We don’t see the writer in Robert Longfellow (Martin Donovan) for some significant time in Collaborator , Donovan’s pensive, carefully woven writing and directing debut. Robert is a stalled playwright, and when we meet him, he’s fleeing New York after poison-tipped reviews have slain his latest, long-awaited effort. Headed home to Los Angeles swaddled in self-pity, he must attend to his mother (Katherine Helmond), some Hollywood hack work, a simmering movie star (Olivia Williams) and a frustrated wife (former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur) stashed in a frosty East Coast locale. But Robert looks mostly inward, giving everyone else the vague but warm-eyed attention Donovan has brought to his work as a Hal Hartley muse and in a host of supporting roles. He’s at his fuzziest with Gus (a hulking David Morse in a handlebar mustache), formerly the shady older kid from across the street, currently the ex-con still living with his mother opposite the Longfellow homestead. Gus has a habit of sneaking up on Robert while he’s home visiting his mom, and in his gracious, facetious way Robert agrees to have a beer with him before he leaves. Of much greater concern is a long-anticipated assignation with Williams (assured in a small, tricky role), whom Robert turns to for comfort, damn those clichéd torpedoes. A lot of Collaborator ’s moving parts shouldn’t work, from the celebrity there for the taking to the painful contrast of smug self-consciousness and barreling authenticity set up between Robert and Gus. But Donovan manages to find a convincing balance between broad strokes and a small canvas, so that when Gus turns a guilt-induced beer between the two men into forced captivity, rather than gory melodrama what takes shape is a character piece that makes a literary job of deconstructing the hostage thriller. Morse has a casual, unwieldy menace as the beer- and pill-addled Gus. A life in trouble with the law has made something of a bipolar ironist of him; he’s cheerfully pragmatic one minute, dark and doleful the next. When Robert realizes that being waylaid en route to Williams has turned into what the SWAT team gathering outside his door might call a situation , rather than triggering panic and fear, it instigates a slower, more considered transformation in his demeanor. The direction is as calm and deliberate as the captive is, and the tension that develops has a natural rhythm to it. Robert the writer has taken over, and we watch his experience of the ordeal slide from shock to a narrative remove. The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts. Whether Gus’s lot in life is the result of a failure of imagination comes up for discussion, and Robert suggests a storytelling exercise to help explain his craft but also his approach to and place in the world. A left turn near the end re-draws their dynamic as that of opposing political ideologies, and there it is Morse’s brute sincerity that keeps the scenes from tipping into cant. By that point we can see Robert culling and appropriating in real time, a process that culminates with a window onto the storyteller’s succubus heart. And a worn dramatic arc is renewed with the spark of life. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
In Friday morning’s round-up of news briefs, The Amazing Spider-Man drums up solid numbers at the box office, while Peter Jackson’s latest concludes shooting. Several of this weekend’s new specialty releases are profiled; AMC ticket takers are taking the chain to court. And Valley Girl is getting a re-do. Amazing Spider-Man Spins $75.5M After Three Days The pic made about $16.3M on Thursday and is expected to make about $140M in its first six days of release, which would make it 27th in the record books for the time period, Deadline reports . Previews of Specialty Releases Hitting Theaters This Weekend Here is the lowdown and some insider info on some of this weekend’s newest limited release titles including The Do-Deca-Pentathlon , China Heavyweight , Collaborator and Crazy Eyes , Deadline reports . Hobbit Pic Completes Principal Photography Peter Jackson has finished shooting his two Hobbit films, four months ahead of when the first is due to open in theaters. The director posted on Facebook from New Zealand, which was “shoot day 266,” Variety reports . AMC Theatres Ticket Takers Sue Over Being Forced to Stand It’s alleged the movie theater chain forced its box office cashiers and ticket takers to were forced to stand though their tasks could have allowed them to sit in violation of California regulations, THR reports . Valley Girl Remake Signs a Writer A remake of the 1983 movie that helped launch the career of Nicholas Cage is in the works with Marti Noxon set to re-write the teen romance about a “valley girl” who falls for a punk rocker from the other side of the tracks. Newcomer Clay Weiner is set to direct the MGM and Paramount production, The Tracking Board reports .
Swedish-born actor Stellan Skarsgard has run a wide gamut of film roles in his career. His blockbuster fare includes roles in Marvel’s The Avengers and last year’s Thor . He appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , Mamma Mia as well as artier titles like A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010) and fellow Scandinavian Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Dogville (2003) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). One of his next projects is the controversial filmmaker’s next two films, which have already titillated fans of the enigmatic Danish director. Skarsgard gave a bit of insight about the back to back projects, The Nymphomaniac and The Nymphomaniac Part 2 , which, perhaps unsurprisingly, promise to live up to their titles. Skarsgard will star opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg in what the actor recently joked is “the porno we’re doing…” The films are described as a “light and poetic story” of a woman’s erotic journey from birth to the age of 50 as told via the main character who is a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac. Initially, the “erotic journey” part of the story was allegedly being fulfilled by porn-star stand-ins, but Skarsgard left unclear who was doing what, though apparently there will be no shortage of carnal delights for von Trier fans to indulge in. He told Sabotage Times, “I pick up Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character on the street and take her back to my apartment, and over two movies we talk about her time as a nymphomaniac.” He added, “There’s a lot of fucking in it. A lot of fucking in it.” The 61 year-old actor, who will also appear in Thor 2 , which will be out next year said he feels “at home” in both big budget movies as well as micro-budget independents. “I’m at home everywhere. If I’ve been doing a small, shoestring budget art-house film that’s very dark and that nobody will see, but that’s very good, it’s nice to go and do something fluffier. I’m extremely privileged in that I manage to enjoy myself all the time with very different materials.” [Source: Sabotage Times via Contactmusic ]
For the first three hours and 20 minutes, I was totally with Savages . During the middle two hours and 25 minutes, I was reasonably intrigued to see how it would all turn out. But through the final six hours and 48 minutes, I kept sneaking glances at my watch, just wishing that Oliver Stone would hurry up and cap off this wiggly-waggly tale of two marijuana-entrepreneur buddies, their shared girlfriend, and a host of Mexican drug baddies led by Salma Hayek wearing a black bobbed wig that’s half Cleopatra, half Bettie Page. Savages isn’t really 12 hours and 33 minutes long – it’s actually only 8 hours and 22 minutes long – but there’s just no shaking the feeling that it would be so much better if Stone had made it trimmer and more taut and limited himself to the use of only 12 different types of film stock. It’s also not clear, exactly, why the movie exists in the first place: That creaky-wheel groan you hear throughout is the sound of Stone anxiously trying to have fun again, after several years of making desperately serious documentaries (the 2009 South of the Border ), useless sequels (the 2010 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ) and observant but ultimately toothless semi-biopics (the 2008 W. ). Savages is, in places, brutal in an old-school way, as if Stone were exercising muscles that have long been out of use. But if the movie is sometimes desperately alive, it’s also cluelessly shallow. Perhaps Stone wanted to make a violent entertainment that speaks to our current age, a time when ruthlessness and greed have reached irreversible proportions, a picture in which characters grow and change but perhaps do so too late. But Stone’s moralism, coupled with discreet but bloody beatings, shootouts and all manner of tawdry goings on, rings hollow. The picture is neither entertaining nor preachy – it is simply very loudly meh. Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson star, respectively, as Chon and Ben, best pals who grow pot for a living in California and also willingly share the same girlfriend, a modern-day rich-hippie-girl free spirit known as O, short for Ophelia ( Blake Lively ). Chon is a war vet who does business by the tooth-and-claw method. Ben is a gentle sort who likes the pot business because it’s “green,” and he spends whatever money he makes doing good deeds in other parts of the world. (To suggest this, Stone treats us to images of Ben, with his ropy hair and razor-averse facial whiskers, teaching the alphabet or something to little naked tropical children.) Though Ben and Chon have been friends since high school, they appear to have little in common temperamentally. It’s O who connects them. Chon is a “baddist,” O explains in voice-over, while Ben is a “Buddhist.” “For me, together they are one complete man,” she goes on to explain. “The one thing they have in common is me. I’m the home they’ve never had.” Trouble brews when Ben and Chon run afoul of some potential business associates, simply because the two refuse to bow to anyone’s bullying. By the time Benicio Del Toro shows up, looking puffy and dissolute and ill-tempered, you know some very bad things are gonna go down. John Travolta also shuffles in, intermittently, as a fast-talking, wheeler-dealer DEA guy with a shaved-stubble hairdo. And Hayek, as drug queenpin extraordinaire Elena, provides heavy doses of eye candy, lounging languidly in her extravagant south-of-the-border headquarters as she devises nasty punishments for anyone who might dare cross her. Savages , based on the novel by Don Winslow, holds the essence of a compact, brutal little thriller. But somewhere along the way – perhaps the problem begins with the screenplay, written by Stone, Winslow and Shane Salerno – the story becomes unwieldy and overstuffed, taking not-very-surprising turns it doesn’t need to take. (The dialogue also includes some classic Stone-style howlers, as when del Toro asks to see Ben’s hands and then pronounces them “soft – like a woman’s!”) The key actors, particularly Kitsch and Johnson, try to give their characters a degree of roundness that doesn’t appear to have been written into those characters in the first place. And for people involved, at any level, in the drug trade, they come off as shockingly naïve. There’s a point at which Johnson’s Ben suddenly realizes he and Chon have become mixed up with some very bad people, and you want to ask where on Earth he’s been for the past 20 years. In fact, even though Savages is a supremely macho tale of drug-dealing and extreme business practices, it’s actually the women who make it worth watching. Hayek makes the kind of villainess who’d be right at home in a late-’40s noir or a ’50s exploitation extravaganza – she purrs through her role like a take-no-prisoners kitten with very sharp teeth. And Lively continues her run as a young actress with an undeniable spark of something. She keys into O’s vulnerability and her rich-girl guilelessness: When O is mistreated (to put it mildly) by Hayek and her gang, she seems certain that her rich mommy can make it all better. We see how ridiculous that belief is, but it makes sense that O would cling to it, and Lively channels that wispy callowness as opposed to just playing a list of character traits. She’s touching, but in the lightest possible way, a sunbeam in the midst of Stone’s heavy-handed universe. O is the most civilized character in Savages , and Lively gives the most open, unstudied performance here. She’s an actress who’s sophisticated in ways she probably doesn’t even realize. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . 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Weston Gosa, the father of 16 & Pregnant star Whitney Purvis’ child, was arrested for DUI in Georgia on the Fourth of July after allegedly crashing his car. He may or may not be aware of this fact yet. Judging by what has to be one of the top celebrity mug shots yet, Gosa wasn’t just driving under the influence … he was plastered out of his MIND: According to the Floyd County Police Department, the 23-year-old Gosa smashed his car, and was placed under arrest for driving under the influence. Police say Gosa was under the influence of prescription drugs at the time of his arrest – Xanax and Lorcet. He apparently has no prescription for either. Gosa has been charged with felony possession of controlled substances, misdemeanor possession of drug-related objects (he also had a pipe), and DUI. As for Whitney Purvis, she dumped this slacker last year (likely a smart move) … but was arrested herself in March for stealing a pregnancy test from Walmart .
Melissa Satta is a 26 year old Italian-Amrican model, TV presenter and actress, at least that is what she wrote in her bio, because I’ve never heard of the bitch…..and the reality is, you should see the number of girls I talk to her are “models” just because some low level photographer gives them 50 bucks to take nude pics of them…or because they were hired to give out samples at a music festival…or because they are signed to some shitty agency that doesn’t get them work but that gives them a stamp of approval even if they are the fourth fucking string…. The world is filled with hot girls and the real hot ones tend to be the ones who don’t call themselves models, tv presenters and actresses….. The reality is that she left America for Italy to break into the scene, it is easier to do MTV Italy than doing MTV where she’d stand no chance, then she banged some footballers, or soccer players to Americans, got into the media, and now she matters…. That hustle can also be considered sleeping her way to relevance, or prostitution, only instead of 100 dollars an hour, she gets in the media…. And who really cares, because at least she’s taken the time to get some implants to make her irrelevance a little less irrelevant…. You see, cuz I like tits. TO SEE THE REST OF THE PICS FOLLOW THIS LINK
I think this time German nobody Micaela Schaefer may have gone too far. I’ve posted a lot of hot pictures of her tight body in all kinds of sexy weird outfits over the last year or so, but this time it’s just not working for me. Here she is on the subway somewhere in her strange blond hair costume. I don’t get it, if you want to show your body off than show your body off, but dressing up as some odd hairy drag queen isn’t the way to do it. Those hair bottoms make her look like she’s a Swedish pornstar from the seventies. Get it? Because back then pubic hair was left to grow wild. Savages.
Rebooting the Spider-Man franchise just five years after Sam Raimi completed his own $2.4 billion trilogy was a controversial move in itself, let alone the idea of revisiting Spidey’s origin story , one of the most familiar and popular beginnings in comic book lore, yet again. But whatever qualms you might have about The Amazing Spider-Man treading familiar ground — this time with Andrew Garfield as a skate-boarding high-schooler/vigilante nursing abandonment issues — director Marc Webb himself wrestled with the very same issues from the start. Webb rang Movieline to answer a barrage of questions about this week’s Spider-Man re-do, which re-frames the Marvel superhero’s journey as a teenage Peter Parker’s struggle with responsibility — not necessarily springing from great power so much as from choosing between doing good, and doing otherwise. Relationships are key here, not only between Peter and his Aunt May (Sally Field) and Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen), but between the orphaned hero and Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), a newfound mentor and scientist with murky ties to the parents who left young Peter behind years ago. But the heart of The Amazing Spider-Man , and that of Peter Parker himself, belongs to Gwen Stacy, Spidey’s first love, brought to life with crackling energy by Emma Stone . Fans of the comics know where Peter and Gwen’s story eventually leads — and while Webb remains amusedly mum on the future of his would-be Spider-Man trilogy, he acknowledges that some parts of Marvel canon cannot be tinkered with. “It’s a very controversial part of the comics,” he teased of Gwen’s fate, “but let me tell you, I’m a fan of the comics.” Read on as Webb addresses criticisms of his reboot, discusses the importance of the Gwen Stacy-Peter Parker relationship, explains why some questions raised in The Amazing Spider-Man were left deliberately unanswered, and talks about that eyebrow-raising post-credits scene. [ Beware: Some spoilers follow. ] The marketing campaign for The Amazing Spider-Man has been attempting to court female audiences, and the romantic element is a significant part of the film. How important did you feel it was to explore and emphasize that side of the Spider-Man story? Spider-Man is of course this huge action film — there’s a boy behind the suit. But one thing that’s different in Spider-Man comics from many other comics is how important the relationships are, in particular female relationships. You can talk a lot about villains, but Spider-Man’s relationships with women are as iconic, if not more iconic, than the villains. You have Mary Jane, and you have Gwen Stacy, and Gwen is very different than what we’ve seen before. One of the reasons why I wanted to use Gwen — first and foremost, she’s his first love in the comics. Let’s just set the record straight, it’s not Mary Jane. But I like the idea of following somebody who is as smart, if not smarter, than Peter Parker. And Emma Stone is the perfect woman to play somebody who is much more proactive, much more intelligent and feisty. I just like that dynamic in relationships in movies where they’re kind of lovers as rivals, you know? There’s this back and forth that I love, in the laboratory, and there’s just this great bond that you feel between them. She’s not just a prize, she’s not just a damsel in distress. She’s a confidante, and that was a really important thing. And their relationship is so different because of this — it’s like they’re the only two people in the world. I thought that, you’re 17 years old and falling in love for the first time, some part of the thrill of that is openness, and you get to express a part of yourself and confide in somebody the things about you that no one else knows. It’s such a thrilling part about being in a relationship at a young age, and all your feelings are apocalyptic, all your emotions are so huge, that I felt that was an interesting and new foundation to lay for the character. It also raises the stakes of that relationship. So it becomes more meaningful when he has to let it go. For those people who are familiar with Gwen’s fate in the comics, the depth and pull of their emotions makes it even more bittersweet. You even include a shot in the film in which Peter throws her out of a window that seems like foreshadowing of a sort… [Laughs] Well, we’ll have to see. It’s a very controversial part of the comics, but let me tell you, I’m a fan of the comics. But Gwen’s story is kind of one of those things, among other developments and plot specifics, that you kind of have to stay faithful to canon on. Right? Honor, yes. I mean, Marvel has certain hard and fast rules, like about the spider bite — you have to have Peter get bitten by a radioactive spider, and Uncle Ben’s death has to transform Peter Parker into Spider-Man, you know what I mean? He has to learn a lesson by that. But I’m trying to find new inflections and new context so that the story feels new. Because I do think the character is different; you want to honor the iconic elements of Spider-Man but you also want to reinvent the world around him so that it feels interesting and new, and that’s a tricky line to walk. It seems even trickier for you in this instance more than other folks rebooting a familiar franchise, just because it hasn’t been very long since the last Spider-Man movies and you’re also starting with an origin story. It’s tricky. We have seen the origin of Spider-Man, but we haven’t seen the origin of Peter Parker and that was my entrée into it. It does feel like more of a Peter Parker story than a Spider-Man story, which a lot of fans of the comics might get hung up on. How do you respond to those criticisms? For me, I thought about it a lot when I was building this up and I really felt like the Peter Parker that I was creating was a different reflection of the character. And in order for the audience to understand that, I thought I needed to build that from the ground up. To me, the most definitive moment in his life — way more important than the spider bite — is the moment he was left behind by his parents. It had a huge emotional impact on his character. That’s where the narrative begins, but it’s also where the character is defined in a very significant way. I mean, anybody who’s left behind by their parents at that age is going to be distrustful of authority because authority has let him down before – so that’s part of the dramatic texture of his relationship with Captain Stacey, and the conflict he has with Uncle Ben and Aunt May. It’s also that he has this attitude, this sort of trickster, sarcastic quality, which is in some ways a defense mechanism that comes from that moment in his life. He’s an outside, but he’s an outsider by choice; he’s a smart kid but he just wants to keep everybody at a distance. That’s why I think the relationship with Gwen works so well; he can trust her. We look at this as a reboot, so can we assume the story here will continue into at least a trilogy, but there are a number of plot points and questions raised in the film that don’t necessarily get answered within the span of this film. How intentional was it to plant those seeds here? I wanted a universe that could sustain a larger story, and the broader arcs I worked out with Jamie Vanderbilt early on. Obviously you want the movie to work on its own, but because so many of these movies typically have sequels, I wanted us to do a little bit of groundwork that could pay off in later movies. The mystery that surrounds Peter Parker’s parents is the long shadow that’s cast over all of the story, and there’s a relationship between Peter’s parents and Norman Osborne, and Oscorp, all that stuff… so much of the story is in and around Oscorp; Oscorp is the place from which all crazy shit emerges in this universe, and I like that idea, that simple notion that this obelisk, this Tower of Babel, is like a splinter in the side of the universe. All of the stories come out of there. NEXT: Webb on Gwen’s future, his stars’ chemistry, Curt Connors and that post-credits scene
Nothing says 4th of July like a hot chick in a white t-shirt and some short shorts. Here’s Emma Roberts running some errands and giving us a pretty good look at that cute little booty. To really make these authentic 4th of July pictures, she’d have to replace that ice coffee with some sort of boozy beverage and poor a couple of pitchers of water over that white t-shirt. Maybe even throw in a few drunk chicks. Now that would really spice these shots up.
If my earlier pictures of supermodel Candice Swanepoel hanging out on the beach in Miami in her sexy little bikini weren’t good enough for you, I’ve got a few more, but this time with even more booty action. Obviously she’s a supermodel so walking around in a bikini that’s this small is nothing to her, but I’m not used to seeing this kind of thing in North America. You’ve got to love those Europeans. Enjoy.
