Some of Woody Allen ‘s best films have had simple, straightforward film titles ( Annie Hall ! Crimes and Misdemeanors ! Hannah and Her Sisters ! Even Midnight in Paris …). But you know, I thought there was really something catchy to Bop Decameron , the former title of his current Rome-set next flick. Apparently, I may have been the only one who liked it; as Anne Thompson reports, Allen’s changed the title to Nero Fiddled . Riiiight.
I can’t help that the new Footloose movie’s soundtrack is excellent. Trust me, I resisted , but the new collection of old tunes is a proper tribute to Kenny Loggins’s heyday and a thoroughly modern update. Accordingly, we’re revisiting five other covers of ’80s soundtrack gems. Let’s hear it for these five great cover versions; let’s give them all a hand!
Every time Sam Worthington shows up in a movie, I squint and ask myself, “Who’s that again?” That might happen two or three times with a new actor. But I feel as if I’ve seen a dozen Worthington performances by now, and I still squinted at him in Texas Killing Fields .
Have you heard about Act of Valor , the upcoming Navy-approved action film starring actual Navy SEAL s as Navy SEAL s on a covert mission that is based on actual Navy SEAL missions? The one that totally glamorizes Navy SEAL -dom and resembles, as EW points out, a feature-length Navy SEAL recruitment video? Not yet? Well, you’re in luck, because now there’s a trailer.
“Usually when I hear the words ‘family drama,’ I run,” said Willem Dafoe, who nevertheless found something to savor in writer-director Dennis Lee’s Fireflies in the Garden . Little did Dafoe or his castmates Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds, Emily Watson, Hayden Panettiere and least of all Lee himself know that their particular family drama wouldn’t make it to American theaters only today — nearly four years after its Berlin Film Festival premiere in 2008.
You know which underrated actor I love? Michael Biehn. You know which other underrated actor I love? Milo Ventimiglia. ( Gilmore Girls forever!) So the tense, bloody trailer for Xavier Gens’ apocalyptic horror pic The Divide pretty much had me at the get go, even before Biehn and Ventimiglia faced off for control of a roomful of survivors bunkered down in a basement after the world outside apparently succumbed to Sarah Connor’s nightmare nuclear blast from Terminator 2 . Watch the trailer and get more midday treats in today’s Buzz Break.
God save Craig Brewer’s Footloose , which is less a movie for today’s audiences than for yesterday’s — and I mean that in the good way. This is a pop entertainment made with an eye for detail: When our teen hero and the young woman he’s been wooing move in for their first kiss, the setting sun peeps out from behind their conjoined silhouettes. Corny, right? Get this: The rays beam out through a star filter. You can roll your eyes at the obviousness of it all, or you can marvel that a filmmaker cared to make a choice so traditional, so clichéd, that it becomes a kind of pop-culture mission statement. It’s as if Brewer is taking a stand for movies that look like movies instead of audience hipness barometers.
Jamie Waylett, the 22-year-old actor who played Crabbe the bully in the Harry Potter films, was arrested last month after stealing champagne from a U.K. drug store during the London riots while in possession of a gasoline bomb. After reviewing security footage, cops identified Waylett and arrested him on September 20, at which point authorities discovered 15 marijuana plants in his home. The actor has been charged with “violent disorder, having an article with intent to destroy or damage property, receiving stolen goods and also cultivating cannabis plants,” which makes that Twilight kid’s Four Loko incident seem like child’s play. [via TMZ ]
Where does appreciation end and exploitation begin? Gorgeous and disquieting, the documentary Bombay Beach wobbles between the two like a beginner gymnast on her first attempt on the balance beam. On one side, it’s a poetic, freeform examination of the lives of a few of the residents of the area of the title, located by the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert. On the other, it’s an uncomfortable fetishization of the community’s outsider status, dictated by poverty, by location and by an inability or unwillingness to exist elsewhere. Israeli-born director Alma Har’el, who comes from a background of music videos and commercials, doesn’t just bask in this abundance of scenic, decaying Americana, she shapes it into choreographed dance interludes with the subjects, who twirl outside their mobile homes and don carnival masks to cavort in an outdoor gazebo. It’s a bit of whimsy as pretty and problematic as the film as a whole.
Congrats are in order to Patty Jenkins, who was confirmed today as Marvel’s pick to helm their 2013 sequel, Thor 2 . Jenkins, who directed Charlize Theron to an Oscar in 2003’s Monster , her feature directorial debut, inherits the helm of the Thor comic book movie franchise from Kenneth Branagh. Full press release after the jump.
