Come this time next year, could Jay-Z be up for an Oscar nomination? The rapper/record producer/entrepreneur is on board to help score the re-make of The Great Gatsby.
Jay-Z, born Shawn Corey Carter, is teaming up with The Bullitts‘ Jeymes Samuel for the film’s music, which Samuel revealed via Twitter. Samuel was clearly ecstatic over their pairing for the film, which stars Leonard DiCaprio and Isla Fisher, saying through the social networking site, “It is too DOPE for words!”
The younger brother of singer Seal, Samuel has left his mark on the music biz on singles Supercool, Landspeeder and Close Your Eyes. He has also written and directed the upcoming single They Die By Dawn starring Idris Elba.
This is not the first mash-up Jay-Z has had with Australian-born filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, who is directing the film based on the classic book by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lurhmann used one of his songs for The Great Gatsby’s first trailer.
Also starring Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Jason Clarke and Tobey Maguire, the story revolves around a Midwestern transplant to Long Island who becomes fascinated by the mysterious past and lavish lifestyle of his neighbor, Jay Gatsby and is drawn into his circle of obsession and tragedy.
The Great Gatsby opens in May.

[Source: The Guardian]
Now that Les Misérables is expected to surpass its opening-day box-office expectations by $5 million-10 million, director Tom Hooper could pretend that adapting the beloved musical for the big screen was a walk in the park — but he’d be lying. On Thursday, Hooper spoke to Movieline from his Sydney, Australia hotel room and, as he watched a massive tanker navigate Sydney Harbor, likened the challenge of directing the film to piloting an unwieldy boat through a very tricky channel.
“It was an extraordinary dance between musical structure and filmic structure,” Hooper explained in a revealing interview about the making of Les Miz. The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who’s expected to snare his second Best Director nomination on Jan. 10, talked at length about his reasons for making the movie and the challenges of pacing and editing a film that is essentially sung through from beginning to end. He also addressed criticism that he relied too heavily on close-ups in the film, divulged Eddie Redmayne’s technique for attaining such exquisite sadness in his performance of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” and answered the burning question of the day: whether Anne Hathaway or Hugh Jackman is a bigger musical geek.
Movieline: When I saw Les Misérables in New York, I was surprised by the audience’s passionate reaction to the movie. After certain scenes and songs, they were applauding and cheering as if they were actually seeing a live performance.
Tom Hooper: It’s quite extraordinary. I’ve never sat in any cinema or any premiere, or any screening of one of my films and seen a response like this. It’s like you’re at some kind of happening, some kind of out-of-body experience rather than a…
Full Story »Ahem. So, if you could just take your eyes off Noomi Rapace’s naked breasts for a damn second, I’d like to ask you a question. Is it me or is the Prometheus star a terrible dancer? Compelling actor, yes — with a face that demands my attention every time she’s on screen. But check out that weird kind of heaving motion she makes when she’s imitating Mick Jagger in Jonas Akerlund’s music video for “Doom and Gloom.” What the hell is that?
I mean, every two-bit stand-up comic beginning with Richard Belzer (remember when he was funny?) can imitate Jagger’s rooster strut, but Rapace seems to be having a hard time even getting in sync with the music. (In a way, I don’t blame her. This song may be on the band’s latest greatest hits collection, but it ain’t great, even if it becomes a hit.)
And then there’s that Flashdance-like scene where you can’t really tell if it’s her or a stand-in. (Have You Seen Your Stand-In Baby, Standing in the Shadow?) Maybe that’s some kind of ironic take on the fact that Jennifer Beals had a stand-in for her dance scenes in the original.
The quick-cutting is another clue. You would think that shots of Rapace dancing in a Stones video would be a selling point. Okay, maybe not as big a draw as her bare breasts, but sensual enough that the camera would be lingering a little longer as she lets her freak flag fly.
Unless it was a little too freaky.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments section.
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Bérénice Marlohe moves through Skyfall with the beauty and grace of a panther, and there’s a reason for that. In an interview with Movieline, the 33-year-old French-Chinese-Cambodian actress, who plays the femme fatale Sévérine in Skyfall, says she based her character, in part, on a mythical creature that was part-snake, part-dragon and part-jungle cat.
Figuratively speaking, of course. Like all actresses who share screen and bedroom time with 007, Marlohe is beautiful in an exotic and ethereal way, but, as the conversation below suggests, she would rather be celebrated for playing a bad girl than a Bond Girl.
Movieline: What is the essence and significance of being a Bond Girl for you?
Marlohe: Honestly, I never took into consideration this title ‘Bond Girl’ while creating my character, because, it’s a beautiful title, but it’s so abstract. You can’t start there. When I think Bond girl, I see women in bathing suits. That is not enough. Also, I was so focused on creating a real human being — but on a surreal level — that I totally forgot about the Bond Girl stuff. Perhaps five years from now, when I see the movie again, I’ll think, Ah, yes, I am in the Bond movie, so I am a a Bond girl. But it was very far from me when I making the movie.
You’ve said that your performance as Sévérine in Skyfall was inspired by music. What was on your playlist?
Because I did a lot of piano from 10 to 18 years old, I feel a strong connection with music, whether it is classical, like Mozart’s Requiem, or rock or pop. It’s so powerful. You connect directly with the whole universe. So, I listen to music a lot on sets because, it puts me right…
Full Story »Here’s something to add to the pile of things in life that’ll make you feel old: Green Day’s new music video for “The Forgotten,” their single from the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 soundtrack. You read that right: The punk rockers, who once repped a generation of slackers with songs about masturbating and smoking weed, are now in bed with Twilight.
Not that Green Day’s mainstream streak is anything new; they’ve played to the masses since making it big on MTV in the mid-90s, they have their own Broadway musical, and frontman Billie Joe Armstrong (who recently checked into rehab) just guest-starred on The Voice, any of which would be reasons alone for a revocation of that punk card.
Suffice to say the Green Day that got their start at Berkeley, CA’s gloriously dingy 924 Gilman decades ago isn’t quite the same Green Day singing about Bella Swan’s undead transformation into a vampire as faux-home movies of Edward Cullen playing the piano for his monster baby play in the background. Because that’s basically what the music video for “The Forgotten” is. Sample lyric: “Don’t look away from the arms of love.” On the contrary — look away! Look away!
Get More:
Green Day, The Forgotten, Music, More Music Videos
The Twilight films have historically nabbed pretty great and surprising artists for their soundtracks, so this isn’t a stretch for the franchise. It’s just, y’know, WHAT HAPPENED TO GREEN DAY? Sigh. Joining Green Day on the Breaking Dawn Part 2 soundtrack are indie faves Passion Pit, St. Vincent, and POP ETC. Full track listing:
Passion Pit, “Where I Come From”
Ellie Goulding,…
Wu-Tang rapper-turned-actor and composer RZA makes an explosive directorial debut with The Man With The Iron Fists, a vibrantly stylized homage to martial arts cinema that could only have sprung from the mind of the lifelong kung fu fanatic, hip-hop fixture, and Quentin Tarantino protege. Who else would think to set a Shaw Brothers-esque opening fight sequence to the infectious battle anthem “Shame on a Nigga,” a Wu-Tang classic that RZA also used to inject a little of his late cousin and bandmate Ol’ Dirty Bastard into Russell Crowe’s swaggering Jack Knife?
RZA also stars in the film, co-written by Eli Roth, as The Blacksmith of Jungle Village, where warring clans, government agents, deadly spies, and secret enemies (including Crowe, Cung Le, Byron Mann, Lucy Liu, David Bautista, Rick Yune, and Daniel Wu) plot to slice, dice, and destroy their enemies for a prized shipment of gold.
Ahead of his Iron Fists tour, RZA rang Movieline to discuss the many influences that inspired his martial arts homage, what he learned from studying under movie master Quentin Tarantino, how he landed the legendary Gordon Liu for a key role, and the elusive and obscure kung fu movie he’s been dying to add to his collection.
[GALLERY: Eye-popping images from RZA's The Man With The Iron Fists]
Your history with kung fu, martial arts, and wuxia movies goes back a long way to your early days, but how did your love of these films synthesize within you into this story you’ve wanted to tell for years now? At what point in your life did you realize you could tell it in this way?
There were many days of imagining, of course, about making my own movie,…
Taylor Swift missed her calling. Taylor should’ve been a torturer at Guantanamo Bay, because bitch knows how to put the pain on a grown man and leave him screaming for a rusty razor so he can murder his ears. Taylor’s newest assault on ears “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is supposedly about Jake Gyllenhaal, and she tells USA Today (via WOW Report) that she wrote that Pee Chee folder poem of a song as an act of revenge against her ex. Taylor’s ex hates the kind of music she makes, so she purposefully wrote a bubble gum shit song that would get tons of play and torture him everywhere he went.
“He made me feel like I wasn’t as good or as relevant as these hipster bands he listened to. So I made a song that I knew would absolutely drive him crazy when he heard it on the radio. Not only would it hopefully be played a lot, so that he’d have to hear it, but it’s the opposite of the kind of music that he was trying to make me feel inferior to.”
And when USA Today asked her why would she want to torment someone, she said, “Because that’s fun.”
Taylor is The Bad Seed of music. She looks like an Anne of Green
…
Full Story »Spike Lee grew up a year apart from Michael Jackson, so like anyone of that generation, or those that followed, and really anyone in the world who had a heartbeat in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s he was fixated on the chameleonic pop star for decades. A new 60-second trailer for Lee’s music documentary Michael Jackson: Bad 25 reveals a mesmerizing wealth of behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the King of Pop’s iconic 1987 album Bad so riveting that it’s clear Lee’s as much obsessed fan as curious documentarian.
Honestly, Bad 25 had me at those few unaccompanied measures of “The Way You Make Me Feel,” which is still one of my favorite tracks from the multi-platinum album. (That music video!) It’s a time capsule of Jackson at his peak, culled from celebrity remembrances and backstage/in-studio/on-set footage — before Wacko Jacko, before the weirdness that overtook his legend, back when Martin Scorsese had a head of youthful brown hair instead of that iconic silver mane.
Bad 25 debuts on ABC on Thursday, November 22 at 9:30pm and will get a sneak theatrical opening this weekend in New York and L.A.
[via Huffington Post]
