Poor Katherine Heigl. America has still not forgiven her for verbally abusing Grey’s Anatomy — the series that brought her fame, fortune and countless one-dimensional rom-com roles — on national television. As such, her post-Grey’s films tanked at the box office, her former co-stars mocked her to the press, and she became the butt of jokes made by other romcom characters. In the latest crushing blow to Heigl, Lionsgate yanked her newest film from the lucrative summer to the barren winter. How’s a girl supposed to fix a self-admitted image problem?
By returning to television! Well, that’s what Heigl is going to try, anyway. The actress is teaming up with HBO to produce and star in an adaptation of Ann Hood’s best-selling novel The Knitting Circle. Dirty Sexy Money creator Craig Wright will pen the script, about a mother who struggles to overcome the grief of losing her young daughter and the trauma of a struggling marriage through a knitting circle. (So, like How to Make an American Quilt meets Rabbit Hole?) In addition to marking Heigl’s first premium cable project, The Knitting Circle will allow the Emmy winner to revisit more dramatic material akin to her Izzie Stevens days on Grey’s Anatomy.
Could this be the career saver that Heigl is hoping for? As long as it doesn’t involve the actress knitting a pair of vibrating panties or playing house with Ashton Kutcher, perhaps. If it succeeds however, let’s just hope The Knitting Circle doesn’t lead to The Ugly Truth 2: The Uglier Truth.
· Katherine Heigl To Produce And Star In Movie Project For HBO [Deadline]
Another day, another image from Fright Night. Hot on the heels of Thursday’s first look at the horror remake — you’ll recall Colin Farrell’s bloody fangs — comes this hero shot of young Anton Yelchin. Looks good, director Craig Gillespie! One question: Can you find Anton a bigger cross?
Oh, never mind. It looks like Gillepsie found the biggest cross. Though considering how terrifying Farrell looked as a vampire, maybe bigger is necessarily better.
Fright Night hits theaters on Aug. 19.
On Piers Morgan’s unwatchable television show Thursday night, Andrew Lloyd Webber noted that he’s been eying a certain superstar for the role of Norma Desmond in his remake of Sunset Boulevard. I’ll be, it’s Piers’ least favorite person Madonna. Is this a stellar or stupid move?
I accidentally love this news, and I don’t even like Evita. Madonna’s movie career never took off for a few reasons (and plenty would argue that a lack of talent is partially responsible), but I believe Madonna’s brass works best in a supporting role. Her performance in A League of Their Own is beyond competent; it’s hilarious, real, and kind of heartbreaking. Norma Desmond is such a towering marquee role that normally I’d question Madonna’s ability to conjure so much campy command, but in this case I think she’s perfect.
Gloria Swanson, who scored an Oscar nomination for her performance in the 1950 classic (losing to the also-brilliant Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday), is so memorably extreme as the unstable has-been that hiring another thespian to reenact her work seems completely uninteresting. I don’t want to see Glenn Close in this. I don’t want Joan Allen or Patti LuPone or Bonnie Hunt or whatever. I want mythological panther goddess Madonna, who will bring the glaring melodrama and “Vogue” cred that I need in an arch Andrew Lloyd Webber romp. I would die to hear, “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. Baptiste Mondino!”
What do you think? Like Rita Hayworth, will Madonna give good face?
· Madonna for ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Remake? [ContactMusic]
· Fans of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox get along about as well as critics and Arthur, but that doesn’t mean both factions can’t have a sense of humor about all the hate. The good folks at New Era have debuted a new commercial featuring Alec Baldwin and John Krasinski that gets right to the heart of the rivalry. Baseball fans, take note: this video will not only delight you with its specifics, but also because it encapsulates all that’s wrong with rooting for the Yankees. Click ahead to watch, then stick around for more Buzz Break.
· More baseball: Entourage star Kevin Connolly says he would love to buy a piece of the Mets. All yours, bud! [TMZ]
· Even if you’re on the fence about Your Highness, it might be time to get excited about David Gordon Green’s next R-rated comedy, The Sitter with star Jonah Hill. “It does feel like a fall or winter movie to me rather than just, ‘Oh here are kids that cuss’ — which it has plenty of that stuff, but I don’t want to just be looked at and perceived as that and come out against a bunch of college humor R-rated movies,” Green told The Playlist about the recent release date shift for his film. “It definitely has some dramatic beats… it has an After Hours meets Adventures in Babysitting [vibe], and with that, all the kind of peculiar interesting New York City texture at night that you have with it that I’m really proud of.” This needs to come out yesterday. [The Playlist]
· While speaking with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, Conan O’Brien revealed that his nose was severely broken when he was beat up as a kid in Massachusetts. Whatta town! [USA Today]
“I think I got into Wayne Gretzky at the right time in my life, when inside the artist in me knew that it was coming to an end. And watching and learning about the career of Wayne Gretzky gives you the feeling of, it’s OK to stop. You can stop doing something that you love. […] Go out high. Win a Stanley Cup and leave. End magically. But end.” Indeed. I’ll organize the parade. [LAT]
BAFTA-winning director Joe Wright could have stuck to his bread-and-butter area of expertise, the lush period drama, a domain in which his films have notched multiple Academy Awards just six years into a feature filmmaking career. But after making Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and the subsequent misfire The Soloist, Wright flipped the script and re-teamed with the teenage actress he’d previously directed to an Oscar nomination — 16-year-old Saoirse Ronan — on Hanna, a dizzyingly kinetic action film about a girl assassin on a mission of self-discovery.
The resulting film is a distinctive modern fairytale with a young heroine (Ronan) as innocent as she is deadly, trapped in a world culled from equal parts bedtime stories and Bourne films. (Read Elvis Mitchell’s review here.) Raised in the wilds of Finland and taught by her father (Eric Bana) to trust nobody, strike with precision, and memorize the name of an enemy she’s never met (Cate Blanchett), Hanna is a feral weapon of mass destruction — until, finding friendship and seeing the world for the first time, she discovers her latent humanity.
Wright pulls the pieces together with aplomb, guiding Ronan to yet another stunning performance. Movieline sat down with the director to discuss the challenges of making his first action film, the secret to Ronan’s talent, the relationship that got The Chemical Brothers to score the film, and how Hanna represents his attempt at counteracting the “misogynistic and misanthropic, and kind of gun-loving, Republican bullsh*t” action films that otherwise dominate at the multiplex.
Hanna is quite a stylistic departure from your last three features. Did it spring at all from a desire on your part to show or explore a different side of yourself?
Not necessarily a desire to show other people another side of my work, but certainly a desire on my part to explore another side of my craft. And I was very excited by that challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it, really. I was scared of it, which meant that I should do it.
What seemed so daunting about tackling Hanna?
Certainly the action sequences, because as you know I’ve never done action before and it’s a very different skill set, but one that certainly is deserving of considerable contemplation. And I think, trying to do something kind of different with the action — trying to do something that had a kind of an economy and a clarity, and almost a beauty, really.
How do you teach yourself to shoot action, then?
You hire a guy called Jeff Imada. [Laughs] He’s this extraordinary fight choreographer. You listen to him very carefully… and then you do it your way.
In addition to the action in Hanna, it’s just a revelation to see this side of Saoirse. You obviously realized her preternatural maturity in Atonement, but what indicated to you that she had this killer edge?
I think Saoirse can play anything, really. I really think she can do anything. I was reading someone recently who believed that belief is a talent, like one might have a talent for painting, or a talent for writing. Belief is a talent, and it’s a talent that the Russians are particularly endowed with, and I think it’s possibly a talent that the Irish have, too. I think that she has this strange belief, and I don’t mean religious belief, obviously, coupled with a kind of extraordinarily powerful imagination. Her imagination is just a dramatic imagination — just as a composer needs a musical imagination, an actor needs a dramatic imagination. And those two things create in her this wicked talent that is just nothing like I’ve ever seen before, really.
And she was actually attached to the film before you came on.
Yeah, she brought me onto the film. It’s all her fault. I told her that in Finland at minus-29 degrees, with a dead deer. “This is all your fault.”
So Saoirse brought you onto Hanna, but you, in turn, enlisted The Chemical Brothers to create the film’s amazing score. How did you first meet them?
I knew them — I’m kind of slightly terrified to tell you that I first saw them play their very first gig in London in 1992. So that’s nearly 20 years ago.
When you were like, 10 years old, right?
Yeah, that’s right! [Laughs] I was at art school at the time and they played a club called Ra Ras which was above a shoe shop in north London, and I became a kind of friend-slash-groupie from then on, really. It was one of the seminal nights of my musical life. And so I’ve been wanting to use a contemporary score, and in particular a score by The Chemical Brothers, for a long time. I didn’t have much of an opportunity with Pride & Prejudice and Atonement. [Laughs] And then when I finally did a contemporary film, it was about a classical musician! So this was like, as soon as I read the script I thought, “OK, The Chemical Brothers have to do this.” It was lovely to work with a proper bit of bass. The full dynamic sound range was very exciting.
Did you work together to shape the themes they incorporated into the score?
Very much so. They wrote a couple of the piece prior to shooting so that we were able to play the music on set while we were filming, and then we worked very closely throughout the whole of post-production to create a kind of unified audio-visual experience.
The idea of a young woman or a teenage girl becoming an assassin has been explored in other very different films, but were those genre precedents in mind when you took on your telling of this story?
To be honest, when we started making the film none of them had come out. So we didn’t know about Kick-Ass; I think it was still shooting when we were in pre-production. Salt came out later, and obviously Sucker Punch was much, much later. So I thought I was being rather original!
Even going a few years farther back, there’s The Professional.
The Professional was a reference. And that kind of felt like it was far back enough not to be a problem. But in The Professional, [Mathilde] actually wasn’t the assassin. So it felt like it was kind of exploring new ground. But I guess that’s what they call zeitgeist, or something. One discovers that. The same thing with the fairytale elements. I was really excited about doing something with fairytale ideas and iconography and then I find that there are quite a few films at the moment that have fairytale roots, if you like. But hopefully Hanna somehow defies genre categorization.
Were there other cinematic influences that you can name that went into Hanna?
Probably because I’m European, my references are Euro-centric. Looking at French thrillers, Leon is possibly the most commercial, but films like Diva and Boy Meets Girl. So looking at a kind of European aesthetic rather than an American one. You know, in the styling of Cate Blanchett’s character, for instance, I loved this idea of a kind of Wicked Witch in a pencil skirt, kind of both sexy and terrifying at the same time.
The timing of Hanna and Sucker Punch makes for an interesting juxtaposition; how do you see the feminist messaging in the two films in contrast to one another?
For me, one of the main issues in terms of womens’ place in society and feminism is the sexual objectification of women. That’s something that feminists in the ’70s tried to fight against but has been totally lost in the 21st century consumer-celebrity world. So for me, when I look at the poster for Sucker Punch it seems actually incredibly sexist, because it is sexually objectifying women regardless of if they can shoot you or not. I have a kind of immediate, knee-jerk reaction to such iconography. I remember when the Spice Girls came out in the mid-’90s and it was all about girl power, but one of them was dressed as a baby doll, do you know what I mean? That isn’t girl power, that isn’t feminism. That’s marketing bullsh*t. And I find it very, very alarming. (More on the Sucker Punch-Hanna debate here.)
The MPAA rating on Hanna is PG-13, and one of the reason listed seems to be sexual content. [From the MPAA’s Film Ratings website, Hanna is rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of violence and action, some sexual material and language.”]
I don’t believe so…
I wondered if you’d had any struggles with the MPAA, either with the violence or in regards to the kiss scene between your two actresses.
I don’t think so with regards to the kiss. [Note: The sexual material citation is likely due to a scene in which adult characters are overheard having sex off-camera.] Obviously the line that we were skipping ‘round was violence and obviously a young person holding a gun and all of that kind of stuff, so there was some discussion about how far we could push things. But really, we kind of found ourselves in a satisfactory place where I didn’t feel like the film was compromised for that rating — and in fact, I was keen for that rating to be achieved, because I wanted to reach an audience who might identify with Hanna and be the same age as her. I think that the action genre is a very interesting one in terms of its place in a social context. I think that Paul Greengrass showed us with the Jason Bourne films that it was possible to make an action movie with a social conscience, a political-social context. You know, it’s not an accident that the journalist in the third film is writing for The Guardian newspaper. And so, I was interested in making such a film, because most action films that I see are misogynistic and misanthropic, and kind of gun-loving, Republican bullsh*t. And that concerns me because those are the films young people are going to see.
Maybe Lindsay Lohan’s dry spell in Hollywood is over. Victoria Gotti reportedly handpicked the troubled starlet to play her in Nick Cassavettes’ upcoming biopic Gotti: Three Generations. Producers had been trying for more insurable actresses like Blake Lively and Sienna Miller, but Ms. Gotti has pushed hard for tabloid fixture. John Travolta has already signed onto the project to play John Gotti. Salut! [THR]
According to these pictures, JWoww and Snooki and the cast of ‘Jersey Shore’ spent Cinco de Mayo getting drunk and making a spectacle of themselves. But I’m not so sure. Seems far fetched. I’m gonna go over to snopes to see if these pictures are some kind of urban legend.
(source = inf daily)
Literally just a few hours after doing the bare minimum to stay out of jail and complete her alcohol awareness classes, Drinksy Lohan became even more aware of alcohol when she stayed at a house party in the Hollywood Hills until 5am this morning. Those classes can be up three hours long, and I heard that the only way Lindsay gets through them is by freezing vodka into a tube shape and then shoving it up her ass. Then as her body heat melts it, the precious alcohol is slowly released. No I’m just kidding. I just made that up. But don’t be surprised now if you see Lindsay look a little stiff legged the next time she goes to class.
Eight years ago, NBC posted a profit of 1.8 billion dollars, but since then it’s been run by bumbling retards who would be required to wear water wings and a football helmet at all time in most states, so this year they will lose over 600 million dollars (source).
As you can tell, they’re not very good with numbers. But if you needed more proof of that…
NBC is pissed at Conan O’Brien and claims he lied during his “60 Minutes” interview.
Network sources tell TMZ Conan was flat out wrong when he said NBC gave him the axe rather than Leno because Jay’s buyout would have been bigger. Sources say the buyouts for Conan and Jay were roughly the same.
For the record, Conan received a buyout worth 32.5 million. Lenos buyout was 150 million.
Now, I’m no mathamagician, and I apologize for all the times I implied I was (I just liked the attention), but I do know that 150 is more than 32. Almost 5 times more, some would say. I also know that NBC is out of their minds to guarantee Leno 150 million dollars. If that dullard is worth 150, if they ever found a guy wearing a silly hat who can wiggle his ears, they would turn the entire network over to him, no questions asked.
(note – my beloved diora baird runs a very cutely entertaining twitter page, and not simply because she’ll occasionally flash her amazing cleavage. you may be wondering what that has to do with conan o brien. well I may be wondering why you’re so gay. NOW who’s asking the questions!)
