Last week I met actor Jesse Eisenberg for a lengthy discussion of subjects ranging from his coming-of-age in the New York theater to his beloved Zombieland and his awards-season prospects for The Social Network. We covered a lot of ground, which I'll be retracing this week in a five-part series here at Movieline.
And so we arrive, sadly, at the end of our five-part journey with Jesse Eisenberg. By the time the actor and I reached this point, the done-to-death The Social Network had given way to... well, quite a few subjects. Let's just say that in this last installment of our bar-side conversation, it's a movie-reference blowout: The Godfather, Jurassic Park, all six Star Wars films and three Lord of the Rings films, among others, made the cut. We also discussed the pending progress of Zombieland 2 and Eisenberg's surprising affection for the star of Three's Company.
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In a town full of funny, feisty, blond actresses, Busy Philipps has climbed to the top of the heap. After acquainting herself with teenage audiences in Freaks and Geeks and Dawson's Creek, the Arizona-raised actress (real name: Elizabeth Jean Philipps) has matured with her audience, trading detention arcs for maturing roles in ER, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and now ABC's Cougar Town. As Laurie Keller, the youngest, bubbliest and (again) blondest member of the Cul-de-sac crew, Philipps regularly lands the funniest lines and story arcs of any given episode -- like in last night's "The Same Old You," when Laurie posed as a transfer student at Travis's college just so that she could join a sorority. Well, maybe her characters haven't matured that much.
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Despite the fact that it's already December, the Oscar race for Best Supporting Actor still feels relatively wide-open. Which made it all the more fascinating to speak with not one, but two buzz-earning hopefuls at the same time, and both from a movie that has no shortage of strong supporting performances to boot. But if there's any hint of off-screen competition between Social Network actors Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake as they prep for possible nominations for their turns as rival Mark Zuckerberg BFFs Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker, respectively, it didn't show. If anything, these co-stars have only grown closer from the experience of making David Fincher's acclaimed Facebook movie. (See? Social media does bring people together!)
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Last week I met actor Jesse Eisenberg for a lengthy discussion of subjects ranging from his coming-of-age in the New York theater to his beloved Zombieland and his awards-season prospects for The Social Network. We covered a lot of ground, which I'll be retracing this week in a five-part series here at Movieline.
Let it be said, once and for all: Jesse Eisenberg is not shy. The young actor the media so often describes as nerdy or awkward in fact hinted at an endearing unpredictability last Thursday afternoon: Mere minutes after learning his Social Network performance as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg nabbed him the National Board of Review award for Best Actor, Eisenberg phoned to ask if we could ditch our original diner meeting spot -- and ditch his publicist, as it turned out -- to meet early, just us, wherever I happened to be at the time.
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Say what you will about his provocative, polarizing films, but don't think for a minute Darren Aronofsky ever takes the path of least resistance. The director's latest, Black Swan, springs from a place from which few filmmakers emerge alive -- the hyper-competitive world of ballet, where, upon earning the role of the Swan Queen in a new adaptation of Swan Lake, young prima ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) commences down the road to paranoia, lust and madness.
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Considering the intense security I had to wade my way through recently to visit Helena Bonham Carter at her Manhattan hotel, for a few moments it actually did feel like I might be visiting the Queen of England. (As it turned out, it was just the Israeli Prime Minister's security detail.) Alas, no -- just screen royalty, as proven in her latest effort, The King's Speech.
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One good, sprawling interview with an international cinema star deserves another, and so we return to Vincent Cassel. When the French actor spoke to Movieline over the summer about his two-part gangster epic Mesrine, he also commented a bit about a little "independent movie" he was doing with director Darren Aronofsky. Mere months later, Black Swan has captivated critics, festival audiences and not just a few Oscar voters ahead of this weekend's theatrical opening.
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After Dexter creators brutally murdered Julie Benz's angelic Rita last season, the Pittsburgh-born actress reincarnated herself on ABC's No Ordinary Family as a scientist with superhuman speed. When Benz phoned Movieline last week, she explained that her ability to keep picking herself up from one role and transition into the next was something that she learned during her sixteen-year ice skating career, where she competed on a national level before a stress fracture forced her off the rink and in front of cameras. Twenty years after her first role in George A. Romero's horror film, Two Evil Eyes, the actress has not only been killed off in one of the most savage television murders of all time, but she lives to tell the tale -- and run a six-second mile on-screen.
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In the last year, Amber Tamblyn has turned over her detective badge from ABC's under-appreciated The Unusuals, inserted a welcome dose of estrogen into Danny Boyle's limb-sawing film 127 Hours, co-starred with her boyfriend David Cross in the IFC series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and released a book of poetry. As if that weren't enough, the Santa Monica-born actress is also practicing medicine on House, the Fox series where Tamblyn has declared residency for a 13-episode arc.
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Geoffrey Rush is well aware that he is one letter (the "G") away from winning an EGOT -- the acronym popularized on the television show 30 Rock meaning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. Of course, this awards season, a Grammy win for Rush seems about as unlikely a bet as it would be to bet against his nomination for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in The King's Speech -- which is about as close to a sure thing as there can be. Not bad for a performance that that was inspired indirectly, of all things, by Crocodile Dundee.
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Writer-director Steven Antin would like to set a few stories straight. First, he wasn't born in Portland. He's a native New Yorker who grew up in Los Angeles, where he and his now-famous siblings -- stylist Jonathan, Pussycat Dolls founder Robin, actor Neil -- all wound up working in showbiz. Antin barely knew Cher before she agreed to star in his new film, Burlesque, though they both reportedly dated music mogul David Geffen at different times, years ago. And contrary to the notion that he's come out of nowhere to direct the razzle-dazzliest film of the holiday season, Antin's an industry veteran who's spent a lot of time hustling to bring his passion project to the big screen after a career in which he's gone from teen movie actor to indie filmmaker to television producer and beyond.
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Tom Hooper isn't ready to talk about his Oscar chances just yet. As he points out, The King's Speech, already a critical darling, has yet to make a dollar at the box-office. But that hasn't stopped the prognosticators from predicting at least some Oscar gold for The King's Speech -- not a bad situation at all for a guy who got his start directing a Right Said Fred Sega commercial (yes, that Right Said Fred).
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Do not call The King's Speech a period piece -- at least not around its star Colin Firth. And this is a guy who knows a thing or two about labels -- an actor who has long since shed the baggage of being the fantasy of every adolescent girl who ever saw Pride and Prejudice. As Firth mentions, he's quite happy he's at an age (he just turned 50) where it's his work as an actor that's being judged -- judgment that paid off with his first Oscar nomination last year for A Single Man and what will surely be his second nomination this year for The King's Speech.
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HBO's sprawling Boardwalk Empire is a character actor aficionados dream come true; after all, the lead is Steve Buscemi. So it isn't all that surprising to see someone like Michael Shannon killing scenes on a weekly basis. The very definition of "that guy" -- having appeared in everything from Revolutionary Road to World Trade Center to Bad Boys II -- Shannon stars as Agent Nelson Van Alden, a G-Man looking to keep both alcohol sales and his sexual desires bottled up during the era of Prohibition. The Oscar-nominated star rang up Movieline to discuss his role, the way Boardwalk Empire treats its ladies, and just what he made of that now infamous self-flagellation scene.
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Elizabeth Banks is terrified of going to prison. The self described "goody two shoes" knows that anyone is just one little moment away from an event -- she cites Brandy's traffic accident as an example -- that can mutate into something far more sinister, changing the course of a person's life forever.
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