It’s too bad they don’t give Oscars out for individual performances in documentaries because Liv Ullmann’s work in Dheeraj Akolkar’s Liv & Ingmar would be worthy of consideration. The Norwegian actress and filmmaker discusses her 42-year relationship with the late Swedish filmmaking legend Ingmar Bergman with such emotional candor and poetic economy that the movie becomes something much more than just a re-telling of one of the most famous work-love relationships in cinema.
Although Ullmann and Bergman — who was 22 years her senior when they fell for each other on the set of Persona in 1965 — lived together for only five tempestuous years, the friendship that they built in the aftermath is very much a love story. And Ullmann’s remembrances of their time together and apart until Bergman’s death in 2007, combined with Akolkar’s sumptuous and artful telling of the story, make Liv & Ingmar a story that can be enjoyed without an immersion course in their work together. Liv & Ingmar is at its essence a story of two people who love each other but cannot live with each other. (Think of it as a real-life Celeste & Jesse Forever.)
Ullmann, 73 will attend the U.S. premiere of the film at the New York Film Festival on Monday night, and the Oscar-nominated actress spoke to Movieline about her initial reluctance to participate in Akolkar’s film, her happiness with the result, her rollercoaster relationship with Bergman, and Johnny Carson’s flirting during a Tonight show appearance. Note: The door to which she refers in the interview is located at the house on the Swedish island of Fårö where she and Bergman lived together. On the door’s surface, the couple kept a kind of hand-doodled calendar of their good — and bad days together, and Akolkar repeatedly depicts the drawings as a document…
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Forget the Battle For Suri and Losing Nahla ‘12, the real custody war we should all be focusing on is the one between RPattz and Kristen Stewart over their fur child Bear Pattinson-Stewart. Finally, a hobo hipster version of Kramer vs. Kramer with 100% more lip-biting, fleas (not from Bear) and vamp sparkles. Cue up the Vivaldi!
Bear was saved from flying up to heaven when RPattz and KStew adopted him from a high-kill shelter in New Orleans sometime last year. Before KStew wrecked her happy home by letting a married director wreck her bland coochie with his tongue (Why did I type that?), she and RPattz were planning to adopt another fur kid from a high-kill shelter in L.A. But Radar says those plans are off and now KStew will try to attempt the impossible by changing her one emotion from “duuuuuuuuurr” to “raaaaaaaaaaaaage” while fighting RPattz for Bear. You probably already heard what Radar’s source had to say about this when CNN covered this HIGHLY IMPORTANT NEWS STORY last night, but read it again. It’s that important.
“After Rob moved his things out of their Los Angeles home, he then told Kristen he wanted Bear. She was heartbroken – they adopted Bear together and she always felt that he was their little baby. But Rob was so hurt by
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Full Story »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]
If you’ve seen the red band trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man whose best friend is his talking teddy bear, you may think you’ve seen the whole thing: Beware the comedy trailer that’s so packed with hilarity that you just know it’s cobbled from the best bits in the movie. But miraculously, Ted manages to sustain itself.
The directorial debut of Seth MacFarlane, mastermind of that animated symphony of crudeness and ’80s pop-culture references known as Family Guy, Ted finds a surprising range of off-color vowel sounds in its potentially one-note gag. It’s also, for anyone who’s ever lived in or spent significant time in Boston, a remarkably accurate portrait of the specific brand of brewski-swilling yobbo the city tends to breed or attract – and I’m talking about the bear.
Ted, the movie’s chubby protagonist (MacFarlane provides his grouchy, growly, straight-outta-Southie voice), begins his life as a garden-variety stuffed toy bestowed upon the young and hopelessly friendless John Bennett (at this point played by Bretton Manley). Ted, like a wise-ass Velveteen Rabbit, becomes “real” when poor, lonely John makes a Christmas wish that comes true: “I wish you could really talk to me – then we could be friends forever and ever.” And lo! Ted speaks, becoming John’s closest pal and confidant.
Some 27 years later, a bear whose only words were once a tinny, canned “I wuv you!” emitted when his tummy was squeezed, is a trash-talking, boob-grabbing, pot-smoking layabout whose greatest joy in life is to sit on the couch next to his equally lackadaisical best pal – now played by Wahlberg – and thrill to repeated viewings of Mike Hodges’ 1980 Flash Gordon. As John says, with anticipatory delight as the opening title appears, “So bad,…
Full Story »…and, um, there’s just one of him. Bear with me here: A slimmed-down Kevin James, who’s actually looking kind of handsome here (or am I crazy?), plays a high school teacher who enters the octagon to raise cash as a mixed martial arts fighter. He’s basically Joel Edgerton in last year’s MMA pic Warrior, only — lucky for us — he’s still Kevin James, so it’s a broad comedy and not a gut-wrenching drama and instead of Tom Hardy he’s got Salma Hayek to wrestle with. Sigh.
The other depressing Here Comes the Boom-Warrior point of comparison: This is going to make so much more money than the under-seen and under-appreciated Warrior. At least there are no talking gorillas (that we know of).
Here Comes the Boom (seriously, do people really use that phrase?) rolls into theaters on October 12 and is directed by Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer, Waterboy, Zookeeper).
[via Fandango]
Pixar is at its best when it’s making movies about rats working in restaurants and families of superheroes with not-so-super powers; not so much when it’s spinning cautionary environmental tales with robots-in-love subplots and sentimental weepers about grumpy codgers “learning to love again.” Somewhere at the more golden end of that yardstick is Brave, in which a peppery redheaded Scottish princess from days of yore named Merida – her voice is provided by the wonderful Glasgow-born actress Kelly Macdonald – decides she doesn’t want to marry from the selection of gents her parents have chosen for her and would much prefer traipsing through the forest with her trusty bow-and-arrow.
Note: This review includes spoilers.
Except Brave doesn’t go where you’re probably expecting it to. (And if you’re sensitive to spoilers, you may not wish to read further.) There isn’t an ultimate prince, a swain of Merida’s choice who steps in to offer her everlasting happiness, while letting her be herself, of course. This is a story about mothers and daughters and the ways they clash over basic, seemingly simple things, only to find their ultimate connection in the very things they can’t change about each other. Even that oversimplifies Brave a little too much, but you get the idea. Brave has a marvelous secret weapon in Emma Thompson, who provides the voice for Merida’s mother, Elinor, a queen with a sense of propriety and a desire to keep her daughter from making bad decisions. But this is a queen who turns into a bear, a big growly girl with a pear-shaped body and a most unladylike manner when it comes to eating fish. The quivering, multi-hued strands of Merida’s curly mane notwithstanding — and they are a sight to behold – the character design of…
Full Story »Let this clip from the local news warn you about the dangers of texting and walking at the same time. The next time you do it, you could be mauled by a wild bear and you only get one cell phone bar in a bear’s stomach. But seriously, the thing that bothers me the most about this clip is that the dude freaks out and runs away like the bear that’s staring him down is John Travolta. That’s not how you deal with a bear in 2012. You’re supposed to stop, take a tall video of the bear, upload that to YouTube, take a picture and upload that to Instagram before changing your Facebook status to “is about to slide down a bear’s froat to meet Jesus.” Come into the now, ho!
via Buzzfeed
In a pub somewhere in Central London, Bear Grylls has his face underneath a urinal drain in the men’s bathroom and is drowning his sorrows in gallons of piss. Discovery Channel announced today that they are cutting all ties with Kim Kardashian’s golden shower idol, because he has skipped out on two projects he was supposed to do with them. The last episode of Man vs. Wild will air in November. Discovery pissed out this statement to The Hollywood Reporter:
“Due to a continuing contractual dispute with Bear Grylls, Discovery has terminated all current productions with him.”
I hardly watched that mess, but it’s still a sad day in television history. We were so close to getting an episode of Bear finding ways to survive on his own pre-cum for days on end. Now if I want to see a crazy moron lick piss and eat out a soulless, fury beast, I’ll have to start watching Jersey Shore again. No. No. No.
