hack is riding heavily on his directorial debut of “Gone Baby Gone”.

Without fail, he falls easily into the category of true talent. Following the path that fellow actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood did with “Mystic River,” Affleck elevated a crime thriller by author Dennis Lehane to the big screen.

Click here to read the full review by Dustin Levell…

This film premiered as part of the Chicago International Film Festival on Oct. 10, 2007.