Yes, this clip of Glinda The Good Witch (Michelle Williams) and a pre-wizard Oz (James Franco) traveling to the Emerald City by bubble in the Sam Raimi-directed Oz the Great and Powerful is pretty phantasmagorical, but let's give credit where credit is due: Do you, um, realize that Flaming Lips' frontman Wayne Coyne has been traveling by bubble since at least 2006 — and he don't need no stinkin' computer-generated assistance. more »
Also in Friday morning's round-up of news briefs: Ridley Scott gives the low-down on a Blade Runner sequel. Michelle Williams is eyeing a role in a WWII-era drama and a run-down on the weekend's new specialty release offerings.
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If you thought you were getting any work done during the second part of the day, think again. The good people at Vulture have apparently teamed up with the RAND Corporation and NASA to devise a series of charts with endless permutations that rank today's most valuable movie stars. But, we ask: Who are today's Most Valuable Indie Stars?
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Take This Waltz is an unusually kind film about infidelity -- not because it sidesteps or shortchanges heartbreak, but because it doesn't let any one of its characters bear the full burden of blame. That such a thing needs to or should even be assigned in this scenario is beside the point, as the film defers to the vagueries of the human heart and the way we can, despite our better judgment, form a connection with someone that can't easily be set aside.
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"Nothing will come from this if you win!” joked Seth Rogen as he opened his hosting gig at the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards. “Absolutely nothing. This won't help you get paid anymore -- if anything, it proves you'll work for nothing.” That may be painfully true for many of the indie film nominees honored today at the annual Spirit Awards, held in a tent on the beach in balmy Santa Monica. But what does it mean that the night’s big winner was the Harvey Weinstein-backed awards season juggernaut The Artist?
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With its soapy survey of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, the new NBC potboiler Smash is clinging to reasonably good ratings since launching last week. And now The Weinstein Company, never one to miss an opportunity, has discreetly hitched its double Oscar nominee My Week With Marilyn to Smash's own (alleged) Marilyn-fueled momentum.
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We're still nearly five months away from the midsummer release of Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz, but it's never too soon to commence anticipating a new Michelle Williams film, or a muted Seth Rogen, or Sarah Silverman's infamous full-frontal nudity, or... Actually, that's all I've got ahead of this new trailer making the rounds.
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Over at Awards Daily, Sasha Stone forwards an interesting theory: "There is a school of thought where Oscar is concerned that goes like this: You can win if you can give them rock hard erections." The latest in said awards trend, it would seem, is the February cover spread in GQ in which My Week with Marilyn's Michelle Williams poses in lingerie as the magazine's headline screams "Who Knew Michelle Williams Had This Body?" It's a far cry from Williams' perpetual pixie-mom persona, the one she broke out in her Golden Globe acceptance speech last weekend. But is her skin-baring the key to getting that coveted Oscar nomination/win?
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Another year, another couple hundred entries in the ever-deepening conversational archive known as The Movieline Interview. They're the collective backbone of our site, and in 2011, it was at its strongest. Look back with us now at the highlights, including the luminary likes of Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Segel, Jodie Foster, Paul Giamatti, and a certain honey badger of a director.
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The world premiere of your first feature film -- in the hypercritical climes of the New York Film Festival, no less -- would be nerve-wracking for any director. But Simon Curtis isn't any director. He's a BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated television and stage veteran who's worked with a who's who of British acting royalty, a noteworthy group of whom appear in Curtis's feature debut My Week With Marilyn.
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Another still from Simon Curtis's drama My Week with Marilyn has surfaced, this time showing Michelle Williams swimming as the iconic bombshell. Click through to see the latest, semi-scandalous photo and hang around for more Buzz Break.
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"It's changed how I see the world and how I interact on a daily basis. It's changed the parent I am. It's changed the friend I am. It's changed the kind of work that I really want to do. It's become the lens through which I see life -- that it's all impermanent." On the eve of her turn as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, Michelle Williams opened up to Vogue even more about her career, family, and personal life. Including: "I'm not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what's on my bedside table rather than what's in my bed." [Vogue]
Disney's fantasy prequel pic Oz, the Great and Powerful has set its final witch, Glinda: Michelle Williams, who will team up with James Franco's snake oil salesman/"Wizard" to vie against evil sisters Rachel Weisz (the Wicked Witch of the East) and Mila Kunis (The Wicked Witch of the West) for control of Oz. Word on the street has Franco's salesman as a ladykiller who breezes into Oz and finds himself in the middle of a magical power struggle with romantic plot threads. In other words: Ding-Dong, the Wizard is a pimp. [Variety]
