After an extraordinary awards season when Kathryn Bigelow could do no wrong, she ran into a little bit more trouble during a brief stint this week at L.A. Superior Court. There, the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director could not break through the jury pool for a drunk-driving case.
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A new site called MovieClips.com has launched on the back of a lot of press attention at South by Southwest and a few posts from Jeff Wells, and it's intended "to give movie lovers, movie bloggers, and everyone else a place to easily find and embed licensed movie clips," says cofounder Richard Raddon, who formerly ran the Los Angeles Film Festival (until his controversial donation in support of Prop 8 led to his resignation). Raddon says the site is still a work in progress, but that the quality and interface is better than YouTube. I decided to take it for a test drive.
· Shia LaBeouf talks around his relationship with Carey Mulligan to GQ: "She's an unbelievably thought-provoking actress, the most talented actress I've ever met in my life, by leaps and bounds. Neither one of us are fame whores. It works out. It's not like we're the premiere couple; we're not the red-carpet king and queen."
· Paul Bettany and Rufus Sewell have joined The Tourist, starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.
· "I'd like to be Philip Seymour Hoffman's boyfriend," volunteers Ewan McGregor. "I think we'd make a good couple. We'd look good, we'd look slightly odd and we'd go to interesting parties and people would be interested in us."
· The Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss has revealed that Bob Guiney was the sluttiest bachelor, estimating his bachelorette-defiling at "5 1/2 women." Was there a double amputee that season?
· What did you miss if you didn't catch A Serbian Film at South by Southwest this week? "Newborn porn," incest, and "the unique magic of rigor mortis," say the WSJ. Sounds appetizing!
Now that American Idol has separated the mellifluous wheat from the pitchy chaff, culling its contestant pool from its initial 3.5 million contestants to a top 12, things are finally, in the parlance of philosopher-judge Randy Jackson, "getting a millionty billionty percent real, dawg." For the unlucky amongst this ultimate dozen, wild dreams of worldwide superstardom are about to be crushed under the heel of a thousand-dollar Simon Cowell loafer and replaced with more measured aspirations to careers on the cruise-ship circuit, where weeks of national exposure lands one the headlining position on the Pacific Princess' Lido Deck Idol Revue. So whom amongst the remaining Idols can we expect to see battling deep into May, and whom should be loading up on seasickness pills for an upcoming maritime musical adventure? Here's how we handicap the Top 12.
Some people's student films never see the light of the day, but James Franco's NYU shorts are another story. Not only can he approach Michael Shannon at a Boston train station to star in them, but they're virtually guaranteed film festival debuts, from the homoerotic The Feast of Stephen to the Sundance-pedigreed Herbert White. Franco's latest short Saturday Night premiered this week at South by Southwest, and it's an intimate look into the backstage process of Saturday Night Live. Let's round up some reactions to it, shall we?
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Over here at Movieline, we definitely adore Johnny Weir, so I was concerned recently when the skater said he was snubbed from the Stars on Ice tour for not being "family friendly." Then I watched last night's episode of Be Good Johnny Weir, which climaxed with Weir finding unorthodox, orgasm-inducing uses for an electronic massager. I mean, yeah, maybe "family friendly" is just code to snub Weir based on his flaming gayitude, but it also, perhaps, is a mantra that does not encompass basic cable O-faces. I guess we won't know for sure unless Evan Lysacek submits to the same televised situation, which I am all in favor of. Video, after the jump:
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Fox announced early this morning that it planned to release Avatar on DVD in conjunction with Earth Day -- April 22 -- thus adding a little something special to the 40th commemoration of the event. Making the date even more unusual: It's a Thursday as opposed to the industry standard Tuesday. And why not? Honestly, if I were the studio and/or James Cameron, I wouldn't necessarily want my stoner-friendly, Earth Day-compatible sci-fi blockbuster hitting the street on 4/20 either. Much more significantly, of course, they need some hook on which to hang their their long term plans. But what exactly are they?
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The farther we get from microbudget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity, the more its sequel seems doomed. Were there any dangling threads in the first that really required revisiting? Vacation photos left undiscovered in an attic? Scrabble boards yet to erupt into flames? And yet all it takes is a look at the hard numbers -- an initial investment of $1.78 and three sunflower seeds has yielded earnings for Paramount of $183 million, plus one funny-enough Oscars parody and a new specialty division -- to quickly realize that Paranormal Activity 2 is coming whether we want it or not. And its search for a director may finally be over.
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By now you know all about the controversy surrounding Iron Cross, the handiwork of one Joshua Newton and the final film of the great Roy Scheider. Perhaps the saddest thing about the scandal afflicting this film and Variety -- which allegedly buried a bad review of the film over Newton's $400,000 ad buy and putative Oscar campaign for Scheider -- is how much sturm und drang and bitter angst is being expended over something as monumentally dreadful-looking as this. Click through for your slightly-used evidence.
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When we're with the ladies of The Runaways there's a lot of glum attitude and druggy malaise on display, so thank God for Michael Shannon as their Svengali producer Kim Fowley, who electrifies the movie like the lightning bolt that's often painted on his face. It's Shannon's most high-profile part since snagging an Oscar nomination in Revolutionary Road, though since then he's made Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and will soon be seen in Jonah Hex and the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
In real life, Shannon couldn't be more different from the wild lech he plays in The Runaways. Serious but also seriously funny, the actor sat down with Movieline last week to talk about working with all those young actresses, working in front of a camera in general, and working with the mysterious James Franco.
How seriously is Summit treating its two-film adaptation of the Twilight series' insane final book, Breaking Dawn? This seriously: The studio is approaching some heavy hitters to direct, including Gus Van Sant, Sofia Coppola, and Bill Condon. Oh, I really did need that laugh this morning! Complicating matters is that, uh, Coppola only directs things she writes, Condon intends to make a Richard Pryor biopic next, and we all know that Van Sant hates filming shirtless boys in the Pacific Northwest. Better luck next time, Summit! [EW]
David Letterman has a habit of tipping his hand when talking to an actor or actress about the film he or she is promoting. Either he likes it or he doesn't. In the case that he has seen the movie and likes it, he will gush so profusely that it sometimes makes the promoting participant uncomfortable -- like he did with Natalie Portman about Brothers back in November. And then other times, he's seen movie, and maybe, well, it wasn't for him. That was the case last night when talking to Jennifer Aniston about Bounty Hunter. Unwilling to endorse the movie entirely to viewers, the Late Show host instead raved about Aniston's star quality ("You light up the screen and you say right there, that's worth the ten bucks."), her ability to run around in heels for 90 minutes onscreen and her co-star's (Gerald Butler) convincing American accent. Those rave soundbites, which could find their way onto the back of Bounty Hunter's DVD case, as well as the other highlights you missed last night while attending your first anger management class, after the jump.
You know it's going to be a slow news day when material that's been rumored and recycled and regurgitated for the better part of two years sends the Web into paroxysms of buzz. Take the new Muppet movie that Disney has planned, with the most recently reported title The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made and a script co-written by Jason Segel. The actor-writer has made little secret about it being his dream project, which is awesome for him because now -- shock of shocks -- he's starring in it.
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We've survived three weeks of live Idol shows, and we have interesting artifacts to show for it: a front-runner in Crystal Bowersox, a lucky holdout in Tim Urban, and some of the stupidest comments ever from Ryan Seacrest's quartet of justices. Whether it was Simon Cowell, Ellen DeGeneres, Kara DioGuardi, or Randy Jackson, someone always managed to burgle the turd, reference the wrong song, call a piano a guitar, or invent new ways to spread idiocy. But who gave us the dumbest comment of them all? Our winner may surprise you -- with a poetic quote about "reality."
· It's official -- Betty White is the hardest working woman in Hollywood. The actress-comedienne has agreed to co-star in TV Land's Hot in Cleveland after initially only signing on for the pilot. The Golden Girl will play a snarky but spry caretaker of the Cleveland home shared by three former L.A. residents played by Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick. Hot will begin its 10-episode season in June. Betty White is also set to host the Mother's Day episode of Saturday Night Live and guest-star in an upcoming episode of The Middle. [AP]
Syfy picks up Three Inches, ABC finds someone to run its drug cartel, and more TV Bites after the jump.
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