In a pretty iffy comic-book-movie year, and on the totally inept heel of Green Lantern, Marvel brings us a nice, crunchy 2-minute Captain America trailer for us to sink our teeth into!

Let’s! (No spoilers for plot, in case you’re wary of that. I mean, let’s be fair, the plot is probably “Also, Nazis and Explosions!”, but still, I’m not giving anything away here.)

- What this movie is up against: Captain America is a really loaded superhero deeply tied to nationalism and whose popularity waxes and wanes with global perception etc etc, and this movie has a big fight ahead of it in the current political climate. Plus, there’s the ever-present pitfall of American-made World War II movies that pretend the war was just getting started when the U.S. rolled up; I’m not saying this movie falls prey to this, only that the potential is there. I’ll spare you this essay on these guys until the movie actually comes out.

- That said, Chris Evans is a very personable and really underrated actor (doubters should check out Sunshine!), and he is selling the shit out of the good-hearted hero here. Gotta love the character beats they provide.

- If you look really hard, you can see JJ Feild for half a nanosecond. (The man is a magnet for period pieces.) See you soon!

- Hayley Atwell, this is your chance to really impress me after Pillars of the Earth and Brideshead Revisited (neither of which were your fault, because yikes). You can do it!

- I like the feeling I get that Hugo Weaving was only in this movie because he hadn’t been Ham-Offing in a franchise for nearly eight months and he was getting antsy.

- Sebastian Stan, I liked you in Kings. See you soon!

- I am the only person in the world who doesn’t care about the Stark mythology for one second, so you guys can have fun with that!

- I am probably also the only person in the world who cares more about everyone else’s costume than about the Cap’s. Production design looks great.

- Richard Armitage, I see you actorbombing this franchise. You get your foot in the door, dude, it’s time you broke out big. JJ Feild will be right behind you.

- Supporting Actor Camp: loving all your hammy little faces. See you soon!

- If you don’t have enough explosions, use flamethrowers. It’s mostly the same.

To sum up: See you at the midnight show.

So, at the launch party for Mechanique, I was lucky enough to have two incredible performances, AND lucky enough to have a friend willing to film them. Both performances were amazing, and I’m so pleased to be able to share them with everyone!

First up was Juanita, who was outstanding on the static trapeze; I had seen her before at a House of Yes variety show, so I knew how athletic she was, but this performance was a complete change of mood that she seriously aced.

Later in the evening, Anya performed on the silks.

Nerd-out about this song: it’s “Paradise Circus,” by Massive Attack, and I listened to it an unhealthy amount when I was writing Mechanique. When Anya emailed me asking for music suggestions, I wrote back instantly with THIS OR ANYTHING LIKE THIS. However, I didn’t know anything for sure until just beforehand, so when this happened I got nerd vapors.

And she was perfect, from her expressions to the fact that she’s 30 feet up for some of these moves. Watching this live was seriously amazing, and I’m really thrilled to be able to share it.

Huge, huge thanks go to Juanita, Anya, and everyone at the House of Yes who made the party feel like a real circus!

They say your childhood is over the moment you watch a David Cronenberg movie.

Related: the trailer for A Dangerous Method came out yesterday!

It stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, and Keira Knighley as a pretty no-talent with the world’s best business manager, as per usual.

Here’s how this goes. We all know that Cronenberg loves his doubling (My First Cronenberg was Dead Ringers, back when I was young enough to be seriously unprepared for a movie like Dead Ringers), and I really love the visual and character parallels that are being set up with Mortensen and Fassbender. If we’re playing in the subconscious mind as well (and since this is Cronenberg, we are), I look forward to some nice boundary-blurring eXistenZ action. Also, the look of the film is impeccable right down to the desk accessories, so I’m pretty stoked.

However, Keira Knightley is not a good actress, and in less than two minutes she ruins this film.

(Let me do my disclaimer: Yes, she seems like a very nice person. Her commentary on the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie is far more charming and engaging than her performance in said movie, so she’s probably fun to hang out with. I like that she did a domestic violence PSA. All this makes her a nice person. I know a lot of nice people who are not good actors, and she isn’t, either, and that’s fine. I have a problem with her because she continues to get cast in otherwise-good movies over more-talented peers, giving us multiple opportunities to prove how short she can fall against the more talented actors with which she stars. Yes, you are free to like her. Okay, all covered!)

I can occasionally suffer through her, but looking at this trailer, I honestly don’t know if I can do it.

It’s a shame, because Mortensen and Fassbender are excellent actors, and if he’d cast Andrea Riseborough in this instead, you might have the strongest cast of the year so far *.

And one of the reasons this casting worries me so much is that there is more at stake than just some awkward moments of dialogue. David Cronenberg’s subconscious is often a treacherous place for women. Jennifer Jason Leigh did all right for herself in eXistenZ, and Maria Bello held her own in A History of Violence, but as a rule, in the course of being creepy, Cronenberg can seriously get supercreepy with the ladies.

Sabina Spielrein went from mental patient to one of the first female psychoanalysts (elected into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, no less – go Badgers!), and she had some controversial ideas about sexuality, and while I totally understand making her sexual identity part of her relationship with Jung, I know how Hollywood works and I am worried. I might not be so concerned if this were being directed by, say, Jane Campion or Ang Lee, but I cannot help but feel that for all this movie’s virtues, that inner journey will rest largely on the shoulders of the actress in those quiet moments between throwing mud at people and cooing to be punished in bed and whatever else Cronenberg needs her to do to be Wild and Id-y. Andrea Riseborough could do that, or Rebecca Hall, or Romola Garai; Keira Knightley can’t.

In conclusion, the combined power of Mortensen and Fassbender might get me to see this in the same way the combined Awesome Actor Camp got me to see Atonement, but it will be despite all this nonsense, because seriously.

* Until The Debt comes out with Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds and Jessica Chastain and Martin Csokas, my favorite Xena paramour of all.

P.S. To end this on an up note that makes my point better than I did, enjoy this video in which a Keira Knightley impersonator is better at being Keira Knightley than Keira Knightley is.

So, way back when, I threw a circus as a book launch party. It was a great time, made even better by the fact that a friend agreed to shoot some footage in case I wanted it for posterity. (I did; posterity is my favorite.)

Then edited a book trailer out of it! (Editing software is not my favorite.)

There’s more bonus footage from the party that I’ll put up a little later this week (those performances were too good to waste!), but for now, here’s the book trailer for Mechanique, presented by a total nerd who really enjoyed that circus.

Let’s start this week with some really fun news, shall we?

THIS SATURDAY, JUNE 25, I will be appearing at the Borders in Springfield, VA, to do a reading and signing for MECHANIQUE!

I’m excited about the chance to go back to the Borders I haunted in high school, buying books for extra-credit research. I’m ridiculously excited about the chance for my family to see me read something that is not a middle-school report! I am slightly less excited about the fact that my grandmother and my sister have been going through family photos and will probably be coming with ammo. (There was a photo of me in my lone dance recital outfit. It was just as great as I remembered, for every possible value of “great.” Element of my dance costume I had somehow forgotten – built-in extra strap of hot-pink sequins right across the collarbone, just in case the rest was a little subdued.)

I’ll be there from noon until 2mumble, and if you’re in the area, I would love to see you there!