The mood is one of cautious contentment since the big announcement that Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin would be tag-teaming Oscar-hosting duties this year. (Movieline, meanwhile, was pleased to see that the Academy had come around to taking our advice on such matters, and can only hope they similarly see the light regarding our upcoming post, "They Should Totally Hold the Oscars On That World's Biggest Cruise Ship.") In any case, Martin and Baldwin seem a fitting choice -- their names even sound like a throwback comedy duo; we've compiled for you a list of talents these two veterans might draw upon to spice up the proceedings.
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One of the most important college goals is to craft the perfect schedule -- a delicate balance between ballbusting Organic Chemistry labs and the 90-minute nap found in any course containing "Postmodern," "Literary" or "Criticism" in its title. From the lowliest junior college to the corridors of the Ivy League, course selection can make or break a semester. With its endowment in a freefall, Harvard has decided to throw a Hail Mary in that direction by offering a new Sociology course with HBO's The Wire as its central text. For all the students wait-listed by the big H or without the proper familial connections to get over the Longfellow Bridge, you can feel content knowing that students in Cambridge are doing exactly what you do every Saturday: Rolling up a gram of mid-grade, watching David Simon's magnum opus and eventually making a Taco Bell run. Only those Crimson losers have to take notes.
But Harvard isn't the first school making use of the idiot box in the classroom. Your proof arrives in today's Movieline Nine.
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During World War II, Americans channeled their civilian energy into war bonds, scrap metal drives and USO volunteer efforts. Over fifty years later, our country is again in peril but we choose to take our minds off of combat with a different kind of distraction: gross-out television. In honor of this shift in wartime priorities and the upcoming Halloween holiday, Movieline has compiled some of the creepiest TV shows on basic cable today. While scanning through this article instead of reading about this weekend's Baghdad bombings, consider which is worse: knowing that pedophiles in the Southwest are pleasuring themselves to TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras or at this moment, a Discovery Health camera crew is staging a reenactment of an Arby's bathroom birth?
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The first official clip from New Moon premiered Monday on Entertainment Tonight. Entitled "Jacob's Transformation" and running a lean 53 seconds, only about half of its material is new; if you've seen Taylor Lautner's midair wolfcake morph once, you've seen it a hundred times. Unless, that is, you watch it and his lupine nemesis in hi-def on iTunes, in which case you might start to see it as a comedy. Read on for a closer look.
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This morning, TLC slapped a lawsuit on Jon Gosselin, the media-circuit-frequenting and production-halting patriarch of Jon & Kate Plus 8, claiming he breached his contract multiple times in the past months. The lawsuit was filed two weeks after TLC announced that it would phase out Jon and retitle the series Kate Plus Eight. Curiously, hours after the network dumped Jon publicly, the Ed Hardy poster boy claimed that the network was exploiting his children and forced TLC to stop production. Executives at The Learning Channel, who have been documenting the Gosselin family over the past two years, remember events differently...(cue milky dissolve)
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"Ridley Scott is attached to direct." It's among the most abused phrases in Hollywood, arising every few months as the nearly 72-year-old filmmaker tacks a new project on to his schedule, both dazzling the world with his productivity and cracking it up with his delusion. Brilliant as he is (or can be), this man is no Steven Soderbergh or Werner Herzog, and today's announcement of Scott's ninth directorial development in three years has Movieline's bookmaking department laying odds on the likelihood (or lack thereof) of any of them seeing the light of day. Place your bets after the jump.
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Several hundred journalists packed the Grand Ballroom of The Dorchester today for a press panel for Fantastic Mr. Fox, which kicks off the 53rd BFI London Film Festival later this evening. Here are nine things we took away from our shared time with George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Wes Anderson, Jarvis Cocker, and others:
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Well, Heroes has gone and done it: They've kissed the lesbian. The kiss, which occurs between Claire the indestructible cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) and her college roommate Gretchen (Californicatiom's Madeline Zima) has been teased for months, and will finally air this Monday. Like shark-jumping, lesbian-kissing is a wet, toothy affair that demands a great amount of agility and courage on the part of the actors, and invariably results in a precipitous tumble in show quality seconds after it airs. (And, in some extreme cases, elicits an outright cancellation.) We've gotten an advanced peek at the kiss in question -- let's see how it measure up to some of TV's greatest girl-on-girl suck-face-fests!
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The first network cancellation in each season always stings, and so it goes for the Mischa Barton comeback vehicle The Beautiful Life, whose aborted, two-episode run left a trail of broken hearts including those of conspiracy theorist costar Sara Paxton, the less than a million Beautiful Life viewers, and a handful of Brazilian fans who watched via iTunes. We hate to see television fans suffer, and knowing that there are inconsolable Americans clinging to tear-stained, homemade petitions and Mischa Barton-covered vision boards is too much for us to handle at Movieline HQ. Take solace, then, in these other quickly canceled series that surely could have taken off if they'd only reached those amazing third episodes.
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My TV, my laptop, my bus stop: Fame's cast of unknowns keep popping into my life at the most unwanted moments, like celebrity-worshiping Jehovah's Witnesses encouraging me to examine their Fame pamphlets and perhaps sign up for a "Claim Your FAME" essay writing contest while I'm at it. Then there's that ubiquitous Coca-Cola-like logo, meant to evoke $$$/power/corporate backing/whatever, and suitable, like all religious iconography, to wear around my neck and ward off evils, like anonymity or being dropped from my label. Where was I? Oh right. Fame opens tomorrow. It hasn't screened for many outlets, but the reception from those for whom it has has been overwhelmingly negative. Here's the nine ugliest reactions to emerge so far.
9. "The 2009 version is pure hell - boring, redundant and talentless. In attempting to "reinvent" the original story, screenwriters Aline Brosh McKenna and Allison Burnett offer us the plot of "High School Musical" without its charm and appealing musical beat." -- David Foucher, EDGE
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Shame on us for guessing such predictable Emmy winners! Boo, Movieline! I mean, we were mostly right, but our clairvoyance is a Pyrrhic victory. No amount of correct hypothesizing saved us from a three-hour telecast marked with "highlights" like an overlong Dr. Horrible interruption and the Branson, Missouri stagewear of Dancing with the Tassles non-nominee Karina Smirnoff. The night's nine most tolerable and intolerable occurrences after the jump.
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The reviews and the ratings for The Jay Leno Show are already in and the first impressions of NBC's prime-time experiment seem to be universal: Jay is still, well, Jay. His jokes are dull, his new set is creepy and don't even get anyone started on that Dan Finnerty Car Wash sketch. Let's take a look at some of the critical observations after the jump.
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1. (PROUD) It's Time to Start the Music
Lady Gaga looks no further than her own Muppet-slaying wardrobe when selecting a date for last night's Video Music Awards, one Mr. Kermit the Frog. On the red carpet outside Radio City Music Hall, she woos Kermit with a red-light-district pterodactyl costume. This is because she's Lady Gaga, and that's one of her five settings.
2. (UGLY) Take a Bow. Please.
Madonna opens the ceremony with a speech about Michael Jackson, comparing his lost childhood to the death of her mother when she was six, or something. Narcissism: the one constant in Madonna's career of reinvention. She adds, "Blanket Jackson's childhood was ruined by the death of his father. My daughter Lourdes's childhood was ruined by untamed Spanish eyebrows."
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While our man in Cannes had a look at Lars von Trier's incendiary, extraordinary Antichrist, I couldn't help but chase it down for my own look this afternoon as my first film in Toronto. It's all downhill from here, I think; von Trier's tale of anonymous He (TIFF's busiest man Willem Dafoe), She (a fearless, unforgettable Charlotte Gainsbourg) and the bloody dead-end of their love lives up to the gross-out hype promised since spring. And though it's probably a film to which no single review can possibly do justice, those first impressions are a good start. Nine of mine (and some spoilers, sorry) after the jump.
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This is why studios don't screen some movies for critics. After a summer during which Bradley Cooper and Sandra Bullock hits combined for $350 million at the box office, the harsh reality of September has set in with their romantic quasi-farce All About Steve. The early reviews are in, and you might say they could be... better. But how bad could Steve really be? Let's take a sampling after the jump.
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