Appearances can be deceiving, and as audiences learn in Friday's testosterone-fueled sequel The Expendables 2, even Dolph Lundgren's volatile Gunnar Jensen has a few surprising secrets to share. Such as: In addition to being a habitual alcoholic and reformed-but-unpredictable member of the squad, Gunnar's revealed to be a chemical engineering savant and former Fulbright scholar — elements cheekily borrowed from Lundgren's real life.
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Before she was cast in Gary Ross's The Hunger Games as District 5's elusive Tribute — known only by the nickname "Foxface," per her wily dexterity and appearance — actress Jacqueline Emerson was a devoted fan of the YA series. Big time. "I was obsessed!" she told Movieline ahead of this week's Hunger Games DVD/Blu-ray release. "It was my new book series that I was in love with."
Upon getting the part (a connection to Ross's daughter put her in the director's sights), the high schooler had to keep her secret from friends and concerned teachers for months — and now, over a year and $684 million in Hunger Games box office receipts later, the one-time child rocker (Devo 2.0, anyone?) is looking to her next adventure with college and a Spike Lee project on the horizon.
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Tony Gilroy's tumultuous history with the Jason Bourne franchise is, as he calls it, "well-documented." But after penning or co-scripting the first three Matt Damon-starring spy pics in the series — navigating a maelstrom of widely reported behind the scenes beefs, including Damon's snipe last year at Gilroy's Bourne Ultimatum script — the writer-director was lured back to this weekend's The Bourne Legacy by the opportunity to create a new secret agent (Jeremy Renner) to build insidious political conspiracies and impossible action sequences and existential questions around. "In a strange way," he tells Movieline, "I felt more of a personal connection with this character than I ever felt with Jason Bourne."
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Filmmaker and actress Julie Delpy won accolades at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2007 with her hilarious 2 Days In Paris, in which she starred opposite Adam Goldberg as a couple who stop off in Paris for a short visit, staying with her parents en route back to the U.S. Delpy, who wrote and directed the feature that did solid numbers in release jiggered the formula for a sequel, 2 Days In New York, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. This time, she stars opposite Chris Rock, and similarly to Paris her family factors into the dialog-heavy plot that's riddled with eccentricity, social commentary and crazy mishaps.
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Rashida Jones filtered her own relationship history — and a few heart-wrenching break-ups — into this weekend's Celeste and Jesse Forever, an L.A.-set look at one couple's struggle to remain besties through separation, divorce, and the complicated disentanglement that follows the world's best-worst break-up.
Co-written with fellow actor Will McCormack, whom Jones dated for three weeks years ago, the sweet, affecting dramedy is peppered with moments inspired by real life events that carry Celeste through her journey of painful but necessary self-discovery — including one legendarily awful date with a guy who turned out to be, in Jones' words, "a serial masturbator."
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At one point, Kate Beckinsale remembers, director Len Wiseman thought of tapping her for a cameo as a three-breasted hooker in his Total Recall remake. Luckily for the actress, Wiseman (who directed the British beauty in Underworld and Underworld: Evolution — and happens to be her husband in real life) instead cast Beckinsale in the much juicier role of Lori, the adoring wife of factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) whom Quaid discovers is actually an undercover agent hellbent on killing him. Consider that a divorce, indeed.
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Danish comedy duo Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam would like you to know they are not pedophiles. Not that accusations of creative indecency would stop them from toying with the line of good taste, as they do to hilarious effect in the R-rated Danish sex comedy Klown. The Curb Your Enthusiasm-style road trip comedy which they wrote and co-star in, happens to be the funniest, most outrageous film of the year, and it has already been acquired for American remake by Todd Phillips and Danny McBride.
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Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lead ArtReview magazine's list of the 100 most powerful artists in the world last October. The Beijing-based artist, photographer, documentarian, architect, activist, dissident, avid-Tweeter and charismatic father made a splash on the international scene when he helped Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron create Beijing's National Stadium - more commonly known as the Bird's Nest due to its design - which gave a jubilant government both a cornerstone and bragging material for the Beijing Olympics. While immensely proud of the project, Mr. Ai denounced the regime and famously criticized officials for its treatment of dissidents and its human rights record in the lead-up to the event. Freelance journalist Alison Klayman met the artist through her roommate in 2008 by chance as he prepped an exhibition of photos he took while living in New York in the '80s and early '90s. Initially commissioned to do a short video on the fly, Klayman, who lived in China from 2006 - 2010 producing shows for PBS Frontline, National Public Radio and A.P. took on a larger doc about Ai Weiwei. In the film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry which will be released this weekend via Sundance Selects, she captured him being assaulted by police, confronting police, promoting his view of human rights and traveling to acclaim overseas.
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If William Friedkin’s adaptation of The Exorcist left you feeling a tad jumpy, just wait until you see Killer Joe.
After a six-year absence from the Cineplex, the 76-year-old Friedkin returns to the big screen on Friday with arguably the most disturbing film of his 45-year career. more »
Jodie Foster returns to the screen – and to sci-fi – in next spring’s Elysium, the latest from District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. Speaking with Movieline today at her first-ever Comic-Con, Foster described the dystopian future of the film, in which she plays a methodical bureaucrat controlling the “border” of an artificially-created space station (a character now named Delacourt - so take note, internet ). The movie-loving polymath also waxed ecstatic about her one-time Panic Room co-star Kristen Stewart, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and her current obsession: HBO’s True Blood.
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After creating a public persona with at least as much swagger as the character with whom he’s most strongly identified — Star Trek’s Captain Kirk — it came as little surprise that the first thing William Shatner said at the beginning of Movieline's interview for his new documentary was an explicit statement of purpose. “My film Get a Life is debuting July 28th on EPIX,” he said without being asked. “We’re going to show it at Comic-Con on Saturday – and we’re all excited about it.”
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Why do we believe, or need to believe, in the possibilities that lie beyond the laws of physics and known science — the unlikely, irrational hope that suggest something more exists in the universe, be it spiritual or simply supernatural? Actor Cillian Murphy explores these Big Questions in Rodrigo Cortes' Red Lights as Tom Buckley, a paranormal debunker who goes head-to-head with a powerful pop psychic (Robert De Niro) whose self-proclaimed powers to bend spoons and read minds may be mere parlour tricks compared to what he's really capable of.
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Rebooting the Spider-Man franchise just five years after Sam Raimi completed his own $2.4 billion trilogy was a controversial move in itself, let alone the idea of revisiting Spidey’s origin story, one of the most familiar and popular beginnings in comic book lore, yet again. But whatever qualms you might have about The Amazing Spider-Man treading familiar ground — this time with Andrew Garfield as a skate-boarding high-schooler/vigilante nursing abandonment issues — director Marc Webb himself wrestled with the very same issues from the start.
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Magic Mike’s Cody Horn probably could have taken a more direct line to acting – her father is former Warner Bros. president Alan Horn, the veteran studio exec who recently took the helm at Disney – but life took her on a more circuitous path. A passion for movies early on (“I read my first script when I was 9”) led to internships and script reading, and she also earned a degree in philosophy at NYU and modeled, but it wasn’t until she met Joel Schumacher that she was cast in her first film, at 22. Now, coming off a turn opposite Channing Tatum as the pragmatic Brooke in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, Horn has a host of intriguing roles ahead of her – and she’s determined to avoid being the traditional leading lady.
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It’s easy to dismiss the films of Tyler Perry, undisputed king of a niche multi-media empire of his own making, as broad, caricature-laden comedy populated by what Spike Lee famously labeled “coonery buffoonery.” But beneath the be-wigged, slapstick-y heft of Perry’s most famous character, Madea, and her often violent crusades in the name of family values — as seen in Friday’s Madea’s Witness Protection, the sassy grandmother’s seventh big-screen outing — lies a fount of subversive discussions of race, class, and self-examination. The only question is: Is Tyler Perry aware of it?
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