I told them to quit with all the sex scenes , but noooo : “Not to mention any names, but one actor came on me during the take. I had to surreptitiously wipe myself off with the sheet. Fortunately, I liked the guy. I found it a little flattering and a little creepy. We never talked about it, so I can’t tell you if it was Method acting on his part or if he just found me pretty, but I suspect I’m not the only actress who’s had this experience. But I can tell you that twenty years later, when I run into him, my first thought is, There’s the guy that had on-camera sex with my abdomen .” [ Vulture ] [Photo via Shutterstock ]
Oh, God, here we go again : “‘Katniss’s act of self-sacrifice [volunteering to take her sister’s place in the games] is a trigger for an entire revolution. She draws an ethical line that she won’t cross over and it serves as such a beautiful example for people,’ [director Gary] Ross said. ‘That assertion of her own individual ethics ultimately triggers a revolution just as it was one Tunisian flower vendor that led to the revolt that rifled through the Middle East last year. Or Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus. It usually comes down to an act of individual ethics that can trigger something like that.'” [ LAT ]
The stirring 2009 documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty took us behind the scenes at Disney Animation to reveal what it’s like when good things happen to good people. But before that, there was The Sweatbox , the 2002 doc that exposed how bad things happen to good people at the notoriously demanding studio — a revelation that virtually ensured the film would never see the light of day. The crackdown worked once and may yet work in the future, but for now, YouTube has all 95 unfinished minutes available for a rare look. John-Paul Davidson and Trudie Styler were granted full access to the Disney process — the dark-arts cauldron comprising writers, directors, animators and executives — as it applied to the doomed project Kingdom of the Sun . The results featured below aren’t especially flattering (particularly to the executives), and Styler’s husband Sting walks his customary line between introspective and pretentious, but as a cautionary tale of snuffed-out Hollywood idealism alone, this one’s worth viewing. What the hell else are you doing with your Friday? [via /film ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The stirring 2009 documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty took us behind the scenes at Disney Animation to reveal what it’s like when good things happen to good people. But before that, there was The Sweatbox , the 2002 doc that exposed how bad things happen to good people at the notoriously demanding studio — a revelation that virtually ensured the film would never see the light of day. The crackdown worked once and may yet work in the future, but for now, YouTube has all 95 unfinished minutes available for a rare look. John-Paul Davidson and Trudie Styler were granted full access to the Disney process — the dark-arts cauldron comprising writers, directors, animators and executives — as it applied to the doomed project Kingdom of the Sun . The results featured below aren’t especially flattering (particularly to the executives), and Styler’s husband Sting walks his customary line between introspective and pretentious, but as a cautionary tale of snuffed-out Hollywood idealism alone, this one’s worth viewing. What the hell else are you doing with your Friday? [via /film ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you happen to live in a neighborhood with no Jehovah’s Witness ladies around to remind you that we’re living in the last days, wackadoodle director Abel Ferrara’s latest, 4:44 Last Day on Earth , is here to drive that truth home — or at least make you think about it just a little bit. Willem Dafoe plays an actor, Cisco, facing what he, and everybody else, knows is the Earth’s last day, thanks to an ozone layer that dissolved faster than anyone expected. He spends that last day writing in his journal, watching video footage of some fake-inspirational guru-dude, reaching out to his daughter and assorted pals via Skype and, most importantly, making sweet, crazy, soft-core love to his dishy, much-younger girlfriend, painter Skye (Shanyn Leigh), in the couple’s artsy, faux-ramshackle Manhattan loft. What a way to go! And yet, for an Abel Ferrara movie at least, 4:44 Last Day on Earth is surprisingly restrained. It doesn’t have the loosey-goosey dress-up-box vibe of the director’s 2007 Go Go Tales (also starring Dafoe), or the lackadaisical silliness of his 2005 Blessed Virgin thriller Mary (which featured a post- Big Fish , pre- La Vie en Rose Marion Cotillard, though I don’t remember a thing about her performance). 4:44 is, like the aforementioned movies, often laughable — watching the excessively craggy Dafoe and the excessively nubile Leigh roll around on their pre-Apocalyptic mattress was certainly good for a giggle. But the picture is also weirdly compelling, maybe most notably for the way Dafoe’s character — who is, in this respect, perhaps a stand-in for the Bronx-born Ferrara — seems to be grappling less with the idea that the world is ending than that the city is ending. Ferrara integrates lots of — perhaps too much — found TV footage of people around the world worshiping, lighting candles, and doing whatever it is people would be likely to do on the Earth’s last day. This stuff is boring and kind of dumb. But Ferrara brings some surprising gracefulness to the mix too: At one point Cisco and Skye order take-out, as any red-blooded New Yorker would do — when the world is ending, who has the energy to cook? When the Vietnamese delivery boy shows up, Cisco asks him, patronizingly, if he knows what’s going on. (He also tips the kid what might be $40 or $60, because, well, why not?) Then he asks, more kindly, if he can do anything for the boy, who responds by indicating that he’d like to contact his family back home via Skype. He speaks with them for a few minutes, but the movie’s sweetest moment comes just after he closes the lid of the MacBook: He stoops down to kiss it. Ferrara has some fun exploring both the high-tech and low-tech ways in which a human being, on the last day of mankind’s existence, might reach out to others. At one point Cisco steps out on his roof deck and lift a pair of field glasses to his eyes, the better to peep through his neighbors’ windows: He sees groups of people huddled together quietly; he also sees a man who’s just cooked a steak for himself, cutting a portion for his begging dog. In the city, looking through other people’s windows is sometimes voyeurism (benign or otherwise), but often it’s just a casual means of human connection, a point Ferrara makes beautifully here. And then there’s the Internet, which connects us all for better or worse. Ferrara can’t seem to get enough of Skype — but then, who among us can? After Cisco and Skye have a lover’s spat that really might be the end of the world, she rushes to her computer to Skype with mom, and what should pop up on the screen but the blessedly unfixed and unadorned face of Anita Pallenberg, who, in a voice that sounds either like the Devil or a lifetime of too many cigarettes (or both) tells her daughter how much she loves her and that she’s proud of her. She also tries to comfort her in the world’s last moments with a piece of advice that’s halfway between outright howler and sage mommy wisdom: “Just go to another sphere and it will be all right.” That’s sort of a metaphor for the act of watching Ferrara’s movies — going to another sphere is always required. At least in the case of 4:44 Last Day on Earth , it really is kind of all right. Read Movieline’s profile of 4:44 Last Day on Earth director Abel Ferrara here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
As a member of the Jakarta police force, Rama (Iko Uwais) is one of dozens of SWAT agents about to be trapped within the concrete walls of a tenement building run by a nefarious slumlord, set upon by machete-wielding thugs and forced to fight his way out using knives, broken doorways, and at times, only his bare hands. The fighting style he uses to do so, leaving a trail of broken baddies in his wake, is silat — a lightning-fast, bone-crunching Southeast Asian martial art that gets its best showcase in Gareth Evans’ festival sensation The Raid: Redemption . Welsh-born writer-director Evans didn’t necessarily set out to become the world’s pre-eminent silat action filmmaker, but with his 2009 feature Merantau and now The Raid he’s created a niche for himself while introducing the Western world to the rarely-seen discipline. His fascination with the form began when he was hired to film a documentary about silat, which introduced him to future collaborator, pencak silat practitioner, and Raid star Uwais. “As a kid I had watched kung fu movies and muy thai movies and karate movies, but I’d never seen silat before,” Evans told Movieline last week at SXSW , where The Raid screened ahead of its March 23 release. “When I finally got to see silat it knocked me on my ass, and I wanted my friends back home to be able to see it. I was hungry to be able to have a movie that I could take back to the U.K. — Friday night, a couple of beers, ‘Guys, you’ve got to see silat, it looks so fucking cool!’” The Raid isn’t the first silat action film, but few predecessors found an audience on par with the classic Hong Kong action films or mainstream martial arts hits. “There were films with silat made in the ‘70s and ‘80s in Indonesia but the choreography didn’t hold up in the same way that the choreography in Hong Kong has held up,” Evans explained. “You can’t compare those films to something like Drunken Master because they’re just so different in terms of style. And they added a lot of mysticism and were great as cult movies, but beyond that, not really. So I figured if I wanted to show them silat, I’d better go out and make a film.” With an unrelenting pace and inventive, dynamic fight scenes, The Raid is a near-constant assault on the senses that showcases the physical skills of stars and choreographers Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, not to mention Doni Alamsyah, former judo champ Joe Taslim, and what seems like hundreds of well-trained extras. After the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival to uproarious acclaim, Sony Pictures Classics picked it up for distribution and two new, unconventional composers were brought onboard to give it a different feel: Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda and TRON: Legacy orchestrator Joe Trapanese. (Screen Gems is developing an American remake with Evans executive producing; more on that here .) Evans screened the film for Shinoda and Trapanese and gave them carte blanche to create their accompanying electronic score, which they developed after settling on a few parameters – for example, no electric guitars. After watching the film, Shinoda went on tour to Asia and Trapanese headed to New York, both working from memory to create sounds that fit the version of the film and its highlights that they had in their heads. “I was working on my laptop in hotel rooms, in the car, on the plane,” Shinoda said. “I would throw these demos together, these ideas and sketches. Like, in my head I’m thinking, ‘There’s that one scene where the guys are doing this and this and this, and this is the kind of thing I remember it being like.’ Then other times it would be like, what kind of emotion don’t I have yet? What kind of theme is missing? When we came back we started laying all those things against picture and found that a good chunk of the stuff really worked.” Shinoda, who wanted to approach his work on The Raid as a score rather than a collection of songs layered over the film, contrasted writing with Trapanese to the creative process with Linkin Park. “I found it to actually be in many ways easier than writing stuff for a Linkin Park album because we tear our hair out,” he said. “When we’re writing a song for a Linkin Park album it can be very tedious, it takes a long, long time to get from a blank page to the final product, and in this case I’m working with a vision that is already realized. This is awesome — all I have to do is make sure I’m supporting in the best way.”
‘I was so happy how it came together,’ actor tells MTV News. By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Josh Hutcherson Photo: MTV News In addition to obsessing over our own reactions to finally seeing “The Hunger Games,” we’ve been enjoying collecting the initial reactions from the castmembers themselves, whose pre-screening thoughts ranged from anxiety to excitement. When MTV News caught up with Josh Hutcherson recently, we asked him what goes through his mind any time he screens a movie he worked on. “Honestly, I just hope it doesn’t suck. That’s my mentality when I go in to watch one of my movies,” Hutcherson said with a self-deprecating smile. “I hope I don’t get bored watching it, and I didn’t watching this. I was so happy how it came together. It really, to me, was kind of the most interesting way this story could be told. The way Gary [Ross] captured the essence of the story and the characters, cinematically, is incredible.” Hutcherson went on to say that the one thing that surprised him most was not any of the actors’ performances but the music backing them. “I think the score, to me, was one of the most surprising things,” he revealed. “I think it’s really interesting. And some of the editing choices that were made were so cool and different and nothing I’d ever seen before. Like, in the scene when Jennifer is stung by the Tracker Jackers. That kind of cool editing thing. It really kind of blew my mind.” But did it blow his mind enough to also evoke emotion via his tear ducts? Did Hutcherson shed any tears while watching the big-screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-seller? “Inside I did. I held it in,” he said, before adding that he’s not at all afraid to let the waterworks flow during movies, particularly those that star Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. “When I saw ‘My Sister’s Keeper,’ I openly wept the entire movie, and I feel comfortable saying that.” Check out everything we’ve got on “The Hunger Games.” For young Hollywood news, fashion and “Twilight” updates around the clock, visit HollywoodCrush.MTV.com . Related Videos MTV Rough Cut: Josh Hutcherson MTV Rough Cut: ‘The Hunger Games’ Related Photos ‘Hunger Games’ Cast Hits NYC The Hunger Games
I don’t ask a lot. I don’t really ask anything . Absurdities come and go . I roll with what I can and let the rest fade away. We’re similar in that regard, aren’t we? We won’t agree on everything, but we’re adults who ultimately respect each others’ tastes and accept — resentfully or not — that in this destabilized, hyper-reductive cinematic climate, even such fare as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot has a place in our culture. It’s big enough for all of us! So with this in mind, and in light of the vicious media sparring currently underway among the TMNT establishment, can we please, please just lay down our nunchucks and let this skirmish go? To wit, can we please not make an international incident out of producer Michael Bay’s context-free acknowledgement that “[t]hese turtles are from an alien race, and they are going to be tough, edgy, funny and completely lovable”? Judging by the fan reaction, you’d think that Bay proposed changing the heroes to rabbits or literally stomped on a live turtle in the middle of the Nickelodeon upfronts. And to that point, can we please no longer spotlight the bottom-feeding likes of Robbie Rist, who provided the voice of Michaelangelo in the original live-action TMNT films and who inveighed against Bay [ via TMZ , of course ]: “You probably don’t know me but I did some voice work on the first set of movies that you are starting to talk about sodomizing. I know believing in mutated talking turtles is kinda silly to begin with but am I supposed to be led to believe there are ninjas from another planet? The rape of our childhood memories continues … ” And to that point, can we please institute a moratorium on vaguely public figures comparing the contemporary adaptation of past glories to “rape,” “sodomizing,” and other terms of sexual violence? Just as nobody assaulted Vertigo against its will — despite Kim Novak’s hair-raising protestations otherwise — Michael Bay is not thinking about or even capable of penetrating TMNT ‘s anus or anyone’s “childhood memories.” For the record, neither TMNT nor our childhood memories have anuses to penetrate, forcibly or otherwise. This is an increasingly reckless, facile and fairly reprehensible analogy that the press nevertheless plays along with instead of suugesting a more appropriate alternative word for the act compromising a renowned legacy. How about “Lucas,” perhaps? E.G.: “Michael Bay had better not Lucas the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, or I’ll be pissed.” “Aliens? But that Lucases everything .” Etc., etc. Now that’s a vision from which even Bay would recoil. And to that point, can we please step back from utterly unwinnable culture wars that make Bay look like the reasonable one? From a message-board dispatch by Bay himself: “Fans need to take a breath, and chill. They have not read the script. Our team is working closely with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles to help expand and give a more complex back story. Relax, we are including everything that made you become fans in the first place. We are just building a richer world.” “A richer world”! Imagine! Put your weapons down! Or at least aim them at a graver travesty . [via THR ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“Gene did think he had Roger on smarts. Whenever Roger claimed to have the superior intellect, Gene would say , ‘Aren’t you the guy who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ?'” Oh, that Siskel. This and many more great At the Movies nuggets can be found over in Slate’s exclusive excerpt from The Chicagoan’s Roger Ebert -Gene Siskel piece Enemies, A Love Story . Give it a go and settle in for a good, long read on the best frenemyship in film criticism history. [ Slate ]
Chart-topping British boy band will kick off tour on May 24 in Fairfax, Virginia. By Jocelyn Vena One Direction Photo: Redferns With their record-breaking debut album, Up All Night, topping the charts , One Direction plan to hit the road for their first-ever headlining tour in the States. The U.K. boy band will kick off the trek May 24 in Fairfax, Virginia, as part of a North American tour set to wrap up on July 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with stops along the way in cities like Chicago, New York, Atlanta and Las Vegas. News of the guys’ tour comes as Up All Night made One Direction the first British group to have a debut album at #1 on the Billboard 200 on Wednesday (March 21). U.S. hysteria for the guys has been over-the-top, with hard-core fans wildly greeting them at stops all over the country. But one of the 1D fellas, Niall Horan, explained to MTV News that the band’s truly appreciative of all the fan love . “No way were we expecting it to do anything like that,” he said of enthusiasm for the album in the States. “We haven’t spent that much time out here and obviously not a lot of people know us, but the power of our fans, they never seem to stop amazing us. They’re absolutely brilliant and they’ve bought the album in great numbers.” Want the scoop on One Direction’s dapper boy-band style? Head over to MTV Style! This won’t be the guys’ first tour in America, though. Earlier this year One Direction toured with Big Time Rush, and things got pretty crazy, according to Horan. “Since we’ve been here, we did Radio City [Music Hall in New York] with Big Time Rush, and when we were leaving the venue, there was a lot of people waiting outside for us and it was like the movies,” he recalled. “We were trying to drive away. [Fans] were running through traffic. It was literally like something you’d see in a movie.” It doesn’t seem the hysteria is going to die down anytime soon. Before 1D even hit the road in May, they’ll perform at the Kids’ Choice Awards on March 31, and then they’ll take the “Saturday Night Live” stage a week later, on April 7. And all this buzz around the five Brits has fans wondering if they might be getting their own show on Nickelodeon . But Horan said that’s not the case, for now at least. “We’ve just been doing stuff with Nickelodeon. They’ve been brilliant to us; they’ve been really good to us. [But] there’s no sign of a TV show,” he said. “We haven’t heard anything. We’re obviously doing the Kids’ Choice and stuff, but there’s no deal been done or anything [for a show]. They’re just kind of helping us out, I suppose.” One Direction tour dates so far, according to band’s record label:
