To quote Patton Oswalt from his great KFC Famous Bowls routine, “America has spoken,” and for Oscar pundits bemoaning Lincoln’s loss to Argo, this Oscars truly was a “failure pile in a sadness bowl”: A reported 40.3 million people tuned in to the Oscars telecast, making it the most-watched entertainment show in three years, Entertainment Weekly reports. (Suck it, Golden Globes.) more »
"I witnessed the genesis," Christoph Waltz says of this season's hot awards contender, Django Unchained. "Quentin [Tarantino] let me have twenty-thirty pages as he finished them!" more »
Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino defended the heavy dosage of violence in Django Unchained, his latest film starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. As with many of his past offerings, Tarantino's Oscar hopeful includes a graphic depictions of blood and gunshot victims. Tarantino was asked about the violence over the weekend in New York in the wake of the tragedy in a Connecticut elementary school that left 26 dead, most of them children.
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The "D" is silent, though the name of Django Unchained's eponymous gunslinger sounds like a retaliatory whip across the face of white slaveholders, offering an immensely satisfying taste of antebellum empowerment packaged as spaghetti-Western homage. more »
Early Thursday morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced its Golden Globe nominees, and, as you might expect, there were some surprises. Thanks to the Academy's decision to unveil its Oscar nominations on Jan. 10, three days before Globe winners are revealed on Jan. 13, today's nominations will have less bearing than usual on Oscar jockeying. But don't let anyone kid you. Academy voters may have nothing in common with HFPA members, but they aren't impervious to the media's perception of who's hot, cold or no longer in the running. more »
Also in Thursday afternoon's round-up of news briefs: Christoph Walt is in talks to star in a Muppets sequel; Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty officially gets new nationwide release; And a Brad Anderson thriller finds a U.S. release.
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The world sat on stitches as the Cold War raged. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Iceland as the world glared. Would the world order of two superpowers on the brink end after decades of a nuclear arms race come to a close? Would a Communist and a Republican actually come to an understanding? Could Mikhail and Ronnie get along? If Nancy and Raisa were any indication, that would be a - no! The meeting that might have ended the U.S.-Soviet standoff is of course heading to the big screen and Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz will portray Gorbachev in Reykjavik.
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Posters are fine and all, but you can't really get too breathlessly caught up in a movie's hype until there are glimmering first images from the set. Especially when they feature one of the world's biggest stars in in all his 19th-century slave-baron resplendence wielding a hammer. And sucking nefariously on a smoke. Yes, Leonardo DiCaprio, come on in! I'll let you repair my morning.
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I love the first teaser posters for Django Unchained — just vague enough to stir the imagination and just explicit enough to sing the film's epic, violent intentions in a way everyone can hear them. Very retro, very minimal, very... Quentin.
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If Sherlock Holmes could be successfully steampunked into a rakish action hero, there's no reason The Three Musketeers couldn't be gearpunked into some tolerable 17th century equivalent -- and Athos, Porthos, Aramis and young D'Artagnan are actually soldiers, so no serious character tweaking is required to send them off into repeated swashbuckling setpieces. It's not the addition of airships and male dangly earrings that make Paul W.S. Anderson's take on Alexandre Dumas' classic, much-adapted adventure such a drag, it's everything else -- the incoherence, the anvil-heavy dialogue, the lack of anything beyond the broadest of characterizations.
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Remakes often suck -- but when they're total stylistic upheavals of the source material, I'm more optimistic. Would you see a whacked-out, space-age remake of a classic period piece like Little Dorrit? I would! Or better yet, this weekend's ridiculous, steampunk The Three Musketeers in 3-D? It puts the "rich" in Richelieu and the "dumbass" in Dumas. I dig it! Ahead, we investigate five other Victorian novels worth revisiting in a fulgent 3-D experience. Put on your special glasses, Heathcliff.
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What happens when you let Academy Award winner Roman Polanski confine three Oscar winners (and one lonely nominee) in a single house to film an entire argument-driven black comedy? Carnage, the upcoming feature from the controversial filmmaker which stars, on one side, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, and on the other side, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, as two sets of parents who meet to calmly discuss -- and then outright argue -- over their sparring school children.
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Looks like Quentin Tarantino's reaching into his own well to fill the shoes of his Django Unchained baddie. The Wrap reports that none other than Kurt Russell, who played Tarantino's Death Proof villain Stuntman Mike, is negotiating to replace Kevin Costner as Ace Woody, a plantation henchman who works for Leonardo DiCaprio's big bad. Battling against Kurt 'n' Leo will be Jamie Foxx as the titular slave-turned-bounty hunter and his German mentor Christoph Waltz (who recently injured himself training on horseback for the role). This Django's turning into quite the QT party! [The Wrap]
Diablo Cody has her own movie to anticipate with the release of her third feature Young Adult this December (featuring a thoroughly unamused Charlize Theron), but the Academy Award winner took time out tell Movieline which three films she most looks forward to seeing. What will make the cut? The Iron Lady? Carnage? A Dangerous Method? Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip Wrecked? Click through for her adroit (and quite cheeky) observations.
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Some might argue that one trip to the wild, wild West was enough for Will Smith. Quentin Tarantino is, it seems, not one of those people. According to a report which you should take with a generous heaping of salt, QT wants Smith for the lead in Django Unchained, his buzzed-about next film which may co-star Christoph Waltz and Sam Jackson. Cue the Stevie Wonder riff!
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