Police are investigating the death of 28-year-old actor Johnny Lewis, whose credits include AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem, The Runaways, Lovely Molly, TV's Drake & Josh, The O.C., and American Dreams following the apparent murder of his elderly landlord in Los Angeles. Lewis was best known for playing Kip 'Half Sack' Epps on Sons of Anarchy.
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Quentin Tarantino is directing a parade of stars on his latest - and very anticipated - feature. Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Fox, Jonah Hill, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, Don Johnson - and apparently, Quentin Tarantino. The Pulp Fiction filmmaker is set to make one of his trademark cameo appearances in his pre-Civil War feature Django Unchained, which will be released Christmas day.
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More Muhammad pics are in the planning stages and this time, they may include cinematic quality. By now, just about every filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker knows that it's a full-on major taboo to depict the Prophet Muhammad in a movie. That rule doesn't just apply to the recent low-budget video that appeared on YouTube, Innocence of Muslims, which didn't exactly depict the Muslim prophet in the best of light, but any depiction is absolutely forbidden among Muslims or anyone else for that matter, at least according to the raging crowds that have rioted for the past two weeks in front of American missions around the Muslim world. But while depictions of Muhammad have remained mostly absent in Hollywood and Western movies throughout the decades, the anti-Islam pic may have had the unintended (or not) effect of opening up a floodgate - or at least a trickle - as at least two filmmakers are looking to make separate pics featuring the prophet, and if all goes according to plan, their budgets will likely be higher.
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Speculation and excitement have been building among Quentin Tarantino fans for the Christmas-day release (in N. America) of Django Unchained, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Jonah Hill, Christoph Waltz and Kerry Washington. But for those Tarantino fans just jonesing for a Tarantino fix ahead of that roll out, Lionsgate and Miramax are teaming up on a massive Quentin Tarantino Blu-ray disc boxed set.
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They're both behemoth British authors, but that does not necessarily translate into desire to pick up the other's books for a read. On the eve of J.K. Rowling's first post-Harry Potter series roll-out The Casual Vacancy, the mega-selling author of the fantasy series, which spawned a mega-multiple movie franchise said she hasn't read fellow author E.L. James' 50 Shades of Grey and probably won't.
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Colin Firth won an Oscar playing Britain's King George VI in the 2010 historical drama The King's Speech. And Dame Helen Mirren won her Academy Award playing the current U.K. monarch Queen Elizabeth II back in 2006 for her role in The Queen. Now both are set to wear their crowns again in two separate projects.
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Even as Iran's boisterous leader (but not supreme leader) President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York for the opening of the U.N. Assembly this week, and already causing some local controversy here staying at a luxury Manhattan hotel, his country is apparently opening a new front in its anti-U.S. proclivities - The Oscars. An Iranian official said his country should boycott the 2013 Academy Awards and not submit a film for Best Foreign-language consideration due to the anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims which rocketed the Muslim world since its debut on YouTube earlier this month.
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This is a case of life imitating art, or maybe just both going full circle. An Italian man took a cue from the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Catch Me if You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio and donned a pilot's uniform, fake identification and gained access to at least one flight in a cockpit. Apparently the age of intense airport security failed to initially discover the faux-pilot, who posed under the pseudonym of "Andrea Sirlo" before being arrested at a bar in Turin Airport.
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Greta Gerwig has gone from so-called Mumblecore actress, appearing in indie titles LOL, Hannah Takes The Stairs and Nights and Weekends to bigger fare by the likes of Ivan Reitman and Woody Allen in No Strings Attached and the recent To Rome with Love. But what most audiences may not know, is that she's picked written some of the material she's played on screen, including her latest Frances Ha, which she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach. The comedy is Gerwig's second match-up with Baumbach following 2010's Greenberg and the pair began bouncing ideas off each other, eventually creating the hysterical black and white feature that debuted at the recent Toronto International Film Festival and will be having its U.S. premiere at the upcoming New York Film Festival.
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According to TMZ, a diver working on a water tank on the set of The Lone Ranger drowned this morning in Los Angeles: "Law enforcement sources tell TMZ the movie wasn't being shot today, and the person who died in the tank was prepping it — possibly cleaning it — when someone noticed no bubbles from the gear were surfacing. That's when they pulled the man out of the water." The Johnny Depp blockbuster is filming for a July 3, 2013 release. More info to come. [TMZ]
Roman Polanski will go French in his next project based on a Tony Award-winning stage-play and he's tapping his wife to play the star. Polanski is adapting Avid Ives' stage play Venus in Fur, relocating the setting to Paris from New York, casting his spouse Emmanuelle Seigner who auditions a role in a sadomasochistic drama.
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Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña spent months developing the brotherly rapport they share as LAPD officers under fire in End of Watch, out Friday from director David Ayer. Channel a fraction of that effort in composing your best haiku ode to the Gyllen-Peña cop drama and you could win a T-shirt and signed poster from the film. Unholster those typing fingers!
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Her novels have sold 40 million copies worldwide and the pending film version of the trilogy's first installment has fans guessing worldwide who will play the male lead with nearly every hot young actor in Hollywood a possible contender. So what is a wildly successful author to do as an encore? Well, be in the movie of course! British author E.L. James, the mind behind the ever-so-hot Fifty Shades of Grey series said on the Katie Couric daytime talk show that she is eyeing a possible cameo in the big-screen adaptation of the novel, revealing that one of the smaller characters in the book is actually based on herself.
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"Bad Qualities: Everything. The Satanic influence pumps through the film's heart. It is the worst movie ever made. It will lead kids to murder and death and drug use. If they had not experimented with Lesbiansm [sic] or Alcoholism before, they will definitely do it after viewing." Hit it here for the best review you're likely to see of horror anthology V/H/S — "a pornographic celebration of blood and violence and a celebration of Satan’s nefarious ways" — in theaters October 5. [Christwire via @Simon_Barrett, @BradMiska]
Robert Downey, Jr. is certainly an It boy at the moment after a summer of Avengers (and more on the way) as well as his current project, Iron Man 3. Now it appears that he and Jude Law are ready to take on another installment of Sherlock Holmes, but Law said that while the pair are into the idea of a return to the eccentric British detective saga, "but Downey's a busy boy…"
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