It's easy to draw parallels to President Obama in Steven Spielberg’s historical Oscar hopeful Lincoln, a portrait of the 16th American President who stood tall, orated well, united a divided nation across color and party lines, and was re-elected to office for a second term. But Spielberg insists he had no specific political agenda in mind when the long-gestating Lincoln came to fruition.
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Harvey Weinstein's controversial Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden landed record ratings for Nat Geo Sunday night just in time to give President Obama that time-tested Weinstein bump, but the Hollywood heavyweight has something for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, too — a Bradley Cooper-narrated trailer for a Romney "comedy" entitled Hindsight.
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Election Day is upon us; go out and vote! Now! Then, to celebrate that crackle of nation-changing excitement hanging in the air, see how Presidents from Ike to Obama (and some of history's lesser-successful White House hopefuls) seized the hearts and minds of the American people as seen in this riveting, superbly-edited campaign ad supercut.
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Republican candidate Mitt Romney caused an uproar during last night's Presidential debate with his vivid and hilariously ignorant "binders full of women" comment. But he didn't just alienate women and men and anyone appalled by his antiquated language and attitude toward gender equality in the work place — he launched the hottest meme since Big Bird.
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Politicians have long appropriated pop culture to lend their campaigns relevancy and catchy hooks, so it wasn't unprecedented when Republican nominee Mitt Romney began using the popular Friday Night Lights catchphrase "Clear eyes, full heart, can't lose" in his bid for the Presidency. That doesn't mean filmmaker Peter Berg has to be happy about it.
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This idea came to me before I actually saw Argo on Tuesday night, but now that I have seen Ben Affleck's gripping, well-directed film, I can't let it go. When I learned about the plot of the movie — in which a CIA agent (Affleck), a Hollywood make-up artist (John Goodman) and a movie producer (the wonderful Alan Arkin) — gin up a fake movie to rescue a group of diplomats trapped in Iran during the hostage crisis — it struck me that Argo was the inverse or the flip side of another fake movie that got a lot of press this past summer: Innocence of Muslims. more »
It's not hard to imagine the big-screen version of scenes like this week's epic takedown on the Australian Parliament floor, in which Prime Minister Julia Gillard eviscerated her opposition party rival Tony Abbott with a 15-minute speech on sexism and misogyny. (Watch it below and revel in the glorious wrath of Gillard's pointed and passionate tirade.)
Somewhere out there a hundred screenwriters are furiously turning Gillard's sermon into Oscar gold, so why don't we go ahead and predict the five Academy Award-caliber actresses at the top of the casting list when Hollywood comes calling with the inevitable Iron Lady-esque Gillard biopic?
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Making his first press appearance since that headline-grabbing Republican National Convention speech, Clint Eastwood laughed off his rambling, off-the-cuff missive to an invisible Obama. “It didn’t get the response I wanted,” joked the 82 year-old actor and filmmaker at a press conference for his upcoming baseball flick Trouble With The Curve, “because I was hoping they’d nominate me.”
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Days after his empty chair speech made Clint Eastwood a polarizing symbol of the Republican National Convention, hometown paper The Carmel Pine Cone scored an exclusive follow-up with the 82 year-old former Mayor. His explanation? He made it up on the fly moments before taking the stage. You don't say! "They vet most of the people, but I told them, 'You can’t do that with me, because I don’t know what I’m going to say'... There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody." [Carmel Pine Cone via USA Today]
Oscar-winner George Clooney lent his voice to President Obama's campaign for a video introduction Thursday night to close out the Democratic National Convention, but it was a trio of leading ladies — Kerry Washington, Scarlett Johansson, and Eva Longoria — who gave the DNC a rousing jolt of star power in Charlotte, NC.
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So Mitt Romney has been nominated as the Republican party's presidential candidate. To quote Robert Redford's money line from The Candidate, "What do we do now?" Even if you plan to watch his extremely fit, catfish-wrangling running mate Paul Ryan speak tonight and Mr. Bain Capital himself on Thursday, there's a big holiday weekend to wade through before President Obama and the Democrats stage their own dog-and-donkey show beginning Sept. 4 in Charlotte, NC.
In other words, it's a good time to watch some good movies, and, given that the 2012 presidential smackdown is about to go into overdrive, Movieline asked one of the sharpest political analysts we know, Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word and an Emmy-winning former producer and writer for The West Wing, to pick five essential movies for our readers to watch in preparation for the 2012 race. His choices are after the break. Now do your homework. more »
The Washington Post caught up with Jon Voight, Hollywood's "new senior Republican," while the 73-year-old actor was stumping for his favorite candidates down in Tampa, FL: "'The Hollywood community is historically conservative,' he said. 'All the people that I so admired growing up were very patriotic and loved the country.' But then came the left-wing 'nonsense' of the 1960’s, which Voight admits he also got caught up in it. 'I'm quite ashamed of it, actually. . . I know as much as anybody about this stuff and I know how poisonous it is.'" [Washington Post via Salon]
Yesterday at a $35,800-per-ticket fundraiser at the Westport, Connecticut home of Harvey Weinstein, President Obama big upped fellow dinner guest/event co-host Anne Hathaway while pretty much nailing his critique of The Dark Knight Rises: "She's spectacular," POTUS enthused. "I got a chance to see Batman, and she was the best thing in it. That's just my personal opinion." Ours too, Mr. President. Ours, too.
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No one really doubted that Steven Spielberg's long-gestating, class-AA historical biopic Lincoln wouldn't land a release date in the middle of Oscar season. But with Disney announcing today that it will release the Daniel Day-Lewis-starring, Tony Kushner-written film in limited release on Nov. 9 — three days after Election Day — the studio has situated Lincoln in a zone ripe for hype.
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Good morning! By which I mean just go back to bed: "'Bane' is the terrorist in the new movie who drives the caped crusader out of semi-retirement in the final Batman movie. Democrats, who believe they have Romney on the ropes over the president's assault on his leadership at Bain Capital, said the comparisons are too rich to ignore. 'It has been observed that movies can reflect the national mood,' said Democratic advisor and former Clinton aide Christopher Lehane. 'Whether it is spelled Bain and being put out by the Obama campaign or Bane and being out by Hollywood, the narratives are similar: a highly intelligent villain with offshore interests and a past both are seeking to cover up who had a powerful father and is set on pillaging society,' he added." [Washington Examiner via Big Hollywood]
