It wasn't hard to laugh off Kevin Smith using Twitter to announce he was banning critics from free preview screenings of his movies. The profession of film reviewing has taken bigger and more serious hits in the past couple years. And now it's been dealt perhaps its biggest body blow yet -- after 35 years on the air, At The Movies will come to an end on August 14.
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Fanboys who wondered whether Joe Johnston -- the journeyman director behind Jumanji, Jurassic Park III and this year's The Wolf Man -- was the man to make Captain America are this morning likely going to be choking on their Cheetos to learn that Paul WS Anderson, a director whose CV is much, much less inspiring, is bringing Buck Rogers to the big screen... in 3-D, naturally. But the rest of us should care, too.
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Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock really together? Not in the sense of Sandy's Oscar speech but as mother and daughter?
300-D? Zack Snyder, who's making Guardians Of Ga'Hoole in 3-D and is converting Sucker Punch to the format, is open to the retro-stereoscoping of 300. This is surely Spartier!
Bindi Irwin does a spot of panda-whispering to promote straight-to-DVD Free Willy: Escape From Pirate Cove, another production that buccaneered the status quo by adamantly refusing to use falsies.
Rather than just use kids to blurb-quote your movie when no-one else will, why don't distributors find out which 80-100 movies these young'uns had to have so bad and use the "So good your children will beg you to steal it!" angle.
Because Mamma Mia! was a successful song-show-movie, now Tom Hanks is doing the same for Green Day's concept album American Idiot! Tom, after Apollo 11 and From Earth To Moon, why not Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon? It screams out for 3-D and IMAX and a million speakers all blasting out! Upside: repeat business from all the fans who can't remember the first viewing except to say it was "awesome".
· Gladiators V. Werewolves is a thing now. When will they start catering these movies to my liking? Is Sandy Duncan V. Val Harper too much to ask?
Carrie Fisher has signed on to the new ABC pilot Wright Vs. Wrong, where she'll play the manager of a right-wing pundit (Debra Messing) who has a strong left-wing rival (Cheryl Hines). Sounds like a solid outing to me. The only way it could be better is if Carrie Fisher's Twitter account could guest-star as a discombobulated young assistant. I will now recite my favorite @CarrieFFisher tweet from memory: "Oh BiPolar the way I'm on Letterman tonight w/ my peers Rihanna & Zac Efron pray 4 me." That Tweet will duke it out with Elizabeth Perkins for the Emmy. [EW]
Betty White's stardom is approaching an unlikely critical mass, and Kristen Bell knows it. At this week's Geffen Playhouse fundraiser, she told Movieline's video correspondent Carly Steel that despite working with a clutch of strong ladies as of late (Cher and Christina Aguilera in Burlesque, and White and Sigourney Weaver in You Again), she's managed to stay calm and not get intimidated. Still, she confessed that Betty White has her by the balls. No, Kristen. She has America by the balls. Video after the jump:
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When you heard that former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson would be racing thousands of his prized pigeons for an Animal Planet reality show, your brain probably switched into concept overload mode after visualizing the Hangover star fist pumping as winged vermin flapped through quotation marks and exclamation points in your mind. Once you regained consciousness, your next response was probably something along the lines of, "But can I make money off of this?" After the jump, Movieline explains how you can make a killing before Take on Tyson even premieres.
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Famously contrarian film critic Armond White recently got a lot of attention when Noah Baumbach's camp tried to keep him out of a Greenberg screening, but Kevin Smith has been pulling that stunt on critics he dislikes for quite a while. Scott Foundas and Dave Poland have been among the pundits who were barred from press screenings of Smith's movies after having panned prior flicks (or, in Poland's case, cracking wise about Smith's meaty calves), but now, Smith aims to go one better: He's announced plans to keep all critics out of his press screenings.
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Just ten days after the death of Mission: Impossible's Peter Graves, another star from an iconic 1960's spy series has passed away: I Spy's Robert Culp. According to authorities, Culp died this morning after a fall at home. He was 79 years old.
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Mike Fleming reports that The Weinstein Company has picked up rights to the John Wells downsizing drama The Company Men, starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kevin Costner. It'll join a TWC slate for the year that so far boasts The Concert (July 16), The Tillman Story (August 20), Nowhere Boy (October 8), The King's Speech (November 26), and Blue Valentine (December 31). Sorry, longtime TWC also-rans Hoodwinked 2 and Shanghai! Hope that shelf you're sitting on is mighty comfortable. [Deadline]
· Scarlett Johanssen is farting fireballs on this brand-new Iron Man 2 poster. Superpowers just ain't what they used to be. (Click for bigger.)
· Liam Neeson will play LBJ and Cedric the Entertainer is set for Ralph Abernathy in Lee Daniels's Selma. Good move, Cedric: Daniels has a history of guiding hairy-legged black comics to Oscar glory.
· CSI and The Mentalist are changing time periods! Stop the CBS lineup, I want to get off.
· Kim Zolciak has admitted that she is in a same-sex relationship (that Andy Cohen and Real Housewives producers arranged for her, cough cough).
· Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fantabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge won a contest to become a new Adult Swim series. Why, that doesn't sound like an Adult Swim show at all!
Can't wait for the pushed-back Wall Street 2 to arrive this fall? Need an Ollie Stone fix in the interim? Well, there's this: His sympathetic documentary about Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, South of the Border, has found a U.S. home at Cinema Libre Studio. The distributor announced it plans to launch the film June 25 in New York followed by a Los Angeles release on July 2 -- just in time for Independence Day. Blurbs from Courtney Love are forthcoming, natch. [Cinema Libre]
Nobody wants to see a couple busted up, and nobody but the other man/woman rejoices if/when it does. With that in mind, it's hard to know what the Hollywood media establishment thinks it will get out of asking celebrities for deep, profound and/or revelatory insights about the break-up process beyond, of course, "Well, that sucks." And, "I wish them only the best." The ongoing Sandra Bullock/Jesse James imbroglio (now upgraded to "separated," according to those definitive arbiters of marital status at IMDB) hasn't proven to break the cycle, but only accelerate it furiously from zero to LOL in seconds flat. After the jump, find the five least essential messages of support for Sandy (with helpful translations from PR-ese) in a time when, really, she'd probably just rather her friends -- from Betty White to Mo'Nique -- just please let it die already.
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We return now to the Geffen Playhouse in L.A., where showbiz luminiaries were on hand to honor Warner head Barry Meyer and everyone's favorite heifer-lunged show-pixie, Kristin Chenoweth, at the theater's annual fundraiser. Carly Steel, the eyes, ears, and glistening legs of Movieline was there to score some scoops -- and score she did. Yesterday, we got confirmation from Clint Eastwood himself that his next project is the rumored J. Edgar Hoover biopic project. Now, Simpsons voice genius Hank Azaria reveals details about the direction he's taking with his fearsome smurf-terminator Gargamel in the hotly anticipated The Smurfs movie. Read on for the video, and remember: You heard it here smurf.
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Hot on the heels of Diablo Cody calling the first season of her own show, The United States of Tara, something she wouldn't have watched, we've got Chloë Sevigny ripping into Big Love (which just won her a Golden Globe). "It was awful this season, as far as I'm concerned," she told the AV Club. "I'm not allowed to say that! It was very telenovela. I feel like it kind of got away from itself. The whole political campaign seemed to me very farfetched...I hope the fans will stick with us and tune in next year. There's a lot of people who really love this season, surprisingly. God, I'm going to get in so much trouble." [AV Club]
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