Cinematical

Our brothers and sisters over at TV Squad have busted through the boob tube and brought with them the following juicy bits of must-see eye candy:

• Julia Louis Dreyfuss' The New Adventures of Old Christine will be heading to the Lifetime network in the Fall of 2010.
• Good lord! Are there actually good omens for Joss Whedon's Dollhouse?
• Despite what you may have heard on The Today Show Betty White is still among the living.
• Everybody's got a favorite TV character and Zap2it is conducting a poll to determine the top ones.
• Warehouse 13 has made its premiere over on The Sci-Fi Channel and Jason Hughes discusses the first episode.
• ...and finally, as you may have noticed, despite all its success, Lost has come this far without a theme song. The producers of the show are having a contest to create a theme song and the winning tune will be performed at Comic-Con.

I always wondered what would happen if you'd throw a space pilot pirate wannabe in a dilapidated shack with a technology-humping soul catcher. Apparently, it will make college kids think the poor saps are dangerous killers.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Alan Tudyk (Serenity, Dodgeball) and Tyler Labine (Control Alt Delete, Reaper) have signed on to star in a new indie horror comedy called Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. The brainchild of writer/director Eli Craig (who also happens to be Sally Field's son), the film centers on Tucker (Tudyk) and Dale (Labine), "two good-natured hillbillies mistakenly accused of being psycho killers by a group of college kids camping at the same lake where the hillbillies have just acquired a dilapidated cabin as their 'summer home.'" Where the horror fits in is anyone's guess.

Chelan Simmons (Kyle XY) blogged last month about the project and writes: "The movie is a horror/comedy ... kinda like Shaun of the Dead" -- well, first she compared it to Dawn of the Dead, until a reader wondered how that was funny -- so that doesn't really help suss out the horror. Since the movie is shooting in Calgary, Alberta, much of the cast is composed with Canadian actors, topped with the clueless Cerie from 30 Rock -- Katrina Bowden.

Whatever this strange project is, Tudyk in a horror comedy sounds good to me, especially if he does turn out to be a killer and channels some of that Dollhouse creepiness.

If you were absolutely heartbroken at the loss of Sony's Moneyball, cheer up! It's still alive and swinging. Variety reports that the project has been revived with some new talent, though now it's in desperate need of a new director.

The good news is that the man in charge of repairing it all is none other than Aaron Sorkin, who is riding high at Sony thanks to The Social Nework. Everyone's favorite screenwriter is taking a crack at Steve Zaillian's original script, and is expected to have it finished by August. Sorkin is steering it back to the film the studio wanted all along: a nice sports film that focuses on Billy Beane, the Oakland A's, underdogs, and statistics. It's also retained the services of Brad Pitt, who is still attached to play Beane.

The bad but not altogether unexpected news is that Steven Soderbergh is off the project. His draft took a more documentary approach that Sony was certain would fail with moviegoers. I guess we'll never know, but I can't really blame Sony for being afraid of an approach that used an animated Bill James character. At least the director has a million other projects he can turn to for comfort. Will it be Making Jack Falcone? Liberace? Cleo? None of the above and out of nowhere? Very possibly.

In a very surprising move, Ryan Reynolds has won the much-coveted lead role in Warner Bros. live-action version of Green Lantern. We reported earlier this morning that Reynolds was up for the role alongside Bradley Cooper and Justin Timberlake, but thought he'd be a long shot considering the fact that he was also gearing up for a solo Deadpool spin-off. But Green Lantern is definitely a better (and more popular) role for him, and Warners probably liked the fact that Reynolds comes with a nice healthy package full of good looks, charisma and physical force. Dude is huge, he's proven he can handle the superhero stuff (ie: Deadpool in Wolverine), and he's at that sweet spot in his career where something like this could turn him into the next Christian Bale.

Lantern fans will probably agree that he's the best choice, though I'm not crazy about actors who double-dip in the comics world, and I can see people wanting the actor to stick to either one or the other. Production on Green Lantern is set to start in January, with Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) at the helm. The Green Lantern is currently scheduled to hit theaters on June 17, 2011.

So what do you think of Reynolds in the role? Can he pull off both Lantern and Deadpool?

(By Erik Davis - reprinted from the Sundance Film Festival, 1/17/09)

We're only a couple weeks into 2009, but clearly this year will be all about the term 'bromance' -- which describes, in case you haven't heard, a close, non-sexual bond between two straight men. Bromance is now a cheesy show on MTV; the flick I Love You, Man (in theaters this Spring) is carrying some advanced bromantic-comedy-of-the-year buzz; and now here's this quiet, unassuming festival film called Humpday -- which takes the Hollywood out of the bromance by bringing it down to a level practically everyone can relate to. And while Humpday lacks the sparkle, the set pieces, the A-listers and the foul-mouthed fart gags, its well-written script remains grounded with the type of real-people humor we've grown to adore over the years.

Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard) are friends; good friends -- some would say great friends -- except that was way back when and, now, Ben has a cushy marriage, a new house, a nice office job and all the time in the world to love his wife and make her a new baby. Andrew, on the other hand, doesn't know how to settle or how to stay put -- he's an intense adventurer who's always looking for the next great "experience". And while it's been some time since Ben and Andrew last saw each other, that all changes when the latter shows up on his old pal's doorstep at two-in-the-morning looking for a place to crash and play catch-up. But Andrew's arrival sparks more than just a few fun memories ...

I began to focus more attention on Mary-Louise Parker back in 2005, when she wrote a feature for Bust on Justin Theroux. In one opening paragraph, she slid from cross-pollinating blueberry bushes and pet pit bulls to a description of the actor himself: "His hair is ice-pond black, he could wash my windows with his eyelashes, and he has that rangy skateboarder's body that girls never grow out of going hormonal after." I was reading a lot of magazine intros that year, and hers was the first that didn't reek superfluous scene-drawing.

Now she's getting literary again, this time with Esquire. The site is doing a new weekly series of bedtime stories and seeing that they say "straight from the bedroom of a Woman We Love," I'm assuming every installment will feature the lovely Ms. Parker. She kicks off with Alice in Wonderland, and you can watch it for yourselves after the jump.

Oh, how I wish that all mens' magazines' treatment of sexy women had them natural, lounging, and reading classic literature. And really, I think Parker is in her element when words are involved. Which, one can hope, will mean wonderful things for Howl. (Although she's playing Gail Potter, a woman brought in to speak against the famous work.)

Will you be tuning in for Parker's bedtime stories?

Back in April, I wondered if we can forget reality when watching actors on the big screen. Well, if there's any way to re-warm ourselves to thoughts of Mel Gibson, how about the story of a man and his beaver puppet?

That wacky story (the one that had Jim Carrey circling it back in May) is now in the hands of Gibson, with Jodie Foster officially signed as director, according to Variety. Kyle Killen's Blacklist script focuses on a depressed toy manufacturer (Gibson) who comforts himself with his beaver hand-puppet. There's no sexual innuendo in this -- he thinks of his faux beaver friend as a sort of "human creature with human feelings" -- a la Lars and the Real Girl.

On top of directing this puppy, her first film since 1995's Home for the Holidays, Foster will play his wife. And with that, I think this may be one of the most interesting projects to come our way. Sure, it's got the strange premise and promising comparisons to the likes of Lars and Being John Malkovich, but it's much more irresistible for the combination of talent. With Steve Carell and Jay Roach, or the later-circling Jim Carrey, the film isn't so hard to imagine. But out-of-nowhere picks like Gibson and Foster? It just leads to questions about why they'd pick this piece of quirk, and what they'll make of it.

Are you ready for Mel, Jodie, and his beaver?

If studios weren't incredibly anal about leaks and spoilers, we might be seeing a whole lot of videos like this on the web. David Berry worked as a rotoscope and animation artist for six months on Star Wars, shooting home movies when time allowed. He's put up a nostalgic compilation of some of those set to music, and it's a fun look back at the behind-the-scenes of George Lucas' space romp in the mid-70s when facial hair was common among men, and bras were not among women.

As one of the commenters points out, it's strange (and awesome) to see a workshop without a computer in sight, and to watch people working on things like a model of the Millennium Falcon or starfields by hand. Berry went on to work at Industrial Light and Magic on films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Raiders of the Lost Ark and winning an Oscar for work on Cocoon. Not too shabby. He now dabbles in time lapse photography and has graciously shared this Star Wars footage with the web.

Hopefully, as NDAs expire and time passes, we'll see all sorts of footage from people shot on the sets of different films.

How do you transform a very funny book into a dreadfully boring movie? I laughed more from reading the first five pages of Larry Doyle's novel than I did during the entirety of Chris Columbus' film version of I Love You, Beth Cooper, despite the fact that Doyle wrote the screenplay. Much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the book, but when spoken on screen, the lines fall painfully flat. That leaves the attempts at physical humor, which are constant, and will tickle to death only those who love to see pratfalls: "Look, Mommy, man fall down and cry out in agony! Ha, ha!"

Leaving aside the source material and the film's relative faithfulness to it, I Love You, Beth Cooper might have worked as either a joyful, gleefully mischievous, yet ultimately conservative rebel yell (a la Ferris Bueller's Day Off) or as a funny yet thought-provoking tale of teenagers finally growing up (a la Dazed and Confused). Like those two infinitely superior movies, I Love You, Beth Cooper takes place over the course of one eventful day in the life of its teen-aged subjects, but Columbus can't decide whether the movie should be an uncomfortable comedy of embarrassment and humiliation or a sweet, sentimental romance. The tone wavers uncertainly throughout -- often within individual scenes -- and the film's general inertia quickly becomes wearisome.

Hayden Panettiere makes for an unlikely Beth Cooper. She's meant to be a high school dream girl, a fantasy figure concocted by the awkward, hapless Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) through all the years that he's sat behind her in class and stared at her picture on his bedroom ceiling.

Welcome back to another edition of Insert Caption -- the game that every boy wizard is instructed to play on Fridays while attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Last week we asked you to churn out some laughs for a photo from a very unfunny (but still awesome) film called The Hurt Locker. Congrats go out to our solo winner, who provided us with a caption too good (and hot and fuzzy) to pass up.




1. "You have no idea how badly I want to shoot this gun in the air and shout aaargh" -- Anthony T.

See full image and all captions






This week is a doozy ladies and gents, as it's finally time to celebrate the return of a dude named Harry Potter. Yes, on July 15th we'll all finally get to cram our sweaty summer selves into theaters and watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince TM. In honor of this momentous occasion, we're giving one lucky person a whole bunch of Potter awesomeness. The grand prize winner behind our favorite caption this week will fly away with one Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince TM laptop sleeve with embroidered patch, one Quidditch bag, one Mask paperweight, one Slughorn hat with screen-print & patch, one Avada Kedavra T-shirt, one Kids' custom dyed Slub Worm Potter Quidditch T-shirt, one Kids' custom dyed Girls' Ginny Weasley Ultra Worm T-shirt, one women's Avada Kedavra T-shirt with velvet print, one Sublimated Luna Lovegood women's T-shirt, one Next Level Quidditch T-shirt, one Nose biting tea cup, one 4x6 sheet of tattoos and one set of buttons. Phew. Now sound off below!


© 2009 Warner Bros. Ent.
Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J.K.R.

Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved.

Read the official rules for this contest