Director Bryan Singer told Deadline yesterday that Emmy-winning actor Peter Dinklage will play a “key role” in X-Men: Second Class Days Of Future Past. This is, of course, great news for the spiffily dressed but not terribly interesting Mad Men mutants. Fans of Game of Thrones, Elf, 30 Rock, and The Station Agent have long known that Dinklage brings intelligence, gravity, and a scary-sharp wit to every production. In fact, I’d go so far as to declare that Dinklage is such a valuable asset every tentpole this year should add him to its cast. The Words of Peter need to spread far and wide.
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The old-fashioned cancer weeper — a genre that includes pictures like Love Story, Brian’s Song, and the gold standard of chemocathartic melodrama, Terms of Endearment — has been in short supply these days, maybe because nakedly manipulative tearjerking is a hard sell with modern audiences. Jonathan Levine tried to freshen the genre with last year’s 50/50 and pulled it off with reasonably effective results, thanks largely to the unassuming charisma of his star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt: You don’t want to see anyone get cancer, but you particularly don’t want to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt get cancer. You may not want to see Kate Hudson get cancer, either, as her character does in A Little Bit of Heaven. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like her. The tiniest bit of Hudson’s wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She’s like an adorbs Camille.
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