First Look: Nic Cage in Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass
September 10, 2008
It looks like Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass has started filming in London where a mustachioed Nicolas Cage was seen reading a paper on the park bench. Cage has previously said of his character in the Millar comic-book adaptation, directed by Stardust and Layer Cake’s Matthew Vaughn: “I play a guy named Damon, the father of Mindy who is “Hit Girl” and I’m “Big Daddy,” and I’m training my daughter to be a superhero.”
- from Here
“Mad Men” spins bright future from past
September 10, 2008
The characters drink like fish, smoke like chimneys, treat women like doormats and are some of the most admired men on U.S. television.
They are the “Mad Men” of the eponymous television drama set in a New York advertising agency on the cusp of the 1960s social revolution, and some TV pundits say it could sweep the industry’s Emmy awards next week after just one season on air.
“I am interested in the 1950s and the impact it had on our culture, how that transition happened and what it’s like for my characters to watch the world change around them,” Matt Weiner, the creator, writer and executive producer of “Mad Men,” told Reuters.
Notable for its meticulous detail and leisurely pace, the character-driven series is nominated for 16 Emmys on Sept 21, including the coveted best drama series and best actor award for star Jon Hamm, who plays brooding account executive Don Draper.
Not bad for a show that was first written eight years ago, almost never got made and originated on U.S. cable channel AMC, which has a small viewership compared the major broadcasters such as NBC, CBS and ABC.
But that audience is getting bigger, thanks to the nominations for TV’s highest prize, which have helped double viewing figures in the show’s second season to nearly 2 million at its July debut.
- from Reuters
Wes Anderson to direct and write My Best Friend
September 10, 2008
Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment has set Wes Anderson to write “My Best Friend,” a remake of the 2006 Patrice Leconte-directed French comedy “Mon meilleur ami.” Anderson is also eying the project as a directing vehicle.
Brian Grazer and Agnes Mentre will produce. Rosalie Swedlin will be executive producer.The French pic starred Daniel Auteuil as a cranky antiques dealer who learns at a dinner with his closest acquaintances that none of them really like him because of his harsh manner and selfishness. When his business partner bets him a valuable vase that he can’t produce a best friend, the dealer tries to get an amiable cab driver to pose as his buddy.
- from Variety
Coen brothers return to Minnesota for next film
September 9, 2008
The Oscar-winning Coen brothers are returning to their home state of Minnesota to shoot their next movie.
Joel and Ethan Coen are scheduled to start shooting A Serious Man on Monday in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.The movie — about a professor whose life is falling apart — is set in 1967 in an unspecified suburb similar to St. Louis Park, where the Coens grew up.
It’s the first time the Coens have filmed in Minnesota since 1996’s Fargo.
- from USAtoday
SNL Star Gets Psyched for Michael Phelps
September 8, 2008
Saturday Night Live castmember Kristen Wiig is counting the minutes until the NBC show returns this weekend. One big reason? The season’s first host.
“I’m excited to meet Michael Phelps!” she told PEOPLE at a bash celebrating her film Ghost Town at the Toronto Film Festival. “He’s gonna be naked in all the sketches I write, for sure.”
But the 23-year-old Phelps, who won an astonishing eight gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics, will still have plenty of costume changes.
“There are some people that you can just picture with a wig on and it’s funny,” she said at the event sponsored by Hollywood Life magazine. “He’s one of those people.”
- from SNL
Spike Lee offers blood, hope in World War Two film
September 8, 2008
Filmmaker Spike Lee was focusing on the past when he made a movie about oft-forgotten the role of black soldiers in World War Two, a war film with both blood and schmaltz set in Tuscany.
But the way the United States has changed since then makes the movie relevant for the present too, said Lee, who proudly sported an Obama T-shirt as he introduced “Miracle at St Anna” to the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
The movie, filmed mostly in Italy, and partly funded there, tells the story of four members of the all-black 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers who are stranded behind enemy lines during the U.S. army’s push up the Italian peninsula.
At times violent, at times touching and at times pure saccharine, the film highlights both the camaraderie of the four soldiers and the tensions between them, and the ugly racism that they faced at home and from their white commanders.
While Lee has focused on race in a string of movies from “Do the Right Thing” up to “Inside Man,” and “When the Levees Broke,” he insists America has moved well away from the racism in this latest film, where his soldier heroes are sent to the back door of a Louisiana bar while Nazi prisoners of war guzzle ice cream sundaes inside.
“There has been a seismic movement in this country,” Lee told Reuters, noting that even a few years ago, Barack Obama could not have won the Democratic nomination for president.
“I’m trying to change the world for the better, and entertain at the same time.”
- from Reuters
Woody Allen makes opera directing debut in LA
September 8, 2008
He had just made his successful debut as an opera director Saturday, creating a hilarious and memorable production of “Gianni Schicchi,” the third of the one-act presentations in Puccini’s “Il Trittico.” The Los Angeles Opera’s opening-night audience at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion kept applauding, wanting to see the 72-year-old filmmaker join the cast and conductor James Conlon for the curtain call.
But Allen remained out of view, unwilling to come onstage because of shyness, the company said.
- from here
Ricky Gervais sees dead people in “Ghost Town”
September 8, 2008
Ricky Gervais sees dead people. And he has found them to be a demanding bunch in his new movie “Ghost Town” as they clamor for help and attention from the only man who knows they’re there.
That man is antisocial dentist Bertram Pincus (Gervais), who hates chit-chat, doesn’t like the living much, and now, after a colonoscopy gone wrong, suddenly starts seeing ghosts.
The romantic comedy, which also stars Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni, provides a first leading role on the big screen for Gervais, who made his name as David Brent in the British comedy TV series “The Office” and won critical acclaim for his HBO TV series “Extras.”
A master in deriving comedy from awkward social situations, Gervais makes the transition to the big screen with a series of droll one-liners. Pincus is hardly a grown-up version of the young Cole Sear from 1999’s “The Sixth Sense,” played by Haley Joel Osment, whose line “I see dead people” has become a part of pop culture and movie history.
- from Reuters
Venice hails cinema’s comeback king Mickey Rourke
September 8, 2008
Eleven days of red carpet galas, 21 films in competition and countless interviews, photo calls and parties at the Venice film festival boiled down to just one man in the end — Mickey Rourke.
The festival, which unofficially kick-starts the awards season leading to the Oscars, will be remembered chiefly for Rourke’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler”, which the actor and critics agree is his best yet.
“The roar of Rourke” read the headline in the Corriere della Sera newspaper on Sunday.
The movie about an ageing wrestler who despairs as his body gives up on him and friends and family turn their backs, won the coveted Golden Lion award for best movie on Saturday.
The award seals his comeback from the Hollywood wilderness, and comments that Rourke is ready to ditch his bad-boy image and cooperate with directors suggest there is more to come.
“A guy like me changes hard, I didn’t want to change, but I had to change,” the star of 1980s hits “9-1/2 Weeks” and “Angel Heart” told Reuters in an interview in Venice.
“It’s OK for me now at this point in my life to play ball, to be a team player,” added the 51-year-old, his face marked by surgery for various boxing injuries.
- from Reuters
‘Wrestler’ takes top honors at Venice
September 7, 2008
Darren Aronofksy’s drama “The Wrestler,” starring Mickey Rourke as Randy (the Ram) Robinson, a washed out pro-wrestler in comeback mode — both on and off the screen, it turns out — has pinned down the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, providing the Lido with a grand finale.
“I think the reason people are reacting to this film is that there is a great talent revealing his soul,” said Aronofsky.“Darren Aronofsky came here a couple of years ago and fell on his ass,” Rourke recounted in the Lido’s packed Sala Grande theatre, referring to the helmer’s “The Fountain,” which premiered in Venice in 2006 and subsequently flopped.
“I am glad he had the balls to come back,” Rourke added.
- from Variety