The extended version of Mercedes’ 2013 Super Bowl Commercial has been released, and does not lack for star power … starting with Willem Dafoe. As the Dark Lord himself, the actor offers one potential buyer the chance to have a CLA and all that goes with it. Notably walking the red carpet with Kate Upton. Challenging Usher to a dance-off, posing for magazine covers and generally making the girls swoon? Done, done, done. So will he sell his soul for a CLA? Mercedes Super Bowl Ad 2013 (Ft. Kate Upton, Willem Dafoe, Usher) Not bad as Super Bowl commercials go, especially lately. It doesn’t compare to the other Kate Upton Super Bowl ad for Mercedes, but really, what does.
Lindsay Lohan took the last flight from JFK to LAX Tuesday night after being warned that she’d be in DEEP if she really did call in sick for court . Mom Dina came along as Lindsay Lohan, broke and deeply in debt, flew first class on American Airlines and landed at around 12:30 this morning. LiLo had no intention of showing Wednesday and got a doctor’s note filed with the court, saying she couldn’t fly due to a respiratory infection. So much for that. Pictures of Lindsay shopping and smoking in SoHo the very day she got the doctor’s note were published on celebrity news site TMZ. Busted, baby! After TMZ – a lawyer-run site, mind you – claimed that the judge would probably issue a warrant for her arrest if she didn’t show, Lohan panicked. Lindsay sources claiming she’s pleading with Shawn Holley, the attorney she fired this month, to come back, saying she didn’t like replacement Mark Heller. What. A. Mess. Holley made it clear days ago she’s off the case, so it’s now up to Heller, who clearly started off on the wrong foot by submitting the doctor’s note. Heller also sent along a New York Post article saying a lot of people in NYC had the flu. Not that Lindsay is one of them, of course. Pretty shady. The lawyer Heller got to sponsor him to appear in a California court has also never met him, so it’s possible the judge could deny him the right to represent Lindsay. So Lindsay could be lawyer-less when she face the music for lying to police after her summer car crash today (11:30 EST). It could get ugly really fast. Lohan: Will she do time in 2013? Yes. Her luck is running out and she’s going crazy! No! She always finds a way to get out of it! View Poll »
Yes, the new Miley Cyrus Cosmopolitan is quite revealing, considering this singer poses for the cover without a bra on. But many fans are focusing not so much on Miley’s wardrobe, but on one sentence she utters during a Q&A with the magazine. Gushing over the hotness of Liam Hemsworth , Cyrus says she’s just so proud to look at the actor and think: That’s my hubby! So… wait! Is the couple already married?!? No, “definitely NOT,” Miley’s rep tells People in response to this rumor. Cyrus herself even makes that clear to those who read the entire interview, discussing the eventual wedding in detail and explaining why she wants to keep it intimate. “I can’t even get coffee without a million paparazzi following me, so I don’t know why anyone thinks I’m going to have this huge, extravagant wedding. That is so not who I am.”
With 30 Rock coming to an end Thursday, one chapter of Alec Baldwin’s life is ending. But, according to In Touch Weekly , a new and exciting personal one may just be getting started: the actor is expecting his first child with Hilaria Thomas! ” Hilaria has told only really close friends and family she is pregnant, only a close circle she trusts,” one of close good friends supposedly tells the tabloid. Baldwin has one child already with ex-wife Kim Basinger, a daughter named Ireland who he referred to as a pig in an infamous 2007 voicemail. But that was a long time ago and the actor told Piers Morgan last year that he’d be very open to kids with Thomas. “That would great, that would be heaven, that would be fantastic,” he gushed in the 2012 interview. If this report is true, we therefore send our best wishes to the expecting couple. HOORAY!
Oscar-nominated feature No by director Pablo Larraín starring Gael García Bernal are among the ten Galas that will screen at the 30th Miami International Film Festival. The ten-day fest will host 117 features and 12 shorts from 41 countries with an emphasis on films from Latin America. [ Related: River Phoenix’s Last Film To Debut At Miami International Film Festival ] No , which screened at the recent Sundance Film Festival , is based on the true story about an ad executive who comes up with an ad campaign to defeat Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. The film will screen in Miami’s CineDwntwn Galas along with other Sundance offerings, Twenty Feet From Stardom (Opening Night Film) by U.S/ director Morgan Neville, Sebastian Junger’s Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington by Sebastian Junger, screening in the Documentary Competition along with Marc Silver’s Who Is Dayani Cristal? , Valentine Road , Gideon’s Army and Blackfish / Radius-TWC’s Twenty Feet from Stardom turns the spotlight to some of the world’s biggest singers’ backbone, their backup singers. Maiken Baird and Michelle Major’s Venus and Serena will screen Awards Night March 9th. The doc will spotlight the American tennis superstars siblings. As previously announced, the festival will honor two remarkable directors with Career Achievement Tributes: renowned Swedish writer-director Lasse Hallström ( My Life as a Dog , What’s Eating Gilbert Grape ) and Spanish producer, writer, and Oscar-winning director Fernando Trueba ( Belle Epoque , Chico & Rita ). MIFF will screen the directors’ latest works including The Hypnotist by Hallström and The Artist and the Model by Trueba. The 30th Miami International Film Festival runs March 1 – 10. Galas, documentary and Ibero-American competition categories follow. For a list of further MIFF films, visit their website . CineDwntwn Galas Amor Cronico (USA/Cuba, directed by Jorge Perrugorría) The Artist and the Model (Spain, directed by Fernando Trueba) The Boy Who Smells Like Fish (Canada/ Mexico, directed by Analeine Cal y Mayor) Dark Blood (Netherlands, directed by George Sluizer) Eenie Meenie Miney Moe (USA, directed by Jokes Yanes) The Hunt (Jagten) (Denmark, directed by Thomas Vinterberg) The Hypnotist (Sweden, directed by Lasse Hallström) NO (Chile/USA, directed by Pablo Larraín) *2013 Oscar Nominated for Best Foreign Film Twenty Feet From Stardom (USA, directed by Morgan Neville) Venus and Serena (USA, directed by Maiken Baird and Michelle Major) Documentary Competition: Viva Cuba Libre: Rap Is War (USA, directed by Jesse Acevedo) Blackfish (USA, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite) The Crash Reel (USA, directed by Lucy Walker) Cubamerican (USA, directed by Jose Enrique Pardo Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story (USA, directed by Brad Bernstein) Gideon’s Army (USA, directed by Dawn Porter) Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation (Sagrada: El misteri de la creació) (Switzerland, directed by Stefan Haupt) Valentine Road (USA, directed by Marta Cummingham) Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (USA, directed by Sebastian Junger) Who Is Dayani Cristal? (United Kingdom/Mexico, directed by Marc Silver) Ibero-American Competition (fist-time feature filmmakers from Spain, Portugal and Latin America): The Boy Who Smells Like Fish (Mexico/Canada, directed by Analeine Cal y Mayor) Edificio Royal (Colombia/Venezuela/Germany, directed by Iván Wild) Good Luck, Sweetheart (Boa Sorte, Meu Amor) (Brazil, directed by Daniel Aragão) Miguel, San Miguel (Chile, directed by Matías Cruz) Molasses (Melaza) (Cuba/France/Panama, directed by Carlos Días Lechuga) No Autumn, No Spring (Sin otoño, sin primavera) (Ecuador/Colombia/France, directed by Iván Mora) Solo (Uruguay/Argentina/Netherlands/France, directed by Guillermo Rocamora) The Swimming Pool (La piscina) (Cuba/Venezuela directed by Carlos Machado Quintela) Villegas (Argentina/Netherlands/France, directed by Gonzalo Tobal)
Two weeks after carrying home the big prizes from the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe Awards , Argo firmly established its Oscar front-runner status with another one-two punch in the form of the PGA’s Motion Picture Producer of the Year honor and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. And in a season of confusion and contradiction, that front-runner status gives Argo traction that none of its Best-Picture rivals have. The PGA win was not a surprise, especially after Argo ’s strong showing with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Content-wise, it’s the type of film that charms producers, being a taut political thriller 65% of the time and a stack of insider Hollywood jokes the other 35%. Apart from that, you have The Affleck, and the time has come to love and praise The Affleck . Rejuvenated and relevant again, Ben Affleck is this year’s Oscar story. When the nominations came out, who was the “snubbed” director? It wasn’t Kathryn Bigelow , Paul Thomas Anderson , or Wes Anderson , the three directors whose films appeared on the most end-of-year lists. It was The Affleck, and within 72 hours, The Affleck was redeemed with populist awards broadcast live on the CW and NBC, making Argo the People’s Film and Affleck the Oscar story of the year. For Best Picture prognostication, the PGA Award is a major get. Since it was started in 1989, the Producers Guild has awarded the eventual Best Picture Oscar winner nearly 70 percent of the time, and has been perfect over the past 5 years. Additionally, the PGA uses a preferential ballot just as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has done since 2009. What this means is that Argo and Affleck do not need to top all ballots, they just need to be agreed upon by most ballots. I don’t have scientific findings to present here, but think about the conversations you’ve had about the Best Picture nominees: Lincoln , Les Misérables, Django Unchained , and Silver Linings Playbook are much more polarizing than the crowd-pleasing Argo . For what it’s worth, Argo also has the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of all the nominees, 96, followed by Zero Dark Thirty , 93, and Amour , 92. The movie’s SAG win was more of a surprise. Argo is not an Actor’s Movie. This is not to say the award was not earned, simply that most of the attention was divided between the flashy Les Mis and the kitchen sink acting of Silver Linings Playbook . But there’s that word: “divided.” The Screen Actors Guild is a massive organization of nearly 160,000 members (though only current on dues are eligible to vote), so while theater types might have leaned toward Les Mis and classically-trained types might have opted for Silver Linings or Lincoln , the one film the Guild ended up agreeing on was Argo and its Affleck-led cast. It was, in a word, the most popular. (Keeping with the populist theme, note how the SAG Awards are the only guild awards that appear on billboards). SAG has a terrible track record with Best Picture. The two top awards aligned less than half of the time since SAG started their awards in 1995. But this is a season when stats mean less than they would normally. The film with the most Oscar nominations is no longer the film to beat. Harvey Weinstein , who put Affleck on the Oscar map with the 1997 movie Goodwill Hunting, is fighting an uphill battle. There’s a legitimate front-runner in town, and it does not have the director’s nomination assumed necessary. (And I’m not talking about Django Unchained .) This season, the Best Picture race is all about tone and attitude, and Argo and its affable director are all about tone and attitude. Affleck is an A-lister once again, charming every room he enters — his jokes won the room at the PGA breakfast Saturday morning — and his film’s recent run of awards-season honors have made its Best Picture prospects impossible to ignore. After months of having several films on the radar, there is finally one at the center of it. John Hendel is a playwright from Los Angeles. Follow John Hendel on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Every once in a while someone talented in one business decides to cross over into another…and ruin whatever credibility she built up in one….by failing at the other…instead of sticking with what she’s good at….this is like Lohan the actor releasing music….Jordan the basketball player taking up baseball…only the bikini model…turned non-bikini model version….and it’s safe to say “send this body back to where she came from”….not that trashy low level photoshoots with fake autographs on them aren’t a step up from getting paid millions to barely cover her vagina…oh right…yeah they totally aren’t a step up from what we are used to….bummer.
Dare I say that, based on this trailer, Melissa McCarthy looks like she could actually be funnier in The Heat than she was in Bridesmaids ? Okay, so I’m one of the minority who didn’t think that the latter film was as hilarious as everyone found it, so I was pleasantly surprised when this international trailer for Paul Feig and McCarthy’s latest collaboration made me laugh out loud a few times. The plus-sized actress plays a “bad-ass” maverick Boston cop who teams up with “tight-assed” FBI agent Sandra Bullock . If you guessed that this is one of those movies where McCarthy’s character shows Bullock’s character how to walk on the wild side, you’d be right, but I’m willing to overlook the formulaic conceit based on the scene in which McCarthy proceeds to look for her captain’s “little girl balls” and the one in which she discovers Bullock is wearing Spanx. (As if!) “They hold everything together,” Bullock tells McCarthy. “Why? What’s going to come fuckin’ popping out?” sputters McCarthy. My thoughts exactly. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Proving that a movie shot over a day and a half can premiere at Sundance if it has James Franco’s name attached, Interior. Leather Bar . is an infuriating stunt that misrepresents itself as Franco and co-director Travis Mathews’ reimagining of the 40 minutes William Friedkin claims he was forced to cut from Cruising to get an R rating. Yet it would seem “James Franco’s 40 Minutes” don’t exist either, leaving only this hastily tossed-off companion piece, a partly authentic, partly scripted behind-the-scenes featurette that never quite conveys the star’s “high/curious” interest in all things taboo. After Sundance and Berlin, relative obscurity awaits. On paper, the project echoes Franco’s earlier Memories of Idaho , two experimental films made from scraps that Gus Van Sant discarded during the making of My Own Private Idaho . A notorious embellisher, Friedkin has often said that he brought Cruising to the ratings board 50 times before they relented and gave him an R, despite still-graphic footage and talk of bondage and numerous other fetish acts, nearly all of it unsimulated. In his DVD director’s commentary for Cruising , Friedkin explains how he recruited actual members of Gotham’s leather-bar scene: “Of course, I filmed all these activities in their entirety, but all the other film that I shot has somehow disappeared.” With or without the lost X-rated material, Cruising was an important and controversial film in its time, serving as a time capsule of a pre-AIDS sexual subculture, while conflating its play-acted aggression with a series of ripped-from-the-headlines New York murders. As such, it’s a rich text to reopen, though Mathews (an openly queer director who shook up the LGBT fest circuit with his art-porn feature I Want Your Love ) makes no effort to investigate what went missing or query Friedkin, but instead focuses on Franco as the pic’s more marketable meta-subject. Recognizing how the “is he or isn’t he” debate has dogged nearly all of Franco’s recent art projects (beginning with his blatantly homoerotic NYU student short, The Feast of Stephen ), Mathews attempts to shift the attention onto Franco and his creative process. None of the young actors who agreed to participate in the film, least of all Val Lauren (a longtime Playhouse West cohort and star of Franco’s directorial debut, Sal ), would have enlisted if not for Franco’s involvement. Although Franco appears in the film, his role is mostly that of the man behind the curtain, stirring things up with half-baked opinions, such as his complaint that the MPAA is to blame for his hetero-normative upbringing: “Why don’t they gives us violence in a little more palatable way, and amp up the sex?” Franco really should have agreed to take the pic’s Al Pacino part himself — a Kinsey Zero assigned to go undercover and blend with an extreme queer subculture — but instead delegates it to Lauren, asking the actor to “play” a version of himself. To the extent that this sloppy assembly has a shape, the film constructs an arc in which Lauren constantly questions his participation in the project (different from the controversial tension underlying Cruising , where exposure to leather bars may be turning Pacino’s cop aggressive and/or gay). Lauren is seen debating his choice with the other actors, most of them straight, and improvising calls to a homophobic friend (performed by one of Franco’s producers) and his supportive wife. The Cruising re-creations make up only a small portion of the pic’s running time, shying away from Crisco-covered forearms and the other extreme acts that caused Friedkin so much grief, while trying to portray barroom fellatio and a random, unrelated rough-love scene between three bears as “just right.” This last act pushes the underlying insult to new extremes, cutting between “dirty” closeups and the expressions on Lauren and Franco’s faces as they watch from the sidelines, pretending that witnessing this act of outre lovemaking has somehow broadened their minds. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
