When I asked Somewhere director Sofia Coppola and her two stars Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning to pick their favorite film scenes of all-time, each responded with a clip he/she first watched during early adolescence. Of course, right? Coppola chose an '80s classic, Fanning selected a cinematic hallmark starring her screen idol, and Dorff recalled a scene that intrigued and baffled him when he first saw it on television. Join us as we revisit their favorites (with clips!).
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As you may have noticed around these parts, the end of the calendar year brings a plethora of Top-10 lists from an assortment of categories. But why should Movieline's staff have all the fun? Let's hear from Adam Scott, whose Parks and Recreation returns to NBC on Jan. 20th and who wrote in to share his own favorite things from the last year in pop culture. Take it away, Adam.
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As television legend has it, the role of Dr. Lisa Cuddy was custom-designed for Lisa Edelstein in 2004 after the Boston-born actress impressed House executive producer Bryan Singer with her performance as a high-priced call girl The West Wing. Seven seasons later, Edelstein is still at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital as Dean of Medicine, long-suffering House colleague and one half of television's most beloved couples on TV today.
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Seattle native Lynn Shelton sprang to the forefront of the indie scene when her 2009 comedy Humpday -- about two straight male college friends who, ten years down the line, decide to make a gay pornography film as an art project -- won a slew of festival awards, including a Special Jury Prize for Spirit at Sundance and the John Cassavetes Award. Since then, Shelton helped MTV re-introduce music into its brand by directing the $5 Cover: Seattle web series (premiering today), which documents 13 local bands in loosely-scripted eight-minute episodes. As if that weren't enough, Matt Weiner summoned the Shelton to Los Angeles to helm this season's Mad Men episode episode "Hands and Knees." You'll recall that one, because it featured Playboy Bunnies.
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While this summer's big-budget adaptation of the '80s TV hit The A-Team (out this week from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment) may not have been the franchise tentpole its studio hoped to get for the money it spent, the action extravaganza did confirm the star quality of Sharlto Copley, who first turned up on our pop culture radars after his starring role in the 2009 Best Picture nominee District 9.
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To say Glee's Chris Colfer is basking in the glow of his first Golden Globe nomination for his role as McKinley High's estranged gay pioneer Kurt is a bit of an understatement. "I'm so excited I've been tackling everyone I've seen on set today," he enthuses, before adding with a chuckle, "Whether I know them or not!" Not everyone in the Glee cast shares Colfer's enthusiasm, however. "Ashley Fink [Lauren] sent me a hysterical text message," he recalls. "She said she was excited that I was nominated but she was more excited for Burlesque."
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Be gone with your bazingas, because this is the real deal, folks: CBS' The Big Bang Theory has collected its first-ever Golden Globe nomination in the Best Comedy category. (Cast member Jim Parsons also earned a nod, for Best Comedy Actor.) To mark this occasion, Movieline spoke with Big Bang co-creator Chuck Lorre about how the fourth-year comedy endured a very scary real-life drama to serve up one of its best seasons to date.
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The Golden Globe nominations were the usual melange of oddities and head-shakers, but one snub has many prognosticators grumbling: Where was the love for Mike Leigh's Another Year? Remember: The Golden Globes thrust Sally Hawkins into the limelight after awarding her Best Actress in 2008 for her performance in Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky. This year, even though Another Year's Lesley Manville just took hope the top prize at the National Board of Review awards, Leigh's critically adored film -- a story about a seemingly happy married couple that is surrounded by sorrowful personalities -- was shut out of the nominations altogether. Was Leigh outraged over his film's exclusion from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association party?
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T.J. Miller -- perhaps best known to movie fans as Hud from Cloverfield -- just wants to make sure you give his new film Yogi Bear a fair shake before you judge it. Then again, Miller, who in 2008 was named one of the 12 rising stars in comedy by Entertainment Weekly, has a bit at stake for this film considering that he theoretically could have been eaten by a real bear during his audition.
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Sofia Coppola's new film is called Somewhere, but its location is specific: the present-day, alienating Los Angeles. Stephen Dorff stars as Johnny Marco, an action star whose boozy, despondent life brightens when his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) accompanies him abroad on a press tour for his insipid blockbuster Berlin Agenda. While Cleo's sunny optimism reinvigorates Johnny, it also confronts him with how joyless -- or is it worthless? -- he feels without her. Somewhere proves that with spiritual awakening comes damning reflection, and Coppola again exhibits her knack for weary characters who discover their sensitivities are firmly intact.
Movieline caught up with Coppola (who directed, wrote, and produced the film) and her two stars for an in-depth look at Somewhere's characters, conflicts, and hilarious -- and in one case, real -- moments of Hollywood insanity.
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John Wells, the director of the recession drama The Company Men, knows very well what it's like to be fired. In 2009, the creator/producer/director of TV institutions like ER and The West Wing lost his new prized show, the critically praised Southland, when NBC made the decision to remove five hours of prime-time per week in favor of Jay Leno.
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Last week I met actor Jesse Eisenberg for a lengthy discussion of subjects ranging from his coming-of-age in the New York theater to his beloved Zombieland and his awards-season prospects for The Social Network. We covered a lot of ground, which I'll be retracing this week in a five-part series here at Movieline.
And so we arrive, sadly, at the end of our five-part journey with Jesse Eisenberg. By the time the actor and I reached this point, the done-to-death The Social Network had given way to... well, quite a few subjects. Let's just say that in this last installment of our bar-side conversation, it's a movie-reference blowout: The Godfather, Jurassic Park, all six Star Wars films and three Lord of the Rings films, among others, made the cut. We also discussed the pending progress of Zombieland 2 and Eisenberg's surprising affection for the star of Three's Company.
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Last week I met actor Jesse Eisenberg for a lengthy discussion of subjects ranging from his coming-of-age in the New York theater to his beloved Zombieland and his awards-season prospects for The Social Network. We covered a lot of ground, which I'll be retracing this week in a five-part series here at Movieline.
During part four of my chat with Jesse Eisenberg I learned a valuable lesson: Even if you have terrible handwriting (which I do) and your notepad is a safe distance across a bar table from Eisenberg, he will still try to sneak a peak at the line of questioning that's on its way. The only words he made out happened to be a topic I'd discarded, which, as Eisenberg's inquisitive nature would have it, now became a full-blown conversation topic.
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As Movieline's discussion with Social Network stars Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake continued, the on-screen rivals and off-screen friends looked toward the next steps in their careers. Timberlake has seemingly refocused his priorities, putting music on hold to make back-to-back films (after this month's Yogi Bear, he'll have no less than three starring vehicles in 2011) and, in doing so, attempt to build up his stock as a serious actor and leading man. Garfield, meanwhile, is about to slingshot out the relative obscurity of his career to date with the most coveted role in young Hollywood: Playing Peter Parker in Marc Webb's Spider-Man reboot.
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In a town full of funny, feisty, blond actresses, Busy Philipps has climbed to the top of the heap. After acquainting herself with teenage audiences in Freaks and Geeks and Dawson's Creek, the Arizona-raised actress (real name: Elizabeth Jean Philipps) has matured with her audience, trading detention arcs for maturing roles in ER, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and now ABC's Cougar Town. As Laurie Keller, the youngest, bubbliest and (again) blondest member of the Cul-de-sac crew, Philipps regularly lands the funniest lines and story arcs of any given episode -- like in last night's "The Same Old You," when Laurie posed as a transfer student at Travis's college just so that she could join a sorority. Well, maybe her characters haven't matured that much.
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