"It's like Whac-A-Mole." That's how John C. Reilly described his eclectic career a couple of weeks ago at a swank Park Avenue hotel in Manhattan. From prestige films like Gangs of New York and Chicago, to broad comedies like Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, to indies like Cyrus and Terri (out Friday), Reilly has made a living toying with audience expectations. "If you start to do the same thing, it just gets boring on a personal level."
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On top of being one of the worst-reviewed filmmakers of all time, German director Uwe Boll is many things: the possessor of a doctorate in literature, an author, an avid boxer (who has literally knocked out his critics), a recipient of the rare Razzie "Worst Career" award, an outspoken adversary of Michael Bay, a non-chewer of Stride gum (the company supported a petition for him to retire in 2008), an unwavering believer in his own "art" form. And judging from the five minutes Movieline spent with him during Tuesday's press event for BloodRayne: Third Reich -- the straight-to-DVD third film in his BloodRayne franchise -- Boll is also a current-events buff with an affinity for George Clooney movies and small, fluffy dogs.
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After last week's rousing round of My Favorite Scene, actor David Hyde Pierce returns to Movieline today to chat about The Perfect Host. Director Nick Tomnay's feature debut features Pierce as Warwick, a posh Angeleno hosting a dinner party crashed by a wounded bank robber (Clayne Crawford) on the lam. That's about all I'm going to tell you about the narrative, which twists like a Red Vine and swings from psychological thriller to dark comedy to heist intrigue -- and sometimes back again -- with dizzying speed.
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Elijah Wood has a new hit on his hands in Wilfred, the offbeat FX comedy about a depressed young man's relationship with the canine next door -- whom he happens to visualize and converse with as a dude in a dog suit (played by the show's co-creator, Jason Gann). Wilfred debuted last week to 2.6 million viewers, the network's highest ratings ever for a comedy premiere. Not bad at all, but it has a ways to go before catching up with the other phenomenon in Wood's life.
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Bad Teacher presents both good news and bad news for fans of Jason Segel. Your favorite Apatow repertory player is quite hilarious in the film as a gym teacher hot for teacher (Cameron Diaz's titular poor educator), but he's decidedly a supporting player. Which actually isn't that bad for Segel when you think about it -- especially since he's spent the last two years working on How I Met Your Mother and writing a pair of highly anticipated films: the upcoming rom-com Five-Year Engagement and a little thing called The Muppets.
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As evidenced by dozens of E! True Hollywood Stories, it is rare for a child actor to gracefully make the leap into a successful adult acting career. Yet Sara Paxton, the California-raised blonde who stars in Ti West's horror film The Innkeepers, has done just that, beginning with a role as "Child at Party" in 1997's Liar, Liar and continuing today with at least seven projects in various stages of production according to her IMDB page.
This week, Paxton took a break from the Los Angeles Film Festival excitement to discuss her creepy experience on the set of The Innkeepers, her seamless transition from child to adult actress and the death-defying underwater stunts required of her on Shark Night 3-D.
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Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino (Alias, LOST, Star Trek, Up, Super 8) has created some of the most memorable aural film and television moments in the last decade, notably working time and time again with a chosen few close collaborators including J.J. Abrams and the folks at Pixar. So on the eve of his latest film, the globe-trotting sequel Cars 2 (his fourth Pixar score since 2004's The Incredibles), Movieline asked Giacchino to share his pro tips for mastering the film-scoring game.
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Along with the likes of Sir Michael Caine and Eddie Izzard, actress Emily Mortimer gives voice to one of the new additions to the Cars universe across the pond: British intelligence agent Holley Shiftwell, a smart and confident paper-pushing analyst who gets thrust into the field (and into the life and heart of Radiator Springs tow truck Mater) in John Lasseter's globe-trotting Cars 2. For Mortimer, a self-avowed Pixar nut, it was an offer she couldn't refuse. And she's definitely now drinking the Pixar Kool-Aid.
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In their new film The Art of Getting By (nee Homework, an alum of this year's Sundance film Festival), Freddie Highmore and Emma Roberts play George and Sally, a pair of New York City high-schoolers brought together by George's prodigious senior-year slacking and Sally's... well, she's not sure. Their attempts to figure each other out result in a cascade of revelations, misunderstandings, an especially drunken New Year's Eve, awkward sleepovers, love triangles and will-they-or-won't-they scenarios anchored in George's endangered graduation plans. Roberts and Highmore spoke with Movieline this week about all of it, plus Roberts's summer reading regimen to date and what adults apparently don't know about modern teen drinking.
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John Michael Higgins is poised to be all over the pop culture landscape for the next six months. The veteran film and television actor co-stars as the principal in Bad Teacher (out June 24) and appears opposite Fran Drescher on the new TV Land series Happily Divorced, which debuts tonight after Hot in Cleveland. Plus, he's also got a supporting role in Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo, due out in theaters at Christmas. In short: get used to merrily shouting, "That guy!" when his face appears on television and movie screens throughout the rest of 2011.
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Ten years ago, after completing his 20th film in 27 years, filmmaking legend John Carpenter took a sabbatical from filmmaking. "I was tired," he explained to Movieline, pointing to a decades-long career spent filming one project after the next, including genre classics like Halloween, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. "I had given up my personal life and given up my health -- given up a lot of things, because of my love of movies, and I'd stopped loving cinema."
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John Slattery's Emmy-nominated performance as the pompous Roger Sterling on Mad Men has led to a number of film roles for the 48-year-old actor: He's turned up in Reservation Road, Charlie Wilson's War, and -- more recently -- in The Adjustment Bureau (out on DVD next week), playing a supernatural, crisply-suited agent named Richardson who's responsible for breaking up two fate-defying romantics (Matt Damon and Emily Blunt). Movieline caught up with Slattery to discuss filming The Adjustment Bureau, wariness about Roger Sterling knockoff roles, and the breakneck pace of directing Mad Men.
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Not so unlike the two-decade hiatus that took him away from feature filmmaking, legendary director Monte Hellman's new film Road to Nowhere is a fascinating, frustrating, languorous journey through the movies' heart of darkness. The noir-within-a-noir places director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) back behind the camera after an extended absence, where he plans to make a true-crime film based on the illicit relationship between -- and supposed deaths of -- femme fatale Velma Duran (Shannyn Sossamon) and corrupt politico Rafe Taschen (Cliff De Young). But when Mitchell casts Velma doppelganger Laurel Graham (also Sossamon), the line between the filmmaker's life and art soon blurs beyond recognition.
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If you weren't familiar with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover model Brooklyn Decker last year, you certainly became acquainted with the Ohio-born blonde this February when Columbia Pictures used her -- more specifically, her body in a yellow bikini -- as the primary marketing tool for Adam Sandler's latest rom-com Just Go With It. Contrary to what the promos would have you believe, Decker didn't spend her first feature debut emerging from different bodies of water in slow-motion; she played a sweet-natured school teacher with whom Sandler's character falls in love and Jennifer Aniston's character falls in perpetual annoyance.
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Old pals and UK comedy heroes Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reunite this week for The Trip, the feature-film version of their mostly improvised 2010 BBC miniseries about versions of themselves who take off on a culinary and cultural road adventure through the north of England. Along the way they confront their perceptions of career, family and talent -- everything from who performs the better Michael Caine impression to how many octaves their respective singing voices cover.
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