Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's weekly spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. Today we hear from director Mark Hopkins and doctors Chiara Lepora and Arnaud Jeannin, three of the principals behind Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders, which opens this week in New York, Los Angeles and five other cities (with more to come throughout June).
If you ever think you've got it rough at your job, have a look at the daily agendas handled by the team featured in the new documentary Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders. From Liberia to Congo, from war zone to hot zone, the surgeons and pathologists here battle a succession of obstacles in their pursuit to bring medical care to people who need it most. These really are their stories -- and they're riveting.
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If you are a fan of little girls committing big, gory acts of violence, then you should check out Shannen Doherty's latest project, the animated web series Mari-Kari premiering tomorrow on FEARnet. The anime-inspired project splits Doherty -- who just this year, returned to the 90210 zip code and competed as a celebrity contestant on Dancing with the Stars -- into identical twins Mari and Kari. The latter is a ghost who goes to great lengths to protect her bubbly, optimistic sister Mari from bullies at school. And as Doherty explained to Movieline last week, tapping into her "saccharine sweet" side is enough to give the actress a major headache.
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Some roles change an actress's career, and then some roles change her life. Neil Jordan's fairy-tale thriller Ondine did both for 27-year-old Alicja Bachleda, who stars in the title role as a mysterious young woman caught in the net of the Irish fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell). Revived and stabilized, she is thought by both Syracuse and his physically ailing daughter to possibly be a selkie -- the mythical sea-woman creature of Irish folklore. Ondine's gifts for singing fish into Syracuse's net and treating the sick girl only compound the suspicion; their increasing closeness sets up a romance both on- and offscreen (Bachleda and Farrell became an item on the set, having a son together in 2008), not to mention a quintessentially Jordan-esque meditation on a woman who isn't what she appears to be.
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George A. Romero may not be the father of the zombie film, but there can be no denying his status as its patron saint. More than four decades after his still-searing Night of the Living Dead put the "gory" in "allegory," Romero returns today with Survival of the Dead -- a grisly, pitch-black satire about the ordeal of an increasingly polarized society. Except this time it's the living facing each other as two families -- the O'Flynns and the Muldoons -- battle for control of an island where zombies co-exist like pets. Hungry pets, sure, but maybe even trainable. This could change everything.
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Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's weekly spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. This week we hear from Matt Levy, the director of the fun new doc New York Street Games, now available on DVD.
It's not often you get a rule book included with a DVD purchase; I think the last time I remember that happening were David Lynch's notes for unraveling Mullholland Dr. (which didn't help a damn bit, by the way). But that's just one of the value-added features of New York Street Games, a half-documentary/half-call to action that challenges viewers to get off their couches, rally the neighbors and the kids, and get that stoopball game going you've always dreamed of.
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Cat Deeley's hosting gig on So You Think You Can Dance acquaints her with talents who want a quick rise to stardom, but her beginnings in TV happened just as swiftly. The 33-year-old star landed an on-air job in her native UK after sending one self-made audition tape to MTV. That job led to countless others, including hosting duties on Brit reality series The Record of the Year and Reach for the Stars. Now that she emcees the US and UK versions of So You Think You Can Dance, Deeley seems poised for a universal takeover. Ahead of SYTYCD's seventh season premiere tonight on Fox, Deeley spoke with Movieline about her academic past, Emmy aspirations, and how the show will be different without Mary Murphy as a permanent judge.
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This week's sweeping epic Agora is a bit of a headscratcher -- not necessarily for its concentration on the bloody collision of religion, science, romance and politics in 4th-century Alexandria, but instead for the fact that a film so serious and substantial wasn't itself made extinct somewhere along the development pipeline. Credit Rachel Weisz, the Oscar-winner whose commitment to writer-director Alejandro Amenabar has resulted in one of 2010's unlikeliest biopics.
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Here at Movieline, we try to be cool and impartial, but when it comes to Ari Graynor, I'm just a full-blown advocate. Give this woman more roles! She can do scene-stealing supporting turns (like her perpetually wasted Caroline in Peter Sollett's Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), tempting sexpots (Whip It, Youth in Revolt), and network TV arcs (Fringe) in equal measure, and she adds her own unique spin to the noir moll in Kevin Asch's Holy Rollers, where she plays Rachel, a drug dealer's girlfriend who entices Hasidic Sam (Jesse Eisenberg) further into a life of crime.
Graynor called up Movieline last week to discuss what made the part an unlikely fit for her, what she was supposed to be doing in one recent Fringe appearance, and the comic book role she's begging to play.
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For years, Justin Bartha's been a dependable supporting player in comedies (The Hangover), tentpoles (National Treasure) and even misfires (Gigli), but his days of second fiddle may be coming to an end. In the new drama Holy Rollers, Bartha still plays support to Jesse Eisenberg, but through his role as the debauched Hasid who lures Eisenberg into a life of drug running, Bartha gives the movie its jittery intrigue. Meanwhile, the 31-year-old actor has the lead in Stanley Tucci's Broadway musical Lend Me a Tenor, and though he was gone for most of the first Hangover, he's due to have an expanded role in the second.
Last week, Bartha spoke to Movieline about the perils of indie filmmaking, Eisenberg's habit of self-deprecating, and the job he'd take on the next Hangover if director Todd Phillips asked him.
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Like the characters of Party Down -- actors, comedians and writers catering their way toward impossible dreams -- Rob Thomas' premium cable comedy, now in its sophomore season, can never quite catch a break. Although the show is beloved by its fans, the Starz sleeper has been leaking cast members ever since Jane Lynch departed the premium cabler for Glee. And even though Party Down's ratings more than doubled this season, the show is still watched by less than 300,000 people. In hopes that tonight's episode, "Steve Guttenberg's Birthday," could be the installment that reverses Party Down's fortune, Martin Starr phoned Movieline to discuss just how the Cocoon actor was cast, Party Down's tragic undertone and how little Starr actually relates to his character.
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis has tackled a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
So far this week, Movieline's talked to Bret Easton Ellis about movies made from his own books -- movies he often didn't script himself. His upcoming screenplay, The Golden Suicides, is for a very different film entirely. Adapted by Ellis from a Nancy Jo Sales article for Vanity Fair and written for producer Gus Van Sant, it's based on the true story of artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan (pictured above), a glamorous couple who eventually secluded themselves in a cocoon of paranoia when they believed that government organizations and Scientologists were out to get them. Duncan killed herself in July 2007, and a week later, the despondent Blake walked into the Atlantic and drowned.
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
Gregor Jordan's The Informers begins with a quick, abrupt car accident, but to hear Bret Easton Ellis tell it, the production was something like a car crash in slow motion. Though it's the only adaptation of Ellis's novels where he actually served as a producer and co-writer on the film, he's not happy with how it turned out, and he's hardly alone. When The Informers was released last year, audiences stayed away and critics were scathing (pundit Devin Faraci, unwilling to review the film according to a normal ratings system, scored it a "F**k God out of 10").
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
When Bret Easton Ellis wrote The Rules of Attraction in 1987, it came burdened with heavy expectations, as his first novel, Less Than Zero, had made him a literary wunderkind two years prior. In a similar way, Roger Avary's 2002 film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction came two years after the relative success of Mary Harron's film version of American Psycho, and if ever Ellis were to become a book-to-film crossover franchise a la Stephen King or John Grisham, Rules would serve as a litmus test.
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
American Psycho is by far the most controversial work that Bret Easton Ellis has written, and yet when it comes to the adaptations of his novels, Mary Harron's 2000 film is the most critically acclaimed and well-regarded. It went through a bumpy production process that attracted directors like Oliver Stone and David Cronenberg and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, but the final result eventually became a calling card for both Harron and its star, Christian Bale, and it's only grown in public esteem since its release.
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Although Glee's ensemble cast sometimes prevents characters from getting their fair share of Ryan Murphy's spotlight, every now and then an episode airs that manages to tenderly chronicle the plight of one glee club member. In tonight's episode, "Dream On," Artie -- the white-rapping, wheelchair-bound character played by Kevin McHale -- supports one of the most emotionally gratifying storylines of the season. In anticipation of tonight's episode, which was directed by Joss Whedon and guest stars Neil Patrick Harris, McHale phoned Movieline to discuss his questionable guitar skills, his boy band days and the one fan anecdote that made him appreciate Glee even more than he already did.
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