The last year's been good to Anthony Mackie. Not only did he star in one of the most acclaimed and awarded movies of 2008, Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War thriller The Hurt Locker, but he's got Night Catches Us at Sundance, where he acts opposite Kerry Washington as a former Black Panther.
Mackie's always a fun, candid interview subject, and when Movieline spoke to him just before the festival began, the 30-year-old actor opened up about his new film, his bold Bigelow prediction, and the problems he's faced lately in Hollywood.
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Josh Radnor is suddenly a very busy man. Most people know him as the titular character from How I Met Your Mother (he'd be the "I," not the mother), but over his summer hiatus, he wrote, directed and starred in a relationship dramedy called happythankyoumoreplease that's suddenly become one of the buzziest films at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
How is Radnor dealing with his film's sudden anointment as a must-buy? Movieline sat down with him hours ago in the midst of all the frenzy.
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24 hours after catching Restrepo at Sundance -- a war documentary that offers an unprecedented glimpse at a full year's deployment in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan -- and I still can't shake its startling, enthralling, and frequently devastating images. If anything, they've only embedded themselves deeper. Yesterday, I had an opportunity to speak at length with the two filmmakers, veteran war correspondents both, responsible for bringing Restrepo to the screen: Sebastian Junger, best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, and award-winning photojournalist, Tim Hetherington. Our conversation follows.
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Here at Movieline, we're proud Franco-philes. Whether we're watching James Franco's guest appearance on 30 Rock, dissecting every episode of his General Hospital stint, or unmasking the real reason behind his soap opera inspiration (as Franco's artistic collaborator Carter told us, it's all background for an upcoming film the two are planning), we're happy to follow Franco's every move simply because the moves make up such a notable zig-zag.
Now, the actor has come to Sundance with two more feathers in his multimedia cap. Festivalgoers caught him last night in Howl, where he stars as poet Allen Ginsberg for directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, and he'll soon be screening his NYU student film Herbert White, which he wrote and directed himself. Movieline caught up with Franco today to shed some light on his novel career.
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As the 2010 Sundance Film Festival beings today, Kerry Washington's accomplished the the indie cred-burnishing feat of having two buzzy films here. The first is Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, where Washington reunites with her She Hate Me costar Anthony Mackie in the story of two ex-Black Panthers, and the second is Rodrigo Garcia's female triptych Mother and Child, which made its well-received debut in Toronto last fall and costars Annette Bening and Naomi Watts.
Before either of us left for Sundance, I spoke to Washington about her festival entries, the limits of control, and the challenges of her current Broadway stint in David Mamet's Race.
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Wes Anderson knows as well as anybody that around this time every year, we all have it pretty easy predicting the winner of the Best Animated Feature prize at the Oscars -- just inscribe the statuette with Pixar's most recent production, and move along to the harder categories. Not so in 2009, when a surfeit of excellent animation resulted not only in an expansion of the Animated Feature category, but a handful of legitimate contenders to upset Pixar come March. Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of them, a lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion gem that signified a creative milestone for a director long prone to accusations of merely repeating himself with every film. Fox's ambition, warmth, humor and style amount to the most accomplished and mature of Anderson's films to date -- a kid's film for grown-ups, a wry meditation on innocence lost. Those qualities -- not to mention its A-list voice pedigree boasting George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray -- should position Mr. Fox well in the ongoing Oscar race against Up.
Anderson spoke to Movieline last week about making the most of awards season, the virtues of animation versus live-action, how he accidentally cast himself as a weasel, and how the French messed up his plans to see Avatar.
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James McAvoy has more than held his own against some of the more domineering screen presences of the last few years, from Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland to Angelina Jolie in Wanted. Now his latest, the semi-biopic The Last Station, drops him into the eye of an ensemble hurricane featuring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and Paul Giamatti. The 30-year-old-Scotman plays Valentin Bulgakov, an idealistic young Russian recruited to work as the secretary of the saintly, celebrated novelist Leo Tolstoy (Plummer). But what begins as an act of moral conscience soon deteriorates into a hot political mess as Tolstoy's inheritance-obsessed wife Sofya (Mirren) and estate overseer Chertkov (Giamatii) vie for Valentin's loyalty. Which is to say nothing of the young man's Tolstoyan vow of celibacy, which is awfully hard to uphold with the beautiful Masha (Kerry Condon) slinking into his bed in the middle of the night.
These outsized personalities orbit around McAvoy's wide-eyed historical witness, with mixed (at best) overall results. Eschewing his co-stars' theatrics, McAvoy delivers at least one modulated success -- a winning performance in which every embattled optimist will likely see a little bit of him- or herself. He spoke with Movieline this week about his crash-course in Russophilia, annoying Christopher Plummer, and the naughtiness of rumors.
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Cougar Town/Scrubs showrunner Bill Lawrence's candor makes you want to pry at him all day. Following a spirited TCA panel where he sat alongside peers from The Middle and Modern Family and riffed on, among other things, Conan O'Brien's liberation and Cougar Town's questionable title, I -- along with the horde of journos -- found myself racking up only more questions. For instance, would he really change Cougar Town to C. Town, as he'd mentioned offhand? Was there real benefit to doing a ninth season of Scrubs? And when is this fragmented network TV viewership going to vault a scripted series to the heights of American Idol? All of Lawrence's answers were provocative, and he also found time to wax optimistic on Conan's future.
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In Andrea Arnold's drama Fish Tank, Michael Fassbender plays Connor, a charming rogue who begins to date the mother of surly Essex teenager Mia (Katie Jarvis) but turns the entire family upside down when Mia, too, begins to fall for him. Fassbender himself has managed to seduce and shake up Hollywood; after impressing (and dieting) in Steve McQueen's Hunger, then swanning through Inglourious Basterds as the debonair Hickox, he's got directors like Steven Soderbergh, Cary Fukunaga, and David Cronenberg falling at his feet to work with him.
As Fish Tank is readied for its U.S. debut, Fassbender talked to Movieline about its tricky moments and his intriguing projects to come.
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There's something so wholesome and reassuringly American about Matthew Broderick that it's no surprise he pops the most in roles that let him play against it. Whether it's the subversive streak he brought to Ferris Bueller's Day Off or the more venal elements of his character in Election, Broderick's nice-guy persona lets him get away with things that other actors would be unsympathetic doing. His latest addition to the rogues gallery is pot-smoking misanthrope Ben in his friend Josh Goldin's Wonderful World, who's relentlessly pessimistic until he falls for an upbeat immigrant (Sanaa Lathan).
I spoke to Broderick today at the Standard in Los Angeles, where the 47-year-old actor opened up about the way he sees the world, his relationship with Ferris director John Hughes before he passed away, and the thorny case of Kenneth Lonergan's eternally-delayed Margaret.
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Verne Troyer has been the butt of jokes so often -- whether it's in a Mike Myers comedy or in a stint on The Surreal Life -- that you have to wonder whether it's gotten to him. Here he is with a rare dramatic role in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, where the 2-foot, 8-inch actor actually gets to hurl the insults for once, and yet Troyer couldn't be more self-effacing and doubtful about his own ability. When I sat down to talk to Troyer for Movieline, intending to congratulate him for his performance, I ended up having to convince him it was worth the kudos.
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Michael Cera's funny, sweet new comedy Youth in Revolt represents a curious turn for the 21-year-old actor, whose critics most often accuse him of playing variations of himself in all his geeky, ironic glory. Revolt seems to agree in part, casting Cera as Nick Twisp, a lovesick (and more than mildly horny) teen in pursuit of his elusive dream girl Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday). Yet director Miguel Arteta's film also implodes expectations by featuring Cera as Nick's alter ego Francois Dillinger, a thin-mustached, chain-smoking creature of unspeakable wickedness and carnality who urges Nick to upend his life in a plot to win Sheeni's heart.
The two go at it credibly and often hilariously, heightening the dramatic stakes -- and adding, according to Cera, an unintentional twist -- of the story found in C.D. Payne's beloved source novel. The actor spoke to Movieline about nailing his adaptation, acting against himself, Arrested Development and why trouble does (or doesn't) love him.
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Gorgeous Texan Jake Pavelka sent thousands of hearts soaring during last season's Bachelorette when the commercial pilot returned to the show after being dismissed by Jillian Harris to warn her about a smarmy suitor will ill intentions. Tonight, Pavelka returns to ABC to hopefully find love among 25 women that range from a Nebraskan nanny to a woman allegedly sleeping with a crew member.
Before the holidays, Movieline spoke to Jake as he relaxed in sunny Dallas, about discovering the therapeutic elements of the show, the preparation that goes into each exotic date and his short acting career playing a young Chuck Norris.
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We introduced you to Jeremy Renner in The Verge a little over six months ago, when the rugged The Hurt Locker star with the deceptively boyish face (he'll be 39 on Thursday) was still relatively unknown. That was then; now, Renner's moment has arrived. As Staff Sergeant William James -- a courageous, crazy, compassionate military technician who thrives on defusing bombs for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit stationed in Iraq -- Renner has crafted a war film hero for our fraught times. It's a marvelous performance, both subtle and bombastic, and we therefore offer it up as another "For Your Reconsideration." Fresh off shooting Ben Affleck's second directorial effort and busily running the awards season gantlet, we checked back in with Renner to see how life has changed since the film's release.
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Since being plucked from obscurity in the early 1970s by Factory filmmaker Paul Morrissey to star in a pair of avant garde monster flicks, German actor Udo Kier has evolved into a full-fledged cult icon. Oscillating comfortably between the art house and grindhouse, Kier's hypnotic and menacing ice-blue gaze has peered out from the dark corners of a vast number of low-budget horror films, countless indies -- including several by longtime friend and collaborator Lars von Trier -- and even the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. His current output is no exception: In the so-bad-it's-amazing Christmas Eve slasher Fall Down Dead, Kier plays The Picasso Killer, for whom murder is delicious kunst. (It just had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run, but several high-visibility L.A. billboards suggests a The Room - style afterlife might await it.) He follows that with a turn as a non-murderous acting teacher in Werner Herzog's true-crime drama, My Son My Son What Have Ye Done. We spoke with the actor about everything from playing the original sparklepire, to his infamous collaborations with people like Andy Warhol and Madonna, to the true, gardening- and cooking-loving Udo the public rarely gets to see.
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