"They've given us a special dispensation... to have lung cancer." So quipped director Bruce Robinson, joining Johnny Depp and the assembled cast of this weekend's Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary for a late morning presser the other week at the swanky Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Things kicked things off, appropriately enough, with a cloud of cigar smoke that hung in the air like the ghost of Thompson himself -- whom Robinson insisted was in the room, watching the entire proceedings.
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After years of watching Johnny Depp give performances from behind thick rings of pirate eyeliner or masks of outlandish Tim Burton makeup, it's a relief to see him, more and more often these days, acting with nothing but his real face. In Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary -- liberally adapted from Hunter S. Thompson's novel -- Depp plays a wayfaring, hard-drinking journalist, Paul Kemp, who has drifted to Puerto Rico, circa 1960, where he lands a job at a floundering, two-bit newspaper, The San Juan Star. Its editor, played by a cigar-chomping Richard Jenkins, hires him reluctantly; never mind that he was the only person who applied for the job.
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Hunter S. Thompson fans have been patiently waiting over a decade for The Rum Diary to reach the big screen. (In fact, the adaptation process, which began in 2000, was so frustrating that the author himself coined the phrase "waterhead fuckaround" to describe the slow studio proceedings.) But The Rum Diary is finally in the can with a fall release date thanks to English writer and director Bruce Robinson, Thompson's long-time friend Johnny Depp and Depp's production company Infinitum Nihil. Let's take a look at the trailer!
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Hunter S. Thompson's novel The Rum Diary, written in 1959 but not published until 1998 -- the year Johnny Depp channeled Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- tells the tale of Paul Kemp, an American journalist who finds himself living and drinking among expats in 1950s Puerto Rico. There he meets Chenault, the ravishing girlfriend of another man, with whom he becomes obsessed. After the jump see Depp and Amber Heard getting cozy as Kemp and Chenault in a still from the October release, adapted by writer-director Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I, Jennifer 8).
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Jonathan Levine has directed two feature films (The Wackness and next month's 50/50) since seeing his 2006 directorial debut, the indie horror pic All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, infamously go from a Weinstein Co. pick-up to a Weinstein Co. cast-off sold to Senator Entertainment, who then went out of business themselves. So what's the latest status of the Amber Heard starrer (which also features Anson Mount, Whitney Able, and Twilight's Michael Welch)?
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Twenty four-year-old Lyndsy Fonseca has been familiar to television fans since her days on The Young and the Restless (she also appeared on Boston Public, Big Love, Desperate Housewives, and as Ted Mosby's future daughter on How I Met Your Mother) but she made herself known in fierce fashion last fall as Maggie Q's cunning and loyal protégé, Alex, on The CW's lady spy series Nikita. This week Fonseca adds to her growing film slate with a turn in John Carpenter's The Ward, a '60s-set psychological horror tale also filled with complex female relationships, themes of survival, and endless twists and turns.
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Ten years ago, after completing his 20th film in 27 years, filmmaking legend John Carpenter took a sabbatical from filmmaking. "I was tired," he explained to Movieline, pointing to a decades-long career spent filming one project after the next, including genre classics like Halloween, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. "I had given up my personal life and given up my health -- given up a lot of things, because of my love of movies, and I'd stopped loving cinema."
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You may have been disappointed by both of Adrianne Palicki's new Wonder Woman costumes -- the one that looked exactly like a sexy Halloween costume and then the one that looked like a slightly-less-sexy Halloween costume -- but something tells me that you will not be disappointed by Amber Heard's get-up in NBC's drama pilot The Playboy Club. Especially when you hear that there is a chance she will be taking it off. Captioning pens ready?
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Some actors are Method; others make up their own method. Like Nicolas Cage, who described his self-taught school of acting and held Movieline rapt with 8 other stories about crazy sex scenes, driving 180 mph on the highway, making the Oscars fair, and other Cage-y anecdotes only vaguely related to his latest vehicle Drive Angry 3D, a high-octane Southern-fried supernatural vengeance thriller disguised as homage to the car-obsessed exploitation flicks of the '70s.
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