If it feels like it's been a little while since Edward Norton last starred in a film, at least you get double the actor in Leaves of Grass. Norton plays twins Bill and Brady Kincaid In Tim Blake Nelson's indie dramedy -- one an Ivy League professor, the other a tattooed pot dealer. Acting opposite oneself isn't an easy thing to do, but at least Norton has always been a consummate multi-tasker on his sets, often screenwriting (as he did on Louis Letterier's The Incredible Hulk, which Nelson also starred in), directing (Keeping the Faith), or producing.
Shortly after Leaves of Grass had its Austin premiere at South by Southwest, Norton rang up Movieline to discuss the perils of split-screen, his long-promised adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn, and his bemusement at becoming a fanboy headline.
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Still grieving after the elimination on last night's Project Runway? At least we've got one last blast of the latest castoff's special mix of candor, sage advice, and refreshing personality here in our day-after Movieline interview. Still, though the eliminated designer is a fan favorite, some not-so-sweet things are said about two Runway judges, including one who is "a big contradiction."
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When you're an in-demand star, the rumor mill can churn dramatically about what upcoming movies you're planning to star in. Leave it to Movieline, then, to go in and help actors clean up their IMDb profiles, separating fact from fiction.
Today's happy-to-oblige star is Carey Mulligan, who's riding high off of her Academy Award nomination for An Education and her new drama The Greatest, out April 2. Mulligan has press duties for Wall Street 2 and Never Let Me Go in the fall, but in the meantime, she'd like to sneak in another film. Will it be John Madden's remake of My Fair Lady? How about Effie, an Emma Thompson-scripted biopic about artist John Ruskin (to be played by Thompson's husband, Greg Wise) and his short-lived marriage to Effie Gray? And hey, aren't there rumors that Mulligan might play the lead in David Fincher's adaptation of the white-hot novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Movieline put all these potential projects to Mulligan for her clarification.
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In Chloe, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan returns to the pulpy, psychosexual domain that first established his international reputation, with 1994's Exotica. In it, we meet Catherine -- a successful Toronto gynecologist, played by Julianne Moore, who is coming to terms with her own obsolescence. Her husband, a handsome college professor (Liam Neeson) spends more and more time with his adoring female students, while her teen son barely acknowledges his mother's existence as he smuggles a mostly naked girlfriend in and out of his bedroom. Enter Chloe: a voluptuous and other-worldly call girl fully embodied by Amanda Seyfried, who Catherine hires to entrap her husband. Soon after, the head games and fantasy fulfillments begin.
To be sure, keeping these melodramatic proceedings from tumbling into trashier nether-zones is a tightrope act, and Egoyan -- working for the first time off a script not written by himself, but rather by Secretary writer Erin Cressida Wilson -- pulls it off. Movieline spoke to the director about breaking out of his comfort areas, how television has replaced cinema as the most consistent source of great drama, and the delicacies of shooting two stars of Moore and Seyfried's caliber in flagrante delicto.
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It's no surprise that Floria Sigismondi would end up in the feature film world, as it's one of the only forms of media she hasn't conquered. The 45-year-old is best known for directing music videos for Marilyn Manson, the White Stripes, and Christina Aguilera, but she's also worked in painting, sculpture, and fashion photography. For a woman who's so steeped in artistic expression, what better film directing debut than The Runaways, where Sigismondi can pay tribute to two other sets of artists: Runaways musicians Cherie Currie and Joan Jett and their film portrayers Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart.
The Runaways comes out today, so Sigismondi sat down with Movieline to discuss her career arc, the frightening story she couldn't fit into the film, and her odd identification with Kim Fowley, the Runaways' unscrupulous Svengali.
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The comedy City Island was one of the most refreshing success stories to come out of last year's Tribeca Film Festival, and Andy Garcia was one of the most refreshing success stories to come out of City Island. The 53-year-old actor delivers a revelatory performance as Vincent Rizzo, a corrections officer (and privately aspiring actor) who takes an interest in a soon-to-be-discharged prison inmate (Steven Strait) he'll eventually set up at his house on the titular island just off the Bronx. Trouble arises as his high-strung wife (Julianna Margulies), college-age daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) and smart-ass son (Ezra Miller) suspect something is up between the two -- even as they scramble to hide secrets and desires of their own. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta steers the ensuing meltdown from farce to drama to dark comedy and back again, with Garcia's conscience navigating closely alongside.
As even the actor alluded to Movieline earlier this week, it might seems odd City Island (which opens Friday) works at all. And that was just the start of our own winding chat from City Island to The Godfather to his upcoming directing effort with Anthony Hopkins, Hemingway and Fuentes.
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Matt Walsh was one-fourth of improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade's most famous lineup -- the one with fellow comic totems Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Amy Poehler that fronted the '90s Comedy Central series Upright Citizens Brigade. The 45-year-old's cult hero status has led to a number of supporting roles as a correspondent on The Daily Show, bit player in The Hangover, Role Models, and I Love You Man, and star on Comedy Central's recent Dog Bites Man. Now, as Walsh's new Spike TV sports bar comedy Players takes off, he talks to Movieline about improvisation, the college experiences that led to Players, and the kind of "postmodern" comedy he finds annoying.
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It's entirely possible you missed a small revolution that played out on daytime TV this year, in a gay storyline on One Life to Live involving Officer Oliver Fish (Scott Evans, the younger, openly gay brother of Fantastic Four star Chris Evans) and Kyle Lewis (played by straight actor Brett Claywell), an old college friend whose sensitive hunkitude draws Fish out of the closet. Sure, gays on TV are nothing new, but Kish, as fans began to lovingly refer to them, shattered the age-old image of the gay eunuch, while demonstrating, in a New Year's Eve consummation scene for the ages, that two masculine men in a committed relationship could make sensitive love without the use of a Lady Gaga backing track or cardboard box of sex toys. (Pottery Barn candles of varying heights, on the other hand, are another story.) It was transfixing, paradigm-busting stuff, heralded by media advocacy groups and perfectly timed to coincide with the gay marriage legislation fiascos of 2009.
Unfortunately, it didn't add up to ratings, which were some of the lowest in One Life to Live history. Last week, both men were informed by producers that the storyline is being dropped and that the characters would be written out of the show by April. We approached Claywell, who was still a little stunned by the news but upbeat, for the real story. What we found was a brave, thoughtful and affable actor who seems to realize he was just a party to something big.
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When we're with the ladies of The Runaways there's a lot of glum attitude and druggy malaise on display, so thank God for Michael Shannon as their Svengali producer Kim Fowley, who electrifies the movie like the lightning bolt that's often painted on his face. It's Shannon's most high-profile part since snagging an Oscar nomination in Revolutionary Road, though since then he's made Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and will soon be seen in Jonah Hex and the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
In real life, Shannon couldn't be more different from the wild lech he plays in The Runaways. Serious but also seriously funny, the actor sat down with Movieline last week to talk about working with all those young actresses, working in front of a camera in general, and working with the mysterious James Franco.
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Aside from The Runaways, Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart have appeared in three other projects together -- two Twilight installments and the Kate Hudson-directed short Cutlass -- but it's only in next week's band biopic that the two finally get to show off the rapport they've always had in real life. Each is well-cast in The Runaways, and when Movieline spoke to Fanning and Stewart yesterday in Los Angeles, they recalled their characters both literally and subconsciously: The 16-year-old Fanning is as California wholesome as Cherie Currie with the same cool, intellectual drive, while the 19-year-old Stewart is all inchoate passion and feeling, channeling Joan Jett's emotional thrusts despite her own delicate frame.
So what was it like to play two young girls on the precipice of fame when both Fanning and Stewart have been dealing with it all their life? I asked them how that felt, and how they navigated the movie's tricky depictions of sexism and teen sexuality.
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As if the buzz around the final season of Lost didn't give Emilie de Ravin enough to contend with, the Australian actress enters a whole other realm of hype this weekend starring opposite Robert Pattinson in the film Remember Me. De Ravin plays Ally, a saucy New York University student with a tragic past and a protective NYPD-veteran father (Chris Cooper); she's the type of girl who eats dessert before her entree to get the most out of life, which she knows from experience could end unexpectedly at any minute. She takes up with Tyler (Pattinson), another saucy NYU student with a tragic past and an estranged, big-shot lawyer father (Pierce Brosnan). They're all headed for a collision (literally and figuratively) in which Ally may be the toughest party -- or at least that's how de Ravin plays her, the keeper of a certain wry grace that slices through the thick machismo and urbane cynicism around her.
De Ravin talked to Movieline recently about doubling up on her Cultural Moment, how to build a back story, and her small problem with dreadlocks.
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The titular mother of Mother -- the new film from South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2006 creature thriller The Host -- is a ginseng seller and under-the-table acupuncturist, whose only child is a man in his early 20s, gifted with great looks but cursed with an under-developed mind. Her doting over the boy, who tends to get into trouble hanging out with his no-good friend, verges on the obsessional -- they share a home, every meal, and a bed at night. Then comes her worst nightmare: before her eyes, her son is snatched away by cops, as he was the last person seen with a local promiscuous teen found dead that morning. Thus commences to churn a hurricane of a performance from Korean national treasure Kim Hye-ja, perfectly cast as a frantic parent running on nothing but adrenaline and desperation in a race to find the real murderer. It's a crackerjack of a thriller. Movieline sat down recently with Joon-ho for a lively discussion about moms and monsters; it turns out the two are not always mutually exclusive.
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Kelly Killoren Bensimon has been a lot of things in her life -- model, magazine editor, author, jewelry designer, self-proclaimed equestrian, and the former wife of famous photographer Gilles Bensimon -- but within the past year, her reputation has exploded thanks to her newest and most sinister role (and landmark fight with Bethenny Frankel) on The Real Housewives of New York City, Bravo's reality show dedicated to the women of Manhattan's upper crust. Just ahead tonight's third season premiere, Bensimon talked with Movieline about fashion industry events, the intentions of Ms. Frankel, and the camera's ability to lie.
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After each Winter Olympics, American athletes typically get two weeks of residual attention before they disappear back into obscurity. That is not the case for Johnny Weir, the flashy figure skater from Coatesville, Penn., whose star has only grown brighter since the games ended on Sunday. Weir's docuseries, Be Good Johnny Weir is just over halfway through its first season on the Sundance Channel, and the skater, whose disappointing sixth place finish last week was largely believed to be political, is busy planning his future in skating, fashion and television.
Moveline caught up with the Olympian after a whirlwind day of press to discuss his experience with reality television, his friendship with Lady Gaga and the one clichéd performance that he still wants to try.
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Robert Pattinson probably didn't want to spend his Saturday at a press junket any more than the journalists who greeted him there, but we're all professionals here. Especially Pattinson, whose new film Remember Me features the young megastar in a searching departure from his Twilight turn as Edward Cullen. There's still the young torment, the dilemma of first love (with a fellow NYU student played by Emilie De Ravin) and, well, that awe-inspiring hair. But in determining what makes his character Tyler Hawkins tick, there's also a somewhat shocking awareness of mortality beneath all that gorgeous sulking. Between his aloof father (Pierce Brosnan), his compassionate mother (Lena Olin), his confidante little sister (Ruby Jerins) and the ghost of his dead older brother, Tyler is always just on the verge of some discovery -- and despite what Pattinson's fans may crave, it's not quite catharsis.
I'd love to be more specific, and I will be as Remember Me's review embargo drops prior to its March 12 opening. Until then, Pattinson helped Movieline make at least a little sense of it all at last week's press gathering in New York:
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