Eva Mendes must have a thing for cops, because she burst on the scene as Denzel Washington's mistress in Training Day, then served as a policeman's love interest in films like Out of Time and We Own the Night. Suffice it to say, though, she's never had an onscreen love affair like the one with Nicolas Cage's loopy law enforcer in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. As a prostitute named Frankie, Mendes plays Cage's only tether to something real, but since this is a Werner Herzog film, even the duo's relative stability is skewed as can be.
A little while ago, Mendes sat down with Movieline to discuss just how out-there Lieutenant gets, but also found time to touch on the Silver Lake hipster scene and the allure of Sam Worthington and Keira Knightley.
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It's time to move Hal Holbrook off the Oscar bubble and into the fold. The 84-year-old actor delivers arguably the performance of his career in That Evening Sun, director Scott Teems's terrific adaptation of the William Gay short story "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down." Holbrook plays Abner Meecham, a Tennessean banished by his lawyer son (Walton Goggins) to a nursing home he'll soon flee in disgust. Returning to his farm, Abner discovers the Choate family -- led by ne'er-do-well patriarch Lonzo (Ray McKinnon) -- occupying the house he and his late wife built from scratch. When Abner decides to set up house in the tenant's quarters, the ensuing battle of wills between he and Lonzo zig-zags from comic to gothic to disturbingly violent -- thanks much to Holbrook's scenic route along the spectrum between righteousness and utter sociopathy. Imagine his celebrated character in Into the Wild soaked in vinegar and hung out to dry in the sweltering Tennessee sun, and that's Abner Meecham. He's quite the marvel.
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Whether flicking a cigarette at Mandy Moore or ripping her shirt off in mock religious fervor, Eva Amurri established in 2004's Saved! that she is a credible, and often intimidating, actress -- not just Susan Sarandon's daughter. This fall, the Brown alum embarked on a meaty ten-episode Californication arc as Jackie, one of Hank's (David Duchovny) brightest college students, who just happens to moonlight as a stripper. The revealing role, which immediately unearthed an avalanche of internet buzz, re-established that the 24 year-old can command a scene, regardless of whether or not she is clothed.
Last week, the actress spoke to Movieline about her arc on Californication, that rumor that she and her mother took pole-dancing classes together and her career aspirations.
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You might expect a legendary director like Werner Herzog to have an intimidating presence; after all, Herzog often seems to be drawn to incredibly outsized lead characters, and his films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are volatile feats in themselves. When I met with Herzog this month, however, he was friendly and charming, quick to smile and even eager to tease. His newest film is the Nicolas Cage starrer Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and if that title recalls the 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant that inspired it, rest assured that Herzog has made a loopy crime drama that stands on its own.
During our conversation, Herzog had plenty to say about drugs, film school, casting, Cage, and women, and he said all of it in his own delightful, inimitable way. For as much fun as Lieutenant is to watch, it's even more fun to talk to its maker.
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If there remains a fanboy or fangirl who doesn't know Jamie Campbell Bower, rest assured, the 20-year-old Brit is working on it. He first won the hearts of theater fans as Anthony in Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and he's got a trio of upcoming projects that come with strong, vocal audiences attached: The Twilight Saga: New Moon, where Bower plays the evil vampire Caius, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which finds Bower in the role of Gellert Grindewald, and Game of Thrones, a beloved set of fantasy books which HBO is hoping to make into its next big series.
Meanwhile, Bower's got fans of The Prisoner to please, as he's got one of the pivotal roles in AMC's miniseries remake. As 11-12, the enigmatic son of 2 (Ian McKellen), Bower is often silent, but -- as he revealed last night -- quite deadly. I talked to him about his Prisoner twists and the pressure of satisfying so many disparate fanbases.
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Chosen from a pool of thousands by director John Hillcoat to play the part of The Boy in his adaptation of Cormack McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, a then 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee was called upon to do things no normal kid from Australia should have been able to handle. But coached by his professional actor dad, Smit-McPhee was soon facing off opposite the likes of Viggo Mortenson -- "each the other world's entire" -- appearing in every scene of what amounts to both a father-son love story and post-apocalyptic survivalist two-hander. And Smit-McPhee is no one-hit wonder: Now 13, he'll next play the lead in Matt Reeves' remake of last year's Swedish vampire instant-classic, Let the Right One In.
We talked to Kodi before that news was announced, during which he gave us some insights into how he creates a character, told us about his bonding time with Viggo staring at freeze-dried cadavers, and scared our socks off with a ghost story from the set of The Road.
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It might be unreasonable to suggest that any actor can have a career year at 28, but you can't say 2009 wasn't a whopper for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In addition to his spunky anti-romcom hit (500) Days of Summer and presence in the tentpole G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, he won a role in Christopher Nolan's mega-anticipated Inception, will host Saturday Night Live this weekend, and saw his tiny indie Uncertainty break $12,000 on one screen over the weekend in New York. The film tracks Bobby (Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (Lynn Collins), young lovers at odds over what to do for the Fourth of July. So they flip a coin, commencing a wild riff on identity, family, NYC culture and genre as one version of the couple spends the holiday evading gangsters in Manhattan, and the other visits an awkward family gathering in Brooklyn.
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As we mentioned this morning, if you happen to live in either of the great coastal American meccas, you're lucky enough to have access to The Fantastic Mr. Fox. A dioramic dramedy in brilliant fall colors, Fox has the honor of being Wes Anderson's first children's and animated film -- but is smart and wry enough to satisfy fans of all ages. Movieline cornered him shortly before the London premiere for a few questions:
How do you choose the pop songs you put in your films?
"I think with this one, let's see -- the first thing we did was Noah Baumbach and I had written some lyrics. So we asked Jarvis Cocker to do the song. That was the first music we had. We had this French banjo player and we had this song. That sort of linked to other things. I started listening to music from other children's films. We had Davy Crockett, Robin Hood, Burl Ives."
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For someone who never quite intended to become an actor, Nick Frost sure is having a good go at it. The British comedian rose to fame on his collaborations with Simon Pegg, including Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and they have more in store (including the alien comedy Paul and a tandem role in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn) but in the meantime, Frost can be seen as part of the sterling ensemble in Pirate Radio, directed by Richard Curtis (Love Actually).
Movieline caught up with Frost to discuss the challenges of making the boat-set comedy, and Frost was happy to share some tidbits about his upcoming, fanboy-friendly slate at the same time.
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Don't judge this weekend's two-part Liftetime movie Everything She Ever Wanted (premiering Saturday) by its cover. As basic-cable pulp goes, the adaptation of Ann Rule's true-crime bestseller is actually some wicked grade-A melodrama with a killer lead performance by Gina Gershon. Literally -- the actress plays the infamous Pat Allanson, a Southern social striver best known for marrying a younger man in pursuit of his family's fortune at whatever cost. A few gun deaths, poisonings and imprisonments later, Pat turns her predatory eye on her own sister (Rachel Blanchard), who may know too much -- or does she? Gershon settles brilliantly into those plot and character ambiguities beneath Allanson's cutthroat, larger-than-life persona.
Movieline caught up with Gershon on her way to a matinee of Bye Bye Birdie (in which she's also currently starring on Broadway) for a chat about true stories, bad girls and what makes a camp classic.
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After once laying waste to the White House and and twice devastating New York, disaster-genre kingpin Roland Emmerich leaves no metropolis unwrecked in his new blockbuster 2012. The whole globe, in fact, gets the Emmerich treatment, from a 10.5 Los Angeles quake from which Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) flees with his family to a mile-high tsunami that drowns the lower Himalayas. It's the epic culmination of Emmerich's weird dualistic vision -- utopia through dystopia, loving families bound by peril and death, cataclysm as a social movement. And it's actually kind of a blast. The filmmaker spoke to Movieline recently about why we love disasters, why his imagination can't be stopped, and why Adam Lambert isn't as big a spoiler as you might have thought.
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We're thrilled to now present the latest addition to Movieline's ongoing One-Page Screenplay Project, the industry's leading repository of budget-friendly material for the New Hollywood Economy.
Today's offering comes to us from the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, scripters of 2009's other global apocalypse thriller, Knowing. In keeping with the microfiction theme, Stiles himself is the author of an ongoing series called Six-Word Tales -- a format that makes the One-Page Screenplay seem positively Tolstoyian in comparison. His accompanying illustrations of these quark-sized narrative gems are compiled over at sixwordtales.com. Check 'em out! They're awesome!
Now on with the show. Presenting: Juliet Snowden & Stiles White's 'Round These Parts, after the jump.
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When General Hospital announced that James Franco would be joining the soap opera for a lengthy story arc, pop culture pundits couldn't fathom the movie star's motivation. Over here at Movieline, though, we sensed the guiding hand of Carter, Franco's frequent artistic collaborator. The two men have embarked on a wide variety of art projects that play with and deconstruct Franco's image, including a VMan photo shoot that handed the actor a flamethrower and covered his face in shaving cream, and Erased James Franco, a 63-minute film (playing November 15 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco) that finds Franco idiosyncratically recreating Rock Hudson from Seconds and Julianne Moore from Safe, as well as some of his own lesser roles.
Yesterday I spoke to Carter, who revealed that he was the mastermind who convinced Franco to appear on General Hospital -- the beginning of their most ambitious collaboration yet.
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As Jim Caviezel told me quite a few times last week, Hollywood's got a short memory, and an actor tends to be offered nothing but variations on his last big part -- a tall order, if that role was playing Jesus Christ. Since acting in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004, Caviezel hasn't necessarily been an easy actor to cast, and some of his larger projects -- like the sci-fi adventure Outlander, which was shunted off by the Weinstein Company -- haven't provided the big bump he hoped for. AMC's miniseries remake of The Prisoner, however, falls right into his wheelhouse: Not only is it getting a splashy, three-night release beginning in the spot just vacated by Mad Men, but Caviezel's role plays to his strengths, casting him as a lone man in a world that doesn't understand him (save for a few acolytes convinced by his fervor).
Movieline talked to a game, slightly punchy Caviezel about The Prisoner's theme of paranoia, a motorcycle accident that left the actor better able to relate to his character, and his unlikely friendship with co-star Ian McKellen, which crosses political lines.
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Carla Gugino's had great success as an actress -- she's a geek goddess after her Sin City cameo and her turn as Sally Jupiter in Watchmen, and she won raves on Broadway this year for Desire Under the Elms -- but she's thinking of starting a second career as a porn star. Just call her Elektra Luxx, the character she plays in boyfriend Sebastian Gutierrez's new movie Women in Trouble; it's a role that Gugino enjoyed so much that she's hoping to spin Luxx into a series of additional films. A little assertive, the slightest bit daffy, and rocked by news of an impending pregnancy, Luxx is a porn star on the brink -- and that's just where Gugino likes her.
I talked to the 38-year-old actress yesterday about Luxx's appeal, onscreen sex, and her much-anticipated reteaming with Watchmen director Zack Snyder on Sucker Punch, which Gugino was eager to discuss.
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