Lock, Schtick and Two Smoking Scoops: We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Guy Ritchie needs his next movie, Revolver, to rock. Badly. More importantly, we need Revolver to rock. After his Madonna-flavored fiasco Swept Away, the once incredibly cool director has almost lost our confidence. Please, Guy, do another British gangster tale like Lock, Stock & Two Smocking Barrels or Snatch. Please?

Well, according to Ritchie regular Jason Statham (you know, the transporter guy), that's exactly what the new flick, about a superlucky gambler who gets caught up in some bad s--t, has: that O.G. Ritchie flavor.

"For me this is one of his best films yet," Statham tells us. "I'm very proud of Lock, Stock and Snatch, but this one is a much more serious movie. It's a much darker movie and really intense."

Want to know how dark? Well, take a look at Statham kicking ass in The Transporter 2, and then realize that he's the wimp in Ritchie's world. "I'm certainly not the action hero in Guy's movies and never will be," he says, humbled. "There are always people much more threatening and evil than myself."

Statham hinted that the twisty plot won't "revolve" (get it!) around the casino as the trailers tease. "It's definitely got the Guy Ritchie stamp more than the Scorcese stamp," he says. "You'll see that as the movie is revealed. It's only a little, not too much, about the casino."

And not at all about a certain geezer pop star. Just how we like it.

Fincher Club: There are few things in cinema we love more than slick director/smart guy David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven) causing mayhem and spreading his dark, slick humor. (This is the guy who had Gwyneth Paltrow's head FedEx'd to Brad Pitt.) So when we heard he's taking on another serial killer movie, we got all CSI on it.

So. Zodiac stars Mark Ruffalo as San Francisco inspector Dave Toschi, who became a happy, well adjusted hero after he busted the psycho who killed randomly, wore a hood and mailed cryptic taunts to cops and newspapers. Oh wait, that's not how it happened.

"All those guys lives fell apart amidst the searching for the Zodiac killer," Ruffalo tells Team Megaplex, totally bringing us down. "It's like the King Tut curse or something, but most of the detectives or people who got involved with this guy's lives spun out of control. This guy's career was destroyed by it, and then he rises up again in the end."

Yeah, but what about Fincher? He's got a whole new bag of tricks this time. "David said this movie's all about behavior. This is not about the shot or the cut," he spills. "We're shooting on digital-video, hi-def DV that Michael Mann used for Collateral. We're shooting a lot of locked down stuff, long scenes, long dialogue scenes. So it's going to be all about acting."

Acting and--severed heads, right?

Action A-Go-Go:Remember when bullet time was cool? Now it gets booed off the screen. Remember when Jackie Chan did his own stunts? Now even white boys are doing it. So, what's the next level of action movies? Louis Letterier, director of the Transporter films, has the plan.

"It's a one-shot, continuous, hour-and-a-half action movie, non-stop," he tells Megaplex, in his crazed happy-Frenchman accent. "You don't cut away. Not just like Steadicam shot, boring, Russian Ark kind of thing, but hand-held. You know, you follow the guy in Die Hard when he goes in the building, you come out with him when he goes out the window. It would be hypnotic, I think."

Dude, we're hypnotized by your run-on sentences. You can do 90 minutes of people fake fighting, but you can't do Die Hard without any cuts, right? "There's computer help. It's digital mattes, morphing, stuff like that. You need to be well organized and well planned. You cannot just shoot and say, Oh all right, now let's piece it up together. You have to preview the film on video and everything. You can do car chases. You can do everything. It's hidden cuts, but well-done. Well hidden cuts."

Okay, monsieur, we're in. Let's get going on this thing, already. "I want a great story, a great screenplay, I want it to be amazing," he goes on and on, with no cuts or pauses at all. "I don't want it to be just about the process. I want a real good story. I haven't found the right screenplay yet."

We'd better get typin'...