There's this thing about women named Juliet: They're famous for meeting tragic ends. Elizabeth Mitchell's character on Lost was no different -- after finding unlikely love with Sawyer (Josh Holloway), she sacrificed herself to set off a crucial bomb -- but luckily, Mitchell's career has new life after that death. In addition to a mysterious number of additional episodes she'll shoot for Lost's final season, she'll be seen later this year toplining ABC's reboot of the alien miniseries V.
At Comic-Con, I talked to the actress about Juliet's journey, the tumultuous period after she learned of her Lost fate (then had it somewhat revoked), and the alien-hunting yet to come.
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Greetings from Comic-Con, where Day One's Avatar, Tron, and New Moon panels have all finally finished and a sense of postgeekdom depression has gripped the masses. Still, there's at least one reliably perky person left in the Convention Center: delightful sprite/actress Kristen Bell! Our full interview with Miss Mars will be coming soon, but for now, enjoy this appetizer as Kristen Bell partakes in that old Movieline standby, My Favorite Scene.
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This week has seen its share of macho turf warfare between Seth Rogen and the crew at Entourage, all precipitated by the latter's contention that in real life, a guy like Rogen would never have a shot at his Knocked Up co-star Katherine Heigl. You and I both know by now that Rogen can defend himself, but that didn't stop Judd Apatow from extolling his schlubby muse's virtues Wednesday at New York's sold-out Funny People preview.
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"Ask an E.P." is a new Movieline feature where we talk to executive producers, showrunners and decision makers about their work. They may be above the line, but they're not above sharing insights with Movieline.
For the first "Ask an E.P.," Movieline spoke with Kevin Burns, the Emmy-award winning executive producer of E!'s The Girls Next Door and Kendra (recently renewed for its second season). Kevin has produced over 500 hours of documentary and nonfiction programming, including two Lucasfilm documentaries as well as hundreds of A&E's Biography episodes. Kevin talked to us about bringing "real-life Barbies" to cable, creating conflict for reality television and staying out of Hugh Hefner's bedroom.
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"I hope you have your Red Bull ready," Judd Apatow told his audience last night in New York, where the Museum of the Moving Image hosted one its typically classy filmmaker fetes prior to a preview screening of Funny People. He knew as much as the rest of us it might be a long night, what with the This-is-Your-Life-esque meander through his comedy-obsessed youth, his TV launching pad, and his formidable Hollywood power brokerage of the last decade -- not to mention some of those pesky complaints and accusations that have followed him over the years.
Like sexism, for starters. He even brought it up preemptively! Sort of.
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Saffron Burrows is not a beleagured, once-famous actress. She just plays one in the movies -- in Shrink, specifically, opening Friday and featuring Kevin Spacey as Henry Carter, a pot-loving therapist to the stars who battles listlessness, grief and professional dereliction while dealing with a fraught cross-section of Hollywood talent. There's horndog action star Jack (Robin Williams), OCD-addled agent Patrick (Dallas Roberts), motherless teen and pro bono case Jemma (Keke Palmer), screenwriter godbrother Jeremy (Mark Webber), and, of course, Kate Abramson (Burrows), the gorgeous movie star better known for her failing marriage than her most recent hit.
In the spirit of Short Cuts, Magnolia, Crash and other ensemble yarns of Angelenos in crisis, director Jonas Pate ties them all together, with Carter's own quest for catharsis leading the way. The lovely Burrows talked to Movieline this week about the emotional costs of fame, the advantages of being English in Hollywood, and the one Shrink-related question she won't answer (sort of).
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There's a certain art to playing the best friend in a romantic comedy, and Bree Turner has inhabited enough of them to prompt comparisons to the master, Judy Greer. "That's a huge compliment," Turner says. "I love Judy." Now, as she prepares for her highest-profile second banana yet -- Katherine Heigl's BFF in The Ugly Truth -- we talked to Turner about being an onscreen bestie and the wild screen credits that led her there.
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Can the studio system be toxic? It was for director Boaz Yakin, who made Remember the Titans and the Brittany Murphy/Dakota Fanning comedy Uptown Girls, yet found himself so compromised that he spiraled into a deep depression. When Yakin first burst upon the scene with 1994's Fresh, he was heralded as an original new voice, and it's that voice Yakin tried to tap into again for his new indie, Death in Love (starring Josh Lucas, Jacqueline Bisset, and Adam Brody). It's a tough work, grappling with explicit sexuality and religious guilt, and those were just a few of the things Yakin wanted to discuss in a wide-ranging, confessional interview with Movieline.
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We're bringing back a classic today: My Favorite Scene was a feature from our golden print era, in which a wide swath of showbiz luminaries would share a personal favorite movie sequence with Movieline readers. Now that we're online, we have the added advantage of being able to show the scenes themselves. And we could think of no more auspicious a way to kick things off than with the American Idol Top Ten (save for Scott MacIntyre, unfortunately omitted for time constraints and not his visual impairment), all of whom are headed to your town soon on their 52-city Idols Live tour. What scenes meant the most to Kris Allen, Adam Lambert, and the rest? Some of the answers might surprise you -- and some, not so much.
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Vinessa Shaw remembers when she first stepped on the London set of Eyes Wide Shut, where the one-time child actress would eventually spend the better part of six months working on Stanley Kubrick's final film. As Domino, the prostitute with whom Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) shares a preempted encounter on his late-night walking tour of New York, Shaw portrayed one of many casualties in Kubrick's wasteland of sexual obsession; her kiss with Cruise -- perhaps EWS's most purely erotic moment -- signaled a peak of intimacy from which their characters would plunge in the day to follow. She was 21.
That was over a decade ago. Today, exactly 10 years after Eyes Wide Shut's July 16, 1999, theatrical release, Shaw talks to Movieline about nabbing her breakthrough role, shattering the notorious perfectionist's all-time take record, and life (and work) after Kubrick.
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When Adam Brody left The OC two years ago, he was tipped as the cast member with the best shot at a film career -- a title he still holds, even if it's been a bumpier ride than he would have liked. Now, after two of his biggest projects were aborted -- a Revenge of the Nerds remake, which was shut down as shooting began, and George Miller's Justice League, where Brody's hopes of playing The Flash were derailed by the writer's strike -- the 29-year-old is set to return to theaters with the Diablo Cody-scripted Jennifer's Body and the Boaz Yakin-directed indie Death in Love, which opens this week. We sat down with Brody to talk about all four films.
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Exhausted by endless replays of Thriller? Fed up with CNN treating Michael Jacksons's "ghost" as actual news ? This week, a special edition of The Cold Case talks to Mick Garris about 1997's Ghosts, the all-but-forgotten 38-minute film he created with Michael Jackson, the late Stan Winston and horror legend Stephen King.
In the 24/7 media meltdown that surrounded Michael Jackson's untimely death, it appeared that every clip of the superstar was unearthed, dusted off and replayed over and over. Even so, somehow, every story or tribute package led to 1983's Thriller, that game-changing 14-minute horror short that remains the highest-selling music video of all time. We should probably be grateful that the networks didn't have a working VCR and a copy of 1997's Ghosts, lest we be subject to an immediate overload of TV talking heads' endless analysis of what it meant and, God forbid, what it predicted.
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You've heard about Labor Pains, the Lindsay Lohan feature that was picked up by ABC Family after narrowly missing a theatrical release. But you probably aren't familiar with Lara Shapiro, the film's co-writer and director. A Columbia Film School and Sundance Lab alum, Shapiro first established herself in the commercial landscape, writing and directing spots like the memorable Hallie Eisenberg IFC commercials , starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Janeane Garofalo and Lili Taylor. We spoke to Lara Shapiro about directing her first feature, dealing with the paparazzi and the unfortunately small world of female directors.
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We have a real treat in store for today's One-Page Screenplay: TS Faull is the screenwriter of Grimm Love -- an award-winning film based on the events of Germany's hugely notorious consensual cannibalism case, starring Thomas Kretschmann and Felicity herself, Keri Russell. The film was banned in Germany for three years after a judge ruled it infringed upon its real-life cannibal inspiration Armin Meiwes's rights, making Faull something of an indie film outlaw in those parts.
For us, Faull has birthed a minimalist masterpiece that pushes the hybrid subgenre of childbirth and body horror to disturbing new extremes. Ladies and gentlemen: THROAT BABIES.
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As LA's Outfest Film Festival celebrates Strand Releasing with a retrospective honoring the company's twenty years in the film industry, we couldn't help but wonder: Where would the state of independent film be without Strand? Partners Marcus Hu and Jon Gerrans have distributed films by some of cinema's most acclaimed directors, including François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, and Hal Hartley, and their pivotal influence and trailblazing tastes helped kick off the New Queer Cinema movement. Where other independent distributors have crashed and burned, Strand has been responsible for releasing great movies for two decades.
To commemorate the moment and to shed more light on how Strand has survived and thrived, Movieline spoke to both Hu and Gerrans as well as friend-of-Strand Gregg Araki and director Fenton Bailey, whose film Party Monster found a savior in the company.
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