Last night, the New Moon stars pounced like shapeshifting werewolves onto the late show circuit to promote this month's second apocalyptic box office event. With a week full of talk show appearances ahead of them (listed here for your Twilight TiVoing pleasure), Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner threw down some of their their meatiest segment-ready anecdotes on Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien and The Jay Leno Show, both relating to rabid Twilight fans they've encountered. (Note: If you are a mid-forties mother from Denver who once offered Lautner your Team Taylor panties at a Barnes & Noble signing, you might not want to click through.)
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If you've ever considered breaking your contract with the cable network who continues to edit your reality show, consider Jon Gosselin's plight. In the past year, reality television's most notorious father of multiples violated his contract with TLC repeatedly to collect money from The Insider and a few assorted Vegas casinos who paid him to shlub around their pool parties. Gosselin then accused the network of violating child labor laws (after learning that he would be booted from Jon & Kate Plus 8), and now he is paying the ultimate price in the edit room.
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Fox Searchlight isn't wasting any time getting over its slumpy fall trifecta of Whip It, Amelia and Gentlemen Broncos, choosing instead to play its ace in the Oscar hole with next month's Crazy Heart. A few strategic early screenings resulted in exactly the buzz the studio intended for Best Actor hopeful Jeff Bridges, and now the film's trailer reveals to the rest of us a few slivers of the folksy woe and redemption that the Academy is likely to reward next spring.
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There were several brilliant moments in last night's episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, including the discovery that in the ten years since Seinfeld went off the air, George Costanza developed an iPhone application called iToilet that allows you to locate the nearest public bathroom. (Alas, he invested with, and later lost his fortune to, Bernie Madoff.) Another was a tongue-in-cheek parody of Michael Richard's racial slur-laced tirade at the Laugh Factory in 2006.
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Suddenly, it's the plot du jour: Old friends, younger wives, and even younger children get together on a vacation. Sometimes, it leads to a Guitar Hero commercial. Sometimes, it leads to MURDER! And sometimes, as in the case of the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups (which just debuted its trailer), it leads to a Saturday Night Live cast reunion. Sandler and his SNL cronies David Spade, Chris Rock and Rob Schneider team up in the film with Kevin James, who unexpectedly had a bigger hit this year than any of them.
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Gordon Willis is the best cinematographer America ever produced. There. I said it. If he'd only shot the Godfather trilogy, Manhattan, Zelig and All the President's Men (let alone Pennies From Heaven, Interiors, Klute and Broadway Danny Rose), he'd have at least earned consideration among the greats like Gregg Toland and Billy Bitzer and his Oscar-winning contemporaries Conrad Hall and Haskell Wexler. And very few would argue against Willis being the best American cinematographer to never win an Oscar -- until tomorrow, that is, when Willis will join Roger Corman as a recipient of a long, long over lifetime-achievement Academy Award. In a series of clips after the jump, see some of what the Academy missed (and is finally making up for) all these years.
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It is a sad presidential term for television comedy when the nation's leader does not have any defining tics, replicable Arkansas drawl or endearing mispronunciations that can be mined weekly for easy prime time laughs. With Saturday Night Live hard up for President Obama impressions (Sorry, Fred Armisen), and South Park nursing their GLAAD bruises from last week's slur-heavy episode, America is ready for an easy target, which Fox News has hand-delivered in the form of polarizing and theatrical talking head, Glenn Beck. In his easy to impersonate delivery, and half of the nation's eagerness for a good Beck bashing, He Who Shall Not Be Named has become the Henry Kissinger of 2009.
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Quentin Tarantino's obsession with Asian pop culture knows virtually no limits, which may or may not have inspired his appearance in a new commercial campaign for Japanese cell phone giant SoftBank. The spots themselves haven't yet emerged online as far as I can tell, but a recent SoftBank press conference announcing the ads -- complete with "Uncle Tara-chan" outtakes -- should hold you over just fine until the real thing(s). Click through for the video.
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So now you finally get to see what all the hoopla surrounding Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass was about at Comic-Con last summer, as Lionsgate has released a teaser trailer online. With virtually no residual traces of his native British accent, 19-year-old next-big-thing Aaron Johnson stars, lending his aspiring superhero a warm, nerd-hot vulnerability and just the right amount of Steve-from-Sex and the City, Brooklynese warble to his narration.
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Twilight wasn't Taylor Lautner's movie -- it was Robert Pattinson's. Sickly, sparkly, dreamy-haired, runs-like-a-girl (according to Kristen Stewart) Robert Pattinson. New Moon, on the other hand, is Taylor's and Taylor's alone, the culmination of a destiny forged one frigid, February morning in 1992, when a future superstar pulled in his first breath, then flexed his tiny, newborn abs to the rapturous applause of the entire Grand Rapids Metropolitan Hospital obstetrics department.
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Last month, a GQ profile painted January Jones as the anti-Betty Draper: an All-American girl who noshes on T.G.I. Friday's queso dip, slams six beers and then shares a little too much during transcontinental flights. And last night, the lovely Mad Men actress further cemented her heartland fan base by deriding Jimmy Fallon's Late Night version of beer pong, telling us just how she parties.
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Imagine if Precious had a sequel that brought back all you favorite characters -- Precious, her mom, Mrs. Weiss, Cornrows, Nurse John, and the rest -- only this time around, it isn't another harrowing story about a beaten-down soul who finds unlikely redemption in an inner-city classroom. Rather, they'd reunited for a wacky road trip aboard a runaway bingo bus in search of $1 million in buried bank-robber loot! And it's called It's a Precious, Precious, Precious, Precious World. Sound good? No? It sounds like an utterly ridiculous departure in tonality and subject matter from what made the first Precious so successful?
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Last night's Hamilton Behind the Camera Awards ceremony was as packed with meta-literal moments as it was with unabashed enthusiasm for the cinema. Onscreen talents such as Jason Bateman, Bill Paxton and Diane Kruger mounted the Highlands stage to thank their behind-the-camera colleagues, who then jumped in front of our cameras to accept their awards. But the most meta moment was claimed when Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt honored screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber by ditching their presenter script to improv how 500 Days of Summer would have looked without Neustadter and Weber's screenplay.
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Earlier in the week we reported how Brüno's DVD and Blu-ray release would restore the film to its original state in full, glorious La ToyaVision. But to further entice you, Universal has sweetened the deal with some bonus material starring disgraced MLB player/manager, Pete Rose. (Except they put the scene on YouTube, defeating the enticement purposes somewhat.) In it, Rose is invited to kick back on the same Pedrolounger as La Toya and Paula Abdul. Sadly, it's a gag that offers decreasing comedy returns, smacking of the trying-too-hardness that weighed down most of this box office underperformer. Still, it's nice to see Rose hasn't lost his capacity for compassion, and that he clings steadfastly to the No Body Hair On My Sushi policy enacted following an unfortunate incident at the Reds' 1990 World Series celebration banquet.
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It's been a long, interesting ride for the Sherlock Holmes promotional campaign, which began with a shot of Robert Downey Jr stripped to the waist and now finishes with a final trailer full of homoerotic banter. "This is not your father's Sherlock Holmes!" the trailer cries. "Did your father's Sherlock Holmes flirt with Watson all day? Did he sublimate his sexual urges for Jude Law into a simultaneous, side-by-side orgasm of gunfire? Did Moriarty sit this one out, biding his time until the proper threesome could be written into the sequel?"
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