Tag Archives: Actors

First Look inside The Hammer Vault, the Coffee-Table Tribute to a Horror Institution

I’ve spent the last few days transfixed by The Hammer Vault , Marcus Hearn’s new tour through the history and archives of the infamous genre maestros at Hammer Films. It’s got everything — from the stories behind the celebrated creature features of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing to remembrances of the risible pseudo-PSA Never Take Sweets From a Stranger to a rummage through such unmade Hammer fare like When the Earth Cracked Open and the awesome Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls (seriously). And while its official January release date won’t necessarily help you for the holidays, it’s worth earmarking a line in the early 2012 budget for any horror, fantasy and B-movie devotees in your life. CORRECTION : The publisher writes to say that it will be out for the holidays! Hallelujah!

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First Look inside The Hammer Vault, the Coffee-Table Tribute to a Horror Institution

Gary Oldman on The Dark Knight Rises and Tinker, Tailor’s Master Spy Smiley: He’s ‘Like Jazz’

At the center of Tomas Alfredson’s marvelously taut espionage thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (based on the John Le Carré novel previously adapted into a celebrated 1979 British miniseries) is an unusually understated turn by Gary Oldman as George Smiley, a recently retired career spy of few words quietly trying to uncover a mole within British intelligence. Oldman acknowledges a departure of sorts from the wild, often manic characters he built much of his career on — Sid Vicious, Count Dracula, Beethoven, DEA agent Stansfield of Leon, to name a few. Some of Oldman’s best-known roles are, as he described to Movieline this week in Los Angeles, more rock ‘n’ roll. “Smiley,” he explained, “is jazz .”

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Gary Oldman on The Dark Knight Rises and Tinker, Tailor’s Master Spy Smiley: He’s ‘Like Jazz’

The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to New Year’s Eve

We may remember this as the week David Fincher and Scott Rudin went to war on movie critics, but think of it this way: If critics couldn’t get an early look at Garry Marshall’s New Year’s Eve , then how would any of us ever know what a soul-rending atrocity it is? I mean, even Pete Hammond hated this movie ! He was in some fine company, too:

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The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to New Year’s Eve

Video: Watch the Old Milwaukee Commercials Will Ferrell Filmed For Free

If you’re a big Hollywood star, why go overseas to shoot a cheesy foreign commercial for millions of dollars when you could just go to Davenport, Iowa, and shoot an equally cheesy domestic commercial for free? That’s what Will Ferrell figured recently when he approached the Pabst Brewing Co. out of the blue and offered his services for an Old Milwaukee ad campaign pro bono.

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Video: Watch the Old Milwaukee Commercials Will Ferrell Filmed For Free

REVIEW: Jonah Hill, The Sitter Offer (Mostly) Inoffensive, Forgettable Fun

Having begun his career as American independent film’s great hope with delicate, languid features like George Washington and All the Real Girls , David Gordon Green has devoted the last few years to turning out goofball stoner comedies that, aside from their hip and very current casts, could seem like forgotten oddball ’80s artifacts discovered in a box of dusty VHS tapes at a garage sale. While it’s not a career trajectory anyone who went googly-eyed over his early output would have guessed for him, there’s an unmistakable undercurrent of glee to these recent films that suggests Green — who still works with many of the crew members with which he started, including composer David Wingo and DP Tim Orr — is having a great time making exactly the type of movies he wants to.

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REVIEW: Jonah Hill, The Sitter Offer (Mostly) Inoffensive, Forgettable Fun

REVIEW: The Material Girl Channels Wallis Simpson, and Her Stuff, in W.E.

Even though it’s something of a slick mess, Madonna’s W.E. is just the kind of movie you’d expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl. A weirdly sympathetic portrait of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne, W.E. is the story of a life told through stuff: Evening gloves, cocktail shakers, baubles from Cartier, little hats trimmed with netting. It’s as if Madonna went back in time and forgot to talk to actual people, to find out how they lived and what they thought — but she sure did a lot of shopping.

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REVIEW: The Material Girl Channels Wallis Simpson, and Her Stuff, in W.E.

The Mirren-Hopkins-Hitchcock Dream, and 5 Other Stories You’ll Be Talking About Today

Happy Thursday! Also in today’s edition of The Broadsheet: Tom Cruise tries (sort of) to talk up Top Gun 2 … Ryan Seacrest may land on Today … There is a movie in the Oscar hunt called The Woman in a Septic Tank … and more.

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The Mirren-Hopkins-Hitchcock Dream, and 5 Other Stories You’ll Be Talking About Today

REVIEW: Gary Oldman Sneaks Off with One of the Year’s Great Performances in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Some movies come directly to you, begging for your attention if not demanding it outright. And other movies sit still and quiet even as they hold out a hand, beckoning you closer until you’ve been drawn in almost in spite of yourself. Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy , an adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1974 novel, is the latter type.

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REVIEW: Gary Oldman Sneaks Off with One of the Year’s Great Performances in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

REVIEW: I Melt With You Mires Male Midlife Crisis in Overstyled Silliness

Perhaps it’s fitting that talking about I Melt With You means talking about all the things it tries — and fails — to be. The story of a boom-and-bust weekend shared by four reuniting college cronies, I Melt With You is driven by music from its title on, setting the perennial crisis in middle-aged masculinity to glittery eighties beats. An industrial grade melodrama with more cuts than a pound of Bolivian marching powder, the movie aspires to all sorts of aesthetic heights — from Reagan-era reckoning to Iron John implosion to feature-length video for a Jay McInerney cover band. That might make it sound like more fun than it is: Although a stark performative moment here and a cold, sexy shot there slip through, all of the film’s lesser ambitions are undone by its most risible one — to be serious, and thus be taken seriously.

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REVIEW: I Melt With You Mires Male Midlife Crisis in Overstyled Silliness

Meryl Streep Exercises Her Authority in Inspiring New Trailer For The Iron Lady

This summer, Meryl Streep formally kicked off Oscar season with the first trailer for The Iron Lady , the British biopic which stars the world’s greatest actress as Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s glass ceiling-shattering Prime Minister. Now that award speculation season is in full swing, the Weinstein Company has released a second trailer for The Iron Lady that all but guarantees it will earn Streep her long-awaited third Oscar.

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Meryl Streep Exercises Her Authority in Inspiring New Trailer For The Iron Lady