"Starting today, the company will offer the features as part of its iPad application, letting users browse merchandise from shows and movies. [... Steve] Yankovich, 50, was inspired to develop the technology while watching the movie Something's Gotta Give, which featured a toaster he wanted. 'You'll be able to buy exactly what's there,' said Yankovich, who runs mobile services at the San Jose, California-based company." [Bloomberg]
The New York Film Critics Circle retreated a bit today from its controversial decision to move its annual 2011 awards vote up to Nov. 28 -- thus becoming the first in the country -- by delaying it 24 hours to Nov. 29. NYFCC chairman John Anderson cited "conflicting schedules" as the motive. Meanwhile, you can follow the announcements live on the NYFCC's new awards Twitter account -- @NYFCC2011 -- next Tuesday morning. Or just keep an eye out here at Movieline for all the results as they happen. [Press release]
The actor and his collaborators Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater could be coming back: "Well, I don't know what we're going to do but I know the three of us have been talking a lot in the last six months. All of three of us have been having similar feelings that we're ready to revisit those characters. There's nine years between the first two movies and, if we made the film next summer, it would be nine years again so we're really started thinking that would be a good thing to do. We're going to try write it this year." Hmm. Twilight? [Allocine via The Playlist]
"The Twilight series challenges what I would call the 'Buffy Summers Maxim': that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity. Bella Swan diverges from many of our more recent teenaged female heroines. The ones who appear in films -- the feisty Olive from Easy A, the quirky ironist Juno MacGuff -- often seem to be written by thirtysomethings seemingly desperate to revisit high school to work some alchemical magic: turning the abjection of it all into a badge of indie cred. But even the more complicated female heroines of recent young adult fiction -- Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games or Katsa of Graceling -- embody a suspiciously pleasing, 'empowered' form of female adolescence." [The Hairpin]
Glenn Kenny didn't quite make the cut in last week's scathing critical responses to Jack and Jill, but his withering postscript deserves a look: "One thing I did not get into in my review of Jack and Jill for MSN Movies was just how (ostensibly) insultingly sub-pro forma is its actual filmmaking. It isn't even just a matter of how obviously its indifferent redemption-narrative structure is the Avid-enabled equivalent of a very sloppy butter sculpture. The indifference is felt in almost every aspect [... T]his is the first time it really hit home for me just how mindful Sandler, director Dennis Dugan, and the rest of the perpetrators are with respect to keeping overhead down. Good lord." [Some Came Running]
"How am I going to market a black-and-white silent movie? I'm praying. I'm going to church and to synagogue. And if that doesn't work, I'm going Buddhist. And if that doesn't work, I'm going Islam. Saturdays and Sundays are very busy in the Weinstein household." [NYM]
I wrote as much on Monday, but take it from AMPAS president Tom Sherak: "Someone the Academy hired to perform a very important function messed up, messed up badly. He's done everything he can, but this is him. The Academy did what it needed to do by accepting his resignation when he offered it. Does it tarnish it? I hope not. If someone feels it does, then we will work really hard getting the tarnish off. It wasn't us, it was someone who worked for us. It's like anything else. I hope not. We are going to continue to do what we do, which is support the arts and the technology of arts, and we want to be as above the fray as we can be." [LAT]
A brief tangentially related rant in the middle of RatnerGate: I usually give remakes a relatively fair shake before they prove their worth (or lack thereof), but Brett Ratner's potential redo of the underrated '80s teen sex comedy The Last American Virgin, I cannot abide. News of Ratner's intentions slipped by in his recent Howard Stern appearance, understandably, but he had this to say: "I think I jerked off to [LAV star Diane Franklin] at least two hundred times." Please, universe, don't let this guy ruin the most surprisingly sensitive teen comedy of the '80s. #RatnerFreeRemakes, anyone? [Howard Stern via Cinema Blend]
A busy weekend of awards-driven screenings greeted Hugo director Martin Scorsese, including Q&As hosted by Paul Thomas Anderson and James Cameron -- the latter of whom reportedly called the sweeping 3-D family flick a "masterpiece." "'[F]inally there is a Scorsese film I can take my kids to,'" Cameron was quoted as saying by Pete Hammond, who added: "And Cameron also told Scorsese it was the best use of 3-D he had seen, including his own films." The 2011 Oscar Index will never be the same. [Deadline]
Razzie authority Dan Kois is on to something: "Clint Eastwood is due! The man is 81 and has directed some real howlers, from Any Which Way But Loose to Invictus. Count us among the Razzie experts who really thought last year was his year; Hereafter, after all, was a metaphysical hash of half-baked ideas and ridiculous plot points, wrapped in a stomach-churning tsunami re-creation. But Hereafter didn't even get nominated! In fact -- and I know this will be hard to believe -- Clint has never been nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award, not even for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. [...] As one Razzie voter told me, "Even if J. Edgar is subpar -- that is, less bad than usual -- I plan to vote for Clint. The old man deserves it for all the crap he's made me watch over the years." [Grantland]
"The new project would almost certainly take Lautner's career in a new direction. He is said to be determined to work only with top directors and writers from now on as he strives to define himself as an actor." Annnnnd that's pretty much all I've got on this one. [THR]
"I know my best angles," the actress jokes in a wide-ranging new Vanity Fair cover profile. "They were sent to my husband [Ryan Reynolds, now Johansson's's ex]. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not like I was shooting a porno. Although there's nothing wrong with that either." Fair enough. But that bit about her and Woody Allen squirting Purell in each others' hands is disgusting. [VF]
After the success of Hugh Jackman's WWE cameo last month, Disney has partnered with the wrestling juggernaut to bring the Muppets to tonight's live Halloween episode from Atlanta. "I can only imagine what will trend this week with the Muppets guest starring, especially when the audience sees what the Muppets are going to do," said a WWE executive. Anything short of Miss Piggy busting a folding chair over Vince McMahon's head will be a failure. Any other dream scenarios? [Variety]
Ralph Fiennes, honored at the BFI London Film Festival awards for his directorial debut -- the Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus -- does not think in sound bites of 140 words or less. 'We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter... [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us." So hey, kids -- go see Coriolanus next January and expand your (five syllables!) vo-ca-bu-la-ry! [Daily Mail]
Steven Spielberg may have hated George Lucas's addition of aliens into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, but the much-loathed refrigerator scene? All him. "What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don't blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying 'jump the shark.' They now say, 'nuked the fridge.' I'm proud of that. I'm glad I was able to bring that into popular culture." See here, fellas: No one gets away clean. [Empire]
