In Chloe, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan returns to the pulpy, psychosexual domain that first established his international reputation, with 1994's Exotica. In it, we meet Catherine -- a successful Toronto gynecologist, played by Julianne Moore, who is coming to terms with her own obsolescence. Her husband, a handsome college professor (Liam Neeson) spends more and more time with his adoring female students, while her teen son barely acknowledges his mother's existence as he smuggles a mostly naked girlfriend in and out of his bedroom. Enter Chloe: a voluptuous and other-worldly call girl fully embodied by Amanda Seyfried, who Catherine hires to entrap her husband. Soon after, the head games and fantasy fulfillments begin.
To be sure, keeping these melodramatic proceedings from tumbling into trashier nether-zones is a tightrope act, and Egoyan -- working for the first time off a script not written by himself, but rather by Secretary writer Erin Cressida Wilson -- pulls it off. Movieline spoke to the director about breaking out of his comfort areas, how television has replaced cinema as the most consistent source of great drama, and the delicacies of shooting two stars of Moore and Seyfried's caliber in flagrante delicto.
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When actress Sheila Kelley was introduced last week on Lost wearing a pair of sympathetic spectacles and exhibiting a desperate need to know just what the hell is happening on this island, she could have been a stand-in for any number of audience members -- so what were we to make of her after she turned a gun on Sawyer (Josh Holloway) and revealed that she actually knows way more than we do? Kelley herself caused quite the online stir yesterday when she told Us that she'd seen the finale and that her name was on every page of it, leading many blogs to believe that her character, Zoe, had somehow come from nowhere to end up in every single scene of Lost's final episode. As she told Movieline, not quite.
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For months, John Corbett has been denying that his Sex and the City character, Aiden Shaw, would be making a surprise cameo in the franchise's second feature film. Diehard Aiden fans reluctantly came to terms with the idea that the sexy, bucket of chicken-eating craftsman would not leave his wife and child for Miss Bradshaw, and slowly began piecing together their broken hearts and dissembling their "Aiden + Carrie 4 Ever" vision boards. But last week, Entertainment Weekly stirred up hopeful feelings when they reported that the furniture designer would appear in Sex and the City 2. Confused, Movieline decided to get to the bottom of the rumors once and for all and discovered that John Corbett was only too happy to help.
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You wouldn't know from the first 10 minutes of Greenberg that it is -- or ever could be -- a Ben Stiller film. Blame it on Greta Gerwig, the 25-year-old indie muse making her mainstream debut in Noah Baumbach's nervy comedy. Starring as Florence, a young woman slogging through post-collegiate malaise as a personal assistant to a wealthy L.A. family, Gerwig embodies a sort of ethereal ennui before meeting her spiritual (and possibly romantic) match in Stiller's narcissistic-creep title character. The veteran actor may usurp the story in the end, but from the start -- a walk in the Hills, a drive through Hollywood, the routine of deference, servitude and resilience -- Gerwig hand-tailors the narrative with a lilting sincerity arguably never before seen in a Baumbach film. Attribute what you will to the touch of Baumbach's wife and story collaborator Jennifer Jason Leigh, but it's Gerwig's optimism and resolve that take the day. "You like me a lot more than you think you do," she tells Greenberg late in the film, daring to suggest that even when it's all about him, it's really about her. Which, of course, it is.
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This week's Project Runway loser was a particularly tragic entry: level-headed, poised to rank higher than eighth place, and committed to a hard-carved personal aesthetic. After the jump, meet the contestant who met an untimely end last night, and hear all about how Michael Kors isn't so enlightening after all.
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For many people watching Nurse Jackie last season, Merritt Wever was an unknown actress -- until she started stealing scenes from the show's title character. The New York City native has been on television before, playing Matthew Perry's assistant on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and because of her success on Jackie, Wever's schedule is filling up fast. Just last month, she appeared opposite Annette Bening in an L.A. stage production of The Female of the Species and this weekend, viewers can catch Wever twice -- in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, which opens in theaters today and Nurse Jackie's second season premiere on Sunday.
Talking to Movieline today, Wever discussed her busy schedule, the most valuable lesson she learned from Edie Falco and the reason it was hard to return to Nurse Jackie for a second season.
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It's no surprise that Floria Sigismondi would end up in the feature film world, as it's one of the only forms of media she hasn't conquered. The 45-year-old is best known for directing music videos for Marilyn Manson, the White Stripes, and Christina Aguilera, but she's also worked in painting, sculpture, and fashion photography. For a woman who's so steeped in artistic expression, what better film directing debut than The Runaways, where Sigismondi can pay tribute to two other sets of artists: Runaways musicians Cherie Currie and Joan Jett and their film portrayers Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart.
The Runaways comes out today, so Sigismondi sat down with Movieline to discuss her career arc, the frightening story she couldn't fit into the film, and her odd identification with Kim Fowley, the Runaways' unscrupulous Svengali.
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How did James Cameron achieve the dazzlingly nuanced computerized performances of Avatar? The answer, at least partially, lies in makeup. Where an expensive and labor-intensive system using reflective beads had previously been the industry standard for digitally mapping an actor's emotional landscape, Cameron had determined early on that he'd use paints instead -- offering far more comprehensive coverage, and, he hoped, a huge leap forward for the medium. The only problem was that the paints didn't exist.
Enter makeup department head Tegan Taylor. A veteran Hollywood makeup artist, she came to Avatar with extensive motion-capture experience, having worked with Robert Zemeckis on earlier experiments in the genre like The Polar Express and Beowulf. But what Cameron and the effects artists at Weta Digital were asking for would require some ingenuity.
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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 the filmmakers behind Waking Sleeping Beauty, which was opens March 26 in limited release.
The riveting documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty is a film that probably shouldn't exist under virtually any or all circumstances. The behind-the-scenes story of the renaissance at Walt Disney Animation between 1984 and 1994 is dense with candid insights from the animators and studio bosses -- including Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney -- who were there at the time, and the truths it reveals about the ego and fragility of the enterprise are of a quality you never see coming from Hollywood, let alone from the fortified walls of the Disney compound. Thankfully, like the creative culture that gave the studio its second golden era, the circumstances were just right for director Don Hahn and producer Peter Schneider to reconvene the insiders for the definitive tale.
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Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are experts at the art of the publicity stunt. In the past year alone, the pair has finagled more tabloid covers than any of their Hills co-stars, quit I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here twice and survived a 24-hour plastic surgery decathlon that transformed Montag into an almost-unrecognizable tabloid star. So when Montag announced last week that she was dumping her manager husband in lieu of psychic Aiden Chase, Movieline, like the rest of the Hills-watching nation, was suspicious.
Movieline tracked down Montag's new manager, Aiden Chase, a third-generation intuitive based in Beverly Hills, who explained his relationship with Montag, revealed which dead celebrities are rooting for the reality star and addressed the rumor that Spencer was banned from The Hills.
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The comedy City Island was one of the most refreshing success stories to come out of last year's Tribeca Film Festival, and Andy Garcia was one of the most refreshing success stories to come out of City Island. The 53-year-old actor delivers a revelatory performance as Vincent Rizzo, a corrections officer (and privately aspiring actor) who takes an interest in a soon-to-be-discharged prison inmate (Steven Strait) he'll eventually set up at his house on the titular island just off the Bronx. Trouble arises as his high-strung wife (Julianna Margulies), college-age daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) and smart-ass son (Ezra Miller) suspect something is up between the two -- even as they scramble to hide secrets and desires of their own. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta steers the ensuing meltdown from farce to drama to dark comedy and back again, with Garcia's conscience navigating closely alongside.
As even the actor alluded to Movieline earlier this week, it might seems odd City Island (which opens Friday) works at all. And that was just the start of our own winding chat from City Island to The Godfather to his upcoming directing effort with Anthony Hopkins, Hemingway and Fuentes.
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Matt Walsh was one-fourth of improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade's most famous lineup -- the one with fellow comic totems Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Amy Poehler that fronted the '90s Comedy Central series Upright Citizens Brigade. The 45-year-old's cult hero status has led to a number of supporting roles as a correspondent on The Daily Show, bit player in The Hangover, Role Models, and I Love You Man, and star on Comedy Central's recent Dog Bites Man. Now, as Walsh's new Spike TV sports bar comedy Players takes off, he talks to Movieline about improvisation, the college experiences that led to Players, and the kind of "postmodern" comedy he finds annoying.
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It's entirely possible you missed a small revolution that played out on daytime TV this year, in a gay storyline on One Life to Live involving Officer Oliver Fish (Scott Evans, the younger, openly gay brother of Fantastic Four star Chris Evans) and Kyle Lewis (played by straight actor Brett Claywell), an old college friend whose sensitive hunkitude draws Fish out of the closet. Sure, gays on TV are nothing new, but Kish, as fans began to lovingly refer to them, shattered the age-old image of the gay eunuch, while demonstrating, in a New Year's Eve consummation scene for the ages, that two masculine men in a committed relationship could make sensitive love without the use of a Lady Gaga backing track or cardboard box of sex toys. (Pottery Barn candles of varying heights, on the other hand, are another story.) It was transfixing, paradigm-busting stuff, heralded by media advocacy groups and perfectly timed to coincide with the gay marriage legislation fiascos of 2009.
Unfortunately, it didn't add up to ratings, which were some of the lowest in One Life to Live history. Last week, both men were informed by producers that the storyline is being dropped and that the characters would be written out of the show by April. We approached Claywell, who was still a little stunned by the news but upbeat, for the real story. What we found was a brave, thoughtful and affable actor who seems to realize he was just a party to something big.
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When we're with the ladies of The Runaways there's a lot of glum attitude and druggy malaise on display, so thank God for Michael Shannon as their Svengali producer Kim Fowley, who electrifies the movie like the lightning bolt that's often painted on his face. It's Shannon's most high-profile part since snagging an Oscar nomination in Revolutionary Road, though since then he's made Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and will soon be seen in Jonah Hex and the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
In real life, Shannon couldn't be more different from the wild lech he plays in The Runaways. Serious but also seriously funny, the actor sat down with Movieline last week to talk about working with all those young actresses, working in front of a camera in general, and working with the mysterious James Franco.
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As far as character names go, there is no cooler moniker on television than Captain Awesome. And Ryan McPartlin is still listing the credit on his IMDB page three seasons after winning the role on NBC's cult-favorite Chuck, which fans have famously refused to let be canceled. Believe it or not, Captain Awesome started out as a peripheral character -- the all-too-perfect boyfriend of Chuck's sister -- and now three years later, McPartlin's character has become the first person in Chuck's inner circle to infiltrate the spy world. To McPartlin, a modest former Abercrombie model from Chicago, the character's growing arc was more a result of luck than talent -- but there are a few Captain Awesome fans out there who might disagree.
Movieline caught up with the Chuck star recently to discuss a huge upcoming twist on the series, what it was like to pull down Betty Draper's panties and the embarrassing role he passed up while nearly $20,000 in debt.
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