Over at Ain’t It Cool News, a poster calling himself Walter B claimed that he’d seen the new PG-13 rated Die Hard film and said that it was as kick-ass as any R-rated feature.
Sounds a bit similar to what a Mr Bruce Willis had been saying last week, right? Well, it’s no coincidence, because representatives from the site confirmed that the poster was Bruce himself (Walter is his real name)
When asked about Michael Bay possibly helming a Die Hard film, Willis got slightly irate, to say the least. Read on to see Bruce’s comments:
Roth joins Liv Tyler and Edward Norton as The Hulk’s famous nemesis Abomination. Although apparently they’re coming up with a less stupid name. Abomination’s alter ego is KGB agent Emil Blonsky, who deliberately exposes himself to the same Gamma radiation as Bruce Banner. Why not?This Hulk re-imagining is shaping up quite nicely. We love both Roth and Norton. And Liv Tyler’s ok, I guess.
New Line have picked up Flight of the Dead, previously known as ‘Plane Dead’. Essentially, it’s ‘zombies on a plane’, which is simultaneously the best and worst idea ever. But zombies beat snakes hands down, if you ask me.
Apparently, the film will most likely go direct to DVD. While you wait expectantly, check out the trailer.
Here’s hoping ‘Sharks on a Plane’ will come along and complete the trilogy.
George Lucas has revealed to Fox News that he’s developing two live-action Star Wars films that will debut on television and will probably be an hour-long.
“But they won’t have members of the Skywalker family as characters,†he said. “They will be other people of that milieu.â€
Milieu? Ooh, look at fancy pants Lucas and his big words. However, Lucas couldn’t think of a fancy word when describing his disdain for Spiderman 3:
“It’s silly. It’s a silly movie,” he said. “There just isn’t much there. Once you take it all apart, there’s not much story, is there?”“People thought ‘Star Wars’ was silly, too,” he added, with a wink. “But it wasn’t.”
With a wink? Stop winking at people George and take a look at the last three Star Wars films. Then try not to use the word silly amongst the milieu of silliness that’s to be found in those steaming piles of disappointment.
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, who has been writing incisive film criticism for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, has been let go after 30 years, her articles replaced by wire service reviews. And so the death of local movie coverage -- and the relationship a critic can build with his or her readership -- dwindles further. The Alliance of Women Film Journalists kicks the story forward in thoughtful ways.
The point I sometimes ponder is whether a working critic even has much of a local readership anymore. Wesley and I cover movie releases in Boston; our reviews generally come out in the paper on Friday and presumably are read and digested by people in the greater New England area. I know that's true because I get e-mails from local readers Friday or Saturday, responding to what I've written with pleasure, vituperation, or just further comment.
Then the local emails stop, and those from readers around the country and around the world start coming in. As our reviews are posted online at Boston.com and disseminated via Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and other websites, the audience becomes anyone with a computer, a love of movies, and a willingness to click through. A woman in Washington State wrote to tell me I'm her favorite movie reviewer. A guy from Somerville wrote to say my writing is "sludge" and he'll never come back. For which reader am I a "local" critic?
On the other hand, The New York Times national edition has made inroads in the Boston area. Many people I know here read both the Globe and the Times; some people read only the Times. Does that mean that A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis are their local critics?
Yes, it does. In an era in which everyone's a critic and all reviews are instantly accessible, one's taste becomes one's neighborhood. The reviewer who articulates those tastes best and pushes them in provocative directions becomes your local voice, wherever he or she is and wherever you are. Cultural geography subsumes physical geography when distribution is moot. (The problem then is getting you to check out another "neighborhood" of taste.)
It's an interesting and not unrewarding new world, but what it doesn't promise is job security for the likes of Eleanor Ringel Gillespie (or Bob Ross or Jami Bernard or Mark Burger or many others).
Or me, really. Which is why Wesley and I have to -- and want to -- keep writing about the Coolidge and the Brattle and the series at the HFA and the guy in Malden pouring his heart and credit card balance into making a movie he hopes someone, anyone will see. If we don't connect the dots for readers in our physical sphere, a wire service certainly isn't going to. Cultural communities need entry points and talking points and as much connective tissue as possible. The local critic is valuable because he or she sits in the same theater you do -- and understands how and why that matters.
After a Tribeca screening of The Killing of John Lennon at Pace University last week, director Andrew Piddington hung around to answer some questions from the crowd. The biggest question, which someone finally dared to ask, was how come when we see Mark David Chapman visiting New York City, it's unambiguously the New York City of 2007? We clearly see Chapman pass by Planet Hollywood, Toys R' Us and every other Times Square fixture you could possibly imagine. Piddington's answer? He needs more money to CGI that stuff away, and hasn't raised it yet. Other questions during the talk touched, of course, on Chapman's motivations, the whole conspiracy angle, the central performance of Jonas Ball, how Piddington went about casting Lennon and Ono, whether he actually met with Chapman and a number of other issues.
Crowd: Talk a little about the research and the casting process for the film.
AP: Considering research and casting, the gestation for this movie began four years ago -- it's taken four years to make. I first came across a book by Fenton Bresler called Who Killed John Lennon? This was a conspiracy book that set out to prove that Chapman was a Manchurian Candidate. There was a lot of evidence in it, but no proof. What it did have was a lot of depositions and transcripts, court information, all of which was public domain. And once I started to read the psychiatrist reports I became fascinated by the actual character. That was what drove me, and that's what started it. I then went onto the Internet and you can imagine the sort of stuff that's on the Internet. It's full of very difficult things to believe, and so therefore I then went to Ebay, and over the course of a year, I purchased nearly every single newspaper that was published during that four or five month period. That became my prime research material.
My instinct was always to cross-check three times and if the same information came through, then for me that was valid, and that's how I built up the screenplay. The screenplay took a while to write, and the film took four years to make. Jonas Ball, who I believe gives a magnificent performance in this film, the fascinating thing about Jonas Ball is that he is very young -- he hasn't done a great deal, but everything up there is very real and very solid and very mature. The great thing about any movie actor is the ability to hold the camera -- to have this relationship with the lens -- it's a cliche, but it's true -- and Jonas Ball has that. If an actor can carry a big close-up and give you the emotion that you require, that's a marvelous tool to have, and it's great for a director to use that tool. So I think he's gonna do really well. It's his first film, and he can't be here tonight because he's working, so that's good.
It's a common complaint among the beautiful women of Hollywood -- they're not taken seriously and not given access to the meatiest parts (you don't even know the restraint it is taking not to make an "access to the meatiest parts" joke here). If I looked like Jessica Biel, I would be more than happy with that alone. I wouldn't need Academy Awards or critical adulation, I'd just need a mirror to gaze upon my incredible hotness. I'd probably never leave the house. Biel talks to Elle for their June issue (no, I wasn't reading Elle -- the article was quoted online), saying "Parts that I really want aren't going to me. Like The Other Boleyn Girl with Scarlett Johannson and Natalie Portman. I don't want to say there's nothing I love that I can't have. But there's still the occasional script that the director doesn't want to see you for. They want that top tier of girls."
I'll admit I've had a somewhat unseemly fixation on Biel since The Rules of Attraction, but when you get past the blinding attractiveness, she is a pretty decent actress. People don't put her with the Portmans and the Johannsons simply because she hasn't really had a chance to prove herself yet. I, like most of the world, didn't see her dramatic turn in Home of the Brave, but I thought she held her own quite nicely in The Illusionist. She's certainly as talented (and a lot less annoying) than a Kirsten Dunst. Biel is in theaters now with Nicolas Cage in Next, and she will be on the big screen again in this summer's I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. If she wants to take the focus off her looks, she probably shouldn't have done the underwear scene in that one. Clips of it in the trailer made me feel like a 13 year-old boy again.
The Professional kid-turned-Amidala has been quite busy lately. Natalie Portman has a bunch of films making their way to us, from the multi-angle love story, Paris, je t'aime to a blonde stint in My Blueberry Nights. Plus, she has other post-production films that should come later this year from time as Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl to a part in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. As if that wasn't enough, she's also been in talks to direct an adaptation of Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness.
So, why does Natalie want to blog her whole life? According to Valleywag, the actress is making the rounds in Silicon Valley to find funding for her new project. Apparently, she's met up with playboy-turned-investor George Zachary of Charles River Ventures. The scoop comes from one of his colleagues, who asked on Twitter: "How big of an audience do you think Natalie Portman lifecasting could attract?" Now sure, she doesn't have any more projects finalized for her future, but is that enough of a reason to reveal her life to the Internet? I see Portman as a pretty smart woman, but this doesn't make any sense. What public figure would put their whole lives on the Internet? I can only assume that she's taking a break from film if this project goes forward, as a continual video feed of her life would interfere with any movie set. Furthermore, isn't this just asking for increased paparazzi trouble, stalking and the like? Sure, from a voyeur standpoint it is all sorts of tasty, but why, why, why? The only thing I can come up with is that she has a stalkee fetish.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Wow. In the genre of sequels you never saw coming, Twentieth Century Fox is shooting for a sequel to Oliver Stone's Wall Street, which would return Michael Douglas to his Oscar-winning role.
The original 1987 drama won Douglas an Oscar for his role as cold-hearted takeover artist Gordon Gekko. The sequel will be titled Money Never Sleeps. Writer Stephen Schiff will write, but Oliver Stone is not involved. Usually I would say this is a bad thing, but have you seen Stone's movies of late?
Edward Pressman, who produced the original, will return for the sequel. Wow. Same financier. Amazing. This report comes from Variety.
Variety reports that the rather good-looking Julie Benz, best known for her starring role in Showtime's "Dexter" (never heard of it), will star opposite Sylvester Stallone in John Rambo (and I really hope they change the title back to Rambo IV).
The sequel finds Rambo living in solitude until he gets involved in a girl's disappearance. The movie is currently shooting in Thailand, Mexico and the U.S. In addition to starring, Sylvester Stallone is also directing. Uh-oh.
Benz has also been seen in Jawbreaker and The Brothers.
Over at Ain’t It Cool News, a poster calling himself Walter B claimed that he’d seen the new PG-13 rated Die Hard film and said that it was as kick-ass as any R-rated feature.
New Line have picked up Flight of the Dead, previously known as ‘Plane Dead’. Essentially, it’s ‘zombies on a plane’, which is simultaneously the best and worst idea ever. 
George Lucas has revealed to Fox News that he’s developing two live-action Star Wars films that will debut on television and will probably be an hour-long..jpg)
It's a common complaint among the beautiful women of Hollywood -- they're not taken seriously and not given access to the meatiest parts (you don't even know the restraint it is taking not to make an "access to the meatiest parts" joke here). If I looked like 
The Professional kid-turned-Amidala has been quite busy lately. 
