Film legend and Movieline pal Sigourney Weaver turns 62 today, which means she's been a working girl for almost 35 years. Damn, Ripley. Let's pick her most underrated work on the big screen after the jump. Personally, I think I've pinpointed it. If your suggestion is You Again, I'm prepared to yell, "Get away from her, you bitch" at you.
Stand back! Brace yourself! Nothing can prepare you for the rocking magnitude of the blast that is Movieline's Week in Review. Read on for all of it, but careful! Don't look directly into the light, and consider hiding the children. And in any case be stay to drop by this weekend for box-office updates and other fiery dispatches from the one and only Louis Virtel. Have a good one!
You knew it would happen sooner or later: Late Apple founder Steve Jobs will reportedly be getting getting the big screen biopic treatment, courtesy of Sony. The Social Network studio has acquired feature rights to Walter Isaacson's as-yet unreleased authorized book Steve Jobs, which culls interviews with Jobs and his close associates and family members and has been fast-tracked to hit shelves October 24. It should be an interesting match, considering Sony's tech division is a direct Apple competitor; imagine the cross-branding planning meetings! As for the film, fantasy casting is wide open. (Put your hand down, Noah Wyle.) [Deadline]
The latest in what's sure to be an ongoing and convoluted affair: national theater chain Cinemark has lobbed the first return volley in the face of Universal's Tower Heist VOD experiment, refusing to play the Brett Ratner-directed Eddie Murphy-Ben Stiller comedy in any of its 300 locations and 3,800 screens come November 4. The question is: Will Universal back down from its $59.99 video-on-demand market test -- or will other exhibitors join Cinemark to boycott the move?
In this weekend's Real Steel, Hugh Jackman stars as a boxing promoter who bonds with his estranged son over a junkyard robot that they train towards a fictional, futuristic boxing championship. So just how did an amnesiac prisoner on an Australian television series transform into a Tony and Emmy Award-winning movie star?
Looks like John Travolta may not get the chance to prove that he's man enough to play John Gotti Sr. in the upcoming crime-boss biopic from Barry Levinson. Showbiz 411 reports that the project, Gotti: In The Shadow Of My Father has been indefinitely postponed now that production company Fiore Films has run out of funds. Al Pacino, Ben Foster and Kelly Preston had also been cast in the film. Click ahead for more Buzz Break.
"So you all know All Things Fall Apart is the kind of movie that is really hard to get studios to finances [sic]," rapper-turned-actor/writer/producer 50 Cent Tweeted to his 5M+ followers, following a screening of his upcoming cancer drama. "My partners were against the idea at first then changed there minds after they saw the movie. All the positive feed back I received makes me feel like I was right. I wrote produced and financed the film. I lost some really close to me to cancer. this film is symbol of our friend ship." And he's trying to feed the world? Start lobbying now for the canonization of Saint Fiddy. [@50Cent]
Since news broke that a Lady Gaga biopic may be in the works, I've fretted. The 25-year-old superstar is ripe for a big-screen toasting, but she's only been a phenomenon since the latter half of 2008. Would you want to watch a Madonna biopic that stopped after the release of True Blue? Of course not. Lady Gaga has a gnarly, couture-bedecked arc ahead of her, and I say if she's destined to be a cineplex draw, why not adapt her eight-track mini-album The Fame Monster into a full-fledged film?
The line "I AM the law!" might yet still be spoken in Lionsgate's 2012 Dredd, the Karl Urban-starring remake of the gloriously cheesy Sylvester Stallone vehicle about a decorated officer wrongfully accused in a dystopian future, but it looks like director Pete Travis won't be uttering any iteration of that forceful declaration of authority. According to the L.A. Times, Travis has been booted from the remake, which is currently in post-production, while screenwriter Alex Garland steps in to make such significant changes that he might even seek a co-director credit.
If The Ides of March has taught us anything before its release, it's that the political thriller is a fabulous forum to act well, build a surprising character and look amazing doing it. The genre of "political thriller" is an ill-defined one with many subgenres (including "supernatural political thriller"!), but it's always an opportunity for great characters to emerge through intriguing twists, red herrings and explosive climaxes. Movieline ranks the 10 best performances in the genre after the jump; please abort any nuclear wars you may have started before reading on.
As a fledgling artist in his teens, Drew Struzan took to illustrating movie posters to make a living; decades later, his work in the world of visual film art has become not only iconic, but a part of the way we celebrate many modern cinema classics of the past few decades. This month's release Drew Struzan: Oeuvre collects more than 250 pieces of Struzan's art from films including Star Wars: Episode V -- The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings, and Movieline has a special exclusive preview of rare pieces from the forthcoming book.
My first reaction to the new poster for Steve McQueen's acclaimed drama Shame was natural, perhaps obvious: "But where's Michael Fassbender?" The guy only ran away with the Venice Film Festival award for Best Actor and is on a track for serious contention in this year's Oscar Index and is one of the brightest rising stars in all of cinema and makes women and men alike swoon with his bracing good looks. (To say nothing of similarly absentee co-star Carey Mulligan.) But that reaction seems forever ago, lodged in the hours since I haven't been able to stop looking at it.
Happy Friday! Also in this week-concluding edition of The Broadsheet: More Depp as a screenwriter joins the star's planned Thin Man adaptation... Robert Zemeckis to get ghostly... A Weinsteins lawsuit stays alive... Why do movies suck?... and more
With September's box office duelers on their way out, it's time we clear space for two new contenders to duke it out for the moviegoing public's vote. But try as he might, does George Clooney have what it takes to unseat Hugh Jackman's crowd-pleasing sci-fi actioner, the probable weekend victor? He does have Ryan Gosling on his ticket. Not too shabby. Onward, to the polls! It's your Weekend Forecast.
How do you possibly promote a movie about a promiscuous high school student in the '80s? If you're ripping a page out of the Weinstein Co.'s Dirty Girl's marketing book, try launching a blog where users can anonymously share their deepest, darkest, most twisted sexual fantasies... then making it accessible for anyone aged 13 and up! Um, guys...?
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