We at Movieline HQ were quick to cheer when Matthew McConaughey was named Best Supporting Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle for his work in Magic Mike and Bernie. After busying himself with forgettable rom-coms, the uncannily likable Texan has been on a tear, choosing unique projects in which he can strut his unique and undeniable talents. For the first time in his career, he is a genuine contender for an Oscar nomination.
Movieline spoke to the man from the set of Dallas Buyers Club (the film that required him to drop tons of weight, so if the noms don’t come this year, he’ll be primed for 2014) about awards campaigns, how he’s perceived by fans, some of his classic lines and some possible film sequels. Normally we’d take laser focus in pruning our interviews, but with a guy as wonderfully laid back as McConaughey (who announces himself on the phone as “McConaughey”) you’d be a fool to ignore all the “man”s.
Before we get to this terrific year, I should let you know I’m on the road and actually in your hometown of Austin and, no joke, in the shadow of a Moon Tower.
Where it all began! Great shadow to be in, man. In Texas, that’s the place to be to hang out with your buds and get on a buzz. You gotta get rural on it.
Okay, since we’re talking about Dazed and Confused, I mean, you’ve embraced that role — you named your company after a line from it, right?
Yeah! On the football field when Randall “Pink” Floyd is deciding whether to play football or take a drug test and I say “you gotta just keep living.” That was my first film, and a week…
Also in Wednesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs, Rialto Pictures picks up theatrical rights to French company StudioCanal’s massive library for the U.S. Indie Eden heads to theaters. Animation distributor has Oscar ambitions for several titles. And “Digital Hollywood” producer is dead of apparent suicide.
Rialto Pictures Acquires U.S. Theatrical Rights to France’s StudioCanal’s Massive Library
The New York-based company which specializes in classic film re-releases, celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, has signed a 3 year agreement with StudioCanal to handle the U.S. theatrical distribution of over 2,000 international classics owned by the French media giant. The film library is one of the largest in the world, includes classic films by Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Abel Gance, Vittorio De Sica, Alain Resnais, Mike Nichols, Jacques Tati, Akira Kurosawa, Bertrand Tavernier, Orson Welles, and many others.
Megan Griffith’s Eden Heads to Theaters
Jamie Chung (Premium Rush) Beau Bridges and Matt O’Leary star in the true story about a Korean-American teenager, dubbed Eden, who was smuggled into Las Vegas and imprisoned as a sex slave. She ensured her own survival by carving out power and influence within the organization that imprisoned her. Phase 4 Films picked up North American rights to the film, which it will release in early 2013.
GKIDS to Offer 4 Titles for Oscar Consideration
The animated distributor said it will feature four film to compete for the 2010 Best Animated Feature Oscar and the 2012 Annie Awards. The company is planning Oscar-qualifying L.A. runs in November for From Up On Poppy Hill, Le Tableau, The Rabbi’s Cat and Zarafa. “All four films are unique and wonderful, each in their own way, and we look forward to sharing them with Academy voters and audiences across North America,” said GKIDS…
And you can curse at the “like” button for that.
One of my biggest regrets in life, besides drinking an all-green protein shake for breakfast today (BARF! NEVER AGAIN!), is not getting a job as a janitor, muralist or glory hole attendant at Facebook during its earlier days. Because if I did, about this time tomorrow I’d be writing Dlisted posts from my private island while clones of Prince Hot Ginge feed me a fresh batch of Zingers I had flown in on my invisible Wonder Woman plane flown by Lynda Carter herself. As you know by now, Facebook went public today and not only is this going to make Mark Zuckerberg a boy billionaire 20 times over, but it might make Bono richer than Paul McCartney.
HuffPo says that in 2009, Bono’s company Elevation Partners invested $90 million in Facebook, which earned them 2.3 percent of the company. With Facebook’s IPO expected to hit $100 billion, Elevation Partners’ shares could be worth up to $1.5 billion. The not-at-all reliable Celebrity Net Worth says Bono’s solid gold money vault is filled with around $900 million. Depending on how much of Elevation’s earnings belongs personally to Bono, he could be richer than Paul McCartney by the end of the day. Paul McCartney is currently worth around $1.05 billion.
Bono is obviously going to use a lot
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It’s one thing for distribution deals to precede the Cannes Film Festival. It’s another thing altogether for the actual absurdity of the annual event to commence before anyone even sets foot on a red carpet. To wit, get a load of this Canadian company trying to sell press access to their stars Kristen Stewart and Brad Pitt. Tacky!
Deadline relays the tale of Alliance Films’ junkets for On the Road and Killing Them Softly, where Canadian journalists are welcome to catch up with Stewart and Pitt one-on-one — for the low, low prices of $1,293 and $3,232 (respectively). Junketing on the Croisette is expensive, you see, and since Alliance says it intends to bring both actors to North America for, er, complimentary press days later this year, the film journalists of Canada can either wait or have the first crack by helping foot the bill to welcome the more crucial international crowd.
On the one hand it makes sense: These films are likely Toronto Film Festival-bound in September, where many more local and American press will flock for coverage anyway. There’s no reason to squander your talent’s precious, limited time on press they’ll likely get in four months. It’s also not unprecedented; Harvey Weinstein famously tried to usurp $1,500 from journalists wanting to cover Death Proof at Cannes in 2007.
On the other hand, come on, Alliance. There are classier ways to handle this dilemma:
“Alliance decided not to partake in the Cannes junkets for Killing Them Softly and On the Road, however we wanted to provide Canadian journalists the opportunity to participate directly if they so choose,” a company spokesperson told Deadline. [...]
As an insider told Deadline: “Of course
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So you’ve always dreamed of owning an electric DeLorean DMC-12 — the same design seen in the Back to the Future trilogy, only fueled by electric energy so that when you do finally fashion it into a time machine, it won’t emit harmful tailpipe pollutants as you travel into the future to score an almanac containing the outcomes of 50 years worth of sporting events and return to present day to use the almanac for financial gain, Biff-style. Right? Well, good news! The DeLorean Motor Company has unveiled an electric prototype of the car that they plan to make available in 2013. Details ahead.
This past weekend, the Texas-based motor company showed off the eDeLorean prototype to customers at their biannual owners event in Houston. After four years worth of research, the company finally built an electric model that they plan to put into production in two years. The eDeLorean features a 200 hp electric motor, a top speed of 125 mph, a built-in GPS display and an iPhone dock. The electric car, dubbed DMCEV for now, can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in less than eight seconds and will reportedly be available for consumers for approximately $90,000.
DMC owner Steven Wynne told Autoweek that the company is already designing an eDeLorean 2.0 that will hopefully feature AC power, over 100 [miles per charge] and significant weight reduction.
For more photos and a detailed account of a test drive of the vehicle, head over to Jalopnik.
· DeLorean DMC-12 electric prototype debuts [Autoweek]
· This is a brand-new, all-electric DeLorean [Jalopnik]
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Monday brought more bad news to the reportedly beleaguered production of the zombie flick World War Z, produced by and starring Brad Pitt, when SWAT in Budapest raided a warehouse storing prop guns for the film. The problem: they weren’t props, but fully-functional military-style assault rifles. Oops!
Since Pitt is involved, US Weekly has the scoop from Hungary’s Anti-Terrorism Unit on the police raid that uncovered the major slip-up:
“This morning a private plane brought guns wrapped in a parcel from a company to an individual [in Budapest],” Janos and Bodnar [said]. “Guns like these are highly illegal to transport even if they were to used as stage guns, which hopefully they weren’t.”
According to a source, Pitt, 47, isn’t to blame for the prop problem. “The movie company’s employees must have made a mistake bringing the guns in without the Anti-Terrorism Unit’s permission.”
According to the report, the World War Z shoot wasn’t exactly going as planned anyway; it’s “already over budget and over schedule,” according to US Weekly’s source. This weapons pickle will only mean more of a headache for poor Brad. (And how could this kind of mix up happen in the first place? Somewhere, some other dude is puzzled over his shipment of 85 fake plastic guns…)
[US Weekly via Cinema Blend]
[Photo credit: Images of (unrelated) assault rifles per Getty Images]
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Steve Jobs, one of the visionary creative geniuses who created the laptop that allows me to type the word “peen” all day on the internet, has gone off to iHeaven today at the young age of 56. Apple, the company that Steve co-founded, released this statement on their website:
“Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Steve stepped down as CEO of Apple earlier this year to continue his battle against pancreatic cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2004. Steve’s family said that he died peacefully while surrounded by those he loved.
Rest in peace, Steve. Thank you for making it easier (and more fun and more interesting) for us to do everything. I would pour a 40 on my MacBook, but I sort of need it to publish this post. iSad.
Hilary Devey, a serious businesswoman who is so serious about business that she has won awards for it, the CEO of a freight distribution company called Pall-EX and the new judge on BBC 2’s Dragons’ Den (which is like the US’s Shark Tank but with dragons instead).
Even after reading a profile on Hilary Devey by the highly important news source The Daily Mail, I still don’t know much about the Dragons’ Den newest Dragon Lady, but that doesn’t matter. Everything I need to know about Dragon Lady Hilary is in these pictures. Hilary’s asymmetrical haircut tells me that she whips her rivals with her hair cape before she takes over their company (or it tells me that her hairstylist is cockeyed)! Hilary’s 100-yard long shoulder pads tell me that she loves to make a grand entrance. Specifically, a grand entrance that involves her slipping through a doorway sideways since bitch can’t fit straight on (like a couch!). Hilary’s permanent heatproof lipstick tells me that when she breathes out fire balls at anyone who effs with her, she wants to make sure that red lacquered glamour stays permanently on her mouth. This is POWAH DRESSING, DAHLINGS! It’s like she’s an alien sea lizard from a planet whose only transmissions from Earth are episodes of Dynasty and she thinks all humans look like Alexis Carrington (which they should)!
Here’s Hilary on an old episode Secret Millionaire.
THAT VOICE! It’s like a chain-smoking toad with a voice box yawning into a fan. That voice could melt the nicotine off any patch.
Unless you’re the person in charge of writing Tommy Girl’s rider, you probably don’t get the word “PENIS!” shouted at you in the workplace. But the lucky (or unlucky, depending on who you ask) employees at Archie Comics know exactly what it feels like to get harshly fucked in the ears with the “PENIS” word by their co-CEO Nancy Silberkleit and now they want her out.
TMZ reports that Nancy, who inherited the job from her late husband and has no experience in running a comic book company, is being sued by Archie Comics Publications for bullying and sexually harassing employees. They say that once during a meeting in 2009, Nancy crashed into the conference room and shouted “PENIS! PENIS! PENIS! PENIS!” while pointing at each person there. Nancy went on another verbal PENIS! frenzy last year and also told a few employees that her “balls hurt.”
A firm who specializes in sexual harassment cases advised Archie Comics to pull the PENIS! out of their company and fire Nancy. Archie Comics wants a judge to ban Nancy from the offices and keep her from representing their shit at events.
Either this is marketing for Horrible Bosses, ho has Tourette’s or she’s my kind of boss who uses PENIS! to spice up a bland and boring meeting. Most of us have sat in useless, stupid meetings wishing that who ever was talking would say the word PENIS! on a loop and that there
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Where oh where am I supposed to feed my craving for sensationalized trash headlines about British reality stars, stoner royals and well aged placentas?!!!!! Evil media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son James, who runs the company that publishes News of the World, announced today that the earth version of News of the World will be buried this weekend. Oh, at least The Sun is STILL there.
Rupert and James decided to lay off around 200 NotW employees, because readers and advertisers dropped like flies after we all found out that the tabloid allegedly hacked into the cell phone of a murdered teenage girl. Earlier this month, NotW apologized to Sienna Miller and handed over $164,000 in damages to her after they admitted to hacking her phone. They have also been accused of hacking the cell phones of dozens of other celebrities. If that’s not enough, police are also investigating claims that their officers were paid by the tabloid for information.
Rupert pet his fluffy white cat and cackled out this statement:
Recent allegations of phone hacking and making payments to police with respect to the News of the World are deplorable and unacceptable.
I have made clear that our company must fully and proactively cooperate with the police in all investigations and that is exactly what News International has been doing and will continue to do under Rebekah
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