It's funny, the things you "learn" while writing a post on Matt LeBlanc biting Lisa Kudrow's style. Take this tidbit, gleaned from Kudrow's Wikipedia page: "It is official that Kudrow, and her other 5 cast members from Friends are getting together for a movie due out sometime in 2011." No, it is not official -- in fact, it is utterly unlikely, no matter how many British tabloids regularly generate the rumor. Until that hypothetical day, then, you're just going to have to enjoy video of Kudrow revisiting her Friends ballad "Smelly Cat," which she did last night at Club Nokia in Los Angeles.
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Exactly two months ago, Fox Searchlight uncorked the first trailer for Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. To say it failed would be kind; piling the cute, the twee, the bouncy and flouncy into one star-studded burst, the trailer condescended to young demographics and rekindled a wholly unnecessary pro-/anti-Anderson debate among adults. In short, it sold anything but the movie the filmmaker has spent two painstaking years lovingly crafting from scratch. It deserved better. But did it get it with the latest trailer?
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It looks like Robert Zemeckis is going to shoot the rest of his movies using motion-capture CG, and when the trailer for his version of A Christmas Carol begins, it's hard to see why. Incredible expense and computing power appears to have been used to...make people look like people. Seems kinda redundant, no? And then the ghosts come, and it quickly becomes apparent what mo-cap could do that real-life shooting could not: lard the classic Dickens tale with as many insane 3-D action sequences as possible.
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Head injuries are no laughing matter, even when the victim themselves joke about their own mishaps -- which was exactly the case with Natasha Richardson before she succumbed to the tragic, fatal fall she suffered on a Quebec ski hill earlier this year. So news that Conan O'Brien took a spill Friday during the taping of a Tonight Show segment that was serious enough to land him in Cedars-Sinai and bring production to a halt sent us into our weekends with a lingering unease. (And sure enough, Jay Leno voiced our darkest fears when he made an insensitive joke about the incident on his show last night, telling Kevin Eubanks how they very nearly earned their own timeslot back.)
Thankfully, the old Conan we know and love returned to his perch last night, perhaps a bit shaken and a shade more pallid than usual, if that's possible, as he described his scary experiences.
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After promising a whole lotta Krueger back in July and offering a whole lotta nothin', the onus was on the producers of the revamped A Nightmare on Elm Street to include a big reveal in the brand-new trailer. And while their new take on Freddy's burned face does indeed make an appearance, it's clear that the real star is Freddy's wounded psyche.
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Have you happened to notice there's a rash of movies coming out set in post-doomsday Americas overrun by lawless (sometimes cannibal and robot-killing-machine!) villains? And they are shot in muted, duotone palettes meant to evoke the very bleakness -- the very lack of color, if you will -- of the lives and worlds they choose to depict? Well, I have, and it's time now to welcome one more addition to the growing canon of what I call the sepiapocalyptic movie:
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As interpretive-dance memorials for fallen movie icons go, you will likely never see a higher-profile piece of work than last night's Patrick Swayze tribute on Dancing with the Stars. And well-intentioned as it was, this morning I can't be sure if that's not a bad thing. Watch (or re-watch, if you dare) and decide for yourself after the jump.
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Pop Quiz! In the picture above, Nicolas Cage is costumed as:
a) the Man of Steel in a test shot for Tim Burton's long-aborted Superman Lives
b) Viggo from Ghostbusters II
c) a body-painted Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair
The answer (and the video it came from) is after the jump!
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It's been a month since Avatar Day -- a long, hard month where we've had naught to feast on but James Cameron's cerulean table scraps. But wait, what's this? Could it be? Brand-new Avatar footage in a delightfully trippy Japanese TV commercial? Let's take a look.
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Some romantic comedies are content to just be, and for them, a major victory is a $50 million gross or landing an original Duffy song for the end credits. Not Valentine's Day! Valentine's Day will eat those romantic comedies, then grow stronger as it adds their souls to its own. Valentine's Day is the ur-romantic comedy. The more you fear Valentine's Day, the stronger it becomes. You don't believe it? Take in this titan of a trailer, which employs every Jessica who's ever landed the cover of Esquire (but not Katherine Heigl!) and boasts Julia Roberts and Bradley Cooper as its star couple.
Oh, but wait.
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Though The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 didn't perform to expectations, John Travolta is not going to be dissuaded: He's got another installment of his "goateed anger bear" action movies ready to go, and this one -- From Paris with Love -- is from the director of spring hit Taken. So how does the trailer look?
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Microbudget ghost story Paranormal Activity -- which at a cost of $11,000 makes The Blair Witch Project seem like a bloated, runaway production -- has been eliciting squeaks, whimpers and eardrum-shattering screams wherever it's screened, most recently at an outdoor theater at Telluride. Now Paramount, who's picked up U.S. distribution, has released the first official trailer.
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Here's what we know about Stone: It's a psychological crime thriller set in a prison that re-teams The Score's Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton, only with Milla Jovovich now added to the mix, making her the de facto Marlon Brando (only more butch). Norton plays cornrowed prisoner "Stomp," DeNiro's the ... jaded parole officer? ... and Jovovich is Stomp's beautiful wife, sent by her husband to seduce DeNiro.
Still, we're left with more questions than answers.
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Taylor Swift appeared on The View today to perform her single "You Belong With Me" and discuss the second-by-second details of Kanye West's ill-timed, pointing-heavy shout-out to Beyonce on Sunday. Apparently, this is what happened: She was giving her VMA acceptance speech and dreaming of a well-deserved post-show Klondike bar, and then Kanye interrupted (first with his cool haircut, then with his words), and suddenly the dream of finishing her oratorio with a shout-out to the fans was deferred. Sure, that's kinda what we could have assumed, but what were we expecting her to say, "And then Kanye committed hari kari just off-camera"? The video, which provoked West to apologize to Swift on the phone, after the jump.
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A lot of trailers featuring pasty-white androgynes debuted last night on MTV, and here's the other one: the final full trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon. After a months-long marketing campaign that focused almost exclusively on Taylor Lautner's abs, Summit has put an unclothed Robert Pattinson front and center for this clip so that teenage girls everywhere can start pondering the age-old question of which type of man's chest they prefer: the Tanned, 24-Hour Fitness look, or the Malnourished, Indie Rock Hip Bones variety?
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