Category: Actresses (Page 69 of 258)

A movie news midnight ramble.

It’s a bit late for a Friday night news dump –and most all of  you will be reading this on Saturday morning — but here’s the news…

* Chris Evans has been offered the part of Captain America, but will he accept?

* Christopher Nolan’s multi-star Philip Dick-esque new movie is generating interesting, of course.

* That word about Tim Burton doing an stop-motion version of “The Addams Family” going back to the characters’ cartoon roots struck me as a perfectly reasonable idea. Charles Addams brilliant cartoons have never really be transferred to the screen in quite the fashion they deserve, so why not take another whack, says me. I any case, the whole story appears to be premature.

adams2* Demi Moore and Nia Vardalos: Twitter heroines.

* Friday’s over now. Is Leo the Lion closer to having a new tamer?

* Speaking of lion tamers, Carl Icahn is at the Lion’s gate. (Sorry.)

* Wow, Jeff Bridges was really a lock for the Oscar. George Clooney did his classy Cary Grant thing again and voted for him. Weirdly enough, much as I just about worship Bridges, I actually think Clooney was better in his nominated role than Bridges in his.

* Christoph Waltz wowed the world as Col. Landa, but what he really wants to do, aside from being America’s new go-to bad guy, is direct, at least once. Good for him for striking while the iron is hot, and it’s very hot for him.

* Woody Allen is having second thoughts, it appears, about casting France’s first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in his new movie.

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* The ultra-hawkish rightwing’s answer to having more successful political thrillers is apparently the same as their longstanding and unchanging prescription for foreign policy: more mindless brutality, please. On the other hand, I might pay to see Gene Simmons’ head explode in a ball of flame, though I’m not advocating it.

* Which is not to say there aren’t some conservatives who don’t have something to teach us liberals. The subtly and thoughtfully right-leaning cinephile Bill Ryan, via Dennis the C,  takes apart the latest highly irritaining controversy involving the always irritaining Armond White.

* I can’t say I actually know the man really at all, but film distributor turned filmmaker turned back to film distributor Jeff Lipsky and I have a bit of history (discussed in my interview with him from 2007). His thoughts on returning to the biz are some interesting inside baseball and most of them seem to make a fair amount of sense.  His movie love is sincere, even as his tastes are quite different than mine. And it’s interesting and hopeful to see an Indie guy still excited about theatrical filmgoing. But why on earth does he feel the need to single out the aforementioned Armond White for praise? I could go on…

From Riches to Rags

Not every celebrity is like Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Buffy the Vampire slayer girl, who still rides a bike in New York and takes used bags to retail stores to get discounts. No, there are some like Nicholas Cage, who shakes and trembles his way into large boutique shops and real estate agencies and never has an idea of what and how much he is about to spend in the next 2 minutes. That’s crazy, really; even celebrities don’t have limitless amounts of money. Everybody, no matter who they are, should not be squandering away ridiculous amounts hard earned money.

Most people spend a lot on credit cards. It’s a psychological thing; credit cards give you the illusion that you have more money to spend than you have actually earned. They give you the illusion that you actually have $5000 to spend, when you are doing nothing but taking a loan –at a high rate of interest- to buy something you don’t need in the first place.

One good way to stop doing this is to use prepaid credit cards. What you do here is, you put in an amount of money into the card at the beginning of a month, say, and spend that money – and only that money – when you use the card. You cannot cross that red line and go into shaky credit zone. You stick to whatever you can afford to put in, and this system naturally puts in a limit to how much you can spend. What this does is basically let you use a card instead of bulky cash, but it puts a limit to your spending too. It’s a great way to budget your life.

“The Bounty Hunter” to ride shotgun for “Alice”?

Karl Rove and Ken Starr in That seems to be the trend in Hollywood conventional wisdom this busy March weekend, at least as reflected by my only source for such matters right now, the thoughts of jolly Carl DiOrio and Greg Kilday of The Hollywood Reporter. It certainly seems fairly impossible to argue that “Alice in Wonderland” won’t continue to enjoy its ride at the top of the box office for another week, with the aid of all those extra-pricey 3-D tickets. If it makes less than $30 million or so, I’m thinking it would be a rude shock for Disney.

As for the #2 spot, the appeal of Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler seems to be working, as per the mysteries of “tracking,” for “The Bounty Hunter.” The film aroused some serious vitriol, however, from our own David Medsker, who has lost all patience with Ms. Aniston. It’s not doing much better with critics as a whole. Scott Tobias of the A.V. Club opines that:

Based on the onscreen evidence, not a single person in front of or behind the camera cared a whit about how The Bounty Hunter turned out…Some movies are passion projects; The Bounty Hunter is an inertia project.

That’s actually mild compared to the zinger Tobias ends his review with. As you might guess, it’s Rotten Tomatoes rating as of this writing is pretty bad, a very lowly 8%.

Jenifer Aniston, Gerard Butler, and the back of bald guy's head star in

Still, audience members may be lured by the film’s effective advertising. Its effective advertising promises a lively ride as a sort of two-fisted spin on “It Happened One Night,” though the PG-13 “Bounty Hunter” is apparently more of an attempt at a light-hearted actioner than the action-packed rom-com you’d expect from the marketing.

DiOrio and Kilday are guesstimating $20-23 million for Sony. Sounds doable to me, though the second weekend might have a huge drop if the film is as much of a creative misfire as it sounds.

Next up is Fox’s PG-rated “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” based on a popular series of young adult “novels in cartoon.” (My pet peeve: why can’t we just call them comics?) I have to say that I hope the movie is much better than the trailer, which I found completely unfunny — just a collection of pale sub-“Wonder Years” jokes. The reviews seem to promise something at least a little better, with “Kid” dividing critics somewhat, though no one seems all that excited in either direction.

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Midweek movie bits

I’m going to be taking a day off from the blogging grind, but there’s plenty going on this late evening in the world’s cinema capital. Starting with…

* Team Coco, the movie! Okay, it’s a documentary about Conan O’Brien’s upcoming live tour and it’s still only in the “early talks” stage according to Mike Fleming’s exclusive. It’s apparently in compliance with his severance deal, even though most people will probably end up watching it on television sets anyhow.

* Speaking of documentaries and comedy, A.J. Schnack rounds up some of the SXSW reaction to James Franco’s SNL documentary.

* At the risk certainty of being repetitious, speaking of comedies connected to SNL, Pete Sciretta rounds up the SXSW reaction to”MacGruber.” We also have reaction direct from Jason Zingale at the big Austin fest just a few posts below.

* In the wake of the sale of Miramax, go-to producer Scott Rudin is negotiating to leave Disney, writes Claudia Eller.

* Okay, even if I might not be a fan of all the movies, I confess to enjoying the idea of having the stars of past Marvel films recreate their roles in the long-discussed “Avengers” film and Edward Norton appears possibly willing to play along by returning as the Hulk, maybe. Whatever else may be true, Norton is a very interesting guy.

* Does a serious version of the Black Knight sequence from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” sound like your kind of film? If so, Anne Thompson thinks you might like “Centurion.”

* I think all the entertainment reporters should just take the month off and let Mike Fleming do all the reporting of stories like the one that Jeremy Renner may be joining Paul Thomas Anderson’s not-about-Scientology movie which will star Philip Seymour Hoffman as not-L. Ron Hubbard. Though it’s relatively modest $35 million budget may be a bit high for the finance folks at Universal, other backers may have been found.

That’s hardly all. Fleming also brings us the one about “Hit Girl” Chloe Moretz joining the cast of Scorsese’s lastest and that Tobey Maguire confirmed to be playing Bobby Fisher.

And one two more from Mr. Fleming…If you think Spike Lee has been working as much as he should after the success of “Inside Man” and his acclaimed Katrina documentary, you’re apparently not alone. He’s switched agencies.

And, oh yeah, another beefcake “Captain America” potential. At least the names for the female lead have a bit of spark to them, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Keira Knightley or Emily Blunt hanging around a Marvel movie.

* Jeffrey Welles is nutso for “Hot Tub Time Machine,” for what it’s worth.

* I often say that the best movies these days are long-form television. So why shouldn’t Martin Scorsese be getting involved? However, does everything crime and Scorsese oriented have to have Rolling Stones music in the background? Unless I’m misidentifying that anachronistic music in the “Boardwalk Empire,” trailer, I guess it really does. Still, yeah, it is Steve Buscemi’s time to play a big bad boss.

* If it’s not news that Jason Segal will be costarring with muppets, why are we talking about  it? Still, based on his obvious love for puppetry as portrayed in the rather brilliant “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” I think it may turn out okay.

Lost 6.8 – Recon

Howdilly ho, Losterinos! Jae-Z is still in Austin for South by Southwest, so I am guest blogging this week. And don’t worry, I’m not going to come up with a bunch of wacky nicknames for everyone, or end the blog with a music video.

It’s tough to decide which version of Earth was more interesting tonight…oh, who am I kidding, the Earth-1 story was definitely better. Crazy Claire tried to kill Kate, while Sayid looked on impotently. He’s clearly reeling from the guilt of knowing that he allowed Evil Locke/Smokey to enter the temple and lay waste to the righteous who refused to go with him. I’m sure he’s also depressed over the “knowledge” that he’s infected, whatever that means. Me, I’m not so convinced that anyone is infected. Yes, Rashomon (damn it, I swore I wouldn’t hand out nicknames) said he was infected, but while we watched the similarly infected Claire put an axe in a guy’s stomach, Evil Locke explained tonight just what it was that fed that insanity, and it wasn’t sickness or disease – it was the need for an enemy, much like Guy Pearce’s character in “Memento.” It drove her, but once she had no need for it and discovered that Kate was not her enemy, Claire turned out to be a reasonable and normal, if mournful, person. Does this mean that there is indeed nothing wrong with Sayid? Or does this mean that we haven’t yet seen exactly what is wrong with either of them?

Stupid “Lost.” Eight episodes left, and they’re still providing more questions than answers.

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Sawyer’s flash-sideways is Hugo-ian in that he’s the opposite of his Earth-1 counterpart. Jack’s still a doctor and Kate’s still a fugitive, but here, Sawyer’s a cop, and he uses his fake Dharma last name as a safe word when his mark pulls back the hammer to shoot him. I just love that he’s able to nail the wife of his intended target before dropping the bomb on her when she won’t play ball. Who wouldn’t sign up for undercover work if they knew it would get them so much sex?

And that wasn’t the only sex Detective James Ford would have this week, as he later bedded a Kidman-esque redhead archaeologist named Charlotte, but completely blew it (her words, later) when he flipped his lid after walking in on her looking at the folder dedicated to the man who led Ford’s father to kill his mother, then himself. The scene was actually one of the clumsiest in the entire history of “Lost,” as Charlotte went plowing through his stuff like she was a con herself…and who knows, maybe she is. (The truth: probably not, since they’re running out of time, but she sure as hell acted like one.) The bigger question, though, is: who leaves a folder that important, that potentially incriminating, in their top drawer? The whole thing was just, to quote my wife, ridiculous.

The big takeaway from the flash-sideways was that the individual stories finally appear to be coming together, as John/Sawyer confesses to his partner Miles about his extracurricular attempts to hunt down the man who destroyed his family, only to be slammed into by a runaway Kate, whom he later runs down in an alley. Up to this point, the Earth-2 story lines have been largely independent of the others, but now it looks as though everyone is going to start getting tied together. Whether they become aware of their other selves, though, is still up in the air. Truth be told, I’m not sure how I feel about that. God knows, I wouldn’t want to talk to another version of me. One’s enough.

Which brings us to the main story line, where Evil Locke asks Sawyer to travel to Hydra Island (where he finds the dress Kate wore when they first hooked up) to confirm Evil Locke’s suspicions that there are people there who mean him harm. Of course, there are, and they’re well armed (Charles Widmore doesn’t do cheap), and Sawyer does what he does best: he lies, which is precisely why Locke sent him there in the first place. Of course, Evil Locke doesn’t know that Sawyer intends to doublecross both Widmore and Locke…or maybe he does. It could be yet another test. Either way, Widmore’s posse is building a Smokey-proof fence, so this could make for a fun battle royale.

God love Jin. The love he has for his wife is so sweet. Which of course makes me think that they won’t meet until the series finale…and will die before they get to embrace one last time. Come on, this is “Lost” we’re talking about. They’re not going to give us some ribbon-bowed, flowery happy ending. People are gonna die. Jin and Sun have spent almost two years in TV time apart. You better believe that their reunion will come with a catch.

Well, that’s it for me this week. Wow, that was so much fun! Thanks for playing with me today. Heeeeere we go: Yooooooooo gabba gabbaaaaaaaa! (*packs up boom box, exits stage left*)

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