Halle Berry Shows Off Baby Nahla
Here are some even cuter (if that’s possible) pictures of Halle Berry’s beautiful daughter Nahla Aubry, 5 months. If you missed the first batch of Nahla and mommy dearest, click here.
As reported earlier, Halle, Nahla and Halle’s mother enjoyed a girls day out at the Los Angeles Zoo on Saturday.
- from justjared
Studio War Involving ‘Watchmen’ Heats Up
The legal brawl over “Watchmen” is about to get rougher.
Lawyers for Warner Brothers, which has already shot a movie of this graphic novel about the seamier side of superhero life, and lawyers for 20th Century Fox, which claims it owns the rights to the material, laid plans for a frenzied fight in a joint report submitted to the federal court here on Friday.
Fox has said it will seek an injunction blocking Warner’s planned release of the film next March. Warner has argued that Fox should not be allowed to stop the movie, after standing by while Warner and its partners on the film, Paramount Pictures and Legendary Pictures, spent more than $100 million on the production, directed by Zack Snyder (“300”).
In a summary of its position in Friday’s report, Warner said Fox “sat silently” as one of the producers of “Watchmen,” Lawrence Gordon, took the project “to studio after studio with Fox’s express knowledge.”
Fox, which filed a lawsuit in February, has claimed in its own filings that Mr. Gordon did not keep the studio apprised of his plans, as required by a 1994 agreement. That deal granted Mr. Gordon rights to “Watchmen” in “turnaround” — an industry term for arrangements under which producers can move a project from one studio to another under certain conditions.
In Warner’s version of events, Mr. Gordon, who is not named as a defendant in the Fox suit, actually offered the project to Fox in 2005, shortly before bringing it to Warner after years of trying to make the movie with Paramount. “Fox simply rejected it,” Warner said in the Friday filing.
On Friday Warner said Fox had gone so far as to grant it rights to the title “Watchmen,” which Fox had earlier registered with the Motion Picture Association of America.
Fox, moreover, was paid $320,000 by one of Mr. Gordon’s companies for rights to “Watchmen” as early as 1991, Warner lawyers said in the report. Fox has said that agreement was superseded by a later deal, under which Mr. Gordon was supposed to deliver a much larger buyout price that has never been paid.
- from NYtimes
Woody Harrelson versus the zombies
Woody Harrelson is set to bash some brains and battle zombies.
The actor has signed on to star in the horror comedy “Zombieland,” which Ruben Fleischer is directing for Columbia Pictures.
Written by the team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (”The Joe Schmo Show”), “Zombieland” revolves around a mismatched pair of survivors who find friendship and redemption in a world overrun by zombies. Harrelson plays one of the men, a zombie fighter named Albuquerque.
- from THR
Robert Downey Jr.: Evil Master Mind
Robert Downey Jr. may soon goose the genre that launched his comeback. The Iron Man star is in negotiations to voice a character in Master Mind, DreamWorks Animation’s send-up of the superhero genre being produced by Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Films. Tina Fey is also expected to join the cast of the movie, about a villain who loses his will to live after accidentally killing his archrival. Neither actor is a newcomer to animation: Downey Jr. lent his voice to an episode of Family Guy and the Richard Linklater film A Scanner Darkly, while Fey voiced a burrito in the film version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Master Mind (the working title for now) is based on a script from Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons and will be directed by DreamWorks Animation veterans Cameron Hood and Kyle Jefferson.
- from EW
J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek plot revealed
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman feel like the most omnipresent writers in the industry. Part of it is how many geektastic projects they’re on, but part of it is also their willingness to talk, talk, talk. How long before they’re directing?
The latest place that the duo yap is a Fox Movie Channel show, Life After Film School. They’re on the show to flog the Fox show Fringe, but the preview clip is all about… Paramount’s Star Trek! Fox knows how to get the eyeballs, I guess.
They discuss the Star Trek canon, but first they go out of their way to say that this film, while it features the earliest days of the Enterprise crew from the original series, is not a prequel. And you know what? They’re sort of right. In fact, Star Trek blows through all the paradigms that we have for film franchises. Here’s why:
The movie begins in the Star Trek present - some time in the The Next Generation timeline. Romulans head back in time, either to kill Kirk or his father (or both, just to be safe. This is known as “The Terminator Gambit”) and Spock follows them into the past, back when the Enterprise crew were young. These events change the history of the Trek universe, either creating a parallel timeline that the films will now follow or simply overwriting everything else that we know as Trek history.
Sopranos Star James Gandolfini Gets Married (again)
James Gandolfini and fiancée Deborah Lin tied the knot Saturday in her hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii, a wedding guest confirms to PEOPLE.
“There was a nice big kiss at the end with both hands on the cheeks” as The Sopranos star and Lin officially became husband and wife, the guest tells PEOPLE. “They looked great.”
As a group of their closest friends and family looked on, Gandolfini, 46, and Lin, a former model, 40, exchanged their vows in an intimate ceremony surrounded by white lilies and rhododendrons adorning every pew held at Central Union Church.
According to the guest, Lin strolled down the aisle in a white gown made of Italian lace while her tuxedoed groom stood waiting as a harpist played the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” in the background.
- from People
Trekkies pay final visits to Las Vegas attraction
After a decade at the final frontier, Star Trek: The Experience is going where no Las Vegas Strip attraction wants to go.
With a decommissioning ceremony - as befits any great vessel - the exhibit and its replica of the starship Enterprise are closing Monday.
Thousands of trekkies are ”beaming up” from across the United Federation of Planets, er, the United States and around the world one last time, according to exhibit spokesman Chad Boutte.
Some seek a final encounter with the Borg, the television show’s race of organic robot aliens who tell everyone ”resistance is futile.” Others just want to share a farewell drink - likely a stiff Warp Core Breach, with 10 ounces of rum - with fellow fans at the attraction’s restaurant.
Employees dressed as aliens discuss the minutiae of their worlds’ mythologies with visitors who learn, in typically circular trekkie logic, that the exhibit is a ”time station” for transporting researchers and equipment between the 21st and 24th centuries.
For $49.99, fans can enjoy two virtual rides and the Museum of the Future, with costumes, ”phasers” and Mr. Spock’s coffin. More than 3 million people have come through since the Experience opened in 1998.
In the end, the frontier the USS Enterprise couldn’t breach was earthly: The attraction’s owner, Cedar Fair Entertainment Co., and the Las VegasHilton, its landlord, couldn’t agree on a new lease. They worked as a typical landlord and retail tenant, with Cedar Fair keeping all revenue from the attraction, said hotel spokesman Ira David Sternberg.
Trekkies are incensed. They’ve scrawled reminiscences about the exhibit on the walls inside, and they’re calling Cedar Fair and the hotel to complain. But their online rumor that the space the exhibit occupies will become a theater for pop star Michael Jackson is unfounded, Sternberg said. He said nothing’s decided.
- from here
Vadim Perelman Directing Poltergeist Remake?
On the newly posted After Dark show, a /Film fan wrote in detesting MGM’s planned Poltergeist remake. Not only did this topic snowball into the most tasteless Heather O’Rourke/pizza joke imaginable, we also contemplated whether the project qualifies as the first remake of a Steven Spielberg movie. And if so, is Jaws within reach? The freaky 1982 supernatural classic was officially helmed by Tobe Hooper, sure, but Spielberg’s directorial contribution remains a point of contention amongst horror fans. Today, Bloody Disgusting reports that Vadim Perelmen, a rather left-field choice, is in “heavy talks” to direct the unnecessary remake.
Perelman debuted with 2003’s House of Sand and Fog, a well received literary adaptation that garnered three Oscar noms, including a Best Actor nod for Ben Kingsley. Earlier this year, his follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes starring Uma Thurman and Marilyn Manson’s muse, was memorably defecated on by the majority of critics. Perelman’s penchant for literature purportedly played a part in his attachment to the long-planned adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
- from /Film
Anne Hathaway’s Passengers Trailer
Passengers is directed by Colombian filmmaker Rodrigo García, of Nine Lives and “In Treatment” previously. The script was written by Ronnie Christensen, of a few various made-for-TV films previously. Sony is releasing Passengers in limited theaters starting on October 24th this fall.
Hollywood asks: who needs Harry Potter?
Boy wizard Harry Potter won’t be whipping up his magic when the fall film season begins next week, but Hollywood is hoping momentum from summer hits like “The Dark Knight” and a wide mix of new movies will keep audiences happy into the holidays.
Two weeks ago, Warner Bros. yanked “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from a November release and pushed it to next July, which could spell trouble at box offices because the previous four “Potter” films averaged $920 million in worldwide ticket sales. That is a lot of movie magic.
But a range of films from broad comedies such as “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” to thrillers like “Eagle Eye” and art house fare including “Flash of Genius” could sustain the summer upswing, studio executives and box office watchers said.
“You’ve got it all,” said Paul Dergarabedian of box office tracker Media By Numbers, when assessing the outlook from September through mid-November, when the new James Bond flick, “Quantum of Solace,” kicks off holiday season moviegoing.
Last year, Hollywood also came off a strong summer after raking in a record $4.18 billion in North American receipts, but then came a slate filled with war films such as “In the Valley of Elah” and dark dramas that tanked at box offices.
When the summer movie season officially ends on Monday’s U.S. Labor Day holiday, box office watchers again expect a summer tally of over $4 billion. A good chunk of that comes from the blockbuster Batman sequel “The Dark Knight.”
This fall Hollywood seems to have learned a lesson from its bleak 2007 as it dishes up such light-hearted entries as Joel and Ethan Coen’s wacky new comedy “Burn After Reading” starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney; the animated sequel “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa”; and Disney’s latest teen confection, “High School Musical 3: Senior Year.”
- from Reuters