You are browsing the archive for June 2012.
“We’re trying to do our part to objectify men for the first time in movies.” Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper pic Magic Mike shimmies into theaters today powered by a charismatic turn by Channing Tatum and a hard-bodied supporting cast — but the tale isn’t all thongs, pelvic thrusts, and bachelorette party thrills. (Well, okay — it’s got a lot of those things, too.) What secrets did Soderbergh, Tatum, and co-stars Alex Pettyfer, Joe Manganiello, and Matt Bomer spill about on-set nudity, overzealous extras, cross-dressing, and Tatum’s real life experience as a male stripper?
The director and cast, along with newcomer Cody Horn, shared these and more stories recently in Los Angeles. Read on for their best anecdotes, advice, and revelations…
1. Magic Mike is based on observations from Tatum’s eight-month stint as a male stripper. How did he get into it — and why did he ever stop?
“Look, I was eighteen years old and I worked three jobs,” Tatum began. “This was just one of them, and I really enjoyed performing. It was probably my first performing job ever.” So what ended the 19-year-old Tatum’s stripping career? “I really like to dance, obviously, but then I didn’t really love taking the clothes off at the end…”
2. Tatum on the “very dark world” of male stripping…
Magic Mike depicts a backstage world filled with camaraderie, g-strings, and baby oil, but as Pettfyer’s Adam discovers, it’s also one filled with drugs, casual sex, and recklessness. Tatum remembers the real world of male stripping as an even darker place. “The world in itself was just a very dark world in a way. I don’t think we even scratch the surface of really how dark…
Here’s a YouTube mashup that is a little too much fun to ignore: Michael Fassbender as secret agent 007 in Christopher Nolan’s James Bond (as edited together by one inspired internet film enthusiast).
Industry prognosticators have suggested that Skyfall will be Daniel Craig’s final go as 007, so speculation has already begun as to who’ll replace him. There ain’t a person alive who isn’t delighted to have Fassbender taking more prominent roles in Hollywood, and the time is nigh for him to land a major franchise where he’s the star. (Magneto doesn’t count; he may be the best performer in those films, but when January Jones is in a white fur hat and go-go boots it’s hard to determine who’s the real star.)
While Fassbender claiming a license to kill (right now he just has a learner’s permit) isn’t that far-fetched, the chances of Nolan directing someone else’s intellectual properties post-Batman are pretty slim. Still, we can dream. Mr88668866 (we’ve only met causally once or twice, so I don’t quite feel comfortable calling him 8866 just yet) thinks it is such a good idea he’s trying to “incept” it on all of us.
With the Hans Zimmer score and clips from most of Nolan’s best known work in the mix, he’s intercut various shots of M-Fass brooding, glancing and scowling in a way that says “Britain’s secrets are safe with me.”
Do yourself a favor and watch this video twice. The first time, obviously, to see if you can catch where all the movie clips come from. The second time to say, you know, this really would be pretty sweet.
[via Hollywood.com]
In Friday afternoon’s round up of news, AMPAS picked a whole slew of new people to join their ranks of Oscar voters (many who were surprisingly not already members). Also there’s highlights of this weekend’s new specialty roll outs. Danny Boyle reaches out to PETA about the Olympics, Cee Lo Green boards Keira Knightley production and Lucky heads to the U.S.
Academy Taps 176 to Join Ranks
The folks behind the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have named 176 artists and executives to join their ranks. They will be among the eligible people who will vote come Oscar time. The membership to the organization has held steady at under 6,000 since 2003. Among the 176 are Jessica Chastain, Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Jonah Hill, Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien), Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Melissa McCarthy, Matthew McConaughey, Sam Rockwell, Andy Serkis, Octavia Spencer, Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Lili Taylor, Kerry Washington, Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) and Michelle Yeoh.
The Undershepherd Wins American Black Film Festival
The 16th annual event opened with Beasts of the Southern Wild and closed with Raising Izzie. Among the festival’s winners: The Undershepherd, which won Best Narrative Feature and Best Director for Russ Parr. Best Screenplay went to The Last Fall, written and directed by Matthew Cherry, while Keisha Taylor’s Soul Food Junkies took Best Documentary. For more winners and festival highlights, visit their website.
Around the ‘net…
New This Weekend: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Take This Waltz, Last Ride, Unforgivable
A long time in the making, Beasts Of The Southern Wild made a splash at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, taking the top prize and winning one of the top prizes in Cannes, and…
The star of Seth MacFarlane’s R-rated comedy Ted reportedly has an entire fetish community agog, only it’s not Mark Wahlberg, though plenty of folks are probably feeling his good vibrations. It’s the bear.
Wahlberg stars in the comedy as a Boston slacker whose BFF, Ted — a stuffed animal come alive thanks to a childhood wish — is an irresponsible, wise-cracking stoner. (Not to mention a ladies’ man — or, bear. Whatever.)
TMZ reports that the CG-created Ted has become a “sex symbol” for plushophiles, or plushies, who comprise a subcategory within the furry community:
“Ted creator Seth MacFarlane has already been contacted by a XXX website that’s popular with Plushies, Clips4Sale.com, in the hopes they can acquire the rights to use Ted’s image and make him the site’s new mascot. The site fired off a letter to Seth saying, ‘Not since Alf has there been this kind of excitement over a stuffed animal.’”
So, uh, eat your heart out, Channing Tatum?
[TMZ]
With Tyler Perry gradually segueing toward non-drag leading man status with Good Deeds and the upcoming James Patterson thriller Alex Cross, his latest appearance as the sassy, wisdom-dispensing matriarch of the title in Madea’s Witness Protection has an aura of fatigued reluctance to it, as does the film itself. Perry mentioned to Movieline that while he planned to keep with the character as long as there was demand from audiences, he “would be pretty good with passing it on,” and certainly in her franchise’s seventh installment Mabel Simmons, better known as Madea, seems ready to do the same, unable to summon the usual levels of outrageousness as she once again plays magical mender of other people’s problems.
In this case, those people are the Needleman family, who are forced to leave New York after George Needleman (Eugene Levy) gets set up as the fall guy after discovering his company has been operating on a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that’s resulted in the ripping off of multiple charities. The mafia is also somehow involved, and the case for whatever reason has to be tried in Atlanta — all contortions needed to land five wealthy white people in the house Madea shares with her brother Joe (Perry) after her nephew Brian (also Perry), who’s prosecuting the case, offers her $4,000 a month to keep them as part of a temporary witness protection arrangement.
By the time the film arrives at this setup — which it does laboriously, forcing Levy to struggle to carry the action for a good while by sputtering and acting flustered — you know exactly the type of humor that’s in store. The film dutifully works the cultural/class differences between the Simmonses and the Needlemans, with Madea referring to the morning routine of wife Kate (Denise Richards) as “yoda” instead of…
After five years and change of marriage, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are calling it quits. And we all thought those crazy kids would make it! (Right?) Relive the glory of TomKat, from their globe-trotting whirlwind romance to daughter Suri, to hobnobbing with fellow A-lister couples and more recent public appearances, in a very special Movieline gallery.
Click on Tom and Katie to launch the gallery.
Even Neil Young couldn’t resist. “This is a town in north Ontario,” he says at the beginning of Neil Young Journeys, Jonathan Demme’s uneven, engrossing combination of road-trip documentary and concert film. Journeys opens with Young in his hometown of Omemee, which alert Ontarians might note is not actually all that far north. It’s less than two hours from Toronto by car, which is how Young and Demme travel there, in a stately 1956 Ford Crown Victoria, for a gig at the city’s famed Massey Hall.
He’s one of those legends Americans tend to assume emerged from one of their forbidding landscapes, or pockets in time. In the decades since he went from busking for change on Toronto’s streets to playing folk rock with Buffalo Springfield in the 1960s, Neil Young has become something of a Rosetta Stone across several worlds, including the Canadian-American axis.
A number of genres and eras of music can be traced through his career, and many of his songs — most famously, perhaps, “Ohio” — document and respond to the times with vigor and alarm. He sang about Elvis and Johnny Rotten in “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” the song Kurt Cobain quoted 15 years later in his suicide note. Around that time some friends and I made a two-hour drive of our own, to the enormous outdoor venue where Soundgarden and Pearl Jam were opening for Young. For us the latter third of the bill was a puzzle; why were our favorites ceding to this aging folky? Then Young shuffled out and rocked our worlds.
Massey Hall is more intimate — under 3,000 seats — and at 65, as Demme emphasizes with his clamp-like focus on the performer, Young can still smash it up. Most of the film alternates between…
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes
They courted and were married amidst a media spectacle, but after five years of marriage, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated couples, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, are calling it quits.
The two wed in an Italian castle back in November 2006 and who can forget those images of Cruise giving Holmes a lift on the back of his motorcycle, as well as the jump on the couch seen around the world on the Oprah Winfrey show? But sadly, the romance has faltered, according to People magazine. The news will undoubtedly unleash a barrage of the ever-present five year contract riffs, though the marriage did actually sustain a bit more time – about 5.7 years, in fact.
“This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family,” Holmes’s attorney Jonathan Wolfe said. “Katie’s primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter’s best interest.”
Their daughter, Suri, is now six. This was Cruise’s third marriage.
[Source: People]
They say it is good to get a child a pet because its mortality will acclimate the youngster to the concept of death. Clearly Tim Burton never saw it that way.
Frankenweenie, the much beloved cult short that, ostensibly, got him fired from Disney in the 1980s, is back with a feature length 3D IMAX release from Disney this autumn. Yeah, there had to’ve been a li’l victory dance at Chez Burton on that one.
The studio’s marketing is revving up in earnest, announcing a Comic-Con panel and its world premiere at Austin’s genre-friendly Fantastic Fest’s opening night on September 20th.
The trailer offers two-and-a-half minutes of the expected Edward Gorey-by-way-of Brooklyn Renegade Craft Fair that, as I’m sure you are well aware, has no small share of its fans.
One of the more interesting things about the upcoming film will be doing a compare and contrast on the voice talent versus the short. Shelly Duvall is now Catherine O’Hara? But I love them both! Daniel Stern switched for Martin Short? Don’t make me choose! The great Paul Bartel was a voice in the original, but, alas, his death in 2000 makes it impossible for him to join this time. Unless… is there a way, you think, to resurrect idiosyncratic character actors?
The film, of course, looks terrific, though I’m curious to see if the Burton schtick is enough to get kids – normal kids – to overcome their natural disinclination for black & white. With the financial windfall Burton handed Disney with Alice in Wonderland (as Warner Bros. scratches its head over Dark Shadows) and the licensing juggernaut that is The Nightmare Before Christmas, I’m sure they were more than happy to throw the director a bone (zing!) on what was, I’m surmising, a not terribly expensive…
In the immortal words of Blue Oyster Cult’s Buck Dharma, “history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.” He was singing about Godzilla and we’re speaking about him, too, as Hollywood has decided to lay another bet on the city-stompin’ monster from the Far East.
Yes, Godzilla, pop culture’s most famous advocate for nuclear non-proliferation is emerging from the seas once more.
There’s been no secret that Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. have been planning a remake of Godzilla (or Gojira if you’re nasty) with British make-a-movie-on-your-iMac whiz Gareth Edwards at the helm. However, Latino Review broke the scoop that the Japanese lizard will be making a surprise appearance at San Diego Comic-Con.
LR has a great track record of being right on this sort of thing — indeed, their announcement that Marvel’s gap on their upcoming slate will be filled with a Guardians of the Galaxy film has been all-but-confirmed. (Although just a few weeks back they swore it would be Black Panther.)
The important thing to consider is this: the San Diego Convention Center’s Hall H is massive (over 6000 seats! so many T-shirts!) and the sound system is so state of the art it makes clips from Jonah Hex seem really impressive. I doubt there will be any finer geek moment of triumph when the lights dim and Godzilla’s trademarked screech erupts.
By the way, when I say trademarked, I mean trademarked. When you have an iconic sound like that – the MGM Lion, R2-D2’s blips or, I dunno, Fran Drescher’s laugh – you protect it. The Godzilla roar, if you’d like a bit of trivia, was actually created by rubbing a leather glove covered in resin across the loosened strings of a…
