Liquor companies often come under fire for advertising in poor neighborhoods where alcoholism is already a huge problem, but now ten Brooklyn teens are accusing director Spike Lee of taking part in the same type of predatory marketing. After conducting a survey of posters and billboards advertising alcohol in the low-income Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the teens found that a series of Absolut Vodka posters for a limited-edition "Brooklyn flavor" endorsed by Lee dominated all other ads. This is the same neighborhood Lee put on the map in his 1989 classic Do the Right Thing.
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Leonardo DiCaprio has signed on to play notorious serial killer Dr. H.H. Holmes in an adaptation of Erik Larson's non-fiction novel Devil in the White City. Set against the backdrop of the 1893 World's Fair, the story goes that Holmes built a hotel complete with a gas chamber, crematorium and dissecting table and then murdered between 27 and 200 females who checked in. It's not quite as bad as it sounds though -- he was also apparently very charming. [Deadline]
· If you're like me, you've been wondering when the NES video game version of There Will Be Blood would arrive. Finally, three years after leaving the cineplex, we're rewarded with a wonderful new cartridge full of milkshakes and pious preachers and Day-Lewis scowls. Can't wait for No Country for Old Men to finally hit the Commodore 64. [Vulture]
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Apologies to Rachel McAdams and...um, that's about it. According to Deadline, Baz Luhrmann has "shortened" his list of potential Daisy Buchanan's in The Great Gatsby to the following actresses: Rebecca Hall, Keira Knightley, Amanda Seyfried, Blake Lively, Abbie Cornish, Michelle Williams, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. Luhrmann will attempt to get as many of these leading ladies as he can to read opposite Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby) and Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway) over the next two weeks. If it were me, I'd pick Michelle Williams -- what about you? [Deadline]
Happy Halloween. An estimated 5.3 million viewers tuned-in to the premiere of The Walking Dead on AMC last night, making it the highest rated series opener in the history of the channel. To give you an idea how big The Walking Dead premiere was, consider that only 2.4 million people watched the season finale of Mad Men. How long before zombies are voicing Mercedes Benz commercials? [NYT/ArtsBeat]
Though Charlie Sheen's alleged cocaine-fueled blowout may not have hurt the incredible popularity of Two and a Half Men, perhaps this factoid will. Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who kept his daughter locked in a sex dungeon for 24 years confessed to Bild, "My favorite show is Two and a Half Men with Charlie Sheen. The little boy who plays along reminds me of my son. It relaxes me, I need to laugh. Because it destroys the soul if you are always sad." [Gawker]
Recently, the UK-based Currys electronic stores hired a couple of familiar spokespeople for their new round of advertisements: Celebrity droids C-3PO (voiced by Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2. My first reaction was, Really? Lucasfilm is allowing its beloved characters to advertise for a department store? But then, thinking back over the years, there have been plenty of Lucasfilm-approved ads -- and at least a handful worth watching again. For instance:
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· I'm already on the record about being excited for Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet, starring the world's least likely superhero, Seth Rogen. Judging from the new poster though, the marketing department at Columbia doesn't seem to share my enthusiasm. Click ahead to see a big picture of The Green Hornet's wheels and stick around for more Buzz Break.
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If it's November, it must be time for our monthly check-in on the (non) happenings surrounding the Arrested Development movie. Take it away, David Cross: "We shot it secretly on location in the Maldives. It's actually been done for about two years now." Oh, you kidder. No, what's really not happening?
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Wow. And phew. The New York Post reports that Will Rokos, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Monster's Ball, was struck by a subway train on Saturday when he leaned over the subway platform to see if the train was pulling into the station. Rokos was taken to the hospital and is in critical but stable condition. And you New York-based readers thought all those MTA warnings about subway safety were just an annoyance. [NYP]
Unless you're one of those people who call Doctor Who their favorite television series, the chances are good that you've got limited knowledge of Tintin and his trusty dog, Snowy. The cub reporter, made famous by Belgian artist Hergé (really Georges Rémi), is huge abroad, but barely known here in America. That will likely change come 2011, when Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson unleash their motion capture-palooza, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, on the unsuspecting public.
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Also in today's edition of The Broadsheet: Julia Louis-Dreyfus may be HBO's Veep... Katherine Heigl's next one finds a buyer... a beloved (if private) ballplayer reemerges for the camera... someone catalogued a bunch of exploding heads... and more!
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Now that we're through celebrating evil and mischief for one more year, let's turn to happier news of reconciliation. You may recall that Justin Long quoted Michelle Orange's scathing Movieline review of Going the Distance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Now, Orange has written a thoughtful piece about the whole experience and how it relates to writing and criticism... and guess who responded in the comments?
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Before the sun rises and Halloween officially comes to an end, here's a first look at the teaser poster for Kevin Smith's upcoming evangelical horror movie Red State. Judging from this ominous one-sheet, it looks like he isn't going for laughs this time. Smith is calling the film as a counterpoint to the Satanic exploitation movies of the 70s, describing it instead as a "Christ-sploitation" flick. Expect to see the six people that showed up to protest Dogma picketing theaters in 2011.
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Every month at Movieline, we collect the best interviews, smartest features, and most compelling reviews we've produced, and curate them in one easy-to-use table of contents called the Virtual Newsstand, which pays tribute to our print magazine history. Here's the Virtual Newsstand for October 2010.
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