“What Doesn’t Kill You,” Brian Goodman’s first film as writer and director, is getting some pretty stellar early reviews, like “amazing reviews” Samuel L. Jackson enthused. “It’s awesome.”

So awesome, apparently, that Jackson is ready to take the plunge with Goodman on the rising director’s follow-up, “The Fallen,” a story which centers around a group of Boston firemen. Now all the talented duo (who admit to golfing together a few times a week) need is a greenlight.

“Yeah, we’ll see what happens with that,” Goodman said of the finished script, which he is currently deciding what to do with. “We are looking at that and we both would like to work together and we’ll see what happens.”

“The script is good and Brian’s a good guy,” Jackson added. “Hopefully, that film will come together and I’ll be able to do it.”

If made (Goodman reportedly has a slew of projects he’s considering or working on in the moment) the film will be a return to South Boston for the Massachusetts native. The movie follows a fireman who gets hooked on painkillers after suffering injuries saving a woman from a fire.

Forget all that, though. Jackson’s just hoping to get some of Goodman’s good review mojo.

“What? Sometimes people get those kind of reviews!” the actor laughed of his earlier claim that Brian got very, umm, excited praise. “I don’t get them that often.”

Have you seen “What Doesn’t Kill You” yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Would Sam Jackson work as a Boston fire chief? Sound off on your thoughts below.

TMB International Friend RonSalon tips us off to an updated trailer for Star Trek. How updated? Well it is the same trailer we were introduced to last week… With a little more.

You have to watch the whole thing to see the three seconds of extra footage, but it is worth it to see a very old looking Spock offer a “Live Long and Prosper”

After weeks of mounting pressure, Rich Raddon, Festival Director of Film Independent's Los Angeles Film Festival, has resigned from the post he has held since 2000.

While not directly addressing concerns that were raised when it was revealed that Raddon, a Mormon member of the film community, had donated $1500 to the campaign in support of California Proposition 8, he did release a statement apologizing for the "negative attention that my actions have drawn to Film Independent and for the hurt and pain that is being experienced in the GLBT community." His full statement is below.

He’s been a penguin with happy feet, and now Elijah Wood’s next animated adventure is going to make him a ragdoll.

“I’m actually just finishing work on an animated film called ‘9,’” Wood told us when we caught up with him at Alicia Keys’ Black Ball. “It’s based on a short film Shane Acker did a number of years ago. It’s a beautiful short.”

Tim Burton is producing the full-length feature from Acker, one of the WETA Digital animators on “Return of the King,” and Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau, and Christopher Plummer are among the other voice actors. Wood plays 9, one of nine mechanized rag dolls, “who kind of have the soul of humanity in them,” he said. “It’s basically about a post-apocalyptic world where machines created by man have destroyed mankind, and these nine ragdolls go about trying to find out what has happened and what these machines are about.”

In the worldless short film version, two of the ragdolls — 9 and 5 — are scavenging for items when they encounter and must fight one of the ramshackle machine monsters, whose head is a skull, limbs are metal, and torso made out of the burlap hide of ragdolls it’s already killed.

The feature-length version will have more characters, as developed by “Corpse Bride” writer Pamela Pettler, and more beasts, to enrich the world that 9 took place in, so that you can see how this world came to be, how the ragdolls fit in, what the beasts are that hunt them, and what happened to the humans. “It’s so uplifting!” Wood laughed.

The ten-and-a-half short took four years to make, but the feature length will be out by next year, Wood said. And the experience of doing another animated character has left him hungry for more.

“It’s a totally different kind of experience,” he said. “You don’t really rely on the physical. It’s loose. And it’s fun to just create a voice and work on a character that way. It’s a different kind of creative process. It’s fun.”

Sound like something that’ll get you into a theater seat? Chime in below.

New York cutie Lady Gaga spits out a fluffy electro number while playing a mean game of strip poker. This song ain’t that great, but Gaga is definitely one hot piece of ace.