Yesterday, Movieline paid tribute to Ben Silverman, possibly the most ready-to-party exec that NBC has ever known. Even if the Peacock won't miss him, the fun-xecutive will always have a velvet roped-off area in our hearts, where he can rage with Molly Sims and white tigers all night long. But let's meet Jeff Gaspin, the new chairman of NBCU who is already being called the Anti-Ben: He's older, slightly paler and less likely to freestyle in the locker room.
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Has it only been two days since we were lost inside the geek fantasia that was Comic-Con 2009? The calendar says as much, but that strange, leotard-friendly universe already seems light years away. With some breathing room from its 24-hour hype machine, we take a look back at the hits, misses and too-soon-to-tells from a watershed year in San Diego's nerd-overrun Gaslamp District.
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Think (500) Days of Summer is the ultimate movie aimed at hipster twentysomethings this year? Think again: Your typical Whole Foods shopper is much more likely to be counting down the days to Where the Wild Things Are or The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and they've got no plans to drag a niece or nephew along with them. How did children's movies get to this point?
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...to the funeral of Dr. George O'Malley. For Katherine Heigl's sake, we'll hope its not a 17-hour service. [PopEater]
As alluded to in today's Buzz Break, a candid new Teen Vogue interview with Taylor Momsen notes that the Gossip Girl star and tween-rock sensation isn't really down with her age cohort. At least not socially or (it seems) romantically: "I would eat a boy my age alive." Fair enough! But let's take a step back and look at the other implications here, all of which seem to imply that her plus-age paramours might consider laying low for at least a little while -- especially if it can save them four years in prison.
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Two years ago, Mark S. Allen, the entertainment douchebag for Good Day Sacramento (yes, it really exists, and isn't just a fanciful platform from which to launch the latest Katherine Heigl vibrating-panty vehicle) had to apologize publicly to Janet Jackson and Tyler Perry for doggedly pursuing a line of NippleGate questioning during an interview that infuriating both them and viewers. He was at it again today, but this time, he chose the wrong target: Joan Rivers.
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· Slashfilm's got the high-resolution posters for Jonah Hex and Nightmare on Elm Street. Facial scarring: so hot in 2010!
· Are these new stills from Prince of Persia, or are we finally witnessing the release of the long-lost Jake Gyllenhaal bukkake video? (It was for art, so it's OK.)
· Mischa Barton is heading back to work this week, says her rep.
· How does Tobey Maguire's mother "shield her children from the downside of the entertainment industry"? By pimping out the teenage ones to land her own reality show.
· "I would eat a boy my age alive," declares Gossip Girl's Taylor Momsen. I think she could probably use the meal.
There's a disturbing -- well, some might find encouraging -- trend hitting the always befuddling, herd-mentality-driven Internet. Since launching in April, site GuysWithiPhones.com [very NSFW] has featured a rogues' gallery of self-submitted snap-bandits, captured with their iPhones in a bathroom mirror either nude or semi-nude and in various states of arousal. OK, fine, whatever floats your app. But now, recognizable faces have begun to pop up on there.
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"I'm Jonah's love interest, I guess you could call it. But it's sort of not very conventional. She's a prostitute he's been visiting for years and they have a special relationship," was how Megan Fox described her Jonah Hex character to a group of journalists at Comic-Con on Sunday. As a measure of character commitment, she traded in Michael Bay's favored low-rise jeans for a period gown with a liver-bursting 19 inch waist.
"The corset obviously changes the way you walk and your breathing patterns," she explained. "I wanted that cinched as tightly as possible."
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Zhang Yimou, the legendary Chinese best known recently for masterminding the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies -- is winding down his remake of the Coen Brothers' classic debut Blood Simple. And rejoice: Now that Sony Pictures Classics has officially announced its acquisition of the film (working Chinese title: The Stunning Case of the Three Gunshots) you will now get a chance to see it Stateside without any infamously Harveyesque tinkering. No release date is yet announced, but if this doesn't debut next year at Sundance -- where the original launched the Coens' careers 25 years ago -- you can bury me in a field and leave me for dead, Texas-style. [SPC]
Sensitive viewers who were more than a little overwhelmed by both Mickey Rourke's tattooed, mechanized Iron Man 2 villain and Sylvester Stallone's tattooed, almost-as-mechanized hero from The Expendables can relax a bit today. A new photo from the latter film reveals the duo's more tender side-- just a couple of average guys sharing their love of huge muscles, huger dragons and the body art that brings them together.
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If you thought that Irish theater-manager outrage would be the biggest international incident spurred by Brüno, let's really hope you're right. Because the alternative seems kind of awful: a revenge attack against Sacha Baron Cohen and his fellow terrorist-tweakers, as pledged Monday by the militia made famous in one of the film's most incendiary scenes.
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The 40-year-old Hollywood institution 20th Century Props announced its closure earlier this summer, and the liquidation of its 110,000 square-foot warehouse begins today at 9 a.m. PDT. For those of you not in the neighborhood, you can take a slideshow tour at the LAT or browse the thousands of lots being sold online here, including a giant Colonel Sanders sign, a spaceship from The Twilight Zone, a life-size zebra and an alien from Men in Black. That's entertainment. Or at least it was. Au revoir! [20th Century Props]
· Jon Hamm will play the third point of a love-and-crime triangle in The Town, co-starring (and directed by) Ben Affleck as a career criminal on the lam from Hamm's FBI agent. Between them is bank employee Rebecca Hall, for whom Affleck is trying to clean up his act but whom Hamm uses to close in on his man. Complications ensue -- including that title, apparently. Was the source novel's Prince of Thieves really that preemptively close to the Robin Hood myth? Was Snooze already taken? [THR]
The rats of NIMH make a comeback, Richard Linklater and Scott Rudin take up with Liars, and much more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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· Disney's Tron Legacy had by far the coolest promotional stunt of anything at Comic-Con with its Flynn's Arcade experience, but -- putting aside the conceptual art they previewed -- the total amount of finished footage screened at the panel amounted to 0 minutes. So what's this nearly three-minute clip, which has appeared and disappeared on YouTube for about a year now, and appears to now be there for good? It's not the trailer, but rather test footage that screened for Comic-Con 2008 audiences. Still, as year-old test footage goes, it should succeed in mercilessly tickling the remote geek-quadrants of your brains.
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