When it rains, it pours for some young actors. Take Jessica Chastain or Gemma Arterton, who've spoken here recently about the flukes of scheduling that have made 2010 the busiest years of their lives. Or take Andrea Riseborough, the 29-year-old British actress who brought not one, not two, but three prestige films to this year's Toronto Film Festival -- including this week's Made in Dagenham and breakthrough-level work opposite Sam Riley in Brighton Rock.
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The sixth season of Weeds draws to a close later tonight with easily the best and most shocking episode of the Showtime series in two years. (We'll have more on this one tomorrow.) In anticipation of the game-changing finale event, Movieline dialed brilliant Weeds star Justin Kirk to play a quick round of Movieline's beloved parlor game, "My Favorite Scene."
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Last year, Paul Haggis, the director of 2005's Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Crash, went through a very public breakup with Scientology. His first film after the defection arrives this week as The Next Three Days, the story of a man struggling to break his wife out of prison and restore his family. Coincidence?
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It's been a crazy seven months for director Doug Liman, who went from scrambling to finish his new film Fair Game ahead of its Cannes premiere to the whirlwind of press ahead of this month's opening in the States. In between he's taken lumps from the right, been the subject of Oscar speculation, and observed just how difficult it is to tell a story about the Central Intelligence Agency -- specifically, the true story of how agency operative Valerie Plame (played here by Naomi Watts), her husband Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn), and their marriage withstood her infamously blown cover in 2003.
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Dancing with the Stars is getting so outrageous that I almost need Erin Andrews on the phone with me as I watch. It's maddening! With Bristol Palin surviving another week and Carrie Ann Inaba sparring with Maks, it's easy to get a little huffy. In our epic interview this week, Miss Andrews discusses her love of Kyle Massey, Brandy's emotions, Maksim Chmerkovskiy's passion, and the possibility that Bristol will make it to the finals.
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Even though it was a recent early Sunday morning when Jeff Goldblum spoke with Movieline, it was impossible to deny the energy coming from this man -- quite the contrast to last year's reports that he fell off a cliff and died while shooting a film somewhere in New Zealand. Not only is Goldblum still very much alive (or, if not, very talented at making you think otherwise), he's never actually ever been to New Zealand. Goldblum, alive and well, returns to theaters today in the new romantic comedy, Morning Glory.
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This week, Shout! Factory releases Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vol. XIX (yes, that's 19), featuring four more classic episodes from the show that made it OK to talk back to the screen: Devil Doll, Devil Fish, Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, and Phil Tucker's infamous Robot Monster. A writer for most of the show's run, Mary Jo Pehl (who played the evil Mrs. Forrester during the SyFy run of MST3K), sat down to talk about her history with the cult cable classic as well as her current movie-riffing project Cinematic Titanic, which teams her with MST3K creator Joel Hodgson and fellow show vets Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, and J. Elvis Weinstein on live shows and DVD releases.
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A third of the way through The Event's first season on NBC, viewers are still frustratingly in the dark about "the event," and also the mysteries being contained by key characters like Sophia Maguire. Laura Innes plays Sophia, a charismatic leader who has gone to great lengths to protect her "people" while shielding the public from secret knowledge, an effort that has kept her followers locked up for 66 years. And finally in tonight's episode, "I Know Who You Are," viewers will get (some) answers.
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It might seem a bit early to turn the spotlight on 23-year-old Miles Teller given that his feature-film debut, as a tortured teenager in John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, won't hit screens until December. The Pennsylvania native and recent L.A. transplant doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet, for goodness sake! But that'll change as audiences watch him holding his own against Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart in Mitchell's emotionally intense domestic drama, based on David Lindsay-Abaire's Tony-winning play of the same name.
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It's never good when the phrase "clogged toilet" comes to mind regarding your would-be Oscar contender's movie poster, but that's just one of the reactions you might remember Movieline having to the dreadful U.S. one-sheet for The King's Speech. Don't take our word for it, though. Director Tom Hooper told me he's on the same page -- and changes are forthcoming.
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After ten months, one continent-sweeping comedy tour and one homoerotic cameo on Running Wilde, Andy Richter returns to the late night format tonight during Conan O'Brien's eagerly anticipated cable debut on Conan. In anticipation of the premiere, Andy Richter dialed Movieline last Friday to discuss the metamorphosis of his on-air relationship with O'Brien, the scathing Late Night reviews he is just now discovering and the man who threw a wrench in his and O'Brien's Tonight Show game, Jay Leno.
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The jury is out on whether or not For Colored Girls will find momentum at the box office, in the Oscar derby, or both, But for at least one-ninth of its ensemble of actresses, the film already represents a cultural success worthy of the celebrated 1975 source choreopoem by Ntozake Shange.
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In the 15 years that have passed since he launched his career as a multi-hyphenate with the Sundance hit The Brothers McMullen, Edward Burns has continued to write, direct, act in and produce his own projects while appearing in other people's films. Some of those acting gigs have been great (Saving Private Ryan) and, let's face it, many have not, but they've all allowed Burns the luxury of making his own personal projects every few years (She's the One, No Looking Back, Sidewalks of New York, Ash Wednesday, Looking for Kitty, The Groomsmen, Purple Violets).
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Naomi Watts freely admits she had a hard time getting to know Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA agent notoriously outed by a Bush Administration henchman in 2003. But it wasn't because of what Plame couldn't tell the actress in preparation for Fair Game, the new film starring Watts as the newly exposed covert operative. It's because of the intimate yet necessary details of a marriage that, as a result of the scandal, nearly became some of the Iraq War's most infamous collateral damage.
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When Danny Boyle has an idea for a film, nothing is going to stop Danny Boyle from doing that film his way. Take 127 Hours, which almost didn't happen for a couple of reasons: First, Boyle thought to tell the story of hiker Aron Ralston's five-day ordeal completely from Ralston's perspective in the canyon in which he was trapped -- and from which he eventually extricated himself by amputating his own arm from beneath a boulder. A few years later, after Ralston finally agreed to the format, Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy then balked at Boyle's offer, saying Boyle's vision was too entrenched in the Oscar-winning director's head. And what did Boyle do? What else? With Beaufoy's help, he wrote the screenplay.
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