No! Not together ! Could you imagine? Actually, I guess you’re perfectly welcome to play these unearthed early ’90s pop gems by artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel and actor Ian McShane simultaneously in a fit of masochistic Tuesday morning ardor, but nine out of 10 doctors would strongly disapprove. And the tenth one would be clinically deaf. Let’s have a listen! Jordan Hoffman passed along word this morning of his extraordinary archival find: Schnabel’s troubled 1993 album Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud , produced by Bill Laswell and featuring a fairly staggering line-up of Anton Fier on Drums, Laswell on bass, Bernie Worrell on keys and Buckethead on guitar. And behind the mic: Schnoul Brother No. 1, Mr. Julian Schnaaaaabellll [CROWD GOES WILD]: I know what you’re asking yourself: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is that a turd or phallus on the album cover? But there’s no time for questions — not with Ian McShane’s 1992 covers album From Both Sides Now to revisit . No real back-up band on this one besides the British producers The James Boys, a pair of wunderkinds who laid down just the right karaoke-style synth jams to complement England’s own hardest-working man in show business: Check out the complete story behind McShane’s misbegotten croonery here , and lobby Hoffman to release the rest of those hallowed Schna-ballads here . Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Move over Suri ! There’s a new too-grown tyke in town and her name is Vivienne Jolie-Pitt. According to US Weekly reports : While her big sister Shiloh, 5, is known for her low-key tomboy style, the youngest daughter (her twin brother is Knox) of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt wore a different kind of look on Saturday. Nearly a week after her instantly-iconic “right leg flash” at the Oscars, a much more casual Jolie, 36, took her daughters Shiloh and Vivienne, 3, to the movies at El Capitain Theater in Hollywood, where they caught the Japanese animated flick The Secret World of Arriety. With her famous mom in a trench coat, aviator shades and bold red lipstick and Shiloh in a t-shirt, shorts and sneakers, little Viv stood out in a black and white dress with gold lame pants beneath and red slip-on sneakers — plus, just like her glamorous mom, bright red lipstick! Back in 2010, Jolie described the twins as “classic boy and girl . . . [Viv] is really female. And he’s really a little dude.” We don’t think she looks too bad, at least she’s not wearing little plastic clear heels like Suri be doin! FameFlynetPictures More On Bossip! EXCLUSIVE: Mike Epps’ Daughter Bria Monae Speaks To Bossip About Her Father’s Threats, Drug Use, Deadbeat Steez, And His OTHER Secret Love Child!!! Exhibitionists PT 2: The Most Revealing Celebrity Twitpics Of All Time Stop The Violence: Ex G-UNIT Member Young Buck Shot At 11 Times In Homicidal Drive-By Bling Bling For Love: 10 Huge And Unforgettable Celebrity Engagement Rings
Remember the short documentary that Errol Morris released last year in commemoration of the 48th anniversary of JFK’s assassination? Not for nothing, but there’s plenty more where that came from — and it sounds… interesting : “I wondered why [he drove] because we offered to fly him in. So I’m interviewing him. He gets up. He walks off. He comes back. And he has a Mannlicher-Carcano, just like the one Oswald used. He wanted to demonstrate for me the enormous difficulty of firing those shots in rapid succession.” [ Smithsonian ]
Screw the bread : From the innovative bakery that brought you edible Uggies — and just in time for one of the more passionately anticipated opening days of the year — comes this remarkable contribution to the annals of sweets: Hunger Games cookies. Leave it to the masterminds at Eleni’s to whip up Katniss, Peeta, Gale, tracker jackers and the rest of the “Down with the Capitol” cookie set — an assortment of call-outs to the best-selling, soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture book series. I’ve never read a page of Suzanne Collins’s novels and personally continue to find Woody Harrelson’s wig a staggeringly tall barrier to film-franchise entry, but even a disinterested party can’t help but want to nibble on Jennifer Lawrence. Or Liam Hemsworth. I can’t believe I just wrote that. It’s Friday! I’m high of cold meds and self-loathing. Just stand back. Find out more at Eleni’s Web site . Read more of Movieline’s Hunger Games coverage here .
Can you believe that someone is accusing the writers of This Means War of being… lazy? “The fact remains, though, that most people don’t launch into film-studies lectures on a first date, not unless they’re in the movie business. When they do so in a romantic comedy it’s a giveaway that the screenwriter was too lazy and unimaginative to give their characters any hobbies that they don’t have themselves. It shifts the story even further away from reality.” Seriously! It’s getting bad. Someone start a human rights petition . [ The Economist via The Awl ]
Will Ferrell movies can usually be summed up as “Will Ferrell as a…” and you get it. Will Ferrell as a reporter? That’s funny. Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver? Also funny. But Will Ferrell as a Spanish soap opera action hero? Casa de mi Padre is a Spanish language film starring Ferrell as a rancher’s son who goes to war with drug dealers to protect his brother’s girl (Genesis Rodriguez). Where, exactly, did he come up with this idea? At the film’s press junket today, Ferrell said he’d had this idea for five to seven years. The inspiration struck him, as such ideas do, during a 2:00 a.m. channel surfing session. “I’m probably like so many people, turning on the television going through the channels at two in the morning and landing on a telenovela going, ‘What is this? Why are they so over the top? This is amazing,’” Ferrell said. “That’s my exposure to them. I’d always had this idea of that’s such a heightened, funny world that it would be really funny to see myself in that world. I thought God, you’ve never seen an American comic in a foreign language film and have them commit to it in a way that’s believable. I thought that’s something if you could pull it off, that would be an original movie.” The TV dramas that pop up on Univision or Telemundo in the states take the drama pretty seriously. You can tell Ferrell thinks it’s funny by all the intentional mistakes (continuity errors, visible boom mics, stuffed animatronic animals and mannequin stand-ins) intentionally placed in Casa de mi Padre , which is written by Andrew Steele and directed by Matt Piedmont, both alumni of Saturday Night Live and Funny or Die . “It technically really isn’t an homage to telenovelas,” Ferrell said. “Telenovela is kind of the broad description for it but it’s an homage to that, it’s an homage to the Mexican spaghetti western. It’s an homage to bad moviemaking, continuity mistakes. It’s an homage to overacting. It’s an homage to stuffed wild animals. Once we started writing the script and talking about how we were going to shoot the movie, we saw this was a real opportunity to play around with a bunch of different elements.” The script by Steele was written in English, then the dialogue translated into Spanish. Ferrell only speaks en espanol ; only an American character delivers a few lines of English. Of course, now Ferrell only remembers the naughty words. “ Chingado is a good one,” he said. “I love that word. Chinga this, chinga that. That’s a good word, but that’s commonly used. Chinga is the F word.” Ferrell got over the language barrier on his first day of filming. “For some reason the schedule worked out to where I literally had like a two page monologue in Spanish on the first day. Once I got the first couple takes under my belt, and I could see people watching behind the monitors going, ‘His Spanish is okay. It’s not that bad.’ Then I thought oh, okay. I’m going to make my way through this. Had I kept up with the Spanish, I’d be really good right now. But I didn’t. I could make my way at a resort. At the Four Seasons in Mexico I’d probably be okay.” Fulfilling his dream of starring in a Spanish language melodrama, Ferrell was proud to use his box office clout to get an outrageous film made. “This ranks up there as one of the things I’ve gotten to do which you can only be so lucky to be in a position to take risks like this.” Casa de mi Padre opens March 16. Watch the trailer here . Follow Fred Topel on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you’re an Avatar superfan who’s been yearning for your own lifelike bundle of joy to complete your home(tree), look no further than this custom-made offering from eBay seller tinytoesnursery15 . The humanoid-Na’vi “REBORN AVATAR BABY” comes with hand-painted blue skin, jewels and various adornment, and has a head that turns… so it can watch you as you sleep. And it can be yours for just $130! In all seriousness, the purchase price seems entirely worth it for a true-blue (ahem) Avatar fan. That said, $18 for shipping? Where to, Pandora?? Personally, it’s not for me since it gives me the creepy crawlies. (I mean, she is not for me — the maker clearly states this is a female Avatar baby). But hey, whatever floats your boat! Bid now, as the auction ends on March 5. [ eBay via Slashfilm ]
Though it’s always a bad idea to review a director’s intentions at the expense of the actual results, there’s something about Paul Weitz’s movies that makes you want to cut him a little extra slack. Weitz, with his brother Chris, was one-half of the directing team that brought us About a Boy (an affecting and well-crafted adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel), as well as American Pie (which, despite its reputation as a teen raunchfest, was surprisingly in tune with the complexities of sexual relationships as they’re experienced by young women). The pictures Weitz has directed on his own have been either unjustly overlooked (as in the case of the freewheeling satire American Dreamz ) or justifiably lambasted (there’s not much to say about the icky gun-for-hire vehicle Little Fockers ). But when Weitz is at his best, his films show an easygoing open-heartedness that more technically gifted directors – we’re looking at you, Alexander Payne – can’t even begin to muster. There may not be a single misanthropic bone in his body. Which is a way of saying that the vibe of Weitz’s latest, Being Flynn, may have a greater impact than the sum of its parts. Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro) is an aging, crabby, racist nutter of a cab driver who’s convinced he’s the most brilliant (undiscovered) writer of his time: He’s got a multi-volume opus — with the rather ominously intriguing title “The Button Man” – stored away in his jam-packed rat’s cubby of an apartment. His son, Nick (Paul Dano), is also an aspiring writer, and he too is struggling to understand exactly how that shapes his identity. But Jonathan and Nick must suffer their respective delusions and anxieties separately: They’ve been estranged for as long as Nick can remember, and he’s been raised by his hard-working, long-suffering mother (Julianne Moore, whose occasional appearances in the angst-ridden narrative are like small puffs of ocean air; how a woman can believably play a character who’s working two exhausting jobs and still look so radiant is beyond me). Nick and Jonathan reconnect when Jonathan tracks him down to ask for help: He needs Nick to help him move his stuff into a storage facility after he’s evicted from his apartment. (The offense: He went after a noisy neighbor with a heavy stick outfitted with two sharp nails, the first of several Travis Bickle-style warning signs that are played more for laughs than for suspense.) By this time the aimless Nick has begun working at a homeless shelter, at the urging of a fetching new female acquaintance, Denise (Olivia Thirlby, who gives some nicely chiseled contours to a rather shapeless role). Imagine his surprise when Pops shows up at the shelter, having lost his cabbie’s license thanks in part to his irrepressible irascibility. The previously nebulous relationship between Nick and Jonathan takes a more concrete form almost immediately, and it isn’t pretty. Being Flynn isn’t sure what it wants to be about: We get lots of voice-over from Dano’s Nick, musing painfully about what it means to be a writer, or even just a maybe-writer, while also reflecting on the nature of the barely-there relationship he has with his father. Meanwhile, Jonathan goes further and further off the deep end, acting more unlikable (not to mention certifiable) before, at the end, being redeemed by a last-minute bout of semi-benevolent winkling and twinkling. The script was adapted by Weitz from Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir , and as he’s shaped the material for the screen, he’s made sure that Nick’s youthful disaffection and befuddlement comes through loud and clear. That may be too much of a bad thing, and Dano drifts through it all like a moon-faced naïf; he’s either giving a really subtle performance, or he’s doing absolutely nothing – it’s hard to tell. The moody, aimless, self-absorbed voice-overs he’s given don’t help much, though it is possible to feel the occasional tug of sympathy for Nick: Dano has the flat, impassive face of a doll from a Brothers Quay animation, but every once in a while, a shadow of confused pain drifts visibly across it. Jonathan is a tougher case: The more he misbehaves, the harder it is to like him, and although De Niro plays the role with the right degree of mischievous menace, his shtick wears thin rather rapidly. This is a character who’s so much larger than life that he’s barely equipped to live it: He’s been a legend in his own mind for so long that he can barely conceive of any effect he might have on other people. De Niro bites into the role with gusto, but that makes it all the more wearisome to watch. You want Nick and Jonathan to find their way toward that necessary connection, but you also dread getting there: That means these two personalities, one rather indistinct and the other far too big for the britches of real life, will have to meet somewhere in the middle, and you just know it’s going to be anticlimactic. And sure enough, it is. Yet there’s no doubt that Being Flynn is an attempt at something painful and genuine – the movie itself yearns to make a connection, even if it can’t quite locate the most effective channels. Some of its problems may be rooted in the tone as dictated by the source material: At one point Nick, thinking aloud in voice-over about the non-relationship he has with his father, wonders if they’ll find each other if Nick just stays in one place. “But what if both of you are lost and you both end up in the same place, waiting,” he says aloud, giving in to that kind of circular nonthinking that writers, as they’re depicted on-screen, so often indulge in. Maybe if Nick did less thinking out loud, and if Jonathan had fewer lovable-loose-cannon moments, Being Flynn would be a more direct, more effective picture. As it is, it’s a movie that’s always thinking out loud, leaving us waiting, and waiting, for it to take action. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The French actor bests George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman and Demian Bichir in the hotly contested race. By Ryan J. Downey Jean Dujardin wins Best Actor at the 2012 Oscars Photo: Robyn Beck/ AFP/ Getty Images For several weeks, conventional wisdom foretold that the Best Actor contest would come down to George Clooney (“The Descendants”) and Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”), and Sunday night (February 26), the suspense was finally lifted. And the Oscar went to: Jean Dujardin. Dujardin bested a field that included Clooney’s pal Brad Pitt (“Moneyball”), veteran actor/ first time nominee Gary Oldman (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”) and Mexican-born Demian Bichir (“A Better Life”). “The Artist” also took home awards in two other major categories, Best Director and Best Picture. Many viewers snickered when the Oscars announcer teased a commercial break by saying, “With no clear favorite, anyone could win” leading into the bigger awards. Several of the winners at the 84th Annual Academy Awards were long thought to be foregone conclusions, but Best Actor was one of the more hotly contested, as both Clooney and Dujardin racked up several awards at ceremonies leading up to Sunday. The 39-year-old French actor and comedian spent this awards season accumulating victories at the AACTA, BAFTA, Cannes, the Golden Globes, Hollywood Film Festival, Independent Spirit Awards and several critical associations. “Key to the success of ‘The Artist’ is the work of its two French stars,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan. “Dujardin and [B
It wasn’t all tepid , frustrating and demoralizing Sunday night at the Oscars. We’ll always have the red carpet with all its bitchy tweets , tuxedo sabotage , wheelchair awkwardness and wackadoodle screen vets getting the live, televised attention they so richly, richly deserve. Take Richard Dreyfuss and Nick Nolte, for example. Who was crazier? Oscar-winner Dreyfuss practically melted with contempt for the whole post-Oscar scene, veering from modulated bickering to some rant about retiring from movies, the Constitution, the conservative political patrons the Koch brothers, and… Well, here. Watch: It made for a fine complement to the evening’s earlier red-carpet batshittery, with nominee Nolte making the most of his face time by discussing crows, pinball machines and whatever else his interviewer brought up (when he could hear and/or understand her): Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Down and Out in Beverly Hills : The Senior Years ? Someone find Bette Midler, let’s get on this! Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
