Every director who's gone through the whirlwind circus that is filming and releasing a Twilight movie eventually gets to relax and breathe a sigh of relief, but Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) still has miles and miles to go. Fans and critics will finally see what the Oscar-winner brings to the YA vampire franchise when The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 hits theaters Nov. 18, but if they find themselves displeased with his treatment of Stephenie Meyer's beloved novel, it could be a tough year's wait until Condon's simultaneously-shot series ender (Breaking Dawn - Part 2) concludes the series next fall.
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Much has been made of British actor Henry Cavill's abs in this week's Immortals, or the strange, logic-defying Superman beard spied on the set of Man of Steel. Never mind that the 28-year-old actor turns in a persuasive dramatic performance in Tarsem's stylized fantasy myth, playing the classic hero Theseus as an honorable peasant battling a sadistic god-hating tyrant (Mickey Rourke) with the aid of a comely priestess (Freida Pinto) and supernatural bow and arrows. But therein lies the surprise: Go to Immortals for the bloody action, or the mythological spin, or the wonderment of Tarsem's visuals, and you'll also get the pleasant revelation that Cavill wears leading man status like a natural.
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Some directors clearly have no filter and suffer for it; others choose to live altogether filter-less, playing the game their own way, on their own terms. Which is why earlier this year Movieline anointed Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) the honey badger of Hollywood; an indie film talent recently gone mainstream -- who wore a homemade shirt proclaiming "I've been media trained" at WonderCon -- Tarsem's infamously cheeky public persona might threaten to overtake his work if only his films, just three features to date counting this week's Immortals, weren't so distinctive and gorgeous.
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For Mark and Jay Duplass, the sibling team behind The Puffy Chair, Baghead, and last year's Cyrus, success came only after years of frustration -- and only by happy accident. "All we were doing in the late '90s, in our twenties, was trying to be the Coen brothers," Jay Duplass laughed to Movieline, "and failing at that, because the Coen brothers are awesome and they're already the Coen brothers." It was only when the brothers Duplass stopped trying so hard, at the end of their creative rope and after years of fruitless attempts, that they found the formula for personal filmmaking that would become their signature.
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The hardest-working filmmaker on Earth was back in New York last week, making the latest of what have basically become semiannual tours in support of his movies. Thus what felt like a continuation of last spring's chat with Werner Herzog, whose latest documentary, Into the Abyss, finds the endlessly curious director exploring one of American society's darkest. sparsest frontiers: Capital punishment.
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This week, Movieline's favorite honey badger of directors, Tarsem (The Fall, The Cell), unveils his spin on Greek mythology in Immortals, a fantasy actioner that blends artistic influences as vast and varied as Caravaggio, classics, and Henry Cavill's abs. So who better to invite to a round of My Favorite Scene than the visionary filmmaker, who managed to pinpoint the uncanny cinematic parallels between the 1992 Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog, a Cannes Film Festival awardee, and that one episode from the "brilliant" first season of COPS.
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This week finally brings Melancholia to limited theatrical release in the US, where prospective viewers have spent the five months since its Cannes premiere attempting to parse the great, fraught, near-instant mythology of director Lars von Trier's latest masterpiece. Finally the work can speak for itself -- or mostly speak for itself, anyway, with help from co-star and modern-era von Trier muse Charlotte Gainsbourg.
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The sweetest feel-good flick of the holiday season may well be the one about two ex-BFFs, who'd once gone in search of White Castle sliders and tangled with Homeland Security, who reunite on Christmas Eve to hunt down the perfect fir, crossing paths with drug-sniffing babies, Ukrainian gangsters, and a sweater-clad Danny Trejo along the way. Stoner heroes Harold and Kumar have come a long way since 2004 -- and so has co-star John Cho, who sat down with Movieline recently to talk H&K, career moves, and his encounters with the likes of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Obama.
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Renowned for his prolific, fearless filmmaking, Werner Herzog is in fact nothing if not a polymath: Opera director, guerrilla film-school proprietor, diarist and author, septi-continental gadabout, and actor for hire (among other interests). It's this latter quality that he and I discussed briefly today as he made the rounds for his new capital-punishment doc Into the Abyss -- a diametric opposite to the biggest onscreen gig he's taken to date.
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If Guinness World Records recognized fictional successive rites of passage, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 would be the clear victor. As weddings go, yes, there most definitely is one -- possibly two, if you believe Robert Pattinson. Kristen Stewart's Bella finally gets her way during the honeymoon. Then there's the emotion-soaked pregnancy that puts Bella in peril once more, and all the dominoes that are set off for the pair and for Taylor Lautner's Jacob as a result. Pattinson, Stewart and Lautner talked up the first installment of the Twilight finale Thursday ahead of its debut Nov. 18, with a surprise news conference appearance by series author Stephenie Meyer, who shared some tidbits from her stint as producer.
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In a career spanning over four decades Lily Tomlin has virtually done it all -- but, as she told Movieline this week at the Savannah Film Festival, in town to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, she's not done yet. After rising to stardom on Laugh-In (where she created indelible characters like Ernestine the telephone operator and Edith Ann, the impossibly precocious 5-year-old), the funny woman won Grammys for her comedy albums, won a Tony for her one-woman Broadway show, earned an Oscar nod making her dramatic debut in Robert Altman's Nashville, and starred in '80s comedy classics like 9 to 5 and The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
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"There's a great story about Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven," said Dennis Farina, in New York recently to discuss his gritty, sensational aging-hustler drama The Last Rites of Joe May. "Clint Eastwood had that script for 15 years and he felt like he wasn't ready to make it until he got much older, and he understood it better. I'm 68 now, so there's a certain credibility that comes with just being 60 or 70 years old and your understanding of life."
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A quick scan of Ray Liotta's filmography indicates that the 56-year-old actor has played tons of officers, captains and detectives. He sticks to that milieu in The Son of No One, a Sundance-debuted thriller about a young cop (Channing Tatum) who is assigned to protect the rough Queens neighborhood where he grew up. As Captain Marion Mathers, Liotta works authoritatively alongside a veteran detective (Al Pacino), even after an anonymous source reveals new information about unsolved murders and a potential police cover-up. Movieline phoned Liotta to talk about the new movie, memories of Goodfellas and traumatizing moviegoers in Hannibal.
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An unusual thing happened to Kal Penn on the way to stardom: in April 2009, after making two successful franchise-starting Harold & Kumar comedies, appearing in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, and co-starring on TV's House, the rising actor opted to take a two-year sabbatical from Hollywood to work in the Obama administration. This week, he returns to screens as Kumar to John Cho's Harold in A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, which finds the former hamburger-seeking BFFs facing new, daunting life changes and, in the spirit of the holidays, renewing their friendship the old fashioned way: With giant spliffs, babies on drugs, and Claymation.
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Sure, it's a tough sell. But Anonymous has plenty going for it both behind the camera (director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff posit the legitimacy of Shakespeare) and in front of it as well, where a sterling cast including Rhys Ifans, David Thewlis, Mark Rylance and the estimable mother-daughter combo of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson -- playing Queen Elizabeth I some 40 years apart -- dig into the historical, political and romantic intrigues with relish.
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