· Perhaps someday, when we reconsider the most important paycheck roles of all time, Angela Bassett will make an appearance. The actress can only hope so, as she's going to be a regular in the Green Lantern franchise for a while to come in the role of government agent and Lantern regular Dr. Amanda Waller. The report goes on to note that Bassett is also still developing her directorial debut United States, so there's the "one for them" half of a certain old Hollywood saw to consider as well. Shooting is underway in New Orleans. [Variety]
Matt Bomer gets Anna Faris's Number, an odd contender emerges to direct Mission Impossible IV, and mor Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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Sarah Jessica Parker's born to greatness! Let's revisit her breakthrough. Plus, the roll-out of the color TV you neither needed nor could afford, Sylvester Stallone's crowning awards glory and the birth of Wiki!
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It wasn't hard to laugh off Kevin Smith using Twitter to announce he was banning critics from free preview screenings of his movies. The profession of film reviewing has taken bigger and more serious hits in the past couple years. And now it's been dealt perhaps its biggest body blow yet -- after 35 years on the air, At The Movies will come to an end on August 14.
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Fanboys who wondered whether Joe Johnston -- the journeyman director behind Jumanji, Jurassic Park III and this year's The Wolf Man -- was the man to make Captain America are this morning likely going to be choking on their Cheetos to learn that Paul WS Anderson, a director whose CV is much, much less inspiring, is bringing Buck Rogers to the big screen... in 3-D, naturally. But the rest of us should care, too.
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Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock really together? Not in the sense of Sandy's Oscar speech but as mother and daughter?
300-D? Zack Snyder, who's making Guardians Of Ga'Hoole in 3-D and is converting Sucker Punch to the format, is open to the retro-stereoscoping of 300. This is surely Spartier!
Bindi Irwin does a spot of panda-whispering to promote straight-to-DVD Free Willy: Escape From Pirate Cove, another production that buccaneered the status quo by adamantly refusing to use falsies.
Rather than just use kids to blurb-quote your movie when no-one else will, why don't distributors find out which 80-100 movies these young'uns had to have so bad and use the "So good your children will beg you to steal it!" angle.
Because Mamma Mia! was a successful song-show-movie, now Tom Hanks is doing the same for Green Day's concept album American Idiot! Tom, after Apollo 11 and From Earth To Moon, why not Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon? It screams out for 3-D and IMAX and a million speakers all blasting out! Upside: repeat business from all the fans who can't remember the first viewing except to say it was "awesome".
· Gladiators V. Werewolves is a thing now. When will they start catering these movies to my liking? Is Sandy Duncan V. Val Harper too much to ask?
[Best Week Ever]
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Carrie Fisher has signed on to the new ABC pilot Wright Vs. Wrong, where she'll play the manager of a right-wing pundit (Debra Messing) who has a strong left-wing rival (Cheryl Hines). Sounds like a solid outing to me. The only way it could be better is if Carrie Fisher's Twitter account could guest-star as a discombobulated young assistant. I will now recite my favorite @CarrieFFisher tweet from memory: "Oh BiPolar the way I'm on Letterman tonight w/ my peers Rihanna & Zac Efron pray 4 me." That Tweet will duke it out with Elizabeth Perkins for the Emmy. [EW]
Betty White's stardom is approaching an unlikely critical mass, and Kristen Bell knows it. At this week's Geffen Playhouse fundraiser, she told Movieline's video correspondent Carly Steel that despite working with a clutch of strong ladies as of late (Cher and Christina Aguilera in Burlesque, and White and Sigourney Weaver in You Again), she's managed to stay calm and not get intimidated. Still, she confessed that Betty White has her by the balls. No, Kristen. She has America by the balls. Video after the jump:
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That headline, while technically true, perhaps undersells the wry, entrancing joy of Plastic Bag, a short film directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop) and indeed narrated by the legendary German auteur. It may not be without some precedent, but for sheer intelligence, wit and ambition, the 18-minute movie handily blows the "plastic bag" sequence from American Beauty out of the water (no pun intended; you'll see). Click through for the full video.
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When you heard that former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson would be racing thousands of his prized pigeons for an Animal Planet reality show, your brain probably switched into concept overload mode after visualizing the Hangover star fist pumping as winged vermin flapped through quotation marks and exclamation points in your mind. Once you regained consciousness, your next response was probably something along the lines of, "But can I make money off of this?" After the jump, Movieline explains how you can make a killing before Take on Tyson even premieres.
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Famously contrarian film critic Armond White recently got a lot of attention when Noah Baumbach's camp tried to keep him out of a Greenberg screening, but Kevin Smith has been pulling that stunt on critics he dislikes for quite a while. Scott Foundas and Dave Poland have been among the pundits who were barred from press screenings of Smith's movies after having panned prior flicks (or, in Poland's case, cracking wise about Smith's meaty calves), but now, Smith aims to go one better: He's announced plans to keep all critics out of his press screenings.
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Just ten days after the death of Mission: Impossible's Peter Graves, another star from an iconic 1960's spy series has passed away: I Spy's Robert Culp. According to authorities, Culp died this morning after a fall at home. He was 79 years old.
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One of the most successful crossover novelists to hit Hollywood since the days of John Grisham and Michael Crichton, North Carolinian writer Nicholas Sparks has seen his best-selling love stories (he considers the term "romance novel" a dirty word) adapted for the silver screen a half-dozen times now, beginning with 1996's Kevin Costner/Robin Wright Penn pairing Message in a Bottle, through to 2004's hit The Notebook, to this year's Iraq War weepie Dear John and the upcoming Miley Cyrus vehicle The Last Song, soon duking it out for your date-night dollars at a multiplex near you.
We caught up with Sparks recently, where he talked about bucking the author-turned-screenwriter trend, why he never writes gay love stories, and what he meant when he recently described Cormac McCarthy's "horrible" writing as "pulpy, overwrought, and melodramatic." Read on for an engaging chat with Hollywood's favorite publishing phenomenon.
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Maybe it's just the pessimist in me: When I see a tall building in a film, I expect someone to jump. And Paris is a film with so much angst, the aerial shots of its title metropolis, shot from high atop the Eiffel and Montparnasse Towers, lend the film not just a sense of breathtaking beauty, but a tinge of ominousness as well. The film begins with the story of Pierre, a dancer who learns he has a bad heart and is slowly dying. Eventually, death is everywhere, whether it's the burial of an elderly parent, a fatal accident, or the Woody Allen-type neurotic perv just fretting about his own moribundity. The multiple intersecting stories in the film vary in size -- some are just blips with vague, unseen conclusions -- but the real anchor to the film is Juliette Binoche, very much alive but lacking in the joie de as she deals with the deathly proceedings around her.
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Jersey Shore coined a number of catchphrases, from "I'm going to the Jersey Shore, bitch" to "Gym-Tan-Laundry" to "DJ Pauly, you look just like a Goomba today" (my addition). The wisest line of all, however, is being retooled as a new book by Jersey Shore housemates Ronnie and J-WOWW. Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore promises Seaside Heights survival skills and tips on maintaining that perfect, burnt sienna sheen and dagger-like haircut. But wait, now, Madam Woww: Movieline has three unanswered Jersey Shore questions it wants acknowledged, and you're the only one who can herpe help.
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