Were you to ask 100 passers-by to list their favorite stand-ups it is unlikely any of them would mention the name Eddie Pepitone. But were you to ask any random group of comedians the same question it might be a different matter. The New Yorker has long been a fixture on the L.A. comedy scene and his rage-fueled rants are beloved by the likes of Sarah Silverman, Marc Maron, and Patton Oswalt, all of whom appear in the new documentary about Pepitone, The Bitter Buddha.
You could hold a fair-sized film festival of killer clown movies — and if you do, it might be fun to hold it in a really small car! Anyway, the latest film designed to delight horror fans, and horrify coulrophobes, is Stitches. The movie stars the great British standup Ross Noble as a rent-a-clown who dies while working a kid’s birthday party and years later returns to wreak red-nosed havoc on the shindig’s attendees.
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The sun will come out on Christmas Day 2014.
The next big-screen adaptation of Annie, which was without a leading lady until just a few days ago, has an official release date. EW has confirmed that Quvenzhane Wallis’ Annie will meet her Daddy Warbucks and sing all about her hard knock life in theaters on Dec. 25, 2014. The film will be directed by Will Gluck and is being produced by Marcy Media along with Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment.
Read more:
The Onion draws ire for offensive Quvenzhane Wallis tweet — UPDATE
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ breakout Quvenzhane Wallis to star in new big-screen ‘Annie’
‘Glee’ star Jane Lynch to make Broadway debut as Miss Hannigan in ‘Annie’
Actress Julianne Moore has spent much of her career appearing in such acclaimed, prestige ventures as Short Cuts, Far From Heaven, and, most recently, the TV movie Game Change, for which the actress won an Emmy with her note perfect portrayal of Sarah Palin. But Moore’s filmography also boasts a surprising number of horror movies—including The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Forgotten, and Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal—and the actress admits to a fondness for the genre. “I like scary movies,” she says. “I don’t like slashers, but I’ve always loved stuff that’s about the devil. My son came back from a movie the other day and I said, ‘So, what was it? A devil or aliens?’ It’s usually one or the other! I personally prefer the devil.”
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Just as viewers seemed divided over Seth MacFarlane’s hosting of this year’s Oscars, so Academy voters were split over the films themselves. Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Amour, Lincoln, and Silver Linings Playbook all scored major awards, with Jennifer Lawrence and Daniel Day-Lewis winning the top acting Oscars. But Life of Pi director Ang Lee took home the Best Director prize while Argo won Best Picture. You can check out the full list of winners below.
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Jai Courtney can currently be seen helping save the day as John McClane’s son Jack in action fifthquel A Good Day to Die Hard. But the Australian had to ruin the day of a planeload of folks — or, at least, mildly inconvenience them — to play Bruce Willis’ offspring. “I was in L.A. boarding a plane home to Australia when my manager called and said I had to get off because they’d like to see me test with Bruce,” recalls the actor, whose other credits include the Starz show Spartacus: Blood and Sand and last year’s Jack Reacher. “I had to literally walk off the flight. I was tempted to say, ‘I’m sorry, Bruce Willis is calling me.’ But they would just have thought I was a crazy person.”
Below, Courtney talks about acting with Bruce and reminisces about the late Spartacus star Andy Whitfield.
Folks wondering why rock star and writer-director Rob Zombie is so obsessed with horror could do worse than examine the manner in which he was educated. “Well, I’m from Massachusetts,” says the filmmaker, whose credits include 2005′s The Devil’s Rejects and his 2007 remake of Halloween. “When we were kids they would take us to reenactments of the Salem witch trials as, like, class trips.”
Zombie’s knowledge of the infamous 17th century trials helped inspire his latest film, The Lords of Salem, which will be released nationwide April 19. The movie stars the director’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, as a modern-day Salem radio DJ and former substance abuser named Heidi who starts seeing visions after listening to a record she mysteriously receives from “the Lords.”
“My premise is that there was another group of women put to death [during the witch trials] who actually were witches,” explains Zombie. “They vowed to come back and wreak vengeance upon Salem and they do it through this bizarre piece of music. Heidi has some lineage to the witch trials — but she’s also a recovering drug addict. So, in the course of the film, you’re not sure if she’s back on drugs, if she’s losing her mind, or if these events are actually happening to her.”
You can see Heidi experience one of those episodes in the creepy clip below, where you will also find the film’s trailer. READ FULL STORY »
Fourteen years after the fact, I still occasionally hear from readers angry that I didn’t like Fight Club. Four years later, I still occasionally receive messages from people upset that I liked The Twilight Saga: New Moon too much. Eight weeks since opening day, both lovers and haters of Les Misérables still have a thing or two they want to tell me about my review. I’ve spent 22 years at Entertainment Weekly, 19 of them as a critic—a glorious tenure that ends this week. And I’ve heard from hundreds of readers fired up about movies and passionate enough to respond to something I’ve written in the magazine’s pages or online.
Often the mail has been gratifying: I love that too! I hated that as much as you did! Sometimes the messages have been harsh: You suck! EW should get rid of Lisa! (Passing fun for the writer but crap for me, you-suckgrams have become a depressingly regular aspect of anonymous, online comment-board culture.) The pissed-off wife of a wildly successful producer of high-octane action schlock once sent me a popcorn bucket filled with stones because…well, I’m not sure why, something about throwing stones at her husband’s work. Anyway, she wanted to remind me that, while her beloved’s pictures rake in billions, my stuff would be gone in 60 seconds. On the flip side, I once received an effing cool email from Josh Brolin telling me, and I quote, “You can f—ing write!” and promising to be in my movie. Not that I have any plans whatsoever to write a screenplay.
A writer always wants to feel she’s connecting with readers. And certainly, agreeing with me or disagreeing with me is a heartfelt form of engagement. But as I move away from regular criticism for EW (my plans include a book, an online project, speaking engagements about popular culture—oh, and a dog!), here’s a party favor I want to leave you with: What matters is not if we’re in sync about a particular movie but why.
My part of the conversation is to use my own experience, analytic ability, aesthetic understanding, points of reference, writing skills, and—lucky me!—EW platform to explain how I come to, say, adore the Lord of the Rings trilogy or despair of the hideous Saw sensibility. (I even explained carefully why I was giving away the ending of Pay It Forward—but some readers went into a hate-mail rage nonetheless. Seen it lately, by the way? I didn’t think so. It’s still hideous hooey.) Your mission is to read with an open mind, watch movies with an open mind, and use the places where we diverge as inspiration for an ongoing conversation about this ever-changing medium we love together.
Grades, stars, thumbs, and assorted icons are inevitably crude, if handy, quantifiers of quality—they’re shorthand, attention-getting invitations to the party. Once we’ve both shown up, though, let’s have a good time pondering both the complexities of Django Unchained and the simplicities of A Good Day to Die Hard. Because then we’ll never run out of things to say to one another.
So keep exploring. Keep responding. And just so you know: The experience of talking with you for two decades has been A+.
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Former ‘N Syncer Justin Timberlake might’ve taken the stage at last night’s Grammy’s, but Timberlake’s ’90s rival, The Backstreet Boys, have a little something up their sleeves as well. A Backstreet Boys documentary is currently in production by Pulse Films and is set to be finished this fall.
The best non-fiction film I saw last year — and maybe the best film I saw, period — was The Shining documentary Room 237. Directed by Rodney Ascher, the movie showcases the theories of five unseen Shining obsessives about what Stanley Kubrick really intended with his 1980 Stephen King adaptation. The end result is at least twice as entertaining — and at least five times funnier — than that synopsis might indicate. (My colleague Owen Gleiberman did a much better job of summing up the movie when, in the course of writing about his favorite movies of 2012, he described it as “a veritable Kubrickian Da Vinci Code that’s really about the power that conspiracy theory now holds over our thinking.”)
