It was an agonizing enough process just getting cast in Tarsem's Immortals, stars Luke Evans and Henry Cavill told Movieline over the weekend at WonderCon, where audiences got their first look at the November fantasy pic. But the real struggle, they say, was in reaching and maintaining the physique required of their roles as Zeus and Theseus, respectively -- characters for whom godlike perfection was a prerequisite. But hey, no pressure!
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If Screen Gems' upcoming post-apocalyptic thriller Priest feels a bit familiar to you, there's a reason: the film reunites star Paul Bettany with director Scott Stewart, with whom he made last year's avenging-angel apocalypse pic Legion. Produced on a relatively modest budget, Legion made $67 million worldwide but fared poorly with critics and, Bettany admits, suffered from its limitations. With Priest, however, he and Stewart aim to surpass their own benchmark and give audiences something that they haven't seen before: a 3-D post-conversion job worth the price of admission.
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The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival keeps adding intriguing titles. Premiering in New York later this month will be Detachment from American History X director Tony Kaye. The film -- about a substitute teacher who has his life changed by a student -- features an all-star cast led by Adrien Brody, Christina Hendricks and Bryan Cranston. Also debuting: Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon, which surely will be Ryan Murphy's favorite film of the festival.
Movieline's submission for a Godard-centric poster to represent this year's Cannes Film Festival went unrecognized, alas, and the world must make do with a 40-year-old image of Faye Dunaway. We could all unite in our outrage -- were she not so gorgeous.
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At the age of 19, Logan Lerman (The Patriot, Jack & Bobby, Gamer) has been acting for over a decade and later this year will take on the most iconic character of his career -- one of the most recognizable heroes in literature, even: D'Artagnan in Paul W.S. Anderson's Three Musketeers. Lerman made his first trip to WonderCon with footage from the October 2011 3D action pic in tow and sat for a quick chat with Movieline about Anderson's insane-looking take on the Alexandre Dumas novel, the reportedly in-the-works sequel to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and a little-known YouTube user known as monkeynuts1069.
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In San Francisco to present his upcoming teen assassin thriller Hanna at WonderCon, director Joe Wright threw a few pointed barbs toward Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, calling out the film's brand of scantily clad feminism. Speaking exclusively with Movieline, Wright elaborated on the subject, tracing the "alarming" brand of sexually-exploitative girl power found in Sucker Punch back to the Spice Girls.
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New theory: Immortals director Tarsem Singh (excuse us, visionary director Tarsem) is the honey badger of film directors. In an unprecedented move Saturday in San Francisco, the filmmaker behind such films as The Cell and The Fall stole the hearts and minds of WonderCon attendees away from Cowboys & Aliens helmer Jon Favreau -- and mind you, Favreau is so popular that he has his own entrance music ("Back in Black," natch). So how did visionary director Tarsem bring the house down during the panel for The Immortals, a 300-styled movie he described as "Caravaggio meets Fight Club?" Hit the jump for highlights from TarsemCon.
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When it comes to conventions, Jon Favreau is nothing if not a man of the nerd people. Mindful of how much he owes to the Comic-Con faithful for jump-starting early word of mouth on the Iron Man franchise, he came to San Francisco this weekend with a treat: Nine minutes of footage from Cowboys & Aliens cut exclusively for the WonderCon audience, including a special reveal of the film's big, bad aliens -- aliens that Favreau otherwise intends to keep under wraps.
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Friday at WonderCon, Blake Lively revealed how she nabbed the role of Carol Ferris in Green Lantern: Warner Bros. execs saw her striking turn as a drug-addicted hot mess in The Town and invited her to read for the part. Coincidentally, Amy Adams landed her Lois Lane gig on the heels of her performance in The Fighter, so let's call it a trend -- the Massachusetts Moxie Leading Lady Rule, in which throwing down on the streets of the Bay State proves that you're more than capable of hanging with supermen.
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Courtney Love shrugged. "We've been in lots of rooms together," she said to a packed theater of moviegoers at the Museum of Modern Art, where Hit So Hard, a documentary about her band Hole (and, more specifically, drummer/addict/survivor Patty Schemel) had its New York premiere Monday night. The crowd laughed, steeped in nostalgia and recognition -- not that Love was talking about this room or this crowd.
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The worst-kept secret (or most obvious development, however you want to read it) of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival was confirmed today: Terrence Malick's long-delayed The Tree of Life will debut on the Croisette in May. The film joins Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris as the only selections officially set for this year's fest, though its status in or out of competition remains unknown. Tree of Life opens Stateside in limited release on May 27. [Thompson on Hollywood]
Brit Marling studied economics at Georgetown and might have been an environmental activist or banker in another life if she hadn't answered the siren call of Los Angeles and moved west to risk it all as an actor. And what a payoff: having co-written, produced, and starred in two critically acclaimed films at Sundance (the sci-fi romance Another Earth and the wonderfully hard-to-define cult drama Sound of My Voice), Marling's smack dab in the middle of her well-deserved breakout moment. Movieline caught up with Marling at SXSW to discuss borderline illegal guerrilla filmmaking tricks, taking professional risks, and avoiding the "morally-corrupt swamp" that is Hollywood.
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When Harmony Korine's short film Umshini Wam screened alongside the latest from Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Thirst) at SXSW, both efforts had an unproven element to unveil. For Korine, the wild cards were his stars, the South African hip-hop act Die Antwoord. But for Park, it was something even more groundbreaking: he filmed the mystical, spiritual ghost story Night Fishing entirely using the iPhone 4.
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The psycho-sexual anthology Little Deaths made a minor splash at SXSW as the Serbian Film of this year's fest, leaving many searching for the film most analogous to Ben Wheatley's even better-loved SXFantastic buzz film Kill List. But while parallels to previous SXSW hits like Monsters and Wheatley's own Down Terrace have been drawn, another entry from last year's festival circuit instead comes to mind: Yorgos Lanthimos' crazypants domestic drama Dogtooth.
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Evan Glodell's nihilist love story/vengeance tale Bellflower is a dangerous piece of must-see American indie filmmaking for Mad Max fans and, in a way, the same crowd who can't wait to see Quentin Dupieux's killer tire flick Rubber. After premiering at Sundance, where Oscilliscope snapped it up for a summer 2011 release, Bellflower blazed a diesel-fueled trail through SXSW treating attendees to a glimpse of the heavily modified Buick Skylark that Glodell transformed into the flame-throwing beast known as the Mother Medusa.
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