AnnaNicoleSmith Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Things weren't so peaceful in the movie buff land when word got out a few weeks ago that Werner Herzog plans to remake Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage in the lead role. Even noted trash auteur Abel Ferrara publicly complained about having his work redone. Bad Lieutenant isn't anybody's idea of a good time: Harvey Keitel puts on a freakishly raunchy performance. Still, it definitely sounds like Herzog's pumped about the gig. Defamer cornered the director in New York today for a few questions about the project, and the responses are kind of amazing. Herzog tends to do a great job of explaining himself, no matter what crazy scheme he has cooked up, but the best part of this interview arrives when the guy claims utter cluelessness about Ferrara's work. Way to stick it to the source material.

To hear Herzog tell it, his version of Bad Lieutenant isn't a remake, although he wouldn't know, since it sounds like hasn't actually seen the original. However, he says that Cage's character's name and the plot are entirely new. Herzog apparently liked the "very, very dark story," written by William M. Finkelstein, and he can't wait to work with Cage (given Herzog's notorious appreciation of Anna Nicole Smith, this last bit actually makes sense). Hearing about Ferrara's discontent, Herzog just eggs him on: "Let him fight the windmills, like Don Quixote." It's a feud made in heaven, almost too good to be true. You might just call it ecstatic truth.

Top: Early poster art for the new 'Bad Lieutenant,' snapped at the Cannes Film Festival last month.

Is this for real? Above is the trailer for the upcoming Anna Nicole Smith biopic Anna Nicole. The only thing that comes to mind after watching it is that they know this is going to be so very crappy, and they're upping the cheese to make it obvious this isn't a flick to watch for artistic merit, but rather for cheap, tabloid entertainment. It has to be, because I simply refuse to entertain the notion that the cheesy voiceover saying "the most anticipated motion picture of the year" is anything but tongue-in-cheek.

As Erik said last year, the film will "chronicle Anna's entire life -- from her birth to her days at Playboy to her bogus marriage to her death." Doesn't it sound exciting? I'll give them some benefit -- Willa Ford does a decent job of embodying the destined-for-doom Monroe-wannabe.

Is there anyone out there who will sit down and watch this flick from beginning to end? Me, I think I prefer a strange, goofy, and nicely brief trailer. I mean, we all know the story anyway.

[via Just Jared]

These bites are more pulpy than usual, but every once in a while, we need something to smirk at:

• Some of you might squeal at the mention of Albert Pyun, but I didn't myself until I realized that he's the man who brought us the fan-freaking-tastic Cyborg. You remember that Van Damme flick, right? An apolocalyptic wasteland, a villain with creepy eyes and a tortured hero who was crucified and tormented with memories of a little girl, a well and some sharp, barbed wire. The latter still makes me twitch. Anyway, while I can't say that I love Pyun's work since then, he's got another film on the horizon -- Left for Dead -- an "amped up spaghetti western / horror fever dream. El Topo meets NC-17 horror madness." You can find stills here, and don't they look quite reminiscent of Cyborg? The women even look similar!
• Christie Boner -a.k.a.- the original Buffy, Kristy Swanson could be heading to television to take on the role of none other than recently-deceased Anna Nicole Smith. Fox News reports that sources are buzzing about a fictionalized version of Smith's life for Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Swanson, who recently made waves for her romance and child out-of-wedlock with still married father of two, Lloyd Eisler, should have the scandal part down-pat, and she's got a pretty good resemblance going (look to the right). Reports also say that Jon Lovitz might take on the part of Howard K. Stern, but Larry Birkhead will remain out of the story. With a television treatment out of the way, I'm sure we'll have feature film news in no time!
• Finally, it's a good thing Angelina Jolie has fame and money, otherwise, I don't know how she would handle her relationship, family, acting and global work! The kid-lover, who already has Maddox, Zahara and Shiloh, is speeding through an adoption for her fourth, a three-and-a-half-year-old Vietnamese son. It could be as little as a few weeks before Jolie whisks him away from the orphanage he's lived in since he was a baby. Why is this news worthy? Well, besides the fact that she's almost half-way to a Baseball team, I wonder how long it will be before we get a Jolie family movie, perhaps written just for her and her ever-growing number of children? Sound of Music for the new millennium, perhaps?

It's been exactly one week since the not-so-shocking death of Anna Nicole Smith, and as the perspective baby-daddies fight to lay claim on a fortune that may never materialize, various media outlets are competing to tag the final footnote on a film career that never really happened. Jim Keough is one of several movie pundits to scoff at the media's insistence on setting Smith's story against that of her stated icon, Marilyn Monroe. "The comparison is unfair to Monroe," Keough writes. "Anna Nicole Smith will be remembered for her outsized proportions, her tabloid-friendly personal life and her erratic behavior, which included dozens of slurry interviews, but unlike Marilyn, she's light years from being iconic." It would seem that the bulk of Hollywood agrees; the L.A. Times reports that Smith's final film, a schlocky-sounding sci-fi flick called Illegal Aliens, co-financed by the wannabe-actress herself and co-written by Smith's late son Daniel, has been unable to find a theatrical distributor and will go straight-to-DVD this spring.

That's a far cry from the fate of Monroe's final film. Though Marilyn was fired from George Cukor's remake of My Favorite Wife, after her death 38 minutes of footage from that aborted project were cobbled together for inclusion in countless tributes and documentaries. The clip reel itself, completely divorced from Cukor's original intentions, was eventually released on DVD as part of a Marilyn Monroe box set. Cultural critic Camille Paglia agrees that the comparison to Monroe is off the mark, but insists that Smith had what it takes to become a genuine movie star -- if only Hollywood had let her. Comparing the late Trimspa spokeswoman to Jayne Mansfield, Margaux Hemingway and Anita Ekberg, Paglia laments the loss of a studio system that would have made room for Smith's "sexual charisma and comedic charm." "The real problem was that the broad, Technicolor comedic films in which Smith might have thrived are no longer made -- except in Bollywood," Paglia writes in a long column at Salon. "Smith had genuine talent but no place to put it."

Oh my God!!! What a week: Oscar luncheon, New York fashion week, Anna Nicole, Vera Wang and Tim Gunn. Not to mention the Grammys this past Sunday. Where do I start, and what do I talk about? To be totally honest I only want to talk about Anna Nicole and fashion week ... I could give a sh** about an Oscar luncheon and what Hollywood puppets wore to their exclusive muppet feast ... I want to talk about what celebrity did to that poor girl, I want to talk about drug addiction and recovery and how no one helped her but in fact encouraged her self-destruction for their own amusement.

I want to talk about the possibility of a Jim Thompson-type murder mystery and how a topless dancer became a Playboy playmate, turned Guess jeans model, became bride to an 89-year-old oil man, lived a dream that turned into a nightmare, lost her only son, gave birth to a brand-new life, then predictably yet grossly and shockingly lay down and died for all of us to see; leaving a clamoring pile of pathetic men scrambling desperately for her money and using her newborn baby as the tool to do so. How this cast (Howard K. Stern, Larry Birkhead and "PRINCE" Frederick Von Anhaldt) seem more like Stepford husbands or the type of scum floating at the top of a hallowed stew dreamt up by David Lynch than real-life humans. But my involvement (to be clear) with Moviefone and this blog is to cover fashion and red-carpet events ... so I'll have to mix that in a little.

Over the past several years Anna Nicole Smith had become an object of downright mockery in the media ... and the former beach babe certainly didn't do much to prevent such sniggering dismissals -- appearing in bottom-of-the-barrel reality shows and popping up in the tabloids every 19 seconds. But now one hopes that the teasing will come to a close: Anna Nicole Smith was just found dead in a Florida hotel. She was 39 years old.

Ms. Smith initially hit the scene as one of Playboy Magazine's most crazily curvaceous cuties. From there her career went ... basically nowhere. She appeared (however briefly) in movies like The Hudsucker Proxy and The Naked Gun 3 before landing the lead in Skyscraper, which just might be the most hilariously inept Die Hard clone you ever will see. Her most recent movie (Illegal Aliens) doesn't seem to have a distributor yet, but that will probably change real soon. Although best known for her (ahem) physical assets (Ms. Smith was Playboy's 1993 Playmate of the Year), she will also be remembered as a gal who married a 90-year-old millionaire when she was 26 years old, appeared in a shameless amount of horrible reality shows and spent a whole lot of money on plastic surgery.

Still, 39 is way too young for someone to go. Rest in peace, Ms. Smith. May the joke-writers wait at least a few days before doling out their monologue material.

Insert painfully unfunny "Not Home Alone anymore" joke ... here. In just about the saddest child star gone wrong news I've ever heard, word on the street is has it that an apparently cash-strapped Macaulay Culkin has signed on to join Anna Nicole Smith and Dennis Rodman in a British "celebrity" version of reality hellhole, Big Brother. As if the very fact that Culkin has, at 25, already given up on legitimate success wasn't bad enough, a source involved with the production of the show told a British tabloid that Culkin was primarily asked to be on the show in the hopes that he'd dish the dirt on his sometime best friend ... yes, that's right ... Michael Jackson.

"This is a great coup for us," the source told the Daily Star. "Because of his friendship with Michael Jackson, you're almost getting two for the price of one." It gets worse: the Channel 4 source admits that the network was "desperate to bag Macaulay because we want some big name Americans who will be controversial and have a chequered history...But more importantly he has been privy to Jacko's private world at Neverland."

When D-listers debase themselves on reality television, I'm usually the first to point and laugh (oh, how I crave a Season Two of Breaking Bonaduce). But just a couple of years ago, when he was starring in Party Monster and Saved!, it looked like Macaulay had a decent shot at a merit-based comeback. How did he get from there, to selling out Michael Jackson on trash British television? The mind reels.