Director and producer Mel Gibson is making his return in front of the cameras, signing on to star in the big-screen remake of the 1985 British miniseries Edge of Darkness. Casino Royale director Martin Campbell is helming the flick, after directing the original six-hour miniseries.
Graham King is producing, and re-teaming with his Oscar-winning The Departed cohort, screenwriter William Monahan, who will pen the script. The movie marks Gibson's first acting gig since 2002's Signs and We Were Soldiers, and will find the star playing a straight-laced policeman whose activist daughter is murdered. When he begins to investigate, he finds a string of corruption, which led to his daughter's death.
The movie is also Gibson's first since directing the controversial flicks The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, and, more infamously, since his July 2006 DUI arrest and subsequent anti-Semitic remarks in Malibu. Edge of Darkness is scheduled to begin filming in Boston in August … And speaking of controversial films, Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh should stir up some headlines with The Girlfriend Experience, a drama he'll direct about the world of prostitution, as seen through the eyes of a $10,000-a-night hooker. The movie, a partnership with Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's HDNet, will film over the course of 14 days and will, like Soderbergh's Bubble, be released simultaneously in theaters, on cable TV and on DVD. Also like Bubble, which was part of six-picture deal Soderbergh has to make low-budget flicks for HDNet, Girlfriend may feature mostly non-famous actors, with Variety reporting that the director is considering casting an adult film star for the lead.
Source: http://movies.com
Apr 30, 2008
Mel Gibson Going Back On Screen
Movie Review: Baby Mama (2008)
Learning on the Job About Birthing Babies
In the new comedy “Baby Mama” Tina Fey plays a 37-year-old single career woman who, desperate for a baby, hires a womb of her own in the dizzy, slap-happy form of Amy Poehler. The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing. But, much like the prickly, talented Ms. Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean.
Ms. Fey is of course best known for working in television, on “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock.” Until now her biggest movie role was the uncomfortable but earnest high school math teacher Ms. Norbury in the comedy “Mean Girls,” which she also wrote. (“You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores,” Ms. Norbury warns the mean girls and their female prey. “It just makes it O.K. for guys to call you sluts and whores.”) Like a lot of comedies “Mean Girls” has its devilish cake and eats it too, wagging an unpersuasive finger at the very cruelty it skillfully deploys. Ms. Fey may not want girls to call one another sluts, but she’s all too happy to call them that herself.
There’s often a degree of sadism in this kind of comic one-two punch, and while some performers appear to direct the cruelty inward — think of Jerry Lewis and Ben Stiller wringing squirmy, uneasy laughs out of the humiliations rained down on their characters — that doesn’t seem to be Ms. Fey’s style. Certainly it isn’t what she’s called on to do in “Baby Mama,” in which she plays a snappy, sardonic individualist who, much like Ms. Fey herself, works in a male-dominated industry (here, as an executive in an organic grocery chain similar to Whole Foods) and favors the kind of sexy librarian look (high-heeled shoes, low-cut blouses and dark-frame glasses) that signals there’s a hot body to go along with that feverishly smart brain.
“Baby Mama,” which was written and directed by the newcomer Michael McCullers, yet another “Saturday Night Live” alumnus, opens with Ms. Fey’s character, Kate Holbrook, eyeballing babies like a hungry wolf. Everyone has a pitter-pattering Tater Tot but Kate, who lives alone in her generically appointed Philadelphia apartment (the film was also shot in New York) and has few contacts outside her job, extended family and wisecracking doorman, Oscar (Romany Malco). Basically she’s Rhoda with thinner thighs, which I guess means that she’s Mary Richards. But this being 2008 and not the women’s-liberated 1970s, it isn’t enough for Kate to be a swinging single: she wants a baby and she wants it now. Enter Angie Ostrowiski (Ms. Poehler).
At 36 Ms. Poehler is at least 10 years too old for the role, as the softly focused close-ups suggest, but she’s a pip. She’s the ball that bounces against Ms. Fey’s formidable wall, a nonstop, joyfully watchable whirligig. Drawn in broad, often crude strokes, Angie is dumber than the usual dumb blonde so beloved of the movies largely because she’s also coded as white trash, a kind of urban Daisy Mae, complete with short shorts, wads of chewing gum and a tag-along buffoon, Carl (Dax Shepard). If Angie works at all, it’s because Ms. Poehler puts a sweet spin on her character’s gaffes, whether she’s yelping in horror at the unfamiliar taste of water or squatting in a sink when nature makes an untimely call.
There’s more, though not much, mostly some amusing nonsense from Steve Martin as Kate’s boss, a belligerently New Agey entrepreneur with an unkind ponytail. Greg Kinnear also shows up now and again as Kate’s inevitable love interest, perhaps so things don’t overheat when Angie moves in. Not that anyone need worry about this female odd couple, given that Ms. Fey, who doesn’t have the acting chops that might invest her character with some personality, has been forced to play it straight and narrow. The close-up medium of television is more forgiving of those comics who tend to stand in the middle of the frame as if they had just been planted. But unlike Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Ms. Fey doesn’t even have a funny voice.
That’s too bad, because she is genuinely funny. And if there’s anything the movies could use it is funny women, especially those who earn laughs by keeping their clothes on and their dignity (more or less) intact. Under the old Hollywood system, the studio boss might have ordered up a dance coach for Ms. Fey, maybe a few lessons on how to walk across a set or move her upper body once in a while. She might not have been able to rip loose as a writer-performer, which makes the idea of her developing a simultaneous on-and-off-screen presence all the more tantalizing. Real funny women — Mae West, Elaine May — come along every few decades, so the timing seems right. But the clock is ticking.
“Baby Mama” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some gentle raunch.
BABY MAMA
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by Michael McCullers; director of photography, Daryn Okada; edited by Bruce Green; music by Jeff Richmond; production designer, Jess Gonchor; produced by Lorne Michaels and John Goldwyn; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.
WITH: Tina Fey (Kate), Amy Poehler (Angie), Greg Kinnear (Rob), Dax Shepard (Carl), Romany Malco (Oscar), Steve Martin (Barry), Maura Tierney (Caroline), Holland Taylor (Rose) and Sigourney Weaver (Chaffee Bicknell).
Source; NYTimes
Aspiring Filmmakers Rub Elbows at Festival
Aerial shot of Manhattan. Camera pans down to office building. Dissolve. Behind a desk, a movie producer reads a script for “Northanger Abbey.”
Smash cut to close-up of producer’s lips as we hear: “Jane, honestly. Bath, in England, really? Why not Weimar Germany? How about Shanghai, present day? A remake of ‘Blade Runner’! But with an edge!”
Fade to black.
Strictly speaking, none of this happened at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. For one thing, Jane Austen has been dead since 1817.
But for 20 New York City high schoolers, ages 15 to 19, the festival was a deep-end-of-the-pool immersion into the modern film business. They got to ask many questions, and each wore a big yellow credential that read “Filmmaker.”
They were enrolled in Tribeca Film Fellows, a program that began Monday and will end on May 4. The fellowship program, which began in 2004, is intended to start young people on careers in film through mentorships with filmmakers, workshops, panel discussions and the filming of a collaborative documentary titled “CityScapes.”
On Thursday, the teenagers met executives at Miramax Films on the Avenue of the Americas in SoHo. A few participants grimaced when David Greenbaum, vice president for production and development, declared, “Ninety-five percent of what comes across my desk, I say no to.”
On the other hand, Mr. Greenbaum said, approving a film project involves weighing commercial potential, artistic merit and so many mystery factors that executives like him often get it wrong.
For example, Mr. Greenbaum, 32, turned down a script that involved masochism and a young woman’s obsession with her boss. “I was almost physically offended” by it, he said.
The completed film, released by another company in 2002, was “Secretary,” starring James Spader, and was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s breakout film.
The teenagers, by way of introduction to the Miramax executives, named their favorite movies.
Some said “No Country for Old Men,” directed by the Coen brothers, winner of the 2008 Academy Award for best picture, and co-financed by Paramount Vantage and Miramax.
Others said “The Science of Sleep” (2006), “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), “Dancehall Queen” (1997), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “Persepolis” (2007), “L’Auberge Espagnole” (2002), “Amores Perros” (2000) and “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).
Kendra Dennis, 16, from Murry Bergtraum High School in Manhattan, said she loved “Goldfinger,” made in 1964. “Filmmaking has evolved since then,” Kendra said, “but the way it was shot is still so beautiful.”
There have been 21 James Bond movies so far. But Kendra had never seen any of the earlier films starring Sean Connery.
The Miramax executives also showed trailers of their upcoming films, including an adaptation called “Blindness,” starring Julianne Moore. Gleb Mikhalev, 17, of the Beacon School in Manhattan, told the executives that he had just finished reading the novel by José Saramago and that he was surprised by the coincidence.
Gleb was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. His mother is a documentary filmmaker who lives in Iowa City. “The first movie I ever saw,” he said, “I was in it, and it was shot by my mother.”
Later in the afternoon, the teenagers got to meet filmmakers at the Tribeca Film Center in mentor sessions.
“He asked me how old I am,” exclaimed Wei Ling Chang, referring to her mentee, Daniel Kharlak, of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. “He’s only 18 and I’m 33!”
Both, however, share a love of film noir, said Ms. Chang, who does indeed look like a teenager. In 2007, she shot a 16-minute short inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, called “The Good Husband.” And she has also directed, produced or written numerous television shows, including episodes of MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16.”
“Daniel doesn’t really have a story yet,” said Ms. Chang about the story pitch that he is working on. “He’s got a beginning but not an end.”
Another mentor, Dan Castle, 41, whose Australian surfing drama, “Newcastle,” is scheduled to be released this year, came prepared with a video iPod on which he showed the trailer for his movie.
Several teenagers gathered around him. Where do you put the camera when the wave hits? How do you keep it steady in the bobbing water? He passed the iPod from student to student, showing his solutions.
“I’m not technically that knowledgeable,” said Mr. Castle, of Los Angeles. “I don’t know what camera to use, I don’t know what film stock is best and all that stuff. But I know what I want it to say, and I know what I want it to look like. And that’s what I told them.”
For Alma Osorio, 16, of the LaGuardia Arts high school in Manhattan, the day had been exhilarating. The daughter of a janitor and a traffic enforcement agent, she said her favorite movie was “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“It’s told through the eyes of a young girl,” she said.
Source: NYTimes
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Movie Review: Death Note (2008)
Director: Shusuke Kaneko
Writer: Tetsuya Oshi
Stars: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Kenichi Matsuyama, Asaka Seto, Shigeki Hosokawa, Erika Toda
Genre: Horror, World Cinema
Length: 126 minutes
Cinema: 25 April 2008
Country: Japan
While Hollywood horror producers seem content to turn Asian horror into a set of cliched scares involving ghost girls and paranormal curses, Eastern filmmakers themselves are experimenting with new directions. That's certainly the case in Death Note, an enjoyable J-horror reboot. It's based on a popular manga about a notebook that allows idealistic law student Light (Tatsuya Fujiwara) to kill people simply by writing their names in its pages. Fiendishly unusual, it's an offbeat time-waster that genre fans will definitely want to make a note of.
Banish all thoughts of Ring, The Grudge or any other Japanese horror movie of the last ten years. Directed by Shusuke Kaneko - who was once responsible for the giant monster chaos of Gamera - this is less a scare-machine than a goofily entertaining thriller. Like the manga original, it follows power-crazed Light as he goes from using his notebook to kill deserving criminals to murdering the innocent. Light's goaded into his kill spree by the God of Death; a lolloping CGI ghoul in rock star clothes, who appears out of nowhere and offers advice while munching on apples. Weird, huh?
"MORE DAFT THAN DEADLY"
Meanwhile, the cops on Light's tail are being helped by teenage slacker genius L (Kenichi Matsuyama), who embarks on a chess-like battle of wits with our anti-hero. More daft than deadly, Death Note is executed with bags of cult flair, Kaneko nailing the manga's hyperstylised visuals in live-action, while lead actors Fujiwara and Matsuyama effortlessly exude teen cool. Despite clocking in at over two hours it ends with a gob-smacking cliffhanger that'll either frustrate or completely intrigue. Tie-in videogames, novels, an anime series and a movie sequel are already out in Japan – so if it hooks you, there's plenty more to come.
Death Note is out in the UK on 25th April 2008.
Source: www.bbc.co.u
Apr 27, 2008
Coachella 2008 in Photos
Jack Johnson headlines the first day of the Coachella Valley Music Festival on April 25, 2008 in Indio, California.
Photo: Winter/Getty
See more photos
My Coachella: The Black Lips
The Black Lips faced some heavy competition for attention on Coachella’s opening night, with Jack Johnson on the Main Stage and Fatboy Slim in a nearby dance tent, but the garage band wasn’t worried. “You either want to dance, you want to chill, or you want to rock,” says guitarist Cole Alexander, whose band is known for wild eruptions of noise, nudity and the sharing of fluids. “I think people are going to want to rock.” Guitarist Ian Saint Pe adds: “If you want to see someone make love to their guitar like Jack Johnson, or if you want to see someone beat the shit out of their guitars like us, you have your choice. We’re in America. It’s a free country.” Rock Daily sought more answers.
oolest thing about your own set:
Alexander: “We have fun. I don’t know that we’re the best musicians, but it will be the most entertaining.”
Saint Pe: “We’ll actually luck out because [fans] will be all be drunk and tired, so it will sound good no matter what.”
Best part of playing in a desert tent:
Alexander: It’s kind of like a rodeo or a tee-pee.
Best Coachella drug (or cocktail):
Alexander: “I like Robitussin.” (more…)
Source: Rollingstone
Apr 26, 2008
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Apr 24, 2008
American Idol, Costly Errors
Voters had a really tough decision to make last night. And I'm not talking about the Pennsylvania Primary.
I mean American Idol viewers, who had to decide who was worse -- Brooke White or Jason Castro.
After the evening's performances, they were clearly at the bottom of the bunch: Brooke for making the uncomfortable error of forgetting the lyrics to her song, Jason for a straight-up dismal performance.
This week, the contestants had to sing the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Randy called it one of the most challenging nights of the competition. I call it one of the most boring.
Sorry, I'm just not a Broadway-show-kind-of-guy. And I suspect a lot of my fellow American Idol watchers aren't either. I never saw Cats or Phantom of The Opera or any of ALW's shows, and hopefully Tuesday night will be my last exposure to them.
Frankly, everyone's performances sounded pretty much the same. All the contestants sang slow, slightly haunting ballads, with the notable exceptions of Syesha Mercado and Carly Smithson. It's no accident, then, that they clearly rose above the rest. Here's my take.
TOP TWO:
Carly Smithson:
Carly wanted to sing some plodding ballad, but thankfully ALW talked her out of it and she ended up singing "Jesus Christ Superstar," one of two songs I recognized. Carly rocked it from beginning to end. It was the most upbeat song of the night and Carly had the best overall performance by a mile and a half. The whole thing reminded me a bit of Aretha Franklin, actually. I'm not sure why. Randy said it was definitely good. Paula loved it. Simon thought it was "shouty" in the middle, but one of his favorite performances of the night. After the judging, Carly grabbed a shirt that read, "Simon liked me (this week)." I hope she has the copyright. She'll make a million selling those.
Syesha Mercado:
The night's other top honors go to Syesha for her rendition of "One Rock and Roll Too Many." Wearing a slinky dress with her hair up, Syesha looked terrific. The upbeat song gave her a great chance to perform and have fun on stage, and her vocals were amazing. Randy thought it was her best performance to date. Paula said she brought the house down. Simon said she looked very sexy, and agreed with Randy that it was her strongest performance so far.
Source: film.com
Girls of Summer 2008 Summer Movies
Here Are The Girls of the 2008 Summer Movies. This Summer May Not Be So Cruel After All.
See more photos at film.com
Movie of the Week: Burnzy's Last Call
Burnzy's Last Call (1997)
Director: Michael de Avila
Producer: Shannon Goldman
Starring: Christopher Noth, David Johansen, James McCaffrey, James Walters, Sherry Stringfield, Tony Todd, Sam Gray, Billy Jaye, Michael Rispoli, Frederique Van Der Wal
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 85m
Synopsis
A look at a day in the life of a downtown New York bar as seen through the eyes of a man on his 75th birthday.
Watch the Film
Apr 23, 2008
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Apr 22, 2008
Vanity Fair May 2008: Madonnarama!
As she nears 50, Madonna’s narrative is shifting. Yes, there’s another new super-pop album, Hard Candy, with Justin Timberlake and Pharrell Williams. But there’s also Filth and Wisdom, the feature film she’s co-written, produced, and directed, and I Am Because We Are, her documentary on Malawi, the aids-ravaged country where she controversially adopted her third child. Whisked to L.A. for an intense prep session, followed by an almost two-hour interview, the author explores the evolution of the Madonna myth as she harnesses her image-making genius to a cause, a philosophy, and the search for her true self.
The world is a series of rooms, which are arranged like concentric circles, or rooms within rooms, joined by courtyards and antechambers, and in the room at the center of all those rooms Madonna sits alone, in a white dress, dreaming of Africa.
To reach her, you must wait for a sign. When it comes, if you are pure of heart, you begin to move toward Madonna, and move fast. One moment you are in Connecticut, wondering if it will snow, the next moment you are swept up by a force greater than yourself. You’re in a car on the highway, flashing past sleepy towns, moving closer and closer to the center, which you approach deftly and humbly, in the manner of a pilgrim. Like a pilgrim, you set off before first light. Like a pilgrim, you remove your shoes—to pass through security at the airport. Like a pilgrim, you read and reread sacred texts: profiles and reviews, the first published in the early 1980s, the most recent published just a second ago, which constitute a kind of record, the good news, the Gospel of Madonna.
Taken together, these chronicle the career of Madonna, each different, but each telling the same story, which is so established and archetypal it verges on folklore: the girl from suburban Detroit, which can stand for anywhere other than here; the early years in Eden, memories of which Madonna describes as “grainy and beautiful,” when her mother was young and alive; then tragedy, the wound that never heals, the death of her mother from breast cancer when Madonna was six; empty days plagued by tormented dreams. “You’re aware of a sense of loss, and feel a sense of abandonment,” she told me. “Children always think they did something wrong when their parents disappear.” Then her father’s second marriage, the stepmother, the drudgery, because she was the oldest girl in a house filled with eight children and so was pressed into adult service, cleaning and wiping and changing, when she was still a child herself; secrets and desires, her life before the mirror, which has followed her everywhere; high school, where she was beautiful, but punky and strange. “I didn’t fit into the popular group,” she said. “I wasn’t a hippie or a stoner, so I ended up being the weirdo. I was interested in classical ballet and music, and the kids were quite mean if you were different. I was one of those people that people were mean to. When that happened, instead of being a doormat, I decided to emphasize my differences. I didn’t shave my legs. I had hair growing under my arms. I refused to wear makeup, or fit the ideal of what a conventionally pretty girl would look like. So of course I was tortured even more, and that further validated my superiority, and helped me to survive and say, ‘I’m getting out of here, and everyone is a heathen in this school—you don’t even know who Mahler is!’ ” She found refuge in dance class and went on to the University of Michigan to study dance, but for just a year, because then she was gone to New York.
Because this is mythology, a short struggle was followed by a quick ascent to stardom. When was it? Nineteen eighty-two? Nineteen eighty-four? The birth of the music video? “Borderline”? And just like that, every girl in every school is Madonna Ciccone, with her slutty magnificence and lacy driving gloves and bare midriff and spangles.
Here is my favorite quote—it’s an editor at Billboard talking to Jay Cocks in 1985 for Time: “Cyndi Lauper will be around a long time. Madonna will be out of the business in six months.”
I felt the presence of Madonna as soon as I landed at LAX. It was as if she had been there a moment ago, and, in fact, while waiting for my luggage, I scanned a copy of the New York Post and came upon a picture taken the day before which showed Madonna, having come through customs, holding her two-and-a-half-year-old son, David, whom she had adopted in Malawi in 2006, the cameras an inch from her face. “The paparazzi are out of control,” she would later say. “I haven’t been to Los Angeles in quite a while, and I don’t watch television here or in England, and I was told there’s now a television show where the paparazzi are the stars of the show—is that true? That they film each other doing paparazzi jobs? Which gives them more fuel. I usually found that type kept their distance—they definitely do in England, because it’s illegal to photograph children. But that’s not how it is here. They get this close, and don’t care how much they scare your children. Being famous has changed a lot, because now there’s so many outlets, between magazines, TV shows, and the Internet, for people to stalk and follow you. We created the monster.”
The Full Madonna Madonna
The many modes of Madonna have been on full display in the pages of Vanity Fair, beginning in 1986. See them all in our revealing slide show.
I was rushed to Century City from the airport, to the towering new office building of CAA, the talent agency that represents Madonna, and seated in an empty screening room, which was spooky in the same way an empty church is spooky. The lights went down, and for 90 minutes I watched a documentary Madonna has written and produced, I Am Because We Are, which is African folk wisdom that means something like “It takes a village.” It too is about community—about identity and how it’s rooted in place. The movie sings of Malawi, a landlocked little nation in sub-Saharan Africa, ravaged by aids, filled with orphans—a world without adults that has become, in her middle years, the great cause of Madonna’s life. With this movie, it seems, she hopes not only to raise awareness but also to explain her own obsession with the motherless children of Africa.
It opens with Madonna walking in a crowd of Africans. Then her voice, which is the voice of the upper Midwest painted in Oxford glaze: “People always ask me why I chose Malawi. And I tell them, I didn’t. It chose me. I got a phone call from a woman named Victoria Keelan. She was born and raised in Malawi. She told me that there were over one million children orphaned by aids. She said there weren’t enough orphanages. And that the children were everywhere. Living on the streets. Sleeping under bridges. Hiding in abandoned buildings. Being abducted, kidnapped, raped. She said it was a state of emergency. She sounded exhausted and on the verge of tears. I asked her how I could help. She said, You’re a person with resources. People pay attention to what you say and do. I felt embarrassed. I told her I didn’t know where Malawi was. She told me to look it up on a map, and then she hung up on me. I decided to investigate, and I ended up finding out much more than I bargained for, about Malawi, about myself, about humanity.”
See Vanity Fair May edition table of contents http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/toc/2008/toc200805
Vanity Fair April 2008
Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler, styled by Michael Roberts and photographed exclusively for V.F. by Annie Leibovitz at Pier 59 Studios, in New York.
Features:
Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?
The idea that women aren’t funny—and which male said that?—seems pretty laughable these days. TV has unleashed a new generation of comediennes, who act, perform stand-up, write, and direct—dishing out the jokes with a side of sexy. Annie Leibovitz photographs a dozen of the wittiest dames in showbiz, from 30 Rock’s Tina Fey to Sarah Silverman, to S.N.L.’s current stars, while the author learns why the setup has changed.
See the table of contents at http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/toc/2008/toc200804
The Vanities Girls
Since 1992, the magazine’s Vanities section has opened with a full-page portrait of a promising young star. In September 2006, we tweaked the format: the Vanities opener now features an up-and-coming actress in a 50s-style pinup shot. These shapely ingénues are on the cusp of fame or have just hit it big; they have names you need to know and faces you won’t have trouble remembering. Here’s a look at all the bombshells who’ve struck a playful pose in the new retro style.
May 2008: Kristen Bell
Age: 27. Provenance: Detroit, followed by the Tisch School of the Arts, at N.Y.U., alma mater of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Martin Scorsese. You know her from … Veronica Mars, the now defunct CW show, in which, as the title character, Bell played an amateur sleuth in her hometown, Neptune. Up Next: Bell stars in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, due out this month, the latest romantic comedy from Judd Apatow, the auteur behind Superbad and Knocked Up. “They’ve sort of invented this new type of moviemaking where you really just improv almost the whole thing,” says Bell. “I think the sense of accomplishment when you’re done is even greater.” —KRISTA SMITH
Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Source: Vanity Faif
Vanity Fair is a finalist for six ASME awards
This year, the American Society of Magazine Editors has nominated Vanity Fair for National Magazine Awards in six categories, including the big one: General Excellence. The winners will be announced on May 1, but in the meantime you can check out all of our nominated features right here.
General Excellence
According to the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), this category “honors the effectiveness with which writing, reporting, editing and design all come together to command readers’ attention and fulfill the magazine’s unique editorial mission.” Vanity Fair always seeks to mix glamour and intrigue with big, muscular reporting, but we had some notable successes in 2007, from Annie Leibovitz’s film noir portfolio to David Kamp’s profile of Sly Stone, to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s essay on “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush.” Did we mention that special issue the guy from U2 put together?
Design
Vanity Fair’s design strives to be modern yet classic, simple yet sophisticated, minimal yet full of restrained energy. Its layout is meant to feel daring, refined, and free of pretense, always at the service of a story. Which is a long way of saying that the magazine has to look as smart and bold as the topics it covers. This was especially true in 2007. The archival images of the late fashion icon Isabella Blow, the never-before-seen photographs of Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, the elaborately staged scenes in the film noir portfolio—these were just some of the indelible visuals that made this a year to remember.
Photo Portfolio
For the 13th annual Hollywood Issue, Annie Leibovitz collaborated with Academy Award–winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter, The Black Dahlia) to produce “Killers Kill, Dead Men Die,” a visual and literary extravaganza that pays tribute to the noir films of the 40s and 50s. With a plot conceived by fashion and style director Michael Roberts and a “script” written by Nathaniel Rich and Jim Windolf, this movie-within-a-magazine stars Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Connelly, Kirsten Dunst, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson, among others.
Profile Writing
This category “honors the stylishness and originality with which the author treats his or her subject.” In late 2004, hotshot film talent, manager, and producer Pat Dollard left a successful career in Hollywood to shoot a pro-war documentary about American soldiers in Iraq. Once a self-described “doctrinaire liberal,” Dollard was attempting to re-invent himself as the right-wing Michael Moore. Evan Wright planned to shadow Dollard as he edited his film and pitched it around town, but the story morphed into something else entirely, as Dollard began to degenerate before the writer’s eyes into a maelstrom of drugs, sex, and violence. The result is a cautionary tale about our nation’s intertwined addictions to entertainment and war.
Reporting
This category “honors the enterprise, exclusive reporting and intelligent analysis that a magazine exhibits in covering an event, a situation or a problem of contemporary interest and significance.” São Paolo is a metropolis of 20 million people and the capital of Brazil’s largest and wealthiest state. In May of 2006, the city was shut down for days by a series of violent and orchestrated attacks. And then—quite suddenly—the attacks simply stopped, and life in São Paolo was allowed to return to normal. The entire episode had been a show of force coordinated by cell phone from inside São Paolo’s vast and notorious prisons. In “City of Fear,” William Langewiesche ventures deep inside the jails and slums of São Paolo to describe the emergence of the gang-led “proto-government” that runs more and more of the city with every passing day. But Langewiesche argues that São Paolo is not alone; for much of the world, he warns, São Paolo holds up a mirror to the future.
Feature Writing
This category, ASME says, “honors the stylishness and originality with which the author treats his or her subject.” In this case, the subject is a horse: Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner who had been a favorite to win the Triple Crown until he fractured his leg in the opening seconds of the Preakness. From the adrenaline rushes of Barbaro’s early successes on the racetrack to the heart-stopping crush of his leg, from the ups and downs of his surgeries and near recoveries to the bleak reality of his last days, Buzz Bissinger captures the rhythms and intimate details of the three and a half years of Barbaro’s brief, bright life.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2008/03/asme200803
Apr 21, 2008
Movie Review: "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"
Latest Apatow-produced comedy should be easy to forget
Forgetting this average comedy won’t take a trip to Hawaii. Peter (Jason Segel) heads to an island resort after his ex Sarah (Kristen Bell) breaks his heart. Though he meets Mila Kunis’ pretty hotel clerk, the only person auds will want to cling to is sleazy English comic Russell Brand playing Sarah’s new boyfriend, who puts more effort into being funny that the combined total of producer Judd Apatow’s post-Superbad factory films.
The usual slob rom com has the lug winning the girl beyond all sense of sanity. Here he loses her, and with good reason. It’s not his daily nipple dance in the mirror or his habit of wolfing down cereal from a dog bowl. It’s his petrifaction in half-manhood, the way station of the depressed and fearful who are dimly aware that life could be better, but are too timid to try harder. The reviled Sarah Marshall has one good scene where she gets to unload on ex-boyfriend Peter why she dumped his sweatpants-wearing, couch-glued ass (which we get to see often in its full glory). She’s an actress on a titillating forensic drama that requires her to purse her lips thoughtfully while mulling over severed penises with William Baldwin. Peter does the “music”—the atonal chords that lend that je ne sais castration. After five and a half years of public togetherness capped off by Billy Bush saluting their love with a montage, she’s left him for the world’s coolest douche bag, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, owning the film), the longhaired, leather-clad frontman of a pretentious British rock band named Infinite Sorrow. Aldous might pretend he’s saving the planet by shooting a video where he makes out with nuns and Orthodox Jews, but he’s also awesomely cocky, really, really great in bed and looks manly in a sarong.
The problem isn’t that we’re supposed to hate Sarah, it’s that we can’t because she’s too damned boring. Bell has glossy lips, blonde hair and zero personality—she’s an amalgamated dream girl as flat as a magazine spread. Heather Mills we can loathe; Sarah Marshall’s a big fat yawn. Peter tries bedding other women, but both parties regret it in the morning—the wet spots on the sheets are from his midnight tears. When Peter tries to escape his misery with a Hawaiian vacation only to run into Sarah and Aldous at the same resort, he blubbers like a baby, but she’s as petty as a splinter. She might even care about his misery—at least a little. Hospitality concierge Rachel (Mila Kunis, sweet, pretty, interchangeable) dotes on Peter, but that could just be her job. Of course it isn’t, but lets pretend, shall we?
Segal wrote the script and knows that his character’s best lines aren’t jokes, they’re great, tearing, bawling sequences where he weeps during Project Runway and drowns his sorrows in cocktails decorated with erotically positioned fruit. Segal is lumpen, glum and prone to tantrums. He’s funny when lashing out at kindness or crumpling under self-pity, his vulnerability extended to several shots of his limp manhood hanging benignly when he’s caught off guard while dressing. For, ahem, harder laughs, Segal and director Nicholas Stoller have fallen back on producer Judd Apatow’s stable—the closest thing in today’s film to the studio system. Jonah Hill is trotted out as hotel worker who’s totally hot for Aldous’ jock. Paul Rudd roams around as a surfer named Chuck, or “Kulu” in Hawaiian (which means “Chuck”), who has the pothazed memory of a goldfish and one of the film’s loudest guffaws when he slaps Peter on the back and advises, “When life gives you lemons, just say ‘F--k the lemons’ and bail.” But the whole film feels like Apatow and clan are still on their own vacation after last summer’s one-two punch. Their comedies have the singular disadvantage of high expectations—they can’t just put Will Ferrell in daisy dukes, they’ve got to enlighten us about the modern man while pushing taste 2 the xtreme. And while this mediocre flick is worthy of a cheap one-night fling (or matinee), don’t introduce it to the folks unless you’re comfortable that they won’t be uncomfortable at all.
Distributor: Sony
Cast: Jason Segal, Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Russell Brand
Director: Nicholas Stoller
Screenwriter: Jason Segal
Producers: Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson
Genre: Comedy
Rating: R for sexual content, language and some graphic nudity
Running time: 112 min.
Release date: April 18, 2008
Source: BoxOffice.com
Movie Review: "Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?"
Spurlock’s latest non-documentary comedy represents everything it thinks it’s criticizing about American foreign policy
The self-indulgent Merry Prankster-isms of the Michael Moore school reach a new low in Morgan Spurlock’s smug, superficial and deceitful Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Imagine, if you will, Moore’s Roger & Me remade as a globetrotting travelogue, with Spurlock in Moore’s role as the hapless investigative journalist trying to score a difficult interview, and Osama Bin Laden as nefarious and elusive then-GM-president Roger Smith. Moore had a shot at landing the White Whale in his influential leftist Moby Dick, so there was a certain giddy suspense in watching him blunder his way toward Smith across the economically devastated Michigan landscape he blamed Smith in part for creating. Though Spurlock pretends otherwise, he knows he will never get near the subject of his rather meandering quest, and watching him mount an expensively produced, entirely touristic vision of the Middle East and then punctuate it with extravagant computer animations, arch editorial cartoons and lengthy voiceover homilies of the “can’t we all just get along” variety is an excruciating experience, made all the more torturous by Spurlock’s witless joviality and depiction of himself as brave and heroic and other nice things for which he offers not much supporting evidence.
The film’s essential technique is to go to a Middle Eastern trouble spot, find a journalist who agrees with Spurlock’s spectacularly pedestrian analysis that things are bad and economic issues and stifled political freedoms are root causes, and then ask random strangers if they know where Osama Bin Laden is. Most people laugh in Spurlock’s face. A few say things like “Pakistan.” Wow, Spurlock says in narration. I think we’re getting closer.
The limits of Spurlock’s technique are especially visible when he decides to visit a Hassidic Jewish community in Israel. The Hassidim (whose customs and beliefs are never even slightly explained) are outraged by Spurlock’s questions and camera crew, and they drive him out with shouts and curses, causing a police incident, and allowing Spurlock to present himself the way he likes to: As a risk taker in a trouble zone. The only thing resembling a weapon anyone brandishes at him is a black fedora hat.
The problem is that, emotionally, this scene tips the balance of Spurlock’s argument toward the Palestinian side, even though we haven’t even heard from a countervailing Israeli voice (he does interview one Israeli commentator who says “A two-state solution is inevitable,” another adventure in obviousness presented as political profundity). Like so much of this lavish home movie, Spurlock’s confrontation with the Hassidim is a completely anecdotal moment, and it reveals nothing significant about the volatile world Spurlock’s traveled halfway around to photograph except that some of its inhabitants don’t trust the media. But because Spurlock frames his movie in cult-of-personality terms and makes himself the protagonist, the fact that Our Hero has been yelled at makes villains of those who confront him.
By the time Spurlock gets to the really dangerous localities like the badlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, he’s alternately palling around with the U.S. soldiers whose presence he decries and hiding in his hotel room bloviating into a webcam. By this point, in a frantic attempt to provide some drama, Spurlock is resorting to his old Super Size Me “documentarian as subject” duplicities, in which he gets to be Schrödinger, the box the experiment takes place in and also Schrödinger’s cat. We are suddenly in diary mode, with Spurlock telling us in direct address how dangerous everything he’s doing is—a blunt approach, but necessary, because despite all the gamer computer animations that show Spurlock facing off against a kind of Mecha-Osama, we probably wouldn’t know if Spurlock didn’t tell us that there’s anything real at stake.
When Spurlock whimpers about how he misses his wife, and how terrible it is that she’s experiencing the last stages of pregnancy and he’s not there to be with her, you want to shout at this self-pitying tourist that, unlike the Pakistanis, the Afghanis, the Palestinians and Israelis, Spurlock isn’t trapped in a danger zone. He is perfectly free to go home, and the problems of the people he’s so merrily accosting with a question he knows they can’t answer are a lot deeper than whether or not they’ve chosen, like he has, to skim across the surface of somebody else’s world with the random thoughtlessness of a small stone skipping over a vast body of water, grasping none of the depths beneath.
If Spurlock really wants to know why so many people find it hard to be friends with today’s America, it’s partly because of paternalistic spews like this one. In its fiscal extravagance, unthinking self-righteousness and fundamental narcissism, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? is a nearly note-perfect anthem for virtually everything about American policy it seeks to critique.
Distributor: Weinstein Co.
Cast: Morgan Spurlock
Director: Morgan Spurlock
Screenwriters: Jeremy Chilnick and Morgan Spurlock
Producers: Stacey Offman and Morgan Spurlock
Genre: Documentary
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language
Running time: 93 min.
Release date: April 18, 2008
Source: boxoffice.com
Movie Review: “Zombie Strippers”
Zombie Strippers delivers exactly what it promises
It’s tempting to simply state that the title says it all. Schlock-stick director Jay Lee promises us Zombie Strippers, and delivers … Zombie Strippers. The involvement of self-styled “Queen of Porn” Jenna Jameson may make a prophet of pic’s scuzzy strip club owner Ian Essko (Robert Englund of Freddy Krueger fame), who predicts “these grave-risen gutter sluts are going to make us a mint.”
But this surprisingly well-read exploitation up-and-comer—who also served as the screenwriter and cinematographer—tries to accomplish something more here, something that his clumsiness behind the keyboard and the camera prevent from materializing. Lee fancies his script an adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s (notice the on-the-nose shout-out of naming his antihero “Ian Essko”) Theatre of the Absurd drama Rhinoceros, an indictment of the culture of conformity that convinces almost all of the residents of a small town to transform themselves into—you guessed it—rhinoceroses. In Zombie Strippers, which is set in a small town named “Sartre,” the culture of conformity convinces almost all of the dancers at an underground gentlemen’s club named “Rhino’s” to transform themselves in into—you guessed it—zombie strippers.
Lee also sees himself as a political satirist, as it is the administration of a somehow-elected-to-a-fourth-term President George W. Bush that creates the “chemo virus” designed to reanimate sufficient dead soldiers to keep fighting the commander-in-chief’s endless wars. When an infected soldier escapes from a secret research facility, he stumbles into Rhino’s and promptly rips the throat out of star stripper Kat (Jameson). Ian is distraught—until, that is, Kat rises from the dead and shambles back to the pole.
“Hey, do you think this is such a good idea?” the hesitant DJ asks his boss before cuing up the music. “Wasn’t that bitch dead a minute ago?”
“F--k it,” Ian shrugs. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
When Kat takes a customer backstage after earning a standing ovation, and devours the dude, they get their answer.
With its absolutely awful special effects and (un)dead-on-arrival dialogue, Zombie Strippers is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Call it unintentional-intentional-unintentional humor: Lee presumably believes that he’s satirizing the unintentional laughs inherent in no-budget genre fare, but does so in such a shoddy manner that the audience is laughing at him instead of with him. Especially when it comes to his efforts to incorporate commentary on existentialism, such as when the undead Kat resumes reading her dog-earred volume of Nietzsche backstage and declares, “This makes so much more sense now.”
But despite that, Lee is a man of his word. He promises us Zombie Strippers, and delivers Zombie Strippers.
Distributor: Triumph
Cast: Robert Englund, Jenna Jameson, Roxy Saint, Carmit Levite, Joey Medina,
Director/Screenwriter: Jay Lee
Producers: Angela Lee, Larry Shapiro and Andrew Golov
Genre: Comedy/Horror
Rating: R for strong violence and gore, sexuality/nudity and language
Release date: April 18 ltd.
Source: boxoffice.com
Apr 18, 2008
Al Pacino Wanted Photos
Al Pacino Hits the Big Screen this Weekend with 88 Minutes. See his latest photos.
See more photos at http://www.film.com/photos/al-pacino/17804797
Super High Me
Super High Me makes for a dull and uneven trip
Standup comic Doug Benson mimics Morgan Spurlock (on pot) for this dull and wildly uneven doc about the relevance of, and struggle for, marijuana legalization. Though medical marijuana is legal in California, the DEA does not consistently recognize the state’s law and so asserts its federal power over California’s marijuana “clubs” and “dispensaries,” although they are legal businesses. Though the point of the film is somewhat obscured by its unwieldy structure (stoned director? high editor?), the project overall has the potential to be the stoner’s Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the informal distribution model (offering free DVDs of the film to nonpaying crowds to be screened on—you guessed it—4/20) could result in a strong cultural foothold for the movie, even if it doesn’t score big in the box office.
Doug Benson is a long time pot smoker. As a standup comedian, he’s found ways to not only support his habit but also integrate it into his work. After seeing Super Size Me (which he says is the single worst film to watch when high), he got the idea that he could compare the harm caused by perpetual marijuana consumption against the effects of sobriety to determine if pot is in fact all that harmful. The medical results are middling at best, indicating the only determinate to Benson’s competence when either stoned or straight is chance. Along the way, we see a number of celebrity cameos: Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt and many more.
Ultimately, this film is intended for use with bong or pipe, so its slapdash assembly is almost a moot point in the context of the film’s purpose. No one expects Rocky Horror to be a masterpiece: If it’s a masterpiece at all, it owes much of its stature to the charm of its paltry assemblage. The film’s half-hearted stabs at legitimacy (showing the DEA busts on dispensaries, angry and tearful activists with signs begging for the acceptance of medical marijuana, etc.) are executed to feel like highpoints in the rhythm of the film, but function as proof the filmmakers were, shall we say, “chill” about their approach. When we finally see a dispensary raided by DEA agents, the event carries with it the irony of censorship: The DEA confiscating boxes of high-grade pot invokes memories of so many Victorian smut trials. (“We’re not sure it’s porn. We need to watch it one more time to be sure.”)
Ultimately, the film’s a weak effort intended for a crowd that will be attending as an event associated with a social culture. It’s therefore not so fair to grade it on the same scale as a film intended to captivate an audience. This is not, after all, There Will Be Blood. This is a party film that has no ambitions to be anything else. As such, it mimics the possible attention span of its (affected) audience and poses a strange issue for the critic. Generally a critic’s word might have some bearing on a film’s reception or at least influence the desire of the possible patron. In the case of Super High Me, if you’re interested in the film, you’re likely interested in the culture and my suggestions are therefore as neuter as the stoners in the film: Affected and possibly innocuous.
Distributor: Red Envelope
Cast: Doug Benson, Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, Dana Gould and Jeffrey Ross
Director: Michael Blieden
Producer: Alex Campbell
Genre: Comedy/Documentary
Rating: Rated R for pervasive drug content and language
Running time: 89 min.
Release date: April 11 NY/LA, April 20 wide
Source: http://boxoffice.com
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Scarlett From G.I. Joe Revealed!
Just a quick post to show off how the character "Scarlett" looks in the new, live-action G.I. Joe movie, directed by Stephen Sommers.
Scarlett, the popular female soldier from the hit 1980s animated TV show is being played by Rachel Nichols.
Angelina Jolie Wanted Photo
Angelina Jolie star as Fox in director Timur Bekmambetov action 'Wanted.'
Find More Pictures from Wanted and read our reviews.
Milo Ventimiglia Wallpaper
Name: Milo Ventimiglia
Birth Name: Milo Anthony Ventimiglia
Height: 5' 10
Sex: M
Nationality: American
Birth Date: July 8, 1977
Birth Place: Anaheim, California, USA
Profession: actor
Education: American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California
University of California, Los Angeles (left UCLA on his freshmen year to perform on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air)
San Francisco American Conservatory Theater
Relationship: Alexis Bledel (actress; born September 16, 1981; dated since 2002)
Claim to fame: his role as Jess Mariano in the television dramedy Gilmore Girls
Contact: Click here
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Angelina Jolie branded dorky
Angelina Jolie has been branded ''dorky'' by her own children.
The 33-year-old actress says that despite her and partner Brad Pitt's glittering Hollywood careers, their four kids don't see them as stars.
She told America's Star magazine: "I think our kids will look back on all that as being really funny when they get older, because they think of us as being really dorky - in fact, the dorkiest people on the planet!"
"We are very much just parents together, although we have moments of being sexy and fun, and I do find Brad very sexy, obviously. I believe we are together for all the other reasons."
Angelina has previously admitted to being a "dorky teenager" after pictures of her as a 13-year-old dressed as Boy George surfaced.
Angelina, who stars as a sexy femme fatale in new thriller "Wanted," is mother to adopted children six-year-old Maddox, four-year-old Pax and Zahara, three, and 21-month-old biological daughter Shiloh with Brad.
She is also rumored to be pregnant with twins.
Source: BANG Showbiz
Hotel for Dogs
Genre: Comedy
Starring: Don Cheadle, Emma Roberts, Kevin Dillon, Lisa Kudrow, Johnny Simmons,
Director: Thor Freudenthal
Producer: Jack Leslie, Lauren Shuler Donner
Distributor: DreamWorks Pictures
Release Date: January 23, 2009
Writer: Jeff Lowell (screenplay), Lois Duncan (novel)
Synopsis
'Hotel for Dogs,' stars Emma Roberts, Jake T. Austin, Lisa Kudrow, Kevin Dillon and Don Cheadle in a smart, funny comedy adventure that shows how far love and imagination can take you. When 16 year old Andi (Robert) and her younger brother, Bruce (Austin), find themselves in a foster home with a strict 'no pets' policy, Andi has to use her quick wit to help find a new home for their dog, Friday. The kids stumble upon an abandoned hotel and begin transforming it into the perfect home for Friday --- as well as all the strays in the city. In no time, the kids have transformed the old hotel into something truly magical: a home for both the dogs and for themselves. But they have also aroused the suspicions of the police who want to know - who let the dogs in?
Source: http://www.celebritywonder.com/movie/2009_Hotel_for_Dogs.html
Apr 14, 2008
Movie Review: "Street Kings"
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Forest Whitaker, Common, Jay Mohr
Directed by: David Ayer
Police corruption is always a juicy theme for a balls-out action flick. And here’s Keanu Reeves going all butch and trigger-happy as LAPD hardass Tom Ludlow, a hothead who bends the law with the blessing of his commanding officer, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker, pushing way too hard). Reeves struggles mightily for the brute force that felt second nature to Russell Crowe in the great L.A. Confidential, from a novel by James Ellroy, who shares writing credit for Street Kings. Director David Ayer also labors under the shadow of the vital script he wrote for Training Day. The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp. Don’t get me wrong. Street Kings clips along with brutal efficiency, but the plot that sets up Tom for a frame-up is, in critic parlance, a strain on credulity. The characters in Street Kings would call it bullshit. They wouldn’t be wrong.
>>Watch Peter Travers' video review of Street Kings.
>>Watch every episode of our weekly Peter Travers video podcast by subscribing via iTunes here (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Friday, a new episode featuring clips from the week's newest movies will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]
Apr 11, 2008
Angelina Jolie Finally Talk about Pregnacy
Angelina Jolie has spoken publicly about her pregnancy for the first time.
The actress and UN goodwill ambassador - who is expecting twins with her partner Brad Pitt - was in Washington D.C. for a discussion on Iraq's education policy on Tuesday (April 8, 2008) when she got a playful nudge from her unborn babies.
Speaking after the talk, she said: "I felt kicking suddenly in the middle of the event."
Angelina, who was joined in the US capital by her adopted sons, six-year-old Maddox, and Pax, four, added: "It is a very special time in our lives."
Despite the interruption, Angelina continued to talk passionately about her two visits to war-torn Iraq and urged the international community to make education a priority.
The actress told the Council on Foreign Relations: "The best way to heal children of conflict from trauma is to have them focus on their future."
"Every child has a right to education and conflict is not a reason to ignore that."
Angelina - who also has an adopted daughter, three-year-old Zahara, and a 22-month-old biological daughter, Shiloh, with Brad - then spoke about her new initiative, Education Partnership for Children of Conflict.
She explained the EPCC would be "a center that helps raise awareness and coordinate all the various efforts of people working towards education for children of conflict."
Source: BANG Showbiz
Salma Hayek's Sleepless Nights
Salma Hayek hasn't slept for six months.
The "Frida" actress, who gave birth to her first child Valentina Paloma last September, is finding motherhood an exhausting but rewarding experience.
She said: "I don't even remember what my life was like before. I can tell you that I don't sleep. This is a cliche but it's true. I haven't slept in the last six months."
"The blessing of having a healthy child, I think is the best thing that can happen to anyone."
The 41-year-old star also dismissed stars who claim they have lost their post-baby pounds simply by breastfeeding, insisting she has had to work out to regain her figure.
Salma added to US TV show 'Extra': "I thought, 'As soon as this baby's out, I'm just going to lose all the weight super- fast because I'm going to breastfeed and the weight is going to come off.'"
"It takes you nine months to get it, and nine months to lose it. I'm proud of what I've lost. And the rest is going to go when it's time to go."
Source: BANG Showbiz
Sean Penn and wife Robin Wright Call off Divorce
Sean Penn and wife Robin Wright Penn have called off their divorce.
The pair - who announced they had split last December - applied to a San Francisco judge to stop the divorce proceedings during a hearing on Tuesday (April 8, 2008).
In a one-page document filed in Marin County Superior Court, the clerk dismissed the couple's petition at their request.
The hearing had been scheduled to be heard in court later this month.
Sean and Robin sparked rumors they had reunited after attending an Eddie Vedder concert together earlier this week.
During the show in Berkeley, California, Eddie dedicated a cover of Tom Waits' "Picture in a Frame" to the "very special couple."
Sean later joined Eddie on stage to wish his wife a happy birthday.
Robin, 43, filed for divorce on December 21 citing irreconcilable differences.
The couple met on the set of the 1990 thriller "State of Grace" and married in 1996.
They have two teenage children, daughter Dylan Frances and son Hopper Jack.
Source: BANG Showbiz
DVD Release: "Jet Li says Fearless"
Starring: Jet Li, Shido Nakamura, Betty Sun, Yong Dong, Hee Ching Paw
Directed by: Ronny Yu
Jet Li says Fearless is his last martial-arts epic. If that's true, he goes out on top in this visual stunner that tells the story of a disgraced Chinese Wushu master who finds redemption defending his country's honor. Li is simply the most compelling kung-fu hero since a guy named Bruce Lee donned a yellow tracksuit.
Read more information about this film from film.com
DVD Review: "Fast Food Nation"
Starring: Wilmer Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Greg Kinnear, Luis Guzmán
Directed by: Richard Linklater
This fictionalized adaptation of the best-selling book is an uneven affair. But when it works, it's a brilliant exposé of the horrors of industrialized food in America. The undeniably gross message is delivered by Bruce Willis, who explains that "there's always been a little shit in the meat." And by saving the slaughterhouse crucible for last, the filmmakers ensure the squeamish won't leave before a character must sort the kidney out of a cow's guts.
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Art-House Cinema and the Girlfriend Factor
Matt Cooley, the wizard who designs my movie pages at Rolling Stone, came in yesterday with a pained look on his face.
“My girlfriend wants to see The Counterfeiters,” he said.
Matt was in agony. I see his torment often on the faces of those boyfriends and husbands who are suddenly put on the spot by their significant she. Women mysteriously seem to know about foreign films and American indies that guys have never heard of. I told Matt that The Counterfeiters, a fact-based German-Austrian film about forgery in a Nazi concentration camp, was a solid choice and showed his girlfriend had quality taste. She might even class up his act. Matt is not a complete philistine. Despite his disturbing jones for the screen acting of comic Dane Cook—including the unwatchable Waiting— Matt saw and liked The Bank Job and seemed ready to commit to something more than endless hours glued to DVDs of Family Guy.
Matt is not alone out there. Guys unbitten by indie cinemania clearly need to know what to say when the girlfriend suggests an art-house movie. A flat “No” will get you nowhere and definitely won’t get you any. So here are some rules to live by when she suggests a break from mainstream escapism. Feel free to add your own, especially if you learned the hard way.
Stall You don’t do this by letting your jaw go slack and looking bored. You show a fierce interest and begin tossing out questions.
Ask What the Movie Is About If it’s, say, Snow Angels, about the drowning of a little girl and how it makes everyone miserable, she may talk herself out of wanting to go. If it’s In Bruges, about two hitmen hiding out in Belgium, you both may be intrigued.
Find Out Who’s In It Look, it could be global hottie Asia Argento who’s in everything indie these days and whose sizzling presence, especially in Boarding Gate, will make up for any shortcomings in the movie.
Inquire About Subtitles When she calls you a slob, look hurt and tell her you wanted to be sure the film wasn’t dubbed into English, which you hate. This will earn you points.
Be Ready With An Alternative When she says The Dutchess of Langeais or Sleepwalking or something that sounds equally butt-and-mind numbing, don’t panic and blurt out, “Isn’t there anything else?” In that way lies madness. Always be ready with an art film you think you’ll like. Often you can tell by the title (My Brother Is An Only Child). Or you might—radical step here—read reviews. The Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days didn’t win unanimous raves because it sucked. A little research and you may be the one doing the suggesting.
Don’t Worry About Chick Flicks Yes, the indies have them too. You can tell from the titles—Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Married Life, Then She Found Me—that these flicks are not for you. And so can she. Girls do want to see these films, but with other girls. It works the same with guys. Would you drag her to Zombie Strippers?
Source: Rollingstone
Movie Review: "The Visitor"
Starring: Richard Jenkins, Danai Gurira, Haaz Sleiman, Hiam Abbass
Directed by: Tom McCarthy
If I told you The Visitor reamed out our government for its shameful treatment of illegal immigrants, you’d say, “stop preaching.” If I told you The Visitor focused on one man, a shy, sixtyish college professor who comes out of his shell, you’d say, who wants to see that? And yet The Visitor, featuring an award-caliber performance by Richard Jenkins as the prof, is a heartfelt human drama that sneaks up and floors you. In only his second film as writer and director, following his acclaimed 2003 debut with The Station Agent, Tom McCarthy is already that rare talent who can work in miniature to reveal major truths. Like his acting — you just saw him on the last season of The Wire as a Jayson Blair-like journalist — McCarthy is attuned to the nuances of behavior. Just watch Jenkins as Walter Vale, a widower who seems to move through life in a trance.
We meet Walter as he leaves his safe, dull perch teaching global economics at a Connecticut college and travels to Manhattan to present a paper at an academic convention. At a barely used apartment he and his late wife kept in the city, Walter finds a beautiful young woman soaking in his bathtub. She’s Zainab (the wonderous Danai Gurira), from Senegal. Zainab and her boyfriend Tarek (Haaz Sleiman excels), a Syrian musician, aren’t squatters. They rented the place from a scam artist. After a few awkward moments, Walter invites the couple to stay till they find new digs. But it’s Walter who finds something — himself. When Tarek, who gives the uptight Walter lessons on the African drum, is arrested, Walter tries to intercede with U.S. Immigration. He even provides comfort for Tarek’s distraught mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), who arrives from Detroit.
McCarthy could have made his film a moral treatise about post-9/11 immigration abuses. Instead, he lets issues present themselves through personal interaction. Walter and Mouna, beautifully played by Abbass, open up to each other in funny and touching ways. When Mouna notices that Walter has changed his eyeglasses to something more modern, the small, precise moment speaks volumes. The same goes for the movie. McCarthy opens up a whole world for us on the face of his leading actor. You’ve seen Jenkins before — as the ghost father on Six Feet Under, the gay FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster, the bored shrink in There’s Something About Mary. Now it’s time to remember his name. This is the role of his career, and Jenkins doesn’t tackle it (that would be the obvious choice of a lesser actor), instead he wears it like a second skin. After decades of honing his craft in film and on stage at Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Company, Jenkins brings a lifetime of experience to bear on this character. The last sight of Walter — he’s in a subway banging his drum with a fierce rhythm that articulates his rage — is indelible. In The Visitor, Jenkins delivers a master class in acting. Oscar, take note.
Source: Rollingstone
Apr 9, 2008
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Apr 8, 2008
Madonna to Addopt Indian Baby
The "4 Minutes" singer – who is in the final stages of formally adopting two-year-old Malawian son David Banda – is keen to open her home to a disadvantaged Indian tot after she fell in love with the country following her visit this year.
During the trip – on which Madonna was accompanied by husband Guy Ritchie, David and her two other children Lourdes, 11, and seven-year-old Rocco - the family spoke to Bollywood choreographer Sandip Soparrkar, who has adopted an Indian baby.
Sandip said: "We spoke about how there are so many children in India who need homes."
Madonna – who has given up her attempt to adopt a little girl from Africa after growing frustrated with the process – and Guy initially clashed over the idea but they have now decided it will be good for the family.
A source told Britain's The Sun newspaper: "Madonna was very taken with Sandip. He told her there were orphans who would melt her heart. Guy was against the idea, but when she wants something, she gets it."
"After the stress of adopting David, Guy thought Madonna was mad to want to go through it all again. But they talked and talked and decided adopting a baby from India would be easier."
The couple started the process of adopting David in October 2006.
Last week, Madonna was deemed a suitable mother by Malawian officials and it was recommended that David should stay with the couple at their family home in London.
The adoption is due to be formalized in the near future.
Source: BANG Showbiz
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