Almost a year after the Kris Allen coronation ceremony that shattered devoted Glamberts and Lamb Skanks across our sparkly nation, we've reached the point where seven American Idol contestants from season nine's Top 10 have released singles. We're still waiting for entries from Lil Rounds, Matt Giraud (of the popular Twitter hashtag #SignMattGiraud) and Megan Joy Corkrey (whose Myspace singles don't seem finalized yet) to follow suit. In the meantime, let's rank what we've heard and figure out the whole "Who was the real winner?" thing.
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You know what's been missing from the internet lately? A nice, satisfying meme. Something timely and simple-to-use, that delivers on its ridiculous premise over and over again. And wouldn't you know it Urlesque has one, that conveniently repurposes the catchiest line from the Clash of the Titans trailer for our selfish memeistic needs. No, not "Titans Will Clash!" -- that's just the dumbest -- but rather Zeus Neeson's thunderous command to "RELEASE THE KRAKEN!" What ungodly leviathan shall rise up from the ocean depths at his summoning to terrorize us mere mortals? A stymied pachyderm? A surfing granny? The possibilities are terrifyingly endless! [Urlesque]
It's unofficially 3D Day at Movieline, so let's keep things going with the movies -- and the moviemakers -- that keeps on giving. In the last 24 hours Michael Bay and Avatar producer Jon Landau have each weighed in at length over the haste and sloppiness with which Hollywood has been pushing 2D-to-3D conversions, carrying the flag James Cameron himself first raised shortly after the Oscars. ("It's typical of Hollywood getting it wrong," Cameron said at the time. "We do a film that is natively authored in 3D, shot in 3D, and so they assume from the success of that they can just turn movies into 3D in 8 weeks... throw a switch and that's gonna work somehow.") But are these guys really creative altruists, or just hypocrites in aesthetes' clothing?
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· Hey, it's the new poster for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse! Did Taylor Lautner just get back from a Caribbean vacation or something? Dude is like John Boehner-level tan.
· Did Zuleikha Robinson accidentally let a secret slip when she revealed the last name of her Lost character to Vulture?
· The next film from James L. Brooks, the Reese Witherspoon dramedy How Do You Know, is set for release on December 17.
· Maybe don't go up to Jake Gyllenhaal in a bar and say loudly, "Isn't that the guy who killed Heath Ledger?"
· Jackass 3-D's potential was fully realized when Chris Pontius strung a toy helicopter to his penis and made it twirl around. Cinema!
Not cool, Corbett. So not cool. After the United States of Tara actor assured Movieline yesterday that his beloved Sex and the City character Aiden would "one hundred percent" not be appearing in the franchise's second film, a new SATC2 trailer premiering at the ShoWest convention has confirmed otherwise. In the film clip, Carrie happens upon Aiden while in Abu Dhabi with her three gal pals and wonders aloud, "We bump into each other halfway around the world? That means something." [HuffPo]
Showtime has debuted the trailer of its upcoming "Weeds but with cancer" dramedy, The C Word, and it afford us our first look at 2009 breakout Gabourey Sidibe in a non-Precious context. Might even arch-nemesis Howard Stern find something to like in this clip?
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The seventh season of Top Chef takes place in a brand new location, and the view from the balcony looks nothing like the Fontainebleau resort from Miami or the hot-dog-cart paradise of New York. Instead, Top Chef is taking our palette-slathering Padma Lakshmi obsession and bringing it to a different kind of cityscape, one that may remind you of a more dubious Bravo franchise.
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In Chloe, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan returns to the pulpy, psychosexual domain that first established his international reputation, with 1994's Exotica. In it, we meet Catherine -- a successful Toronto gynecologist, played by Julianne Moore, who is coming to terms with her own obsolescence. Her husband, a handsome college professor (Liam Neeson) spends more and more time with his adoring female students, while her teen son barely acknowledges his mother's existence as he smuggles a mostly naked girlfriend in and out of his bedroom. Enter Chloe: a voluptuous and other-worldly call girl fully embodied by Amanda Seyfried, who Catherine hires to entrap her husband. Soon after, the head games and fantasy fulfillments begin.
To be sure, keeping these melodramatic proceedings from tumbling into trashier nether-zones is a tightrope act, and Egoyan -- working for the first time off a script not written by himself, but rather by Secretary writer Erin Cressida Wilson -- pulls it off. Movieline spoke to the director about breaking out of his comfort areas, how television has replaced cinema as the most consistent source of great drama, and the delicacies of shooting two stars of Moore and Seyfried's caliber in flagrante delicto.
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When actress Sheila Kelley was introduced last week on Lost wearing a pair of sympathetic spectacles and exhibiting a desperate need to know just what the hell is happening on this island, she could have been a stand-in for any number of audience members -- so what were we to make of her after she turned a gun on Sawyer (Josh Holloway) and revealed that she actually knows way more than we do? Kelley herself caused quite the online stir yesterday when she told Us that she'd seen the finale and that her name was on every page of it, leading many blogs to believe that her character, Zoe, had somehow come from nowhere to end up in every single scene of Lost's final episode. As she told Movieline, not quite.
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Ten seasons in, Dancing with the Stars is still event television because producers have the nerve to pit, say, Cloris Leachman against Brooke Burke. Or Steve Wozniak against Lil Kim. We're watching foregone conclusions manifest themselves with the help of the judges' goading critiques, and for some reason, that's titillating. Last night's premiere showcased another infeasible range of talents, from Pam Anderson to Kate Gosselin to Chad Ochocinco, but the top and bottom scorers exhibited the most disparate set of skills to date.
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The Emmy-winning actress has been tapped to play a Pittsburgh veterinarian in CBS's untitled pilot from How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. The project centers on an unmarried couple, Tommy (Kyle Bornheimer) and Gina, and their friends -- Pressly's vet will be Tommy's best friend. Unfortunately, this casting decision throws a wrench into Rules of Engagement star Patrick Warburton's plan for Pressly to become a regular on his CBS series if it is picked up for a fifth season. [THR]
Reports today have Time Warner, Lionsgate and the private-equity firm Access Industries as the last companies standing in the bid for the near-bankrupt MGM. The bids are said to range from $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, with Time Warner as the odds-on favorite to bring the Lion home and consolidate its library of pre-1986 MGM classics with the ailing studio's own catalog -- not to mention to take over the James Bond franchise and sole control of The Hobbit, set to go into production later this year. A decision is expected from MGM's board in "several weeks." [Reuters via THR]
Between Terminator Salvation, Avatar and Clash of the Titans, Sam Worthington may be on the A-list hot streak of his career. So you can't really blame him for attempting to keep that going with a bit of creative fudging with the first franchise. Or rather, maybe you can't blame him, but according to Worthington himself, it appears that Terminator's producers have heard enough out of him.
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It's a widely held belief that if Robert Altman had only been able to produce his much-maligned 1980 adaptation of Popeye in 3D, the legendary filmmaker would have truly realized his vision for the monoeyed, bulging-armed, spinach-gorging sailor of comics and cartoon lore. Now, 30 years later, the technology is here, and it is on.
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If you're anything like me, you've spent the last few sleepless nights wondering, "What ever happened to Jay Leno's Green Car Challenge Course?" You know, that multi-million dollar track constructed for NBC's primetime experiment so that stars like Tim Allen and Rush Limbaugh could race eco-friendly cars in figure-eights for a segment that no one in America cared about? Jay Leno finally addressed that concern last night by revisiting the immaculately-maintained course for a pre-taped sketch in which the Tonight Show host abused cowboy and Indian stereotypes. That gem, as well as the other moments you missed last night while tweeting your unwanted opinions on health care reform, after the jump.
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