You’ve been hearing about it for years , and at last, the fabled Hugh Hefner biopic that will never get made has moved from Universal to Warner Bros. The one and only Jerry Weintraub will produce, at least until he won’t. “While Universal had filmmakers like Brett Ratner attached at one time or another and actors like Robert Downey Jr. and Hugh Jackman mentioned as possibles to play Hef, the project languished,” Mike Fleming writes at ML’s sister site Deadline. “Wentraub would not disclose what part of Hefner’s life he will cover, and he denied that Harry Potter scribe Steve Kloves is being talked to as a potential screenwriter.” Finally! We’re getting somewhere. [ Deadline ]
Amber Tamblyn ( Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants , The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret ) always seemed like a girl with moxie, and I’d guess you don’t fall in with a guy like David Cross without one wicked sense of humor, but even so the depths of awesome that she went to in pranking Tyrese Gibson deserve applause. And boy, what a prank: After receiving an e-mail from the Transformers / Fast 5 star proposing a future collaboration after he mistook her for model Amber Rose on a mutual friend’s email message, Tamblyn had some fun with the musician-actor with a series of original “Awareness Raps.” An excerpt of the exchange, as detailed at the blog Street Boners and TV Carnage : On Feb 26, 2012, at 10:16 AM, Amber Rose T wrote: lol u are so sweet boo I’ve been trying to get this album goin for so long u know how it is. Attached is the single demo I’ve been workin on… not finished yet but soon! Thanks to u boo lol. I will send you more demos soon. You will have demos comin out ur demos!! lol A On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Tyrese Gibson wrote: We can make it real …. I’m sitting on a lot of magic … Let me know when ur in LA .. We can play until we customize AR Respectfully, Tyrese Gibson Head to Street Boners and TV Carnage for the full — and increasingly hilarious thread (sorry, Tyrese!) — with yet more of Tamblyn’s original R&B jamz. Eventually Tyrese caught on to the sham and cut off the exchange; Tamblyn gave the following update on her official blog in a post entitled The Tyrese Sessions : I emailed Tyrese one last time yesterday (as myself of course) after he wrote me saying “you took this shit public?! Not cool… not even remotely…” I reiterated that yes I took advantage of a man that took adntage of another man’s cc list… but it’s all good- we should do a song together and laugh at the whole thing. He said my music was “corny as fuck” and no. Now I am 86% sorry, Tyrese. Raise your Maker’s Mark in the air for Amber (Rose) Tamblyn, everyone. Get we get a slow clap going by everyone on the Internet? [ Street Boners and TV Carnage via @QuestLove , @JohnAugust ] Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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 .
Jennifer Westfeldt’s sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt’s directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein ), and it’s polished to the point of shallow glossiness — it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier. But the picture at least attempts to wrestle with the notion that there’s no single right way to raise a family or navigate a partnership. And it acknowledges, if only fleetingly, the way very well-meaning people who are parents can often be incredibly smug toward those who aren’t, insinuating that their own lives are somehow more meaningful because they have kids who run them ragged. At one point Westfeldt and Adam Scott, who play best friends Julie and Jason, ponder how much their friends changed after they had kids. “I don’t know these people anymore,” Jason says, bewildered after he’s just attended a dinner party where frazzled, distracted parents did nothing but snap at one another and at their children, completely unable to enjoy themselves or one another. “These people are mean and angry.” The tide shifts when Jason and Julie decide to have a child together without becoming romantically involved. They’ve been close friends for years, and they live in the same apartment building — why not? The experiment goes surprisingly well, and the two end up with a pretty good kid who really does seem to be enriching their lives. In one of the movie’s most gratifying sequences, their traditionally coupled friends, played by a Bridesmaids reunion cast including Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm (Westfeldt’s partner in real life), speculate about how out-of-control the new parents’ lives must be, only to find that Jason and Julie’s unorthodox arrangement is extremely efficient and agreeable. But Friends with Kids winds up turning on itself, becoming a more conventional comedy than it sets out to be. In the end, Jason and Julie do fit themselves into a mold, although at least the transition doesn’t come easy. Westfeldt’s Julie is too adorable by half: She’s a cutie-pie neurotic, and the appeal wears thin quickly. (You can hardly blame Jason for falling, temporarily, for a shallow vixen played by Megan Fox.) But as writer and director, Westfeldt has at least done right by Adam Scott, a fine comic actor who, until now, has been relegated to second-banana roles. A highly unscientific poll conducted here and there among my women friends, straight and gay, has revealed that all women love Adam Scott. I have not been able to determine the source of his charm, but it appears that in addition to being good-looking (but not too good-looking), he tends to come off as the kind of guy who has flaws you could live with: He’s a little smart-alecky but also smart and funny; he might leave his underwear on the floor, but he remembers to hang up his towel; and so forth. As I said, it’s all unscientific. Friends with Kids proves that Scott can carry a movie: His comic timing is crisp and on-point, but he’s also capable of playing it straight when he needs to. He’s marvelous in one revelatory scene where he enumerates Julie’s best qualities, and as written, it’s the sort of dialogue that could head right into pukefest territory, fast. Scott gives Friends with Kids some necessary edge, and though the picture overall could still be much sharper, from scene to scene, he’s key to its integrity. No wonder his Jason is superdad material. [Editor’s note: This review appeared earlier, in a slightly different form, in Stephanie Zacharek’s Toronto Film Festival coverage. ] Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
