Tag: Big Night

It’s your post MTV Movie Awards debacle movie news

Yes, isn’t it?

* Okay, so as I wrote in the post below, I felt slightly ill-used by the MTV Movie Awards PR apparatus. However, the question they asked Mrs. Lincoln remains: what did I think of the show? Well, when I finally watched it at home after a long drive home and an only-at-Universal-City-Walk possibility of following up a Pink’s chili dog w/sauerkruat with a Tommy’s Chili burger, I found it…okay. It was loud, vulgar — and not always in a good way — and it had excellent production values that the Oscars could learn from. I think I was as moved as everyone else by Dr. Ken Jeong’s speech about his wife’s former illness.

On the other hand, I could have done with less of the Tom Cruise dancing with Jennifer Lopez thing. The Les Grossman character was very funny, and definitely reminiscent of some real Hollywood characters, in the context of “Tropic Thunder,” but now it seems to have taken on an unneeded life of its own that is starting to creep me out and not in a funny way. But, once again, no one is listening to me and Cruise is talking about, Lord helps us, a Grossman movie. I’m starting to think he should talk more about Scientology.

Tom Cruise,Jennifer Lopez

As far as I what I felt about the actual awards and the movies and performances that were recognized…is there even the slightest point in complaining? I don’t think there’s any pretense that these awards are intended to honor good movies. Of course the “Twilight” movie was going to win. And I guess it’s somehow appropriate to know there’s at least one award Christoph Waltz just can’t get for playing Col. Hans Landa.

One thing that irked me slightly and then later amused me greatly, but not for the reason the MTV producers would have liked, was the much remarked upon proliferation of swear words. I use relatively few curse words for a modern-day American, but I’m not particularly opposed to them, especially when used in a clever or entertaining fashion. In the context of a show where the curses are to go out bleeped, however, more than one or two in a sentence can be a real problem for the audience at home that doesn’t hear it, and it really did bury many of the jokes in a volley of random silence.

Still, one comic highlight was Peter Facinelli’s acceptance speech on behalf of the rest of the “Twilight: New Moon” cast in which he apparently simply overwhelmed the person on the kill-switch with his deliberate carpet F-bombing, and several fuck-words made it through. It was a really funny moment that did not go on unnoticed by society’s killjoys who, just this once, weren’t completely in the wrong, I suppose.  I nevertheless believe that the religious fundamentalist-driven PTC should get a fucking life.

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Stop me before I give casting news again!

I thought I was done with these kinds of tidbits last night, but I can’t resist this one.

Stanley Tucci, one of my everyone’s favorite character actors who I featured here recently in a great bit from 1996’s “Big Night,” is joining the cast of a musical, “Burlesque!” The movie will also star Cher and Christina Aguilera, who presumably will be doing most of the singing between the two of them. To be helmed by actor-writer turned first-time director Steve Antin, the production is described by Variety‘s Mike Fleming as follows:

Aguilera plays an ambitious small-town girl with a big voice who finds success in a neo-burlesque club reminiscent of the nightclub in Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” Tucci will play the manager of the Sunset Boulevard club and the best friend and confidante of Tess (Cher), a former dancer who takes the young girl under her wing.

I’ve lived within a few miles of the Sunset Strip the vast majority of my life and, as far as I know, there is no club remotely like the Weimar-era Kit Kat Club on the strip or anywhere in Los Angeles — except, of course, if they’re actually doing a production of “Cabaret.” If I’m wrong and there is one, I definitely want to go. Now.

A meatball free movie moment

In honor of this week’s cuisine-centric #1 film, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” I present a semi-related scene from Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s 1996 “Big Night,” starring Tucci and “Monk“-to-be Tony Shalhoub as a pair of restaurant-owning Italian brothers struggling with America’s limited palette during the early fifties, when Italian food in the states meant spaghetti and meatballs, and not too much else. I’d suggest watching all of this, but if you’re feeling impatient at the leisurely set-up, you can skip to about 2:45. I always try to please the customers. And, yes, that’s singer-actor Marc Anthony as the nervous waiter.

Campbell Scott talks “Phoebe in Wonderland,” “Singles,” and more

Although Campbell Scott is one of those actors who’s been happily flying under Hollywood’s radar for the past several years (he estimates the time frame as somewhere between eight and ten), his appearance within the ensemble of the buzz-heavy indie flick, “Phoebe in Wonderland,” may change that. And if it doesn’t…well, as he reveals in his interview with Bullz-Eye.com, it’s not like he doesn’t enjoy being able to ride the subway in relative anonymity.

Campbell Scott on “Singles”:

“I’m 47, I have gray hair, and yet people still come up to me on the street who are in their twenties, who weren’t even born when ‘Singles’ was made…well, they were pretty tiny, anyway…and they say, ‘Oh, I love that movie.’ And I always say, ‘How OLD are you?”

Campbell Scott on “Phoebe in Wonderland”:

“When you go and watch it, even if you’re thinking about being a parent or if you have a little sister, anything like that, it becomes this little journey. And people either go for it or not. It ain’t ‘Die Hard,’ let’s face it! But it’s very, very provocative, I think.”

Campbell Scott on “The Spanish Prisoner”:

“Steve (Martin) is fascinating. I really like that guy. He’s really smart. You know, the thing I always think about Steve is that, like most really, really brilliant comedians, he’s a very serious dude. People who are funny in a profound way, when you meet them, they are totally serious. I don’t mean they’re severe or boring or unfunny to be with – they’re hysterical – but they are definitive in their work habits.”

Check out the entire interview by clicking right here…or, of course, you could always just click on this big ol’ image below:

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