With Afghan Star, London-based filmmaker Havana Marking has crafted something utterly extraordinary -- a fly-on-the-wall glimpse at a shattered culture beginning to "awaken from a dream," as one Afghan puts it. And it's all thanks to the unlikeliest of things: a televised singing competition that has quickly become a runaway national phenomenon. Even the most impoverished of Kabul slum-dwellers somehow find a way to watch Afghan Star, cheering on their favorites with the same ferocity as the most obsessive Adam Lambert fan. Contestants are of both genders and from every province of that civil war-torn country, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, American Idol-style, as host Daoud Sadiqi affects his best Ryan Seacrest and reveals the week's voting results.
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It's long been taken for granted that Kathryn Bigelow is Hollywood's best female action director -- and that's a reputation she firmed up before tomorrow's release of The Hurt Locker, her best film so far. The Iraq War bomb squad thriller is a shot of adrenaline for not just the audience, but Bigelow's career, which includes classics like Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days. The whip-smart director recently sat down with Movieline to talk all things Hurt Locker, though the conversation soon veered to Point Break parodies, wooing the King of Jordan, and a certain vampire franchise she'd been heavily touted for.
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Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are having a moment, and they know it.
As the screenwriters behind the year's two biggest films, Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (cowritten with Ehren Kruger), the writing partners have solidified their position as Hollywood's top screenwriting duo. It's a long way from Hercules and Xena, where the two began, and they'd be the first to admit their journey wasn't the one they planned on. Now, as all they touch turns to gold (and even the projects they've recently produced -- including Eagle Eye, The Proposal, and Fringe -- have become unqualified hits) they sat down with Movieline to discuss their unlikely path, Megan Fox's big mouth, and just whose idea it was to give one of the Transformers a gold tooth.
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Josh Harris saw all of this coming. The ubiquity of the Internet, the reality-TV craze, social networking, the surging access to (and increasingly desperate chase for) fame -- all of it. In 1999, Harris was at the bleeding edge of the vanguard chronicled in We Live in Public, filmmaker Ondi Timoner's Sundance-winning documentary charting Harris's time spent as an early Web mogul run aground on the shoals of self-obsession. On one hand, Timoner was lucky: That self-obsession yielded thousands of hours' worth of videotapes for her project. But it came at a cost.
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Harold Ramis has a busy weekend coming up: First, the veteran actor-writer-director will uncork his latest comedy, the historical Jack Black/Michael Cera farce Year One, in multiplexes nationwide. The following day, June 20, Ramis goes a little more micro at the Nantucket FiIm Festival, which will honor Ramis with its Screenwriter's Tribute and a 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters. (He'll also participate in a comedy roundtable with Ben Stiller, Peter Farrelly and John Hamburg the same day.) The comic maven spoke with Movieline recently about looking back in time -- from 25 years to two millenniums -- as well as his most underappreciated films and what he absolutely doesn't want Ghostbusters 3 to be.
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Though many of his famous peers like to say they'll soon make smaller, more intimate movies, only Francis Ford Coppola actually seems to be doing it. The director's latest, Tetro, is a moody family drama about young Bennie (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) reconnecting with the titular brother (Vincent Gallo) who fled the family years before to escape from their overbearing father. When Bennie unearths one of Tetro's discarded stories and secretly adapts it into an acclaimed play, the already-riven family dynamics become even more fraught.
Movieline talked with Coppola about his own familial rivalries, the criticism his films have received (including the famous franchise he regrets serializing), and the splashy action film he's unexpectedly looking forward to this year.
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Weeks before its release this Friday, industry observers were sizing up The Hangover as the sleeper hit of the summer. Either way, director Todd Phillips has reached his peak here, corralling Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and, in a true breakthrough performance, Zach Galifianakis as a mismatched trio attempting to find their friend the morning after a spectacularly debauched Vegas bachelor party.
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