January 15th, 2012 by Richard under elsewhere writings. No Comments.
In his three decades of acting, Woody Harrelson has gleefully taken on the roles of serial killers, psychopathic zombie hunters, and criminally stupid bartenders, but in his 50th year of life, he finally took a role that forced him to exhibit his greatest demons: a uniformed officer of the LAPD.
And not only a police officer, but a very, very bad one, teetering on the edge of sanity and lawlessness in Rampart, a new movie by director Oren Moverman. The film is a rematch for Harrelson and Moverman, who previously took the actor to other dark places in The Messenger. In that 2009 film, Harrelson—often thought of as a comic talent because of his Cheers beginnings—showed again he could be a Serious Actor, as a soldier who brings the news to families that their son or husband has been killed in combat. “He said he never wanted to play a soldier and he never wanted to play a cop,” said Moverman in an interview. “So I cast him as a soldier and now I’ve cast him as a cop.”
The Messenger earned Harrelson a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination and there is a chance his performance in Rampart could bring another nod (he has already been nominated for Best Actor, in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt). Moverman said, “I knew he would be uncomfortable playing a cop, and I thought that would be great to get him out of his comfort zone. And when Woody’s out of his comfort zone, he works harder to convince himself that he’s true to the part.”
Moverman’s plans for him aside, Harrelson initially recoiled at such a step. An outspoken marijuana-rights activist with at least three arrests to his name, Harrelson’s easy Texas drawl becomes sharp and hard when he recalls his first reaction to the character upon reading the script, “I thought he was an asshole,” he said. “And I was like, Jesus. I don’t want to play this guy.”
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
Tags:woody harrelson.
December 15th, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
Of all the wacky stories in this year’s Oscar race, perhaps none is more unlikely than the fact that America’s bard of nerddom, comedian Patton Oswalt, finds himself a very serious contender to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor—one of this year’s most competitive categories—for his role in Young Adult, the new film from the Juno duo, director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody. But after years of mocking Hollywood’s foibles as a stand-up, and leading a band of ill-shapen misfits from the sidelines, Oswalt, the cherub-faced comic, may very well have earned himself a seat at the Oscars ceremony against other possible contenders no less notable than Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow, Nick Nolte, Ben Kingsley, and Kenneth Branagh.
Before an audience of his friends, fellow comedians, and family in a screening room on the Paramount lot for a first peek at Young Adult, a humbled Oswalt stood in front of the assembled to introduce this major leap into the world of Serious Acting. Addressing the crowd, he said, “Young Adult will open nationwide on Dec. 9. Tonight sit back and enjoy Human Centipede.” Pause. “I need you to see the film the way I saw it.”
The character in question may go down as the most nuanced and heartbreaking portrayal of the nerd dilemma ever committed to film. Oswalt plays Matt Freehauf, a man festering in the literal and psychic wounds of high school, an experience that ended with his being beaten by a group of jocks, leaving him permanently disabled. Wallowing in his resentments while living within sight of his tragedy, Oswalt slams into Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), his high school’s former prom queen and doyen of his tormentors. As obsessed by her youth, in her way, as Matt is, Mavis has returned home to reclaim her now happily married high school boyfriend.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
December 15th, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
ext month, a new sitcom called “Work It,” about two out-of-work salesmen who dress up as women to get jobs, will make its debut on ABC. There’s nothing new about the premise — Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari covered the same ground on the early-80s sitcom “Bosom Buddies” — and the tone isn’t exactly novel either. The stars of the show, Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco, are operating in the prevailing frat-boy mode perfected by Bradley Cooper and Seann William Scott.
In May, an 84-second trailer of “Work It” hit the Internet, instantly attracting more blogger rage than most shows accumulate over the course of several seasons. Gobsmacked by the very fact that “This got made! And is going to series!”, The Futon Critic lambasted the show’s “limp attempts at misogyny,” “groan worthy madcappery” and “Mrs. Doubtfire hijinx.”
The Best Week Ever blog took special umbrage at the network’s attempt to position the series as “high concept”: “Holy moly, ABC. If you’re going to put a terrible show on the air, the least you could do is not try to make two bumbling fools dressed up like women for cheap laughs a ‘high concept’ in which the guys become moral compasses. It’s not the iconic Louie poker scene, for heavens sake.” The Dallas Transgender Activists Alliance launched a petition to keep “Work It” off the air, and a blogger for the Gay Voices section of The Huffington Post predicted that the series would face summary cancelation, “not because the content is offensive to queers, but because the show itself is just bad.” (ABC did not respond to requests for comment.)
(Read the rest at Huffington Post entertainment)
November 5th, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
For The X Factor, tonight’s U.S. debut on Fox comes at the end of the longest, rockiest development road perhaps ever faced by a television show. It has been eight years since Simon Cowell, then a judge on the fledging American Idol, dreamed it up as the next iteration of the singing-contest format. He wanted a show with no age limits—young or old—for the contestants, where not only individual singers but groups would be allowed to perform, and where the judges don’t just preside from Mount Olympus but get down into the weeds, actually managing the contestants and battling against each other.
In enacting this vision, Cowell set himself in direct conflict with the show his electrifying presence had helped turn into a colossus. Two lawsuits, a prolonged negotiated peace, and a painful breakup with Idol later, The X Factor finally arrived on American airwaves Wednesday.
The talent-contest marketplace has gotten a lot more crowded, however. Once, Idol stood alone on American networks as the show that had managed to achieve major success. In the interim, the TV schedule has been flooded with musical competitions, from the dance genre—led by Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance—to shows like Cowell’s own America’s Got Talent. Now the launch of X Factor comes not only three months after the mega-finale of Idol’s 10th season, but also after the conclusion of the first singing contest to give Idol a run for its money, Mark Burnett’s The Voice, which attracted very respectable numbers in its debut season on NBC.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
September 19th, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
In the Golden Age, when Hollywood was one vast fraternity, when everyone knew everyone, when the fan magazines printed what they were told and not a letter more, the Friars Club was the frat house of the campus’s more rambunctious element; the enclave where madcap cut-ups liable to set a studio chief’s wastebasket on fire took refuge from the stuffy world of showbiz. And in that cozy little fraternity, the Friars Club Roasts functioned as something akin to wedding banquets: occasions for the brotherhood to show their love to their most celebrated brethren in the only way wiseacres know how, by teasing them within an inch of their lives.
Sixty some years later, a panel of seemingly randomly selected comedians and tabloid fodder convened in a cavernous sound stage to rake over the coals a man known as America’s most horrific open wound with the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen, the latest installment of the network’s salute to the nation’s greatest train wrecks.
The spectacle descends from the Friars Club Roasts of old in the same way Jersey Shore descends from On the Waterfront; the setting may be similar, but all that’s missing from the original is every bit of its humanity. And therein lies the story of much of our culture during the past decades.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
September 14th, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
A decade and a half after he burst into public consciousness with one of the most obnoxious debuts of modern times, Matt Damon has quietly, almost underneath the radar, transformed himself into one of the most effective actors of our day. While others of his generation have soaked up the acclaim and the trophies, Damon has turned in a string of flawless performances that have suddenly turned him into the archetype for a new breed of screen masculinity.
Looking back on the Matt Damon who stampeded onto the scene in 1997, there was little evidence to suggest the material of greatness. First appearing as half of a buddy act with fellow Bostonian Ben Affleck, the testosterone-fueled duo personified Hollywood’s cigar-lounge era. The image was capped by the pair’s fist-pumping Oscar-acceptance speech after winning the screenplay award for Good Will Hunting when Damon was the appalling age of 27.
But since that night, Damon has traveled almost in the exact opposite direction from the frat-boy trail, settling down to a series of non-showy, journeymen performances onscreen, and a reticence toward the spotlight offscreen that has, years later, transformed him into something no one could have foreseen: our most admirable of young actors.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
June 23rd, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
Has America grown so cynical that it has turned its back on superheroes?
On and off for the past three decades, whatever the nation’s trials, we have been watched over from our multiplexes by a long line of caped champions, and in exchange, America consistently rewarded these crusaders with our allegiance in the form of untold box-office riches.
Since Christopher Reeve arrived as Superman in 1978, superhero films have become the nation’s onscreen superego, reflecting its changing zeitgeist, as they strode like a spandex-clad Goliath atop our blockbuster culture. This summer was to be the year when the genre swallowed the box office whole, with a new superhero mega-adaptation rolled out every third week.
But it’s not working out that way.
Six weeks and three men in tights into Blockbuster Season ‘11, America has met this year’s crop with, at best, muted enthusiasm and, more often, shrugs of indifference. Where the release of a new superhero film not long ago was the grandest (not to mention most grandiose) event on our cultural calendar, the successive releases suddenly feel routine, predictable, and oddly out of tune with the times.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
June 17th, 2011 by Richard under elsewhere writings, the cinema. No Comments.
For some reason, aliens are still invading Steven Spielberg’s Planet Earth.
Throughout his career, America’s foremost filmmaker has allowed his native soil to be conquered — and reconquered — so many times that you’d think word would’ve gotten out across deep space that it’s not worth the trip.
But yet they keep coming.
This Sunday, the latest horde of marauding spacemen touches down in “Falling Skies,” an eight-part series executive-produced by Spielberg for TNT. Not all aliens have been equal in the Spielberg canon, however. His visitors have ranged from the cuddly (“ET,” “Gremlins”) to the serene (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Indiana Jones”), and from the robotic (“Transformers”) to the comical (“Men in Black”) to the slithering (“War of the Worlds”).
Read the rest right here.
April 20th, 2011 by Richard under elsewhere writings. No Comments.
Before there was JWoww or Omarosa or Survivor, in the winter of 1973, America was introduced to the concept of reality television by a soft-spoken upper-middle-class family, who, for 12 weeks, the nation watched eating dinner, sunbathing by their pool, and, before our very eyes, slowly disintegrating.
Called An American Family, the PBS documentary series mesmerized the nation with a peek into the lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. The show became the centerpiece of a three-month-long national conversation, with viewers first engrossed in and then horrified by the charming family who became a symbol for all that had gone wrong with the country.
Nearly 40 years later, the Louds are back, this time as docudrama, in Cinema Verite, a made-for-HBO-movie that restages the filming of An American Family. Starring Diane Lane and Tim Robbins as Pat and Bill Loud, the clan’s matriarch and patriarch, and James Gandolfini as Craig Gilbert—the series’ producer whose insertion of himself into the family’s story off the cameras would be the subject of controversy for years to come—the film purports to tell the real tale of manipulation behind the series.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
Tags:cinema verite, The Louds.
April 18th, 2011 by Richard under elsewhere writings. No Comments.
In another age, it might have been a great thing to be Robert Redford.
Unfortunately for him, however, Robert Redford arrived at the precise moment in history when being a handsome, soft-spoken leading man went out of fashion. While he might once have had the world without apologies, Redford’s career has been a struggle against his chiseled features, to prove he is not just a haircut. That struggle seemed to reach its sputtering conclusion this weekend with the release of The Conspirator, the latest in Redford’s long string of somber, self-serious, hectoring films.
Seeing the earnest director and the guarded, gloomy festival kingpin of today, it’s hard to picture the charismatic young Redford whose career once seemed headed in a very different direction. But that was before the star ran headlong into a little event known as the 1970s, from which his balance has never quite recovered.
A gifted actor with a touch for light comedy, with a dose of melancholy behind the perfectly sculpted features, Redford began his acting career on Broadway, winning rave notices as the uptight newlywed in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. He rode the part to the big screen, appearing opposite Jane Fonda, and a star was born that still dazzles half a century later.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
Tags:robert redford, the daily beast.
