Happy Friday! Also in today’s edition of The Broadsheet: Steven Soderbergh walks from U.N.C.L.E. … Angelina Jolie linked to the latest movie Ridley Scott will never make… I, Frankenstein casts its leading lady… The $775 million opening week… and more.
“I kind of went my own way, really. I didn’t watch the [ Alien ] films. When I found out I was doing it, I didn’t revisit them. Greg Louganis was my first inspiration. I figured that I’d sort of base my physicality roughly around him, and then it kind of went from there.” [ MTV Movies ]
Actor. Writer. Photographer. Musician. And now Joshua Leonard makes his feature directing debut this week with The Lie , a darkly comic, sneakily moving vision of 30-something parenthood.
From Sideways to Little Miss Sunshine to Slumdog Millionaire and Black Swan , Fox Searchlight has long proven more than adept at marketing its awards-season wares. Thus the distributor seemed a logical choice to acquire Shame , the acclaimed sex-addict drama that was near-instantly presumed to be destined for an accursed NC-17 rating. But now Searchlight, continuing its “What, us worry?” campaign on behalf of the Steve McQueen-directed, Michael Fassbender-starring gem, may have hit its stride.
Edward Burns’s newest film Newlyweds closed out the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and the director/writer/star is happy to tell you how he allocated the $9,000 in its budget: “5k for actors, 2k insurance, 2k food and drink. 9k in the can.” That’s according to Burns’s Twitter , which is a pretty fun and inspiring scroll for independent filmmakers. Movieline premieres the new poster for Newlyweds after the jump.
As a general rule in the movies, dysfunction is better offered as a side dish rather than a main course, accenting what’s really a story of grieving and letting go, or coming of age, or self-acceptance. Screaming, crying, acting out and mistreating others are tougher to take when they’re the primary focus instead of symptomatic of something deeper to be excavated and explored.
Maybe Ricky Gervais wasn’t kidding when he tweeted that he has already claimed the Holocaust and pedophilia as Golden Globe monologue material. The polarizing Globes host and comedian has taken to his blog to express his true (R-rated) intent in hosting this year’s ceremony and to declare that he will be making guests even more uncomfortable than they felt last year. Yikes!
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I is such a departure from the previous three Twilight pictures that you could almost consider it a rogue offshoot. Director Bill Condon steers the franchise away from visions of wan, suffering teens and fake-fur werewolf tussles and brings it closer to — if not necessarily close to — something resembling human adult sexual obsession and its attendant responsibilities and anxieties. It’s like Jules and Jim for the Tiger Beat set.
Now that the Twilight film franchise is drawing to a close (with $1.8 billion in receipts and counting, not including the projected $125 million opening predicted for this weekend’s Breaking Dawn – Part 1 ), series screenwriter and Dexter veteran Melissa Rosenberg has turned her attention to a sizable slate of television projects. Talking with Movieline today, Rosenberg delved into the Sopranos esque qualities of her newly announced female-led crime drama Penoza and discussed the challenges of bringing a Jessica Jones superheroine series into a post- Birds of Prey / Wonder Woman world.
“It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton,” Demi Moore said in a statement to the Associated Press today. “As a woman, a mother and a wife there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life.” The announcement arrives after numerous reports of Kutcher’s infidelity around the time of their sixth wedding anniversary in September. [ AP ]