It began with "Time For Miracles," the song sung by Adam Lambert that accompanies you as you exit 2012, pondering the true meaning of overcoming incontinence that director Roland Emmerich leaves us with after nearly three hours of skull-fracturing digital destruction. And with today's news that Leona Lewis, another reality TV singing sensation, will be recording a song for the Avatar soundtrack, it's all but official: the closing credits power ballad is back, and in a big way.
Let us sing its praises, then, with a tribute, as Movieline predicts the next five songs to follow the trend, and the artists who'll sing them.
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About 79 hours remain before New Moon makes its midnight debut, which can only mean navigating a steady torrent of related news as the hype flood swirls around us. Find below a few of the more compelling subplots to consider as you prepare for zero-hour:
· Kristen Stewart isn't aloof, reports the NYT -- she's just guarding herself against the horrors of abject teen stardom. To that end, says her Into the Wild director Sean Penn, she's a "truth machine" who admirably endures public scrutiny that would be "an obscenity on anybody's life." Stewart herself looks forward to the film's mall tour with the reassuring observation: "[T]hey could totally assassinate me at any time if they wanted. When so much energy is thrown at you, it has to throw you for a loop." Great. This may be the first time Kevlar is added to a tour rider.
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The fact that Couples Retreat had its black actors extracted from international posters has gotten a lot of attention today, but I'd argue that while it's an unclassy move, it's an incident that's threatening to obscure the real issue. The truth is that in the world of Couples Retreat, something much, much worse than the poster controversy happened this weekend, and nobody seems to be saying a thing about it.
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· Star Wars droid R2D2 made a cameo in a galaxy far, far away from his own: this summer's Star Trek. Gizmodo has the screencap.
· Actor Pruitt Taylor Vince was hard at work directing and starring in the film Cameraman...until the producer fired him from both jobs.
· Food Network star and commercial pitchman Guy Fieri is the absolute worst (we can agree on that, right? I mean, it seems to be what he's going for) and so, it makes sense that he would want to appear on the absolute worst season of SNL.
· The Playlist has details on Wes Anderson's next script.
· Why is Lady Gaga on Gossip Girl tonight? "It's very performance art," she says. Carter strikes again!
The idea of film bloggers feuding publicly with each other is nothing new -- hell, it's practically what Twitter was invented for. Over the last few days, however, a remarkably juicy battle royale has broken out in the comments section of Thompson on Hollywood, and it's populated mostly by an upper echelon of film writers who tend to stay out of the fray, including NYT film critic Manohla Dargis, outgoing LA Weekly scribe Scott Foundas, and Film Comment's Amy Taubin. It's like Super Smash Bros. for people who love the Dardenne brothers!
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The marketing department at Universal is probably ready to take the rest of their forgettable year off after its second ethics controversy in a week. Just days after Uni was caught fabricating news stories for The Fourth Kind, critics and moviegoers in the UK (or at least the ones the Daily Mail located) are objecting to the studio's campaign for Couples Retreat, one of 2009's rare Universal hits that nevertheless required some adaptation for foreign markets. Or so the studio thought -- right before it pulled African-American co-stars Faizon Love and Kali Hawk off the British one-sheet. Click through for a look at both posters and a few reasons -- including an explanation to Movieline from Hawk herself -- why this probably isn't quite the controversy it looks like.
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British actor Edward Woodward passed away today at age 79, and he leaves behind a lengthy filmography that includes The Wicker Man, Breaker Morant, and the television series The Equalizer. Woodward continued working up until the end, appearing in Hot Fuzz and taping numerous episodes of British television this year. He'll be missed. [E!]
CBS's organ-transplant procedural Three Rivers just earned its highest ratings yet, jumping 11% since last week's showing. The problem? The network has to decide whether to order more episodes of the struggling, often painfully bad show quickly in order to avoid expensive production stoppage. Movieline's advice? Dump it. Law and Order: Criminal Intent satisfies the incident-investigation-resolution formula better, and there are fewer high-tech touchscreen monitors that look swiped from an intimately lit version of the Enterprise. [THR]
Last Wednesday, Glee's alto-castrato Kurt, played by Chris Colfer, competed in a "diva-off" for the solo in Wicked's "Defying Gravity." The plot, it turns out, was inspired by Colfer's real life high school talent show experience: "Every year I'd beg to sing 'Defying Gravity' and every year they turned me down because I was a boy and they said it was a girl's song; and every year I protested, saying that there are no lyrics that indicate gender specification whatsoever [...] One day on set, [Glee creator] Ryan Murphy told me he was coming up with a Kurt versus Rachel plotline, and for whatever reason, I started talking about this, and the next thing I know it was in the script." [New York Magazine]
· It's official: MGM is for sale. The venerable studio, with its James Bond franchise, massive film library and some of the most patient creditors in Hollywood, is now welcoming offers; Time Warner, News Corp. and Lionsgate are among the likeliest suitors. I'm pulling for the latter company to make this happen -- partly for the symmetry of their brand names, but mostly because Tyler Perry's Diamonds are Forever is a 007 movie I think we all want to see sooner than later. [Variety]
George Strait gets in on the country-flick resurgence, Aussies battle Brits in King's Speech, and more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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After a couple slow weeks at the box office, the Hollywood Industrial Complex belches back to life with a movie about the end of the world in which John Cusack is upstaged by Woody Harrelson and a chicken. Yes, it's business as usual at Weekend Receipts. Click on to see how that one, and the rest of the top five, fared.
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Like a giant, runaway donut splatting a pedestrian fleeing unsuccessfully from the Grand Canyon-sized fissure where LAX used to be, 2012 has trampled the weekend box office. Roland Emmerich's shimmering love letter to mankind's inevitable and spectacular demise grossed $65 million domestically and an additional $160 million in foreign territories, giving it a grand total of $225 million for the weekend, and almost assuring it a spot in the top ten openings of all time. Come back later for our full box office report. [Variety]
Roland Emmerich has once again wrung a blockbuster out of the apocalypse, as 2012 blew out all projected estimates with a fantastic Friday gross over $23 million. That cast a pretty lengthy shadow over virtually all the weekend competition with the notable exception of Precious, which continued last week's dominating performance with $2 million on only 174 screens. That was good enough for third place right below Disney's A Christmas Carol, which slid a not-too-bad 37 percent off its opening weekend pace. George Clooney's Men Who Stare at Goats was not so lucky. Check out that and the rest after the jump.
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And so another long week closes at Movieline, where we leave you with sweet memories of new friends, old enemies and the undecided strangers in between. If the last seven days of news taught us anything, they won't stay neutral for long. Reminisce after the jump, and have a lovely weekend!
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· There's a mini furor going in England over a photo that purportedly shows Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe smoking a joint. Radcliffe denies the charge "categorically," saying he was merely gathering what he thought was some Belladonna root for a magic spell that makes Pink Floyd music sound a million times better.
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