In these supposedly progressive times, gender equality is one of those touchy issues relegated to the last paragraph of a trend piece nobody reads. When Katherine Heigl suggested to Vanity Fairthat Judd Apatow's movies were sexist, the assertion came across like an after-the-fact shrug of acceptance. Ever the galvanizing provocateur, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis confronts the issue head-on with a thorough analysis of the gender bias in this year's summer blockbusters.
With "Iron Man, Batman, Big Angry Green Man" and other massive expressions of virility invading the box office, female roles appear to be relegated to the back of the multiplex. Dargis touches on the rumors that Warner Bros head Jeff Robinov believes no woman has been able to sell a movie since Julia Roberts (a point that Natalie Portman might contest, but not Paris Hilton) before sizing up numerous upcoming studio releases, with particular attention paid to Anna Faris, "who could be the next Judy Holliday but without the right material will, alas, probably end up the next Brittany Murphy." It's the kind of pronouncement that hits you in gut.
Like many of the characters he plays, Clive Owen was reserved, astute and insightful throughout his public appearance at the Apple store in downtown Manhattan on Friday. Interviewed by American Psycho director Mary Harron as a part of a series of conversations co-hosted by Apple and indieWIRE, taking place during the Tribeca Film Festival, Owen touched on two of his recent projects while fielding broad questions about his professional interests.
Although not currently starring in any theatrical releases, Owen was in town performing opposite Julia Roberts in the corporate spy thriller Duplicity, the sophomore feature from Michael Claytondirector Tony Gilroy (a special guest at the store the following night). "I read the script and thought it was brilliant," Owen said, adding that shooting was halfway done. "I'd met Tony already, and he screened Michael Clayton for me. Obviously, when I saw that, it was a no-brainer." Meanwhile, Owen has another thriller in his queue: He plays an Interpol agent fighting global arms dealing in The International, which finished shooting in New York last January and hits theaters next year. Directed by Run Lola Run visionary Tom Tykwer, The International has provided Owen with "as good a director as I've ever come across. He's incredibly on top of every aspect of filmmaking."
There are two ways to watch Charlie Wilson's War. The first way is to watch it like we watch most movies -- go in to be entertained, to experience something outside of our scope of experience -- to leave our lives at the door and encounter something different. The other way is to be critical, having researched the situation upon which the film was based, to see how it diverges, and then decide whether the divergence is acceptable within the realm of what actually happened. One way will give you an entertaining experience. The other will probably result in the film getting under your skin.
I usually get pretty tense over large leaps in the truth. To this day, I grumble at the thought of Girl Interrupted, and the fact that they could insinuate that a character based on a real, live person could be indirectly involved in another's death when it simply isn't true. With Charlie Wilson's War, however, I wasn't completely weighed down by derailments from truth. Perhaps this is due to being warned after reading reviews like James' and Kim's, maybe it was due to the film more omitting facts than completely changing them, or perhaps it was the light delivery of the subject. Whatever the case, Charlie Wilson's War is an enjoyable film weighed down by its decisions of omission.
For many, Closer is that Mike Nichols movie where Natalie Portman played a stripper, stripped down, but then had her nude footage destroyed. For me, it's the film that gave me a new-found appreciation for Julia Roberts. Like many of you out there, I've grown tired over the years of the typical Roberts roles, but pitting her against Clive Owen and making her a mellow, wry, and serious photographer was excellent, and it dulled the memory of her monotonous previous work. Was it her own talents, or what Owen inspired within her that made this possible?
Now she's teaming up with Owen again for Duplicity, and I can only hope that they have the magic again. The film stars Roberts and Owen as two corporate spies who conspire to con their bosses, and Just Jared has a whole slew of pics of the two shooting an anger-filled scene. It's all suits, grabbed arms, and arguments for the pair on the streets of New York. So far, so good.
But even if Closer becomes a distant memory and this flick is just classic Julia, it's still looking damned good. It will be an absolute and serious waste if these two, mixed with Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, and the increasingly impressive Tom Wilkinson can't create a great flick. Are you ready for their Duplicity?
Here's a doctored-up poster for the film Pretty Woman which is currently circling through email this morning and was forwarded along to me by my wife with the line: "You HAVE to see this -- soooo funny!" This wasn't the only picture attached; there was also one of our former Governor in a purple pimp suit, one of his face on a bottle of No. 9 Client cologne, and then one of him sprawled out on a bed with money in his hand and a half-nekked woman in the background. But this image up top was the only one film-related, and since everyone here in my hometown of NYC is getting a few good laughs out of this, I figured the poster might do the same for you. 80 grand on a hooker? Is it just me ... or do I smell a real-life Pretty Woman sequel in the works?
She's getting into some duplicitous cinematic action with Clive Owen, but that's not enough for Julia Roberts -- she is already getting her next project lined up. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that she will be producing and starring in an adaptation of an upcoming novel by Margot Berwin called Hothouse Flowers, for Columbia Pictures. Roberts will be "a recently divorced woman who is dissatisfied with her job at a Manhattan ad agency and goes off on an adventure that takes her to places she never expected to go." Right now, there's only a plan in place, since the strike has the project sitting without a writer or a script.
Berwin is a writer from Nerve.com, which should give you an idea of how saucy her words can get. Back in 2005, she wrote a story about a man and woman who work in an office and, um, find some extracurricular activities to keep themselves busy. (You can read it here, and it's Nerve, so don't expect anything G-rated, or PG for that matter.) Whether this new work will have similar sauciness, we'll have to wait and see.
Roberts has been making some interesting choices with her career lately, from Closer to Fireflies in the Garden, so I'm hoping this will have a good, meaty twist to the "dissatisfied person discovers the world" theme. Unfortunately, we'll have a while to wait and see.
When I first posted about the film back in November, I said that the upcoming Clive Owen and Julia Roberts-starring Duplicity filled me with curiosity and dread. The curiosity (and a little excitement, I must admit) came from the fact that it was re-teaming two stars from Closer -- a film I really enjoy. On the other hand, I hear "Duplicity," and I think of the similar-sounding Derailed. That makes me want to run for my life. (Famous last words said before watching the latter: It's got Owen. It can't be all bad.)
All that said, there's two more great actors joining the cast, which should start to erase those Derailed fears. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Tom Wilkinson and Billy Bob Thornton are looking into joining the cast. (Wilkinson is in negotiations, and THR doesn't say whether BB has officially signed on yet.) This will re-team Wilkinson with Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy, who also wrote the script, so I imagine he'll sign on the dotted line soon enough -- Tom's role in the film did nab him an Oscar nod for supporting actor, after all.
The thriller focuses on Roberts and Owen's characters, "who are longtime lovers and rival corporate spies who team to pull off an elaborate con." (Sounds like Mr. & Mrs. Smith meets Ocean's 11.) Wilkinson is set to play the CEO of a large company, while Thornton's role is said to be "a more maverick type of CEO." The film will shoot this spring in the Big Apple.
Sometimes I wish I had a large, waiting-to-be-used stash of money that would allow me to go to every film festival that caught my fancy. The other option would be to convince a patron of each fest to wear a mini camera on their lapel, but that would be, well, illegal, so let's stick with the other fantasy. Like many of the big fests, Berlinale is looking to be all sorts of tasty. We've already had somepreviousscreening announcements, and now Reuters has added even more eagerly-anticipated films to the fest list.
In the realm of Berlin's competitive films, Kristin Scott Thomas' I've Loved You So Long has been added to the roster. In the "out of competition" offerings at Berlinale, filmgoers can delight in a who's who of big names. There's Fireflies in the Garden, the Julia Roberts-starring film about a town devastated by an unexpected tragedy. (It's also a film that co-stars the likes of Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hayden Panettiere, and Ioan Gruffudd.) Or, if you want to dip back into history, there's Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman's The Other Boleyn Girl. And, what could be better to wrap up the festival than a movie for fans of film? Berlinale will perfectly close with Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind. (Check out James' Sundance review!)
I just love those lists that are supposed to represent the fandom of the general public. This is probably because my preferences rarely converge with them. Sure, some of my tastes are a little off the beaten path -- I'd pick Danny Huston over Brad Pitt, or Julie Delpy over Julia Roberts. That being said, I still love me some good mainstream. Yet I still find myself raising my brows when I read these lists, just as I did today when I saw the annual Harris Poll for America's favorite movie stars, which Hollywood.com put up today. The order is surprising, as is the one lone oldie to the group.
Yes, that's John Wayne there at number 6. Apparently he is the only actor to nab a spot on the poll every year since its inception in '94. Also, Depp is quickly working his way up the ranks, having moved up four positions from last year. Personally, I find the list surprising, and a bit sad in the realm of women in cinema. What say you?
Gone Baby Gone had surprise written all over it. The first surprise was that Ben Affleck could direct. The second surprise is that Ryan's edgy, emotional performance as a morally mushy mom actually got noticed at the end of the year. The third surprise is that she could actually win. But it's no surprise that Ryan ("The Wire," Before the Devil Knows You're Dead) has been a rising star for some time.
The question is, if you're going to make a political movie based on a true story, how "true" do you have to be, and is it fair play to make such a film that works as purely entertainment, even if you fudge the facts a little? There are two things going on withinCharlie Wilson's War, which stars the affable Tom Hanks as the title character, a liberal Democratic congressman from Texas with an affinity for single-malt scotch whiskey and women. The first thing is an entertaining story about a good ol' boy from Texas, a hard drinking skirt-chaser who, if we're to believe Hanks' take on the character, wasn't so bad, really. Oh, maybe he called his staff of sexy, all-female all-stars "jailbait," drank heavily, and partied in Vegas with Playboy models while surrounded by cocaine, but heck, y'all, that doesn't make him a bad guy, does it? Shoot, he's just a rascally sort, and after all, he's from Texas, where the good ol' boys are, so that makes it all okay.
But, okay, let's toss that aside and say that in spite of his flaws, he really did, underneath, care about his job, at least enough to look up from the nekkid women in the hottub in the first scene of the film long enough to notice that Dan Rather is wearing a turban, and astute enough to realize it might be interesting to know why. The second thing that's happening in Charlie Wilson's War is the story of what happened after Wilson gets interested in Afghanistan: In the summer of 1980, Wilson reads a dispatch about the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion; Wilson, newly appointed to the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, casually orders the CIA funding for Afghanistan doubled from five million to ten million, and presto, it's done. But not quite finished.
I didn't leave Charlie Wilson's War, the new film from director Mike Nichols, dissatisfied or unamused. I walked out of Charlie Wilson's Warangry. No reasonable person expects a film -- any film -- to capture the complexity and scope of real events with absolute precision; adaptations are translations, and as the old Italian saying goes, "The translator is a traitor." It's one thing to compress, combine and fictionalize a story to fit the sprawling, ugly mess of it onto the big screen; it's another to take only the best, shiniest parts of a real, ugly story and turn it into a feel-good comedy. Translation may be traitorous, but Charlie Wilson's War feels like a conscious act of treason against reason itself. As film critic David Thompson has said, "We learn our history from movies, and history suffers ...." Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia.
Based on George Crile's 2003 book of the same name, Charlie Wilson's War follows the exploits of Charlie Wilson, a Democratic Congressman from Texas who, during the '80s, had as much fun with his position as you could, which was a lot. As Charlie Wilson's War opens, we see Charlie hot-tubbing in a Vegas hotel suite; the room's full of booze, broads and blow. But Charlie, played by Tom Hanks, can't look away from the news; as one of his new acquaintances notes her apathy to world events, Charlie boils it down: "Dan Rather's wearing a turban; you don't want to know why?" Dan Rather's in a turban because Dan Rather's in Afghanistan, among the Afghan mujahideen -- the Islamic rebels trying to drive the Soviet Union out of their country by any means necessary. This sight sparks something in Charlie, so he sets out to increase the C.I.A.'s funding for the Afghan rebels -- from $5 million a year to 10. It's a lot of money. It's going to be much more.
There are girls who make the waves in the media world because of their exploits (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears), and then there are some special ones who just know how to keep gossip-fiends hooked with their strange vacation from reality. Jessica Simpson is one of those people. If you thought Blonde Ambition or Major Movie Star (as if) were laughable, get ready for this -- she wants to be the next Julia Roberts. Or, at least, follow in her footsteps a little and play a hooker.
Yes, dear Cinematical readers, Jessica Simpson wants to star in a remake of Pretty Woman. According to OK! Magazine's source, "She thinks this one's got 'hit' written all over it.' Her father Joe has been telling anyone who will listen that she's the next Julia." Yeah, so as her manager, he's got to talk her up, but there's a difference between being positive about your talent (for lack of a better word), and making ridiculous comparisons. I would ask if she's really that clueless, but after her television show, and her myriad of insane statements, I think that's clear. And, no, I'm not talking about the Heckerling sort of Clueless.
And here I thought Simpson taking on the role of Sandy for a Grease remake was bad ... but I'll hand the mic over to you. Would you like to see Miss Jessica as a Pretty Woman? Can you see her winning an Oscar one day? Have we all just somehow disregarded her amazing acting talents?
There should be two lists: Which actress makes the most and which actress deserves the most. The Hollywood Reporter released their annual list of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, and leading the pack is Reese Witherspoon, who commands a whopping $15 to $20 million per film. Since winning an Oscar for her performance in Walk the Line, Witherspoon has starred in Just Like Heaven, Penelope and Rendition -- all of which did poop at the box office (save for Penelope which never opened). Will she still be demanding this much next year? God, I hope not. Geez, friggin' Carrot Top entertains more people than this gal.
Number two on the list, of course, is Angelina Jolie (though she only earned $8 million for lending her voice and body to Beowulf). Next up are Cameron Diaz ($15 million per film), Nicole Kidman ($10-15 million), Renee Zellweger ($10-15 million), Sandra Bullock ($10-15 million) and Julia Roberts ($10-15 million). Drew Barrymore, Jodie Foster and Halle Berry round out the list with around $10 to $12 million each per film. Out of all those names, unfortunately, I believe Jolie was the only one to turn in a great performance this year in A Mighty Heart (we'll see if Kidman redeems herself in both Margot at the Wedding and The Golden Compass come awards time). The rest? Blah. So blah. Might as well take all their photos and slide them next to the word 'overrated' in the dictionary. So, in your opinion, who deserves the most? And feel free to list someone not mentioned here.
About four years after filming the dysfunctional love fest otherwise known as Closer, Variety reports that Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are teaming up again for a new con flick called Duplicity. This fills me with both curiosity, and dread. I happened to love Closer, from Owen's creepy pervishness to Roberts actually being understated. Then again, the last one-word con film Clive did was Derailed. I put that sucker in my DVD player with the thought: "It's got Owen, so even if it's as crappy as I hear, it'll have something to enjoy." Oh yeah, not at all. It was downright scary with how bad it was.
So, now we've got the next attempt. The drama was written, and will be directed by Tony Gilroy, who seems to be getting better with age, like a fine wine. The guy has flicks like The Cutting Edge and Bait on his roster, as well as the three Bourne movies. But that's not all -- he's also the pen and director behind Michael Clayton. The drama will focus on Roberts and Owen as "longtime lovers who happened to work as spies on opposite sides. They team up to stage an elaborate con to rip off corporations and steal a valuable product." It's looking like a Mr. and Mrs. Smith without the assassinations and after the discovery of their work -- unless they know and find a thrill in bonking the enemy. Duplicity will start filming this March, after Owen wraps his stint as Tom Tykwer's The International.
In these supposedly progressive times, gender equality is one of those touchy issues relegated to the last paragraph of a trend piece nobody reads. When Katherine Heigl suggested to Vanity Fair that Judd Apatow's movies were sexist, the assertion came across like an after-the-fact shrug of acceptance. Ever the galvanizing provocateur, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis confronts the issue head-on with a thorough analysis of the gender bias in this year's summer blockbusters. 
Like many of the characters he plays, 
For many, Closer is that Mike Nichols movie where Natalie Portman played a stripper, stripped down, but then had her nude footage destroyed. For me, it's the film that gave me a new-found appreciation for 
.jpg)
She's getting into some 
When I first posted about the film 
Sometimes I wish I had a large, waiting-to-be-used stash of money that would allow me to go to every film festival that caught my fancy. The other option would be to convince a patron of each fest to wear a mini camera on their lapel, but that would be, well, illegal, so let's stick with the other fantasy. Like many of the big fests, Berlinale is looking to be all sorts of tasty. We've already had 
I just love those lists that are supposed to represent the fandom of the general public. This is probably because my preferences rarely converge with them. Sure, some of my tastes are a little off the beaten path -- I'd pick Danny Huston over Brad Pitt, or Julie Delpy over Julia Roberts. That being said, I still love me some good mainstream. Yet I still find myself raising my brows when I read these lists, just as I did today when I saw the annual Harris Poll for America's favorite movie stars, which 
Best Supporting Actress
There are girls who make the waves in the media world because of their exploits (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears), and then there are some special ones who just know how to keep gossip-fiends hooked with their strange vacation from reality. 
There should be two lists: Which actress makes the most and which actress deserves the most. The Hollywood Reporter released 
About four years after filming the dysfunctional love fest otherwise known as Closer, 
Insert Caption: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian_thumbnail.jpg)
SCOOP: Spider-Man 4 and 5 Might be Shot at the Same Time!
Cinematical Seven: Disney's Awesome Live-Action Kid Adventures
