Actors David Spade and Kevin James along with baseball player Brian Wilson and LA nightclub promoter Josh Richman all hung out at Westwood Village. The stars where spotted leaving and greeting fans as they left the “Jack and Jill” movie premiere at Regency Village Theatre in Westwood, California.
Listen closely and you can hear the womp wooommp coming out of Universal HQ from miles away — that’s the refrain of the day as Tower Heist underperformed its way into second place behind the incredibly resilient Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots . Faring as well as could be reasonably expected in both films’ shadows, find the latest Harold & Kumar installment. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
Friday night at the 2011 AFI Fest, the seats in the historic Grauman’s Chinese Theatre weren’t quite filled to capacity for the gala screening of Luc Besson’s The Lady , which received mildly lukewarm reviews on the festival circuit. But, as it did at its premiere in Toronto, the biopic of Burmese democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi received a standing ovation at AFI Fest — one clearly directed primarily at star and Oscar hopeful Michelle Yeoh .
Helena Bonham Carter’s upcoming turn as Miss Havisham in Mike Newell’s adaptation of Dickens’s Great Expectations is going to be a decadent one: In new photos from the film (set to debut in fall 2012), the Oscar nominee is fully made up as the manipulative spinster from the literary classic, and she’s wearing an original design by costumer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor. Though Carter appears younger than other actresses who’ve played Miss Havisham, the photos are just as crazy you’d expect. And sinister. And they call to mind 10 images that I thought I’d long repressed. Here they are — some are less hallucinogenic than others.
News of Ralph Macchio’s 50th birthday should be reason to celebrate and reflect on the life and work of one of the ’80s most recognized movie stars. And it is! Once you get past the fact that Ralph Macchio is 50 — and the implications this has for the rest of us.
J. Edgar is undoubtedly one of the flashiest Oscar contenders this year. With Clint Eastwood’s direction, Dustin Lance Black’s script, and the well-pancaked melodrama of Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench and Armie Hammer, we’re dealing with a formidable award-attractant group. But was the film’s quality worthy of opening AFI Fest this year? Movieline saw J. Edgar last night — along with a bunch of other critics, bloggers and assorted plebes — and we’re not quite sure. Here are the first 140-character reactions to the movie. (We threw in some comedian takes for the hell of it.)
Renowned for his prolific, fearless filmmaking, Werner Herzog is in fact nothing if not a polymath: Opera director , guerrilla film-school proprietor , diarist and author , septi-continental gadabout , and actor for hire (among other interests). It’s this latter quality that he and I discussed briefly today as he made the rounds for his new capital-punishment doc Into the Abyss — a diametric opposite to the biggest onscreen gig he’s taken to date.
At the press conference for J. Edgar , which premiered last night at AFI Fest to mixed, often hilarious reviews , stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Naomi Watts joined director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and producer Brian Grazer fielded questions about the very issues that make the biopic seem difficult to make: the ambiguity surrounding both Hoover and his confidants’ personal lives. Movieline culled the best five quotes from the panel, one of which involves 81-year-old Eastwood’s on-set brawling.
The sweetest feel-good flick of the holiday season may well be the one about two ex-BFFs, who’d once gone in search of White Castle sliders and tangled with Homeland Security, who reunite on Christmas Eve to hunt down the perfect fir, crossing paths with drug-sniffing babies, Ukrainian gangsters, and a sweater-clad Danny Trejo along the way. Stoner heroes Harold and Kumar have come a long way since 2004 — and so has co-star John Cho , who sat down with Movieline recently to talk H&K, career moves, and his encounters with the likes of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Obama.
“You might say hey, maybe punk rock was never meant to grow up — but it did, so too bad. We’re in uncharted territory,” Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz, also the owner of Epitaph Records, says early in Andrea Blaugrund’s documentary The Other F Word . Billing itself as a “coming of middle age story,” this earnest and intermittently lovable look into the lives of prominent punk rockers who’ve gone on to become responsible fathers doesn’t break as much ground as it seems to hope and believe.