Harold Ramis has a busy weekend coming up: First, the veteran actor-writer-director will uncork his latest comedy, the historical Jack Black/Michael Cera farce Year One, in multiplexes nationwide. The following day, June 20, Ramis goes a little more micro at the Nantucket FiIm Festival, which will honor Ramis with its Screenwriter's Tribute and a 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters. (He'll also participate in a comedy roundtable with Ben Stiller, Peter Farrelly and John Hamburg the same day.) The comic maven spoke with Movieline recently about looking back in time -- from 25 years to two millenniums -- as well as his most underappreciated films and what he absolutely doesn't want Ghostbusters 3 to be.
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Is there any more beloved American comedy icon than Betty White? You need only have scanned the outpouring on Twitter last Thursday, when the star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls shot to the top of the trending topics following a charming appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. (It bears mentioning that she took the host on in a cutthroat match of Beer Pong -- the Official Sport of Movieline, it just so happens.)
Whether boldly paving the way for cougars decades before their time as Sue Ann Nivens, or torturing roommates with tales of her Viking ancestry as Rose Nylund, there's simply no one who could match White's masterful comic timing or gift for character. With talk already turning to the possibility of Oscar nominations for her scene-stealing, tear-jerking turn in The Proposal, Movieline had the opportunity to talk with White about her incredible career.
She was everything we hoped for and more.
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If you've cued up a children's DVD over the past few years that wasn't made by Pixar, chances are that Karey Kirkpatrick had something to do with it. His screenwriting resume is a veritable master class in family entertainment: Chicken Run, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlotte's Web are just a few of his efforts, and after making his directorial debut with Over the Hedge (just the year after he wrote the screenplay for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), he's moved on to his first live-action directing gig with the Eddie Murphy comedy Imagine That. Movieline talked to Kirkpatrick about Murphy's mystique, the film's soundtrack (for which the director himself recorded several Beatles covers), and the film he's planning that will mark a big departure from his usual family-friendliness.
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For 11 classic seasons, everybody in America knew John Ratzenberger's name. Well, at the very least they knew Cliff Claven's name, installed as he was at the corner of the Cheers serving area, spouting off made-up facts like some Miller-sipping human Wiktionary. The character actor with the unmistakable New England accent would then go on to an unlikely second career act, as Pixar's most dependable repertory player. Beginning with Toy Story, in which he voiced a pragmatic piggy bank named Hamm, Ratzenberger has gone on to appear in every Pixar release since, most recently as Up's Construction Foreman Tom. With that buoyant film sending audiences to animation heaven, and A Bug's Life's recent issue on Blu-ray, we thought it was time to spend a few minutes chatting with John Lasseter's rabbit's foot.
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After a three-year hiatus from the screen, the notorious photographer and Kids/Bully/Ken Park visionary Larry Clark is planning a comeback. And believe it or not, there are no wasted, doomed teenagers in sight: Instead, Clark is the somewhat unlikely (even to himself) choice to revive Neil Jordan's 1986 underworld thriller Mona Lisa, a London-to-New York transplant featuring Mickey Rourke and Eva Green reviving roles originated by Bob Hoskins (whose performance was nominated for an Oscar) and Cathy Tyson. In the meantime, the filmmaker spent three days assembling Chavo, a 42-second-long film for the touring shorts omnibus 42×42, which also features work by David Lynch, Abel Ferrara, Asia Argento, Charles Burnett and more than three dozen other auteurs.
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In 1995's Casper, Brad Silberling had directed the first studio release with a computer-animated title character; nine years later, he'd direct Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events -- an eccentric children's fantasy just a little too Terry Gilliamesque in scope to pose any real threat to the Harry Potter franchise. Now Silberling returns to the toy chest for his big-budget spin on Sid and Marty Krofft's Saturday morning serial, Land of the Lost, opening today.
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Though many of his famous peers like to say they'll soon make smaller, more intimate movies, only Francis Ford Coppola actually seems to be doing it. The director's latest, Tetro, is a moody family drama about young Bennie (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) reconnecting with the titular brother (Vincent Gallo) who fled the family years before to escape from their overbearing father. When Bennie unearths one of Tetro's discarded stories and secretly adapts it into an acclaimed play, the already-riven family dynamics become even more fraught.
Movieline talked with Coppola about his own familial rivalries, the criticism his films have received (including the famous franchise he regrets serializing), and the splashy action film he's unexpectedly looking forward to this year.
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Yesterday, we brought you Part One of a fascinating roundtable discussion with brilliant sitcom provocateur Norman Lear, and two of his appreciative disciples, The Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane and Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal. In Part Two, Norman recalls the Maude abortion episode shitstorm, Phil relates the dumbest network notes he's ever gotten, Seth reveals which celebrities he's pissed off, and all three commiserate over the idiotic network pseudoscience that is "audience testing."
It's after the jump.
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Like that quintessentially American art form the musical comedy, the situation comedy -- the kind performed in three, ten-minute acts on a single set, shot with multiple cameras before a studio audience, and then beamed weekly into millions of living rooms -- was born here, too, on a show called I Love Lucy. Of its many innovators to follow, however, there can no disputing that one stands head and shoulders above the rest: Norman Lear is the sitcom's Gershwin. He's also its Rodgers & Hammerstein, and its Sondheim, all rolled up in one.
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Weeks before its release this Friday, industry observers were sizing up The Hangover as the sleeper hit of the summer. Either way, director Todd Phillips has reached his peak here, corralling Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and, in a true breakthrough performance, Zach Galifianakis as a mismatched trio attempting to find their friend the morning after a spectacularly debauched Vegas bachelor party.
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There are two things I'm an unabashed fan of: sharp old broads and Pixar. Thus, when Disney came calling and offered us the chance to speak to Phyllis freakin' Diller about her appreciation for Pixar god John Lasseter (and her role in Pixar's second minor masterpiece, A Bug's Life), it was a no-brainer to accept. Before the 91-year-old comic trailblazer had to sign off to finish one of her paintings, we asked her about bugs, biopics, and Blu-Ray (the loaded disc for A Bug's Life is out now, and Diller was impressively on-point when it came to advertising it).
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That Stephan Elliott -- the Australian filmmaker who became an overnight sensation back in the mid-'90s with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert -- was able to talk to us at all is something of a miracle. After a couple post-Priscilla flops, Elliott dropped out of the game, and pursued his other passion, skiing. That led to a horrific accident that saw him tumbling off the ledge of a cliff in the French Alps. As he was air-lifted to the nearest hospital, hemorrhaging internally and the nearest life-saving transfusion simply too far away, a doctor told him to make his peace: He had ten minutes to live. He woke up five days later in a hospital.
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On a warm, sunny afternoon at the legendary Hotel du Cap, about 30 minutes outside Cannes, Willem Dafoe sat down to discuss Antchrist, the press, Lars von Trier, and why he didn't notice much acting in his latest film.
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Jessalyn Gilsig's first big break came in 1999, with a guest-starring role on The Practice. So impressed was creator David E. Kelley with the Canadian actress with the large, expressive eyes, he created a part specifically for her on high school drama Boston Public. Later came roles on some of television's most passionately followed series: shows like NYPD Blue, Prison Break, Friday Night Lights, and Heroes.
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It's entirely conceivable that you could enter a multiplex today and have a Clifton Collins Jr. marathon. Start things off on a sweet and low-key note with his role as Amy Adams' one-armed love interest in Sunshine Cleaning, kick them up a notch with his turn as a psychopathic gangster in Crank 2: High Voltage, and then end it with a galactic bang, watching him kick some Starfleet ass as Romulan heavy Ayel in the blockbuster Star Trek reboot. The versatile and hotly in-demand actor has lots more coming up -- including a ballsplosive turn in Mike Judge's Extract -- but he managed to carve out some time from his schedule to tell Movieline about how he never lets it get to his head.
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