Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
Gregor Jordan's The Informers begins with a quick, abrupt car accident, but to hear Bret Easton Ellis tell it, the production was something like a car crash in slow motion. Though it's the only adaptation of Ellis's novels where he actually served as a producer and co-writer on the film, he's not happy with how it turned out, and he's hardly alone. When The Informers was released last year, audiences stayed away and critics were scathing (pundit Devin Faraci, unwilling to review the film according to a normal ratings system, scored it a "F**k God out of 10").
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
When Bret Easton Ellis wrote The Rules of Attraction in 1987, it came burdened with heavy expectations, as his first novel, Less Than Zero, had made him a literary wunderkind two years prior. In a similar way, Roger Avary's 2002 film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction came two years after the relative success of Mary Harron's film version of American Psycho, and if ever Ellis were to become a book-to-film crossover franchise a la Stephen King or John Grisham, Rules would serve as a litmus test.
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
American Psycho is by far the most controversial work that Bret Easton Ellis has written, and yet when it comes to the adaptations of his novels, Mary Harron's 2000 film is the most critically acclaimed and well-regarded. It went through a bumpy production process that attracted directors like Oliver Stone and David Cronenberg and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, but the final result eventually became a calling card for both Harron and its star, Christian Bale, and it's only grown in public esteem since its release.
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Although Glee's ensemble cast sometimes prevents characters from getting their fair share of Ryan Murphy's spotlight, every now and then an episode airs that manages to tenderly chronicle the plight of one glee club member. In tonight's episode, "Dream On," Artie -- the white-rapping, wheelchair-bound character played by Kevin McHale -- supports one of the most emotionally gratifying storylines of the season. In anticipation of tonight's episode, which was directed by Joss Whedon and guest stars Neil Patrick Harris, McHale phoned Movieline to discuss his questionable guitar skills, his boy band days and the one fan anecdote that made him appreciate Glee even more than he already did.
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
As a property, Less Than Zero heralded the arrival of two major talents: Bret Easton Ellis, the young author who had written the novel while in college, and Robert Downey Jr., who co-starred in the 1987 film adaptation as the wily junkie Julian. Still, while the Marek Kanievska-directed movie had style to burn and gorgeous production design (by Barbara Ling) and cinematography (by Ed Lachman), it softened and moralized Ellis's sex-drugs-and-violence tale by considerable amounts.
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After a relatively quiet decade spent dabbling in TV, studio comedies and a few underperforming indies, Michael Douglas is taking no prisoners in 2010. Currently in Cannes promoting Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- in which he reprises his Oscar-winning role as treacherous capitalist baron Gordon Gekko -- Douglas spent the earlier part of this week in New York talking to Movieline about his other cutthroat comeback kid in Solitary Man.
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It's purely accidental that Jesse Eisenberg should have three movies opening in theaters in the next 10 days. Still, it's all the reminder you need that the 26-year-old New Yorker is as in demand as virtually any young actor in the business. Coming off 2009's mainstream tandem of Zombieland and Adventureland, Eisenberg begins an all indie May this Friday in New York with the microbudget marvel The Living Wake. He follows that next week with the drug-running drama Holy Rollers and the Michael Douglas showcase Solitary Man (as well as Wake's L.A. opening). And then there's David Fincher's The Social Network, which he just completed as well. Needless to say, we had plenty to catch up on recently when Eisenberg called Movieline HQ.
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Last week's pivotal episode of Lost brought with it many casualties, and though Jin, Sun, and Sayid all got their due, we at Movieline would like to sing a ballad for Frank Lapidus. Over the last three seasons of Lost, Jeff Fahey has managed to make his errant pilot character one of the show's most-liked with little more than a pocketful of one-liners in his arsenal. He may never have gotten his own flashback episode, but damn if we didn't love him all the same.
Last week was a big one for Fahey, between that nutso Lost episode and the trailer for Machete, where he reprises his Grindhouse role for director Robert Rodriguez. I called him up yesterday to chat about both.
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In Hollywood, Justin Theroux puts most other multi-hyphenates to shame. The 38-year-old actor is already well-known for roles in film (Mulholland Drive, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle) and TV (Six Feet Under), and he even directed the Sundance entry Dedication, but after co-writing the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder, he's suddenly become the town's most in-demand screenwriter. Iron Man 2 is his latest credit, though Theroux's got many more scripts on his plate, including Space Invader, Chief Ron, and Zoolander 2, the latter of which he'll direct. (If you'd rather see him in front of a camera, never fear: he'll play the villain in next year's James Franco/Danny McBride stoner comedy Your Highness).
Movieline already teased a little bit of our interview with Theroux; now, here's the rest, where he describes his unlikely career shift, the unorthodox Iron Man 2 writing process, and what he's got planned for the Zoolander franchise.
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In many ways, Jackie Earle Haley's new status as a fanboy icon is as unlikely as the actor's comeback itself. After success as a child actor and then a long hiatus from the industry, Haley was enticed back into work through two stately dramas, All the King's Men and Little Children. Still, it's his work in Watchmen, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the TV series Human Target -- not to mention that variable voice -- that have quickly given Haley his bona fides in the Comic-Con community.
Haley rang up Movieline this week to talk about that evolution, what he thinks of the newly announced Elm Street sequel, and what recent film gave him a "nerdgasm."
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If ever there were a year for Annette Bening to have "Her Year," 2010 might be it. The 51-year-old actress has a relative windfall of projects arriving in theaters, starting Friday with the drama Mother and Child and continuing this summer with the Sundance darling The Kids Are All Right. But one thing at a time: Mother features Bening as Karen, a nurse haunted by her decision as a teenager to give up her baby for adoption.
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Brazilian-born actress Morena Baccarin is so strikingly beautiful that ABC designed an entire race around her. As Anna, the manipulative leader of the extra-terrestrial "Visitors" on the network's remake of V, Baccarin has played a pivotal role in the series. Not only was she relied on heavily for the show's promotional campaign last year (there's a good chance people thought V would be a one-woman show), but she plays a politician so fearless and so evil that she would make real-life legislators cry -- or at least fear for the human race.
With two weeks until V's season finale, Baccarin phoned Movieline to discuss the art of green screen, the perks of playing an alien and why she thinks Joss Whedon is ready to direct a mega-budget action flick.
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Katee Sackhoff is a self-admitted thrill junkie -- that's why she was a perfect fit for the daredevil pilot Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, and it's what made her casting on the final season of 24 sound like a no-brainer. Still, her character Dana Walsh hasn't always had an easy time of it; during the first half of the season, she was often stuck in a subplot involving a no-good ex-boyfriend, and it's only recently that Sackhoff's gotten to show off her action-packed bona fides as Dana was revealed to be this season's obligatory, villainous mole.
In advance of tonight's episode, Movieline spoke to the always-candid actress to get her own feelings about her character's arc and to hear about the torturous stunt she couldn't wait to do herself.
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The grim, almost impossibly violent Harry Brown will no doubt draw endless comparisons to Dirty Harry and other risible exemplars of do-it-yourself crimefighting. But beyond the grit of the British projects where lawless hell descends, the film truly thrives in the quiet dignity afforded by leading man Michael Caine. Even as his ex-Marine title character goes to war against the subculture of hoodlums, addicts, dealers and thieves, the 77-year-old acting legend reinforces the bloodshed with purpose and gravitas. Clearly there's a little something more going on here than just target practice; Brown's mission to restore order is perhaps secondary only to Caine's own to effect change.
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This week's Please Give returns Catherine Keener to the fraught, funny world of Nicole Holofcener, marking their fourth collaboration since 1996's Walking and Talking. This time, the crisis on hand is as social as it is personal -- the epidemic of white liberal guilt that wallops her Kate into a new, unusual variety of midlife crisis. Making matters worse, Kate's daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) has bad skin and a jones for $200 jeans, while husband Alex (Oliver Platt) has only slightly more compunctions about the affair he's having with his neighbor's granddaughter (Amanda Peet) than he does about waiting for the neighbor to die so he can expand their apartment.
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