Roman Polanski's lawyer on Sunday provided the press with a status update for his client. It's pretty much what you'd expect a defense attorney to offer: The 76-year-old is "tired and depressed," Herve Temime told a Swiss newspaper, adding in another interview that "Polanski was in an unsettled state of mind" when Temime visited him in his detention cell in Zurich. That said, the director appreciates all the support he's received -- or almost all of it, with the possible exception of the French culture minister trying to explain away that passage in his autobiographical novel about paying for sex with "boys."
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The moment Miley Cyrus deleted her Twitter account, the 140-character world cried out, called its best friend's mom, and hashtagged into the night. The "#mileycomeback" meme lives on even now. Luckily, Cyrus understood that she ruined everyone's good Twime and filmed an elaborate YouTube rap designating her reasons for abandoning Twitter. Now, days later, the Hannah Montana star has issued another comprehensive statement for off-Twitter privacy. The Evita-like sendoff is after the jump.
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In last night's Mad Men episode, Roger Sterling swiftly shitcanned Sal at the faintest whiff of deal-breaking impropriety. Today, the actor behind Roger Sterling, John Slattery, is attempting to dispose of a real life New York City deal-breaker: the sanitation department's plan to erect a $346 million facility in Slattery's beloved SoHo neighborhood.
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Back in Toronto I suggested that of Willem Dafoe's two talking-fox movies to open this fall, Antichrist had the cultural edge over The Fantastic Mr. Fox. While Wes Anderson's animated adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl novel will no doubt stimulate interest among a more general audience than Lars von Trier's nightmarish horror epic will, only the latter film makes its fox's dialogue really count -- which is quite the accomplishment considering it says only two words. Click through and hear them yourself.
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Hey, Fantastic Mr. Fox D.P. Tristan Oliver, how did you like working with Wes Anderson? "I think he's a little sociopathic," Oliver told the LAT...while he was still working on the movie. "I think he's a little O.C.D...Contact with people disturbs him." Mr. Anderson, can you offer a response from your scarf-laden Paris chateau? "I would say that kind of crosses the line for what's appropriate for the director of photography to say behind the director's back while he's working on the movie. So I don't even want to respond to it." [LAT]
An anecdote buried in the press notes for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans attributes either an uncanny prescience or cynical revisionism to Werner Herzog. Between his experience in the devastated Crescent City and his attempt to lease a car, the filmmaker basically wants you to believe he foresaw the current recession. "I had never borrowed money, and hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was not in the red," Herzog writes, trying to explain a high interest rate he received at the auto dealership. "But the system punished you for not owing money, and rewarded those who did. I realized that the entire system was sick, that this could not go well, and I instantly withdrew money I had invested in stock of Lehman Brothers while a bank manager, ecstatic, with shuddering urgency, was trying to persuade me to buy even more of it." [Looker]
· Chernin Entertainment, the production shingle of former News Corp honcho Peter Chernin, has announced their first major acquisition: They've purchased the rights to the Moses story from God, for a rumored mid-seven figures. The plan is to turn it into an effects-heavy, 300-style (read -- very homo-kosherotic) action tentpole. All the greatest hits will be there -- the Plagues, the Parting of the Red Sea, the Burning Bush; but screenwriters Adam Cooper and Bill Collage -- who just wrote a sexed-up spin on Moby Dick for Timur Bekmambetov -- are also delving into the Midrash in search of lesser-known biographical details. (Eg. Moses invented hang gliding; was deathly afraid of spiders; played a very primitive version of the saxophone; etc.) [Variety]
Next up in Hollywood Ink: A hell of a hangover, Angelina is the new Charlize, and Bryan Singer might head back to the mutant academy.
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It was a box office bonanza this weekend for two films in particular, each an unlikely success story. One was made simply by setting up cameras and letting the actors improvise their way toward some predetermined, terrifying plot points. The other was Paranormal Activity. Let's see how they did!
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The slump is over at Universal, where a year of underachievement and a week of front-office turbulence concluded Friday with the smooth first-place landing of the studio's Couples Retreat. The Vince Vaughn effort scored a scorching $12.3 million -- a record-breaking opening day for a live-action comedy in October. Even more impressive was the turnout for Paranormal Activity, the microbudget thriller that pulled in $2.5 million on a mere 159 screens. Still struggling, meanwhile: Whip It, which failed to crack seven figures and is on track for a devastating second-week drop of at least 50 percent. Find yesterday's full top 10 after the jump.
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There's no telling what will happen to love once you run it through the cultural wringer, but we at Movieline HQ gave it a shot this week anyway. The results were mixed: Sure, we witnessed an unprecedented criminal drama and ignited an international incident, but the tenderness of a few key names and faces shone through as always. Revisit them after the jump, and have a great weekend!
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Due to server issues, we weren't able to get Comments of the Week up last Friday, and that means two things:
1) This edition comprises the last two weeks of comments, and
2) I had to wade past eight thousand angry comments about Harry Connick Jr, Roman Polanski, and Kris Allen (?) to find our winners.
But hey, whatta prize, am I right? You can dress up for Halloween as Precious's mustachioed Mrs. Weiss, played by Mariah Carey! (Just don't tell Mo'Nique that you got this for free.) So, who are our winners?
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· Apparently Oprah's new favorite thing is a swimming-pool-sized glass of iced acai berry tea.
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ABC picked up full seasons of its comedies Cougar Town, Modern Family, and The Middle late yesterday, just on the heels of CBS's pickup of NCIS: Los Angeles and The Good Wife. Can you handle ABC's love of the middle class? The possibilities for cross-promotion are endless. Patricia Heaton can guest-star on Modern Family and get into a talk-to-the-hand-ish fight with Sofia Vergara, all while Courteney Cox gives a hilarious mockumentary confessional about how everyone needs a drink. It all works out fine! Hehe! Man we miss you, Pushing Daisies. [Variety]
Michael Cudlitz, who played gay cop John Cooper on Southland, reacts to EW about NBC's ridiculous cancellation of one of their few worthwhile dramas: "In retrospect, I saw it coming. We were two weeks away from airing and [the cancellation news] has created more press for the show than NBC has put into it on its own...We were given the same statement that everyone got. [NBC] said they watched the first [four] episodes and determined that they were too dark...There's something else going on I'm sure. We had a cast and crew screening on Tuesday for the season 2 premiere, and it was phenomenal...There's some speculation that they're trying to cut costs because they're trying to sell the network, but I don't know. The thing that strikes me as very bizarre is that they have [six episodes] in the can, they don't have anything on right now that is doing well, and our show is good. Why would you not put it on? So something else must be going on....I'm pissed." Damn right -- you should be. God forbid there be a positive depiction of a masculine gay man on network TV. [EW]
Well, Heroes has gone and done it: They've kissed the lesbian. The kiss, which occurs between Claire the indestructible cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) and her college roommate Gretchen (Californicatiom's Madeline Zima) has been teased for months, and will finally air this Monday. Like shark-jumping, lesbian-kissing is a wet, toothy affair that demands a great amount of agility and courage on the part of the actors, and invariably results in a precipitous tumble in show quality seconds after it airs. (And, in some extreme cases, elicits an outright cancellation.) We've gotten an advanced peek at the kiss in question -- let's see how it measure up to some of TV's greatest girl-on-girl suck-face-fests!
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