Nearly five months after giving birth to her first child, Natalie Portman returns to Hollywood tomorrow night to take part in Jason Reitman’s live reading of The Apartment at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Oscar winner will play Fran Kubelik, “the fetching elevator operator” that Shirley MacLaine played (and earned an Academy Award nomination for) in the 1960 Billy Wilder film. J.K. Simmons, Ken Jeong, Nick Kroll, Mindy Kaling and Jake Johnson will round out tomorrow night’s cast. [ @JasonReitman , Vulture ]
Now that Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin has made its world premiere and his Christmas drama War Horse is already garnering Oscar buzz , the director is free to plan his next epic directorial project. According to Deadline, the filmmaker is considering getting biblical with Warner Bros. for Gods and Kings , a gargantuan film that will chronicle Moses’s entire life. Are you interested in Spielberg’s take on the Old Testament?
We’ve seen enough satirical Muppets promo material to last us through the next hundred Muppet sequels, but I have to hand it to the tireless Disney merchants for their newest gag: a Twilight Saga spoof. The Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog posters are expected, but it’s the third, Lautner-ian one-sheet that left me speechless. The pun is also first-rate.
Did you think that the Snow White and the Huntsman trailer starring Kristen Stewart was a little too dark? Did you find yourself wishing for Bollywood-like dance numbers, a wide-eyed Disney princess, Armie Hammer’s impersonation of a dog and Julia Roberts attempting to (and failing to) play evil? If you answered yes, then does Hollywood have the Snow White movie for you! It’s Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror and now, the very first trailer is available for you to view.
Rupert Grint, Warwick Davis and other ‘Potter’ stars offer up some creative ideas for the Orlando, Florida, park. By Josh Wigler Rupert Grint Photo: MTV News ORLANDO, Florida — The books are long finished, the movies are now over, but all it takes is one step inside the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida, to know that “Potter” is forever. Still, despite the ever-flowing butterbeer and copious amounts of “Potter”-based roller-coaster rides, there’s always room for improvement, even at the Wizarding World. After all, the “Potter” universe is just too grand to fit every single element into one theme park. With that in mind, when MTV News traveled down to Orlando to cover the red-carpet celebration of the “Deathly Hallows Part 2” DVD release, we asked the cast and crew to weigh in on which features of J.K. Rowling’s imaginative world they’d like to see included in future park updates. Jessie Cave, who plays lovelorn Lavender Brown in “Half-Blood Prince,” suggested a new means of transportation for the park: “I think instead of being allowed to walk here, everyone should have to arrive by Hogwarts Express. You wouldn’t actually have to walk. It’d be just the most comfortable trip ever!” James and Oliver Phelps, better known as the mischievous Weasley twins, focused on a different mode of flying — via broomstick. “If it were actually possible, maybe [it’d be cool] for an actual Quidditch match to go on,” Oliver said. “Something like that would be quite cool to watch if that were actually possible to do.” Wishful thinking, perhaps — the technology probably isn’t quite there to catch a real-life golden snitch just yet. But the rest of the “Potter” cast tried to think in more practical terms, offering their ideas on attractions that could be added to the park in the coming years. Several of the actors, including Warwick Davis and Rupert Grint, suggested the Gringotts breakout as an excellent possibility for a roller-coaster ride. “Wouldn’t that be great? You could join Griphook on the cart,” Davis, who plays the aforementioned goblin, said of his Wizarding World wish-list. “And it’s already done!” “The Gringotts vault would be a really cool ride, I think,” agreed Grint, who played courageous hero Ron Weasley over the course of eight “Potter” films. “Also, the flying car!” Some castmembers didn’t need to look much further than their own reflections to find suggestions for Wizarding World improvements. “I’ve been thinking of a ride, a Luna ride,” offered Evanna Lynch, speaking of her own character, the loopy Luna Lovegood. “You know all of the creatures she dreams up, all of the creatures that she mentions throughout the books, I like to think that there would be a roller coaster, and each cart would be a new creature. It’d be in the dark and there’d be all these projections of creatures flying around.” “I don’t know what it’s like to be stoned,” she added, “but I imagine it feels something like that!” And Jason Isaacs, who plays Voldemort loyalist Lucius, believed it was high time for the Malfoy clan to get some Wizarding World love. “There should be a Malfoy ride,” he said. “I don’t know why there isn’t a Malfoy House of Horrors that you can enter as Lucius and leave as Lucius post-Azkaban.” Of course, Isaacs wasn’t the only one thinking of his own character. “We all want a ride based on us,” he said. “It’s a fantastic place here. The only thing that’s missing is, obviously, me!”
Co-star Matthew Modine, promoting his short Jesus Was A Commie , explained why the notion to film the megabudget blockbuster at Occupy Wall Street was scrapped. “The wisdom of Christopher Nolan and his incredible team was that, while it seemed like a good idea to give [the protestors] an opportunity for work, to give them money, it would send a terrible message . At the end of the day, we’re making a movie. What’s happening down there is more important than that. To co-opt what’s happening there and around the country… we didn’t want to trivialize it. It was more important to respect what they’re doing than to do anything that could potentially trivialize the political situation downtown.” [ indieWIRE ]
This weekend, most of the Harry Potter cast and filmmakers flew down to Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter to fête the home release of Deathly Hallows — Part 2 , the final installment in the film series based on J.K. Rowling’s beloved books. At a Potter-themed party in Hogsmeade Village Saturday night — complete with a performance by the frog choir, endless rounds of butter beer served by wizards and fireworks — franchise star Rupert Grint took a moment to play a round of ‘My Favorite Scene’ with Movieline.
It’s Friday, opening day for Sony’s legendarily crapped-upon Adam Sandler vehicle Jack and Jill — so what better time to launch a Jack and Jill Twitter feed than today, amirite? So the timing’s not so good; at the time of this writing the page is just a few hours old. But the Tweets?? PRICELESS . Trust me: Skip the movie, hold onto your $10, and instead give it to the poor Happy Madison intern you might imagine slaving away in the office on a Friday trying to drum up interest in the abysmal comedy one unintentionally hilarious awful Tweet at a time. After the jump, a selection of the mind-blowingly best-worst Jack and Jill Tweets thus far. You’re welcome.
Much has been made of British actor Henry Cavill ‘s abs in this week’s Immortals , or the strange, logic-defying Superman beard spied on the set of Man of Steel . Never mind that the 28-year-old actor turns in a persuasive dramatic performance in Tarsem ‘s stylized fantasy myth, playing the classic hero Theseus as an honorable peasant battling a sadistic god-hating tyrant (Mickey Rourke) with the aid of a comely priestess (Freida Pinto) and supernatural bow and arrows. But therein lies the surprise: Go to Immortals for the bloody action, or the mythological spin, or the wonderment of Tarsem’s visuals, and you’ll also get the pleasant revelation that Cavill wears leading man status like a natural.
I’m sure there are more exciting things in life than watching Colin Farrell, dressed in a sleek, dark suit, weave through the streets of London behind the wheel of a saucy black convertible, the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” rumbling on the soundtrack. But as random weekend movie pleasures go, I’ll take it: Farrell is the star, and the unassuming center, of William Monahan’s nervy, noir-inflected thriller London Boulevard .
