Across the pond in the U.K., the popular sitcom The Inbetweeners earned two BAFTA nominations and the Audience Award and ran for three seasons, depicting the coming-of-age mortifications of four teenage boys (Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley, and Blake Harrison) stumbling their way through life, girls, and the assorted humiliations of young adulthood. Naturally, MTV's gone and mimicked the formula with an Americanized version, but the original foursome get their own feature-length holiday in The Inbetweeners Movie (out September 7). And if you're in the Hollywood area today, you can be a part of their British invasion.
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Michael Clarke Duncan, best known for his Academy Award-nominated turn as the prison inmate John Coffey in The Green Mile, died Monday weeks after suffering a heart attack on July 13. Duncan had been hospitalized since the attack, with fiancee Omarosa Manigault confirming his passing in a statement today.
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Okay, so you've devoured Maureen Orth's Vanity Fair cover story on Scientology's work-intensive but ill-fated attempt to pair Tom Cruise with Scientologist actress Nazanin Boniadi — a name that will launch a thousand late-night talk-show jokes. Now check out the elegant Boniadi's sexy Nespresso ad with George Clooney, an overseas commercial that should also launch a thousand late-night talk show jokes. more »
The October issue of Vanity Fair magazine has a Scientology-related cover story about Tom Cruise that makes Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master look like light comedy.
In a feature titled, " What Katie Didn't Know: Marriage, Scientology-Style," special correspondent Maureen Orth reveals the details of a top-secret 2004 mission that Shelly Miscavige, the wife of Scientology head David Miscavige, undertook to find a girlfriend for Tom Cruise. more »
Clint Eastwood made Twitter's Day — or at least its night. The veteran actor and filmmaker's bizarre, aimless speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Thursday night — to a chair that purportedly contained an invisible President Obama — brought out plenty of celebrity tweeters on the social media site. more »
The feature documentary had a limited roll out in Texas and other locations in mid-July, but after expanding to additional screens in the lead-up to the Republican convention, it has reaped more than $10.5 million to date at the box office. (The doc is second only, so far, to Katy Perry: Part of Me , which has earned in excess of $25.3 million domestically, as the top non-fiction film of the year.)
Those box-office numbers could get a boost now that the anti-Obama doc has scored a high-power endorsement from conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The embattled News Corp. chairman gave 2016: Obama's America his thumbs up via Twitter, even as questions arise about the veracity of the film's assertions.
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Bad 25 is having its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which opened Wednesday, but the Spike Lee-directed documentary, which recalls the late pop-star's creative process leading up to his follow-up album from his seminal Thriller release. This year marks the 25th anniversary of MJ's 1987 mega-seller Bad. ABC will broadcast the feature on Thanksgiving in the U.S. after picking up television rights.
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The scepter of free speech and the protection of intellectual property via the internet reared once again, nearly a year since the Motion Picture Association of America-supported legislation first landed in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, only to be resoundingly defeated after a well-coordinated backlash by internet heavy-weights Google Wikipedia and others. MPAA chief Chris Dodd, himself a former U.S. Senator from Connecticut (and a Democrat to boot) gave a thumbs up to the Republican Party's platform language on intellectual property and the internet.
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So Mitt Romney has been nominated as the Republican party's presidential candidate. To quote Robert Redford's money line from The Candidate, "What do we do now?" Even if you plan to watch his extremely fit, catfish-wrangling running mate Paul Ryan speak tonight and Mr. Bain Capital himself on Thursday, there's a big holiday weekend to wade through before President Obama and the Democrats stage their own dog-and-donkey show beginning Sept. 4 in Charlotte, NC.
In other words, it's a good time to watch some good movies, and, given that the 2012 presidential smackdown is about to go into overdrive, Movieline asked one of the sharpest political analysts we know, Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word and an Emmy-winning former producer and writer for The West Wing, to pick five essential movies for our readers to watch in preparation for the 2012 race. His choices are after the break. Now do your homework. more »
Director John Hillcoat spent ample time in the the American South, the setting for his latest bootlegging drama Lawless. Starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska, the film is inspired by the true-life stories of Matt Bondurant's own family in his novel, The Wettest County in the World and adapted for the screen by rocker Nick Cave. Lawless begins its roll out in the U.S. Friday.
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Well, another power couple have locked lips and the result may be nothing short of earth-shattering. No longer relegated to the sidelines in this Summer filled with Batman and Spider-Man hoopla, Wonder Woman and Superman have hit the headlines with a snogging session that has turned the super-hero universe into a flutter - or at least some raised eyebrows and a little good-old fashioned gossip. Could their off-screen romance some day even make it to the big screen?
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It seems Ridley Scott gave himself options when it came to some of the effects in his Prometheus saga, which the forthcoming DVD/Blu-ray release (and its reportedly sprawling bonus features menu) should handily reveal for hungry fans. Newly unveiled unused effects shots of a pivotal action scene in the film involving a certain crewmember are so drastically different than what's seen in the theatrical version it actually is making my brain hurt more trying to figure out how this alterna-design would have made any sense.
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The Washington Post caught up with Jon Voight, Hollywood's "new senior Republican," while the 73-year-old actor was stumping for his favorite candidates down in Tampa, FL: "'The Hollywood community is historically conservative,' he said. 'All the people that I so admired growing up were very patriotic and loved the country.' But then came the left-wing 'nonsense' of the 1960’s, which Voight admits he also got caught up in it. 'I'm quite ashamed of it, actually. . . I know as much as anybody about this stuff and I know how poisonous it is.'" [Washington Post via Salon]
She received an Oscar and BAFTA nomination for her starring role as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in the aptly titled Frida back in 2002, an Emmy nomination for her appearance in TV's Ugly Betty (where she was also an executive producer) and has been in films from Puss in Boots (ok, her voice), Desperado to Dogma and her latest pic, Savages, directed by Oliver Stone. Yet Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek told a German magazine that she was in fact ready to end her acting career.
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Leslye Headland won't forget her first time, but not for the reasons you might think. In a guest blog she wrote for The Film Experience, the playwright and filmmaker, whose buzzed-about debut, Bachelorette, opens theatrically on Sept. 7 wrote that while losing her virginity was "sort of a let down," the experience was salvaged by a post-deflowering viewing of Wes Anderson's iconoclastic teen romance story Rushmore. more »
