Audiences may not have known what to expect when TV Land announced its first original sitcom, Hot in Cleveland -- after all, this is the network that built its brand on vintage Alka-Selter commercials aired during stale episodes of Designing Women. But after seeing the first clip from Cleveland, Movieline is ready to make a bold prediction about the fate of the show and its Golden star.
more »
"The freak show has come to our town and it's full of nothing but sinners and evil!" the generic small-town pastor who hates fun proclaimed. "Hallelujah!" responded the one African American woman in the movie. "I'm going to investigate this peculiar carnival!" said sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips. "I knew you'd say that," said the good-hearted psychic. "Rooooaar!" said the mythical Jersey Devil that escaped from its cage and wreaks havoc. There, I just spared you the trouble of having to watch Carny, the SyFy original movie that's part of the Maneater Series of made-for-tv horror films.
more »
At the Golden Globes this year, Mo'Nique made a speech about the terrible tragedy that is child molestation, an experience she herself suffered through. That's when (according to the new issue of Esquire) Tina Fey and her friends snickered to themselves and added in Mo'Nique's voice, "...but I like it now!" What would prompt Fey to make such a tasteless joke? The following NSFW clip from Queens of Comedy has the answer, where Mo'Nique herself delivers a routine that's every bit as outrageous. Let's see Vera Farmiga try to do this:
more »
Filmmaking is hard by any measure, but who knew anyone could so easily screw up the lurid, outrageous story of the Runaways, the original girl punks with more drama and depravity per pound than half their male contemporaries? If knowing them truly is to love them, then it only makes sense that Floria Sigismondi's tone-deaf, soulless and vapid biopic The Runaways should feel this spiteful -- to its source as well as the viewer.
more »
Previously on Lost: Sawyer's girlfriend falls down a pit with an atomic bomb, but doesn't die. Then she hits the bomb with a rock. It explodes. She dies! (We think?) The world is split into two timelines. (We think? It could secretly be just one.) Sawyer is sad because his ladyfriend is dead. He buys her an engagement ring, then throws it in the ocean because he's still sad about her being dead. Sawyer listens to Iggy Pop records. A Smoke Monster who looks a lot like John Locke kills everybody at the Temple. Kate runs from people who are trying to arrest her. Charlie tries to kill himself in an airplane bathroom. Hurley says, "Dude," meaningfully. And then says it again, with an entirely different, and even more meaningful, inflection. An unnerving horn noise blares before a cut to black.
Climb into our submarine and get ready to surface on the beach of television's most baffling island, where we'll disembark, armed with machine guns loaded with Answers, ready to slaughter all the unlucky Questions we come upon in this week's episode.
more »
OK, so we knew already that Neil Patrick Harris would play the live-action lead in the big-screen adaptation of Smurfs, while the little blue critters would be CG and voiced by an atrocious cast led by Katy Perry, for some reason. Now, though, EW is reporting that Hank Azaria will voice Gargamel, who I'm pretty sure is a human. So real humans and cartoon humans will be interacting? Is that necessary? Is this whole movie necessary? No, you're out of order! [EW]
· How excited are you about Edgar Wright's upcoming Michael Cera starrer Scott Pilgrim? Excited enough to moon over this picture of a poster? That excited!
· "'Cougar' has become so distasteful. I really hate that expression," Demi Moore tells Harper's Bazaar, instead preferring "puma."
· It ain't easy being Amanda Seyfried, who gulps both a Lexapro and a diet-mandated spinach lunch during her new Esquire interview.
· Matthew Morrison wasn't fond of that aggressive Elle interview a while back that insinuated he was gay. "That was, like, the worst interview I've ever done, and it kind of turned me off from doing interviews completely, because that guy was such a d**k," Morrison told Zap2it. "I was completely caught off-guard."
· Padma Lakshmi's rumored baby daddy Adam Dell is fighting for more time with their daughter, thereby confirming his paternity. You know, I'd always held out hope it was Sam Talbot from Top Chef season two.
Matt Walsh was one-fourth of improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade's most famous lineup -- the one with fellow comic totems Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Amy Poehler that fronted the '90s Comedy Central series Upright Citizens Brigade. The 45-year-old's cult hero status has led to a number of supporting roles as a correspondent on The Daily Show, bit player in The Hangover, Role Models, and I Love You Man, and star on Comedy Central's recent Dog Bites Man. Now, as Walsh's new Spike TV sports bar comedy Players takes off, he talks to Movieline about improvisation, the college experiences that led to Players, and the kind of "postmodern" comedy he finds annoying.
more »
Did Michelle Williams take the career we thought Katie Holmes was going to have? Once upon a time, Holmes was regarded as the Dawson's Creeker with the most promise, an actress with subtlety and star power who'd certainly have a healthy life in movies after her show happened. And then, things happened. Now, Holmes is only a part-time actress, and one of her scattered few projects is The Romantics, where she goes head to head with Anna Paquin.
more »
No, not that Conan. (Though it would be fun to see the actress randomly replace Andy Richter on Conan O'Brien's roadshow tour. Well, in theory.) Instead, Rose McGowan is joining the big-screen reboot of Conan the Barbarian as an evil half-human/half-witch. Can the Charmed veteran possibly pull it off? [Variety]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the world would be a funnier place with more Zach Galifianakis. Until the comedian strikes an exclusive deal with NBC to appear on the network three-times-a-week as an ambidextrous flute player though, we'll just have to settle for the odd big screen comedy, Arby's sighting and new installments of his online celebrity talk show.
more »
A strange report from TMZ says Nicholas Brendon, best known as the actor who played Xander Harris on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, got into a scuffle with L.A. police a few hours ago that ended in the actor being tased repeatedly. According to their story, a call was made to cops saying a man in Venice was drunk and causing a disturbance. When they arrived, Brendon was the man, and he took several wild swings at the officers and made a break for it. They pursued, caught up with him and tased him twice. Developing... [TMZ]
Heaven forbid the Tribeca Film Festival should really showcase front-and-center anything made in New York, but this is just embarrassing: The opening film of its annual ESPN Sports Film Festival sidebar is Straight Outta L.A., director Ice Cube's documentary filmmaking debut about the relocation of the NFL's Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles in the early '80s. As our bloggy cousin Mike Fleming points out at Deadline, was the NY Mets-inflected stadium doc Last Play at Shea not good enough? Arrgh. Deep breath. OK. Anyway, Cube, congrats. Find the rest of the fest program here and here.
It's entirely possible you missed a small revolution that played out on daytime TV this year, in a gay storyline on One Life to Live involving Officer Oliver Fish (Scott Evans, the younger, openly gay brother of Fantastic Four star Chris Evans) and Kyle Lewis (played by straight actor Brett Claywell), an old college friend whose sensitive hunkitude draws Fish out of the closet. Sure, gays on TV are nothing new, but Kish, as fans began to lovingly refer to them, shattered the age-old image of the gay eunuch, while demonstrating, in a New Year's Eve consummation scene for the ages, that two masculine men in a committed relationship could make sensitive love without the use of a Lady Gaga backing track or cardboard box of sex toys. (Pottery Barn candles of varying heights, on the other hand, are another story.) It was transfixing, paradigm-busting stuff, heralded by media advocacy groups and perfectly timed to coincide with the gay marriage legislation fiascos of 2009.
Unfortunately, it didn't add up to ratings, which were some of the lowest in One Life to Live history. Last week, both men were informed by producers that the storyline is being dropped and that the characters would be written out of the show by April. We approached Claywell, who was still a little stunned by the news but upbeat, for the real story. What we found was a brave, thoughtful and affable actor who seems to realize he was just a party to something big.
more »
HBO's most expensive pilot ever, Boardwalk Empire, established its must-see creds early via affiliations with director Martin Scorsese and ex-Sopranos writer Terence Winter. Its first teaser didn't hurt much either. So if Empire's new teaser feels a little like it's merely piling on the epic scale and gilded pedigree of the whole enterprise, you're forgiven for asking it to lay off maybe just a bit.
more »
