In Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Alan Arkin's plays Herb, a retiring Lothario who woos a beautiful wild child (played at two ages by Blake Lively and Robin Wright), then stands idly by as she becomes domesticized (and anesthetized) in an attempt to please him. It's the juiciest part he's had in quite a while, and as Arkin freely admits, he didn't want it. The 75-year-old is as prolific as he's ever been since winning the Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, but he's also choosy, and he's got a very particular set of criteria for picking roles that Miller had to adapt to in order to win him over.
In a wry interview with Movieline, Arkin expanded on that criteria and also provided unexpected, helpful tips for bloodstain removal. Who says his range has to be saved for the screen?
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Eva Mendes must have a thing for cops, because she burst on the scene as Denzel Washington's mistress in Training Day, then served as a policeman's love interest in films like Out of Time and We Own the Night. Suffice it to say, though, she's never had an onscreen love affair like the one with Nicolas Cage's loopy law enforcer in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. As a prostitute named Frankie, Mendes plays Cage's only tether to something real, but since this is a Werner Herzog film, even the duo's relative stability is skewed as can be.
A little while ago, Mendes sat down with Movieline to discuss just how out-there Lieutenant gets, but also found time to touch on the Silver Lake hipster scene and the allure of Sam Worthington and Keira Knightley.
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It's time to move Hal Holbrook off the Oscar bubble and into the fold. The 84-year-old actor delivers arguably the performance of his career in That Evening Sun, director Scott Teems's terrific adaptation of the William Gay short story "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down." Holbrook plays Abner Meecham, a Tennessean banished by his lawyer son (Walton Goggins) to a nursing home he'll soon flee in disgust. Returning to his farm, Abner discovers the Choate family -- led by ne'er-do-well patriarch Lonzo (Ray McKinnon) -- occupying the house he and his late wife built from scratch. When Abner decides to set up house in the tenant's quarters, the ensuing battle of wills between he and Lonzo zig-zags from comic to gothic to disturbingly violent -- thanks much to Holbrook's scenic route along the spectrum between righteousness and utter sociopathy. Imagine his celebrated character in Into the Wild soaked in vinegar and hung out to dry in the sweltering Tennessee sun, and that's Abner Meecham. He's quite the marvel.
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You might expect a legendary director like Werner Herzog to have an intimidating presence; after all, Herzog often seems to be drawn to incredibly outsized lead characters, and his films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are volatile feats in themselves. When I met with Herzog this month, however, he was friendly and charming, quick to smile and even eager to tease. His newest film is the Nicolas Cage starrer Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and if that title recalls the 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant that inspired it, rest assured that Herzog has made a loopy crime drama that stands on its own.
During our conversation, Herzog had plenty to say about drugs, film school, casting, Cage, and women, and he said all of it in his own delightful, inimitable way. For as much fun as Lieutenant is to watch, it's even more fun to talk to its maker.
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If there remains a fanboy or fangirl who doesn't know Jamie Campbell Bower, rest assured, the 20-year-old Brit is working on it. He first won the hearts of theater fans as Anthony in Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and he's got a trio of upcoming projects that come with strong, vocal audiences attached: The Twilight Saga: New Moon, where Bower plays the evil vampire Caius, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which finds Bower in the role of Gellert Grindewald, and Game of Thrones, a beloved set of fantasy books which HBO is hoping to make into its next big series.
Meanwhile, Bower's got fans of The Prisoner to please, as he's got one of the pivotal roles in AMC's miniseries remake. As 11-12, the enigmatic son of 2 (Ian McKellen), Bower is often silent, but -- as he revealed last night -- quite deadly. I talked to him about his Prisoner twists and the pressure of satisfying so many disparate fanbases.
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It might be unreasonable to suggest that any actor can have a career year at 28, but you can't say 2009 wasn't a whopper for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In addition to his spunky anti-romcom hit (500) Days of Summer and presence in the tentpole G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, he won a role in Christopher Nolan's mega-anticipated Inception, will host Saturday Night Live this weekend, and saw his tiny indie Uncertainty break $12,000 on one screen over the weekend in New York. The film tracks Bobby (Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (Lynn Collins), young lovers at odds over what to do for the Fourth of July. So they flip a coin, commencing a wild riff on identity, family, NYC culture and genre as one version of the couple spends the holiday evading gangsters in Manhattan, and the other visits an awkward family gathering in Brooklyn.
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For someone who never quite intended to become an actor, Nick Frost sure is having a good go at it. The British comedian rose to fame on his collaborations with Simon Pegg, including Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and they have more in store (including the alien comedy Paul and a tandem role in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn) but in the meantime, Frost can be seen as part of the sterling ensemble in Pirate Radio, directed by Richard Curtis (Love Actually).
Movieline caught up with Frost to discuss the challenges of making the boat-set comedy, and Frost was happy to share some tidbits about his upcoming, fanboy-friendly slate at the same time.
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Don't judge this weekend's two-part Liftetime movie Everything She Ever Wanted (premiering Saturday) by its cover. As basic-cable pulp goes, the adaptation of Ann Rule's true-crime bestseller is actually some wicked grade-A melodrama with a killer lead performance by Gina Gershon. Literally -- the actress plays the infamous Pat Allanson, a Southern social striver best known for marrying a younger man in pursuit of his family's fortune at whatever cost. A few gun deaths, poisonings and imprisonments later, Pat turns her predatory eye on her own sister (Rachel Blanchard), who may know too much -- or does she? Gershon settles brilliantly into those plot and character ambiguities beneath Allanson's cutthroat, larger-than-life persona.
Movieline caught up with Gershon on her way to a matinee of Bye Bye Birdie (in which she's also currently starring on Broadway) for a chat about true stories, bad girls and what makes a camp classic.
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After once laying waste to the White House and and twice devastating New York, disaster-genre kingpin Roland Emmerich leaves no metropolis unwrecked in his new blockbuster 2012. The whole globe, in fact, gets the Emmerich treatment, from a 10.5 Los Angeles quake from which Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) flees with his family to a mile-high tsunami that drowns the lower Himalayas. It's the epic culmination of Emmerich's weird dualistic vision -- utopia through dystopia, loving families bound by peril and death, cataclysm as a social movement. And it's actually kind of a blast. The filmmaker spoke to Movieline recently about why we love disasters, why his imagination can't be stopped, and why Adam Lambert isn't as big a spoiler as you might have thought.
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When General Hospital announced that James Franco would be joining the soap opera for a lengthy story arc, pop culture pundits couldn't fathom the movie star's motivation. Over here at Movieline, though, we sensed the guiding hand of Carter, Franco's frequent artistic collaborator. The two men have embarked on a wide variety of art projects that play with and deconstruct Franco's image, including a VMan photo shoot that handed the actor a flamethrower and covered his face in shaving cream, and Erased James Franco, a 63-minute film (playing November 15 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco) that finds Franco idiosyncratically recreating Rock Hudson from Seconds and Julianne Moore from Safe, as well as some of his own lesser roles.
Yesterday I spoke to Carter, who revealed that he was the mastermind who convinced Franco to appear on General Hospital -- the beginning of their most ambitious collaboration yet.
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As Jim Caviezel told me quite a few times last week, Hollywood's got a short memory, and an actor tends to be offered nothing but variations on his last big part -- a tall order, if that role was playing Jesus Christ. Since acting in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004, Caviezel hasn't necessarily been an easy actor to cast, and some of his larger projects -- like the sci-fi adventure Outlander, which was shunted off by the Weinstein Company -- haven't provided the big bump he hoped for. AMC's miniseries remake of The Prisoner, however, falls right into his wheelhouse: Not only is it getting a splashy, three-night release beginning in the spot just vacated by Mad Men, but Caviezel's role plays to his strengths, casting him as a lone man in a world that doesn't understand him (save for a few acolytes convinced by his fervor).
Movieline talked to a game, slightly punchy Caviezel about The Prisoner's theme of paranoia, a motorcycle accident that left the actor better able to relate to his character, and his unlikely friendship with co-star Ian McKellen, which crosses political lines.
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Carla Gugino's had great success as an actress -- she's a geek goddess after her Sin City cameo and her turn as Sally Jupiter in Watchmen, and she won raves on Broadway this year for Desire Under the Elms -- but she's thinking of starting a second career as a porn star. Just call her Elektra Luxx, the character she plays in boyfriend Sebastian Gutierrez's new movie Women in Trouble; it's a role that Gugino enjoyed so much that she's hoping to spin Luxx into a series of additional films. A little assertive, the slightest bit daffy, and rocked by news of an impending pregnancy, Luxx is a porn star on the brink -- and that's just where Gugino likes her.
I talked to the 38-year-old actress yesterday about Luxx's appeal, onscreen sex, and her much-anticipated reteaming with Watchmen director Zack Snyder on Sucker Punch, which Gugino was eager to discuss.
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Marrying Swiftian satire with hi-tech saboteurship and the good ol' art of the con, The Yes Men are an infamous group of agitprop pranksters who've emerged as cable news darlings and mini movie stars in their own right. Just mild-mannered and vaguely authoritative enough in demeanor to slip through security cracks, The Yes Men -- aka Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno -- assume the identities of everyone from big oil and chemical execs to World Trade Organization officials to representatives of the U.S. Government, mounting bogus press conferences and lecture appearances to make their point. (At a Canadian oil conference, for example, they posed as ExxonMobil reps, telling 20,000 industry workers they've devised a new technique that would turn the human victims of their irresponsible practices into an oil substitute called "Vivoleum.") It's all part of their all-out, highly entertaining battle against what they finger as the U.S.'s most dangerous enemy: disaster capitalism. Their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, expanded its release last week -- a full list of theaters showing the movie is here. Movieline chatted with Bichlbaum recently about his life's mission of punking with a purpose.
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When you think "Roland Emmerich disaster-film leading man," the image of John Cusack probably isn't the one that leaps straight to mind. But that's who Emmerich specifically sought for this week's epic 2012, which, for all of its floods, volcanoes and California-collapsing temblors, is something of a classically Cusackian tale of underdog romance and wry grace under pressure. The actor plays Jackson Curtis, a failed writer, husband and father who accidentally encounters word of a world-ending series of natural disasters. Jackson manages to land squarely in the middle of all of them with his estranged family, resulting in the slow correction of perhaps 2012's biggest disaster -- himself.
Cusack spoke to Movieline last week about his unlikely-ish collaboration with Hollywood's modern cataclysm kingpin, the public's love of disaster, and his own favorite classics of the genre.
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In his new thriller The Box, director Richard Kelly puts forth a thirtysomething couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) with a spiritual crossroads to consider: accept a significant financial upgrade from mysterious benefactor Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) with the tiny catch that a stranger will die for it, or continue eking out a meager existence but do so with the knowledge that there are no favors owed or strings attached. It's a conundrum that the 34-year-old Kelly himself might be familiar with, since he rose to fame on the utterly independent, inevitably dystopic visions of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, yet a financial lifeline is being dangled by a studio system (in the form of Warner Bros, which financed The Box) that can pad his future stories with budget, comfort, and potential compromise.
I talked to the writer/director last night about formulating his next move, his uneasy détente with the present day (and the influence of the Internet), and the unexpected side effects of being a creative person with biceps.
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