Happy Tuesday! Also in today's edition of The Broadsheet: Mickey Rourke and Kellan Lutz get disposable (again)... An Iranian actress faces 90 lashes for a foreign screen performance... Judge Dredd director on damage control... and more.
Monday brought more bad news to the reportedly beleaguered production of the zombie flick World War Z, produced by and starring Brad Pitt, when SWAT in Budapest raided a warehouse storing prop guns for the film. The problem: they weren't props, but fully-functional military-style assault rifles. Oops!
Twelve years after critics found it to be totally decent (and refreshingly stereotype-free) and audiences made it a solid $34M box office hit, the 1999 Taye Diggs vehicle Best Man will be getting a sequel! So if you've been holding your breath to find out what happens after interpersonal secrets and scandals among friends come to a head on one dramarama-filled wedding day, you're in luck. Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee is set to script and helm Best Man 2 for Universal, and reportedly got the idea after a cast reunion dinner; take that as good indication that the likes of Diggs, Morris Chestnut, Terrence Howard, Sanaa Nathan, and Nia Long might reprise their characters. [Deadline]
It's the second Monday in October and you know what that means -- it's Columbus Day, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's 1492 arrival in the Americas. But let's not forget, approximately 500 years after the Italian explorer set foot in the New World, a young filmmaker also named Christopher Columbus pioneered a new world of family comedy with hits like The Goonies, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire and the Harry Potter franchise. In honor of today's holiday, Movieline wonders which Christopher Columbus had the bigger impact on cinema -- the navigator who brought attention to the mass of land that would eventually encompass the U.S. center of filmmaking and provide setting for millions of films -- or the filmmaker who established some of our most nostalgic family films (Adventures in Babysitting included) as well as three Harry Potter movies. Let's investigate below!
Despite that one disgruntled moviegoer's complaints, there are plenty of diehard members of the cult of Drive, which incidentally has racked up a cool $30 million to date. Not too shabby, Film District. Perhaps it's fitting, then, that Ryan Gosling's Driver character has now been commemorated in the cutest, cuddliest way imaginable: as a crocheted amigurumi doll, complete with his signature toothpick and a yarn hammer. And you thought YOU were obsessed with Drive. Hit the jump for today's Buzz Break...
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings probably wasn't prepared for the earful (or Internetz-full) he received last month when he announced plans to spin-off Netflix's DVD rentals into a new company called Qwikster. "It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult," he wrote in a blog post today. "So we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs." Read on for more flip-flopping, and rejoice?
"[T]he veneration accorded to Paris by Americans is puzzling. Like other grand cities, this one certainly has an aura -- yet its cultural credentials are hardly the world's most impressive. If anything, its most enduring characteristic is a distinct whiff of merde de taureau. It wasn't Paris that delivered Bach, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Leonardo, Marx, Michelangelo or the Beatles. Instead, the city has given us the likes of bohemianism, deconstructionism, symbolism and the nouvelle vague. All of these were quite fun at the time, but in retrospect seem somewhat less than the real deal. The city's aesthetic soul appears to have more to do with Gitanes, cafe society and elegant posturing." Wait -- symbolism is over? And Roman Polanski lives there? Sacrebleu! [The Guardian]
You might've realized it by now, but Real Steel is a ridiculous premise for a movie. So ridiculous it worked, in fact. Twitter blew up this weekend with comments about Hugh Jackman's and the sweet science of robo-jousting, and Ryan Gosling's effectiveness in The Ides of March. We tally the best five tweets after the jump.
Happy Monday! Also in today's edition of The Broadsheet: A Pixar alum gets the closest of close reads... Tortured Oscar logic... Awesomely ridiculous new reality stars... The $24 million Korean humanist marathoner WWII film you have (or haven't) been waiting for... and more.
The American Film Institute has selected Shirley MacLaine, the candid Hollywood legend and memorable Oscar speechifier, to receive their 40th Life Achievement Award. Hooray! Problem is, they're only honoring her current lifetime. Her other 18 or 19 lifetimes were failures, I guess -- but still, she's had a pretty good career on the big screen. Shall we take a walk through her finest quotes in film?
Hugh Jackman's plummy-eyed posters did not scare off moviegoers (or robot foes) this weekend, as Real Steel toppled all challengers at the box office. The Ides of March comes in for a distant, but respectable #2, and Moneyball and Dolphin Tale continue to hold hands, shut out the rest of the world, and survive on sheer joy.
Ben Stiller hosted last night's episode of SNL, and while he didn't quite bring the game that Alec Baldwin and Melissa McCarthy did in weeks past, he did bring an old friend: Derek Zoolander. Stiller revived the titular male model from the 2001 comedy during Weekend Update, where Bill Hader's Stefon claimed him as a date. Hope you're prepared to handle Derek's "cold coffee" face on this pleasant Sunday morning.
Zsa Zsa Gabor suffered another health setback when she slipped out of consciousness this afternoon and was sent to the hospital. The 94-year-old film and matrimonial legend fell and broke her hip last year, which didn't stop her husband Prince Frederic von Anhalt from declaring he wanted to have babies with her. Watch, I bet he'll start shacking up with some younger woman like Joan Fontaine soon. [TMZ]
Buena Vista's aggressive marketing push gave Real Steel a major edge on Friday's box office receipts. In fact, it rocked and socked its competitors, including The Ides of March, which pulls in at a distant second. Elsewhere on the tally, Dolphin Tale and Moneyball continue their streak of identical revenues while 50/50 strides on admirably.
Splendor in the Grass, Elia Kazan's ode to teenage angst and adolescent obsession, turns 50 this Monday. The golden anniversary of William Inge's torrid screenplay may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you haven't seen Splendor in the Grass (which was a box office sensation in '61), you've missed out on three important film moments: 1) the performance of Natalie Wood's career; 2) the debut of a young buck named Warren Beatty; and 3) a level of teenage hysteria that is both extreme and extremely moving.
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