The New York indie-film Gotham Awards just took place on Wall Street in Manhattan, and The Hurt Locker emerged the night’s big winner, taking home trophies for Best Feature and Best Ensemble. Its only loss came in the Breakthrough Actor category, as The Maid‘s Catalina Saavedra upset Hurt Locker star Jeremy Renner and The Messenger‘s Ben Foster. Meanwhile, Robert Siegel won the Breakthrough Director prize for Big Fan, and Food, Inc. was named Best Documentary. The Hurt Locker is well on its way to a Best Picture nomination, though its momentum won’t continue with tomorrow morning’s Spirit Award nominations: Since it played the film-festival circuit in 2008 (and received two Spirit nods last year), it’s not eligible this time around.
Archive: November 2009 (1-10 of 72)
Nov 30
2009
07:07 PM ET
'Hangover' director Todd Phillips talks 'The Hangover 2'
Just as the time-honored treatment for a hangover is some hair of the dog, in Hollywood the time-honored way to follow a huge hit like The Hangover is to dive straight into a sequel. The staggering success of this summer’s Vegas-bachelor-party-gone-awry comedy, which took in $277 million to become the highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever, may have surprised the movie industry, but director Todd Phillips tells EW that, even while the film was shooting, he was already toying with an idea for a possible sequel. “You always have those days when you say, ‘If we did another one, wouldn’t it be funny if…?’ ” Phillips says. “Then once the movie tested so well, Warner Bros. came to me even before it was released and said, ‘Let’s do another one.’ “ Phillips, who’s currently shooting the road-movie comedy Due Date, with Robert Downey Jr. and Hangover star Zach Galifianakis, says he’s midway through working on the script for the Hangover sequel. Though he’s keeping the plot under wraps for now, he promises The Hangover 2, which will reunite the trio of Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Galifianakis, won’t simply rehash the stag-party-disaster formula of the first film. “What people loved about The Hangover was not Las Vegas or the bachelor party but these three characters,” Phillips says. “I think you can take those characters and put them in other situations, and you don’t need the sell of Vegas and a bachelor party and all that other stuff.” As long, of course, as those situations involve a whole lot of booze and maybe a roofie or two.
Nov 30
2009
06:50 PM ET
Warner Bros. on the hunt for the next 'Twilight': Is it 'Beautiful Creatures'?
Tomorrow marks the publication of Beautiful Creatures, a young adult novel from Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl that centers on a mortal high school boy living in Gatlin, South Carolina and his love for a very strange girl with some mysterious powers. Her name is Lena Duchannes and she’s trying her best to conceal her powers. Sound intriguing? Well the publishing world has been very kind to Beautiful Creatures with glowing advance reviews. (Little, Brown, the publishers behind Twilight are behind this book.) Hollywood has also been interested in it for some time and the book’s rights have just been optioned by Warner Bros. for writer/director Richard LaGravenese (P.S. I Love You, Freedom Writers) to develop. Erwin Stoff (The Blind Side) is producing. The book doesn’t go on sale until tomorrow but Amazon and other booksellers have been offering pre-sales on it for some time. Here is the link to the book’s home page and its own trailer. (Who knew books had trailers?) So tell us readers, have you heard of this tale? Does it interest you?
Nov 30
2009
06:48 PM ET
'The Hobbit': production could begin by mid-2010 and casting is moving forward
Relax, Middle Earth fans. There’s no need to panic.
Yesterday, TheOneRing.net posted a story speculating that the release dates of both Hobbit movies could get pushed from their tentative December spots in 2011 and 2012. The theory arose from comments that Hobbit co-writer and exec-producer Peter Jackson recently made to the German website moviereporter.net (currently off line), in which he mentioned that he hoped production would begin by the middle of next year. Jackson was quoted as saying: “We’re currently working on the second script, which we hope to have completed by the end of this year or beginning of next. When the scripts are completed, we can begin with the exact calculation of the necessary budget. We hope to start filming in the middle of next year. However, we’ve received no greenlight from the studio yet.”
A source for The Hobbit project confirmed to EW that Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and director Guillermo del Toro have finished up the script for the first Hobbit film, “are about to turn in” the script for the second installment, and are “looking at a number of scenarios for start dates,” including sometime in mid-2010. But no one on the creative side is worrying about release dates, according to the source. As always, that’s up to the studio.
As for Jackson’s comments about The Hobbit not having an official greenlight yet, fans shouldn’t read into those, either. There’s no strife between creative and the various studios (New Line, MGM, and Warner Bros.). It’s simply a matter of protocol. Without a finished pair of screenplays and a budget, the filmmakers wouldn’t expect to have a greenlight. Yep, even Peter Jackson sometimes has to play by studio rules.
On the upside, we could have casting news soon. Talent agents all over town are abuzz with word that casting directors for The Hobbit have been hired in London and L.A.
Nov 30
2009
04:45 PM ET
Edward Cullen, stalker? Yes, but so is the hero of 'The Graduate'
Is Bella Swan an independent and sort of daring young lovesick renegade…or a doormat? A good role model…or a godawful role model? Or should she be considered a role model at all? And what of the Twilight saga itself: Is it liberating the fantasy life of a new generation of young women by inviting them to wallow in the kind of stormy-skies, trembling-damsel romanticism that has been a staple of popular fiction from Wuthering Heights onward? Or is it setting back the holy cause of women’s enlightenment by 50 years?
These and other questions were debated, with rude and furious passion, in response to my New Moon post last week. I confess, though, that amid the flurry of ardent, and at times angry, stand-taking, one particular view, repeated over and over again, caught my eye: the notion that there’s something deeply wrong with the Twilight saga because that hot-blooded, painfully chivalrous James Dean-of-the-northwest vampire Edward Cullen is nothing less than a “stalker.”
A stalker? Really? I mean, the kid is a vampire. Theoretically, stalking would be one of the nicer activities that he does. Can you imagine saying about Dracula that you had a problem with him as a character because he’s obviously guilty of sexual harassment and trespassing?
Nevertheless, the stalking argument got me to thinking: If the Twilight movies are, in fact, guilty of celebrating one amorous demon’s inexcusable behavior, perhaps they’re not the only popular romantic movies to do so. Looking back, I found any number of films in which some of the most celebrated heroes of movie history behave badly enough to risk inviting serious scrutiny, if not downright condemnation, from the love police. Here are just a dozen. Can you think of others? READ FULL STORY »
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Thanksgiving, movies, and reasons to be grateful
The gratitude lists emailed among friends and families this Thanksgiving are lovely and thoughtful, expressing heartfelt appreciation for food, shelter, health, friends, family, babies’ smiles, rainbows, Mom’s lasagna, all that good stuff. The only problem is, when mentioned in the same breath as Mom and rainbows, offering thanks for the genius of Netflix looks pretty puny. But not here: Here’s where movie lovers can offer up movie love in the spirit of the holiday. I’ll go first:
1. Thanks to great American actors whose appearances invigorate every movie they’re in. My choice trio: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Jeffrey Wright, above. Who would you add to the list?
2. Thanks for cup holders and stadium seating in movie theaters.
3. Thanks to filmmakers who know the proper length for their movies. Sometimes 90 minutes is all that’s needed to tell a story; occasionally 140 minutes feels right. (Mostly, the 90-minute range is plenty. Thanks again.)
4. Thanks for the work of great actors already famous in their own countries, stars in the bigger world, including READ FULL STORY »