A Few Good Men
As a dear friend would say to me every Friday around this time, "God, let's just end this week." My thoughts exactly. Without further ado, your Week in Review. Have a fantastic weekend.
As a dear friend would say to me every Friday around this time, "God, let's just end this week." My thoughts exactly. Without further ado, your Week in Review. Have a fantastic weekend.
· Movieline knows all too well the special brand of crazy that's uncorked when former SNL star Victoria Jackson starts talking politics. Fox News, however, may have had no idea. Watch in the clip below as Steve Doocy attempts to restrain himself as a funereally dressed Jackson claims, "The president is a Communist," and "I watch Glenn Beck, and he's taught me well!" Victoria Jackson hasn't been this funny on TV since Handi-Off. [Media Matters via Gawker]
James Cameron put it out there -- he wants to take Glenn Beck to a state school auditorium, let Anderson Cooper moderate, and let the public decide who is more fit to be an incendiary public figure. Lucky for Movieline's commenters of the week, they also get a crack at outsmarting Mr. Cameron in public! You think you can weave an adequate health-care metaphor out of Jamie Lee Curtis's stripping scene in True Lies? Here's your chance. Think you can compare Sam Worthington's nondescript acting to governmental inactivity? You're on. Can you strike a pro-life stance and call Christian sanctity "The Heart of the Ocean"? This is your week to win. So: Who's suiting up for town hall?
...So says the show's own Mary Lynn Rajskub, who was notified today. This may call for an unusually basso "Dammit" from Jack Bauer. [Twitter]
We now interrupt our regular Friday afternoon office beer-pong league for Say Whaaaa?, your convenient survey of the week's most confusing, bizarre and/or incomprehensible news stories. The Say Whaaaa Singers are tuned up and justly baffled about this week's highlights; take it away, fellas.
· Here we have the poster for Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child, starring Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington. Click for bigger.
· In the battle between Lady Gaga and Michel Gondry, Donny Osmond is firmly Team Gondry.
· Even the characters saw this coming: FlashForward returned to weak ratings last night.
· If you want to impress Christina Hendricks, blow her mind with home theater technology. Works every time.
· In all fairness, if I had a rad "I went to the Super Bowl on mushrooms" story like John Cusack does, I wouldn't stop talking about it either.
What will Heidi Montag do now that The Hills has been canceled? Screenwrite! "After working with Oscar-winner Ron Howard on a short film project [for FunnyorDie.com] and then working for days with the comedic genius director Dennis Dugan and his team of brilliant comedy visionaries at Happy Madison on Just Go With It starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, I have been able to truly find what makes me the happiest in life," Montag told People. "I am making the first 3-D beach comedy about a shark that attacks a small beach town and I save the day with my 3-D boobs." Yes, I can see the logical progression of thought there. The ghost of Gene Kelly is rescinding his support. [People]
Jim Field Smith's Butter is one of the most buzzed-about projects currently in pre-production, and it's been that way since the Jason Micallef script won the Nicholl Fellowship in 2008 and landed on the Black List. Jennifer Garner attached herself early on to this analogue for the 2008 Democratic primary, where a philandering, term-limited butter-sculpting champion watches as his Hillary Clinton-esque wife (Garner) competes against a young, black butter-sculpting upstart who happens to be a 12-year-old girl. If you're thinking that the child sounds like Butter's Obama metaphor, you're right -- and now that part has been cast.
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Paramount has finally landed on a director for Paranormal Activity 2: The Blanket Hogging, reports Deadline, and it isn't Brian De Palma, and it isn't Akiva Goldsman. It's...Tod Williams. But he goes by Kip. You know, Tod "Kip" Williams! Director of The Door in the Floor? Gretchen Mol's hunky husband? Best of luck, Kip! [Deadline]
Everyone is entitled to change his or her mind -- especially film critics, some of whose best work occurs in a kind of corrective retrospect. That said, I'm not so sure that's what's happening with L.A. Times critic Betsy Sharkey's (pictured above, left) approach to Chloe, which Sharkey lauded following its premiere at last year's Toronto Film Festival, yet lashed out at in a review prior to this week's opening. And the fun only starts there.
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Michael Lewis, the journalist whose books Moneyball and The Blind Side have made for some the most high-profile adaptations (or prospective adaptations, anyway) of the last year, had a bit of news about each to pass along to Bloomberg in a recent interview about his new book The Big Short. First of all, Moneyball appears to be shooting in June with Brad Pitt still on as Billy Beane, presumably with Bennett Miller directing a script reworked by Aaron Sorkin. So there's that. But what preceded that was even more revealing -- and probably not all that surprising to even the most casual football follower.
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· Goodness knows we can't have a whole week without another development around the romantic dramedy Something Borrowed, so let's hear it for Kate Hudson, who is closing in on a role as a woman whose best friend (played by Ginnifer Goodwin) becomes involved with her fiancé. John Krasinski also stars as Goodwin's male BFF, whose own romantic entanglements will be followed in the sequel, Something Blue. (Seriously, I'm not even making that part up.) [Variety]
A dream pairing is realized, a Dirty ensemble comes together, and more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or three-dimensionally explosive at the movies. This week, there is literally something for everyone as an uncouth dragon takes on an adults-only hot tub, which takes on a really adults-only psychosexual romp. Click through for a closer look.
Holy crap -- we were just talking about seeing Citizen Kane in 3-D and now Orson Welles is the drawcard in a new 3-D movie entitled Christmas Tails. It's to be based on a rare recording of the actor narrating a book of the same name and will be a hybrid CG/live-action fantasy.
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3-D's sweeping the land! This week we've had almost non-stop news of projects to be filmed in the process (Spy Hunter, Popeye, Buck Rogers, Gulliver's Travels, Narnia), discussion of movies that're being converted (Clash Of The Titans , Sucker Punch) and the retro-stereoscoping of other recent hits (Titanic , 300). Three-dimensionality's even been in the gaming, TV, fashion-action film and religious broadcasting news, too. It's the wave of the future I tells ya! But also the past. Around the time we hear that Woody Allen's Untitled Spring 2011 Project will be filmed in the process, I'm betting there will begin a flurry of conversions of actual classics. As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker recently, it's hard to not be curious about what Casablanca might look like in 3-D. But, apart from that and dead-certs (The Wizard Of Oz , Star Wars , Lord Of The Rings) what other hits (and a few box-office misses) would be too hard to resist watching with the glasses on?
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