Christopher Nolan recently said it's as tough for older actors to get roles as it is for older actresses. Not if you're Alan Arkin. This has been a big week for the 78-year-old actor, who was nominated for a Golden Globe on Thursday for his performance as a crusty film producer in Argo. more »
Pedro Almodóvar has taken a rather dark turn in his last couple of outings including 2011's The Skin I Live In and Broken Embraces (2009). Speaking in Cannes in 2011, Almodóvar admitted that he has a dark outlook on life, at least then, but he is still very capable of pulling out a comedy. And this teaser for his latest, I'm So Excited appears to be just that.
[Related: 'Zero Dark Thirty' Bows A New & Haunting Trailer]
There are not many detail about the film that his longtime U.S. distributor Sony Pictures Classics will open domestically sometime in 2013, but its stars include Carlos Areces, Raul Arevalo, Javier Cámara, Lola Dueñas, Carmen Machi, Laya Martí, Cecilia Roth, Hugo Silva, Miguel Ángel Silvestre, and Blanca Suárez.
The clip seems to indicate I'm So Excited (a not-so-subtle reference to the Pointer Sisters early '80s hit) will be a high-flying Laugh Out Loud adventure complete with dancing queen flight attendants and at least one pilot asleep on the job. And even Pedro himself appears to be a passenger (seated in the back in the top image).
Almodóvar teased two Mays ago he was working on a comedy and even his first English-language script, though I'm So Excited or Los amantes pasajeros, which is its official Spanish title, appears to be firmly in his Spanish roots.
The trailer follows with English subtitles.
Kristen Stewart says it was director Walter Salles' passion for On The Road that inspired her to sign on for the film. At the New York premiere for the film, the actress, who plays free-spirited Marylou (a character based on Beat icon Neal Cassady's onetime wife LuAnne Henderson), Stewart told me she was impressed by the immersive research that Salles did — including a 2011 documentary called Searching for On The Road — in preparation for adapting Jack Kerouac's novel for the screen. more »
"Can I be honest with you? I'm bad news. I'm not your friend. I'm not going to help you - I'm going to break you. Any questions?" are the haunting words that open the latest Zero Dark Thirty trailer spoken by actor Jason Clarke who plays Dan, a CIA interrogator.
[Related: Oscar Index: 'Zero Dark Thirty' Caught In The Cross-Hairs]
His character is at the center of a mini-controversy that broke this week by critics of the film by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow who say it justifies the U.S.'s use of water-boarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques — considered torture by many &mdash' as useful tools in the eventual successful hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
The trailer depicts the worldwide hunt from the boardrooms of the CIA in Washington, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and eventually Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jessica Chastain, who has received multiple critics awards and nominations so far, including a Golden Globe nomination yesterday, is the secret operative at the center of the hunt. The trailer hints at the slick telling of the story and ends with what sounds like a child's choir singing a haunting version of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters."
[Related: Should Torture Controversy Blindside 'Zero Dark Thirty'?]
Zero Dark Thirty Synopsis:
For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar-winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man.
Any Day Now writer-director Travis Fine came across the story that would be his next film from a script that sat on the desk of original writer George Arthur Bloom and adapted it and tapped Alan Cumming to star in the story about a gay couple in the late '70s who fight a discriminatory legal system to formally adopt a special needs teen who has been in their care.
The feature, which opens Friday through Music Box Films, has won audience prizes at festivals throughout the year, including Tribeca where it debuted last Spring, to Provincetown, Chicago, Woodstock, Seattle and Outfest.
Inspired by a true story and touching on legal and social issues that are more relevant now than ever, Any Day Now tells a story of love, acceptance, and creating your own family. In the late 1970s, when Marco (Isaac Leyva), a teenager with down syndrome who’s been abandoned by his mother, is taken in by committed couple Rudy (Alan Cumming) and Paul (Garret Dillahunt), he finds in them the family he's never had. However, when their unconventional living arrangement is discovered by the authorities, Rudy and Paul must fight a biased legal system to adopt the child they have come to love as their own. Co-starring Frances Fisher, Gregg Henry and Chris Mulkey, Music Box Films will open the film in select theaters across the country on December 14.
Golden Globe nominees Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor turned out for a special screening of their epic tearjerker The Impossible and talked to me about how they summoned the emotional wherewithal to play a couple whose family is torn apart by a tsunami. more »
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are not only co-hosts of the 70th Golden Globes this year, they're also competitors. Both were nominated for Best Actress in a Television Musical or Comedy, with Fey duking it out with her counterpart for 30 Rock, while Poehler is up for the award for Park and Recreation.
[Related: Golden Globes Unveil 70th Edition Nominees]
But while the co-hosts won't conceivably know the results until the envelope opens at the ceremony on January 13th, the pair are busy working together in the lead-up to the big event, and no doubt re-calling those good ol' Saturday Night Live days.
In this promo for the Globes, the duo are dressed in matching golden sparkly dresses and they both dish out cheesy Brit(ish) accents (until they don't). Maybe they're commenting on the resurgence of British-speak in Hollywood films reminiscent of the very early "golden days" of Hollywood? Who knows, but here's a funny look at what may bode well for the Globes telecast after the New Year.
[Source: Huffington Post]
You know who probably wishes he was a little bit taller, and wishes he was a baller? BILBO BAGGINS, that's who! Which is why it's so genius that the good folks over at NextMovie tapped rapper Skee-Lo to critique Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which incidentally now has the best pull-quote of the year: "The Hobbit," proclaims Skee-Lo, "is a G."
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At long last, the Paranormal Activity/found footage horror hits are getting their own comedy spoof in the form of the Marlon Wayans vehicle A Haunted House — Paranormal Hacktivity, anyone?
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Holy Macross, the first trailer for Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim is here, and I can't believe what I'm seeing! Dimensional rifts, enormous monsters, and sweet sweet giant mechs battling it out over the streets of a large city while the helpless populace flees. Someone finally figured out how to update the kaiju genre without ruining it. Glory be!
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Matt Damon channeled Bill Clinton on a recent Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He recalled a trip he made to Camp David during the Clinton presidency when he and Ben Affleck brought along their Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting.
Damon recalled how a producer from the film told the Prez that he was friends with John Travolta who was starring in Primary Colors, a film considered unflattering to Bill Clinton and did a great impression of him. Damon recalls the story and then morphs into the then POTUS. Check it out...
Why yes, there are musical numbers in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which hurtles into theaters this week. Alas, none of them are eligible for the Oscars' Best Song category, though I'd love to see Richard Armitage, AKA Thorin Oakenshield, face off against Katy Perry and Adele on that Academy Awards stage. Listen to Thorin and his not-so-merry band of dwarves prepare for peril with a solemn ditty in a clip from The Hobbit.
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The second Man of Steel trailer has been released to the Internets, and by the gods it's actually very effective!
While retaining the moodiness of the first teaser, that mood now more clearly emphasizes Clark Kent's feelings of uncertainty and separation due to his alien heritage and fantastical powers. His arrest (first revealed in the poster released last week) has a bit more context too, as we see him stepping out from behind what appears to be the wreckage of military hardware, as soldiers draw their weapons. It looks like he makes his debut after the Kryptonian super villains led by General Zod, and submits to arrest to prove he isn't a threat, a much more interesting take on humanity's initial reaction to him.
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Can Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski do for cowboys and Indians what they previously did for pirates? We'll find out soon enough, as today we have proof that the troubled, years-in-development new version of The Lone Ranger will actually hit theaters.
A new full-length trailer for next summer's The Lone Ranger hit the web today, and it's full of everything you've come to expect from the people who convinced us that the British East India Company operated in the West indies. It's definitely an original story, but it's also apparent that the film will treat the desert of west Texas with the same kind of cheesy awe that the Pirates films did the Caribbean, which is fine by me. The trailer shows us how Tonto and Kemosabe become pals, how the Ranger takes up the mask, and how the west Texas (actually, New Mexico) desert has some rather spectacular scenery.
Incidentally, despite seeing more of Armie Hammer's Ranger, I'm still getting the impression that Tonto is the main character. If that turns out to be the case, it'll be an interesting twist on the Anglo-centric
view of the old West.
So, will this be a hit? There hasn't been a successful filmed take on the character since The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold in 1958, that film an extension of the popular TV series which ran on ABC from 1949 to 1957. The last theatrical attempt was the 1981 flop The Legend of The Lone Ranger, the less said about which, the better. And after the failure of Cowboys and Aliens, there's a real sense that Westerns tend to flop (Brokeback Mountain notwithstanding). It's probably more likely that boring Westerns flop, however. More importantly, Johnny Depp remains Johnny Depp to the point that even an underperforming movie like Dark Shadows still rakes in $239 million.
So what do you think? Fire off your silver bullets in comments.
If, like me you're horribly old and ready to be sent by the farmer to the local dog food factory, you might remember a 1981 science fiction book called 'After Man: A Zoology of The Future,' by Dougal Dixon. Now sadly out of print (I still have a battered copy with a half-torn cover, because bragging rights), it featured fantastic naturalist illustrations of creatures extrapolated, evolutionarily, from modern fauna 50 million years after humanity had gone extinct. Wolf-like beasts descended from rats and ungulates descended from rabbits are the least weird creatures you'll see, and it's a crime no one has ever seen fit to make a half-decent movie based on concepts from the book.
We'll have to wait much longer for that, but based on the new international trailer, we can at least see something of the book's influence on M. Knight Shyamalan's next film, After Earth. The Will Smith and Jaden Smith-starring sci fi movie concerns the adventures of "legendary general" Cypher Raige* (Will) who, along with his young son Kitai (Jaden) crash land on planet Earth a thousand years after humanity abandoned it and moved out into the stars. Critically injured in the crash, the General is in desperate need of help; now Kitai must venture out alone into a completely re-forested home-world teeming with creatures, so we're told in the trailer, that have all evolved to kill human beings.
The glimpse of what looks like slightly evolved baboons is promising, and I'm actually shocked to admit this thing looks good. Shyamalan has not earned any benefit of the doubt, however, and I am confident that by film's end we'll be treated to some kind of clunky twist. Maybe it'll turn out that they're on the Planet of the Apes and that Jaden is actually Cypher's father.
Here's the trailer. Let us know what you think in comments.
* Dear science fiction filmmakers: please, dear god, please stop with
the ridiculous naming conventions.
Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow him on twitter
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