Because I know how much you guys enjoyed those pictures we had the other day of Jennifer Lawrence in a bikini , I’ve got more pictures of her at the beach again today. Granted, she’s in a full-body wetsuit because she’s busy filming the Hunger Games sequel, so it’s not quite as exciting, but let’s just say the suit hugs her in all the right places. Much like I hope to do some day, if I play my cards right. » view all 16 photos Related Articles: Jennifer Lawrence Stretches Out Her Shirt Jennifer Lawrence’s Tasty Front Meat Jennifer Lawrence Pumps It For Me Jennifer Lawrence Bikini Pictures For Thanksgiving Photos: Fameflynet , PacificCoastNews
Arndt, who also wrote the script for ‘Hunger Games’ sequel ‘Catching Fire,’ is rumored to be involved in all three new ‘Star Wars’ films. By Kara Warner Michael Arndt Photo: Getty Images
Billy Ray Cyrus debuted on Broadway Monday night, coming on board the latest production of Chicago. And the singer was in a joking mood afterward when asked by Us Weekly about his daughter’s engagement to Liam Hemsworth . “Liam asked if he could have my daughter’s hand in marriage, and I said yes if I could be in his brother’s next movie,” Billy Ray said , referring to Chris Hemsworth and his very successful run of Thor , The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods . The country star then continued to play around, but revealed something very real and interesting in the process: “Now, they [Miley and Liam] are going to have three weddings, so I’m thinking one movie with Chris, then we got the sequel to Liam’s new movie [ Hunger Games: Catching Fire ] coming out. They have got three weddings, that has to be three movies for me.” Three weddings?!? Who does Miley think she is, Kim Kardashian ? In all seriousness, though, Cyrus said he was recently inspired by Indianapolis Colts Coach Chuck Pagano , who is battling cancer and whose locker room speech last week went viral. Said Billy Ray: “He told his team he wanted another Super Bowl trophy and he had two daughters he wanted to walk down the aisle. When I saw that last night, this guy that’s battling Leukemia, and the fact that he is talking to his team saying, ‘I want to hoist that trophy and walk my daughters down the aisle.’ I immediately texted Miley and said, ‘I just want you to know, whenever you’re ready, I’m going to be very proud to walk you down that aisle.’ She was like, ‘Daddy!’ with two smiley faces! That coach and that moment touched me.” Okay. Now we need a Kleenex.
The Game’s Bond. James Bond. Which means that you will be Bored. Majorly Bored. Agent 007 should be perfect video game character. “Kicking ass with the latest fun gadgets” is his actual job description. So it’s a shame that almost every Bond game sucks. Not even Blofeld got to betray Bond this many times and come back to do it again. The funny thing is that Bond has even played video games himself. In Never Say Never Again, he plays Domination against villainous SPECTRE agent Maximillian Largo. Each round costs thousands of dollars and issues powerful electric shocks, making it a great analogy for the Bond video games that civillians get to play: expensive and painful. Domination is not nearly as much fun to play as it sounds. It has holographic 3D graphics and is based on satellite laser weapons and nuclear warheads, but Largo explains that it’s just a simple target game: shoot the things when they light up. That’s less gameplay than Minesweeper. It’s also badly designed, because it’s a crosshair shooting game controlled by a joystick. Which, if you’ve played twitch-shooters, is like trying to control a scalpel while riding a unicycle. And it’s still better than most real world Bond games. Why are they so bad? Because Bond might be perfect for great games, but he’s also so incredibly famous that he can sell shit ones. The Bond license has been shoved onto everything from text adventures to a side-scrolling “bouncing car getting blown up by spaceships and scuba divers” simulator. I’m not exaggerating. Rare Ltd finally realized Bond’s potential in 1997 when Eon Productions smartly licensed GoldenEye t o a studio that actually knew how to make good games. The resulting product wasn’t merely good — it was one of the most important console shooters of all time, because it proved that console shooters could actually be good, which they weren’t until GoldenEye . One of the most successful N64 games ever made, GoldenEye combined accurate shooting with an unbelievably faithful rendition of the movie. (The split-screen multiplayer mode remains one of the fondest gaming memories for an entire generation You didn’t just recognize parts of the movie in the video game, you recognized parts of the video game when you re-watched the movie. Rare understood that by printing “007” on the cover of a regular action game meant being smarter, sharper and simply better than everything else with guns in it. And it succeeded. The game was stuffed with love for the franchise. Not only was it an incredible recreation of the titular movie, but bonus levels brought in Moonraker lasers, Jaws, the Golden Gun and Baron Samedi. It was originally meant to be the best multiplayer ever made, with a mode where four players could each be a different Bond — Moore, Connery, Dalton, and Brosnan. But, as further proof that the lawyers of the world are sucking the fun out of life, this mode was removed from the final game. A wide range of cheat options extended playability. Unfortunately Rare really did understand the nature of James Bond — which is why they moved on to the next mission without looking back. It turned down the chance to make Tomorrow Never Dies , instead building the spiritual sequel of shooting excellence in 2000 with Perfect Dark . Stuffed with stylish shooting and cunning gadgetry, it would have made the perfect 007 game. But Rare was so good it didn’t need the license to succeed. From that point on, almost all Bond games were shooters, but they never mattered. Where Rare had been the elite double-oh agent, the others were an army of uniformed minions wildly spraying machine gun fire and missing the point. They took bog-standard gun games and put some Bond sprites on top. There was less passion and spark than a morgue during a power outage (except there are people who would actually enjoy that). As the games got more desperate they tried to replicate Goldeneye’ s success, the results were more disastrous than Dr. Frankenstein’s attempts to replicate life. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent literally put GoldenEye in the title of a totally unrelated shooter. The 2010 GoldenEye 007 remake rewrote the original with Daniel Craig, improved graphics, and blew more than that compressed air pellet Bond used to kill Dr Kananga. You just can’t re-skin something from 13 years ago and expect it to be impressive. The remake was aimed at exactly no one: retro fans were aghast at the altered level structure and models, while contemporary fans were turned off by the incredibly unimaginative level layout and zombie-grade enemy intelligence. Like all Bond technology, the original GoldenEye game was revolutionary at the time but almost unusable now. A true Bond game needs to be smarter, sharper, simply better at being Bond than everything else on the market, and we finally have the technology to make that happen. In the old days every shooter was the same game with different sprites. Now we can build entire game mechanics around the character. Batman’s Arkham City is the greatest character game ever made — everything from the graphics to the combat system flows perfectly from the character. Get it right and you’re unstoppable, but even one mistake and you’re in deep trouble. The Hitman series proves that we can build interesting worlds with multiple paths to reach our goal. Bond isn’t an Arnold Schwarzenegger shooting machine. Games which set him up against an endless wave of enemies don’t even know who he is. Bond is the elite. Bond is the best. The original GoldenEye understood that, offering amazing unlocks for not only completing the level, but doing it at maximum difficulty in record time. A Bond game should be a razor-sharp shooter in a sophisticated world. We don’t need another automatic-fire grinding chore like Gears of War . We don’t want another hallway shooter, where we run down pre-set pathways and the most amazing cut-scene — with helicopters crashing through skyways as we parachute to safety — are just glorified loading screens. All we did was “Press A to jump.” That’s less gameplay than an elevator and with the exact same function. Think Mirror’s Edge meets The Club with multiple paths and an upgrade system. Every level is a speed run with a score multiplier for combo shooting and avoiding damage, designed for replayability as you learn your trade. You can blast your way through a building of enemies for an “Agent” rating or rappel down the side snap-shotting guards as it collapses to earn “00”. Because you’re the one who worked out how to collapse it. Because you’re Bond. Improved scores earn “Q points”, unlocking new gadgets, each of which works on each level in different ways, and you have to choose which you bring on each mission. Think grappling hooks, glass-shattering sonics, vehicle remote control, each providing fun options in levels and new ones in old ones. Think of Hitman , where the very first mission can be completed in a few seconds if you return with later gear. Imagine replaying old levels to beat your high score (and earn more equipment), optimizing your strategies, trying out new things. Imagine working out how to beat your enemy in then fastest, coolest way possible, then realize that you’re not just controlling Bond: You’re playing as him. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Emmy-winning ‘Game Change’ scribe Danny Strong reportedly beat out tough competition to write two-part series finale. By Kara Warner Jennifer Lawrence in “Hunger Games” Photo: Lionsgate
Also in Friday afternoon’s round-up of mostly movie-related news briefs, Pakistan faces the deadliest day yet over riots stemming from anti-Islam video The Innocence of Muslims . The Napa Valley Film Festival unveils details for its upcoming event. And two new features are headed to theaters. Here Comes The Devil Headed to Theaters The thriller had its U.S. premiere Thursday at Fantastic Fest. Francisco Barreiro and Lura Caro star in the film by Bogliano as parents whose preteen son and daughter inexplicably reappear after being lost overnight on a desolate, cave-riddled mountainside after a casual hike became every parent’s nightmare. The good luck and good fortune of their return soon changes, as the children’s behavior suggests ominous and unspeakable events the night the children were lost that continue even now. Magnet Releasing picked up the film and announced it at the premiere. The filmmakers, cast and audience toasted the news with champagne at the screening. Napa Valley Film Festival Sets Slate Ten narratives and nine documentaries will screen in the festival’s competition lineup at the second annual event taking place in California’s famed wine country. The festival runs November 7 – 11. For details on its roster, visit their website . Any Day Now Heads to U.S. and Canadian Theaters Music Box Films picked up the film directed by Travis Fine. Inspired by a true story, the feature centers on a gay couple in the 1970s who take in an abandoned mentally handicapped teen. The film will have a theatrical releases in December. Around the ‘net… Make a Doritos Ad, Get a Part in Transformers 4 Hollywood director Michael Bay is partnering with Doritos on a competition that invites would-be filmmakers to shoot their own home-made chips advertisement. Two selected adverts will air during the Super Bowl in January and the final winner will get the chance to appear in Bay’s next project, Transformers 4 , The Guaridan reports . Deadliest Day of Violence Over Innocence of Muslims Despite calls for peaceful protest, violence raged in Pakistan where between 12 and 19 people were killed in the worst day of rioting over the anti-Islam video. Movie theaters were also burned in the Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Karachi, Deadline reports . Homer Simpson Votes for Romney It’s not exactly film news, but animation’s favorite dad is voting for Mitt Romney. In the season premiere of The Simpsons set for September 30th, Homer Simpson said he’ll vote for the GOP hopeful because “he did invent Obamacare,” THR reports .
Max Thieriot began his career opposite Twilight ‘s Kristen Stewart (in 2004’s Catch That Kid ), and this week he finds himself romancing Hunger Games ‘ Katniss Everdeen herself, Jennifer Lawrence — albeit against the advice of her mother, the neighborhood, their classmates and, perhaps, insidious forces that linger in secrets and shadows in The House at the End of the Street . In recent years the former child actor has navigated his way toward increasingly interesting projects (Atom Egoyan’s Chloe , Nick Cassavetes’ Yellow , the Toronto entry Disconnect , and the upcoming Bates Motel series on A&E) — and one thing that helped was making a conscious decision to live outside of Hollywood, as Thieriot told Movieline recently. The 23-year-old actor, who made his biggest recent mark starring in Wes Craven’s My Soul To Take , grew up in Northern California (where his family once owned the San Francisco Chronicle) and still lives there. “I always told myself that no matter what happened, how famous I became, I didn’t want to change the person that I am,” Thieriot explains. He spoke about the challenges of revealing just enough information to the audience in House at the End of The Street , if he really is in a genre phase right now, what he’s looking forward to in the Hitchcock-based Bates Motel , and the single best perk of growing up the scion of a newspaper family. You live in Northern California – tell me about the decision to stay there instead of Los Angeles. I moved to L.A. right after I finished high school, for three years, because everybody was telling me it was important to get down there, and then I kind of just decided for myself that I didn’t need to be there to be doing this. I wanted out of some of the chaos that comes with living here and being an actor. And I spend so much time away from home anyways, filming and stuff, that I might as well make home base somewhere I want to be. I grew up swearing that I’d never move to L.A. and yet here I am. L.A.’s fine! But I don’t know, I love Northern California. Jennifer Lawrence describes you as an unconventional actor type – you spend time in your trailer listening to country music, not really concerned with typical showbiz stuff. Do you feel like your approach to the industry is drastically different from the norm? I’d say so. Different from your typical actor, for sure. I don’t know – it’s just the way I was raised. As much as I appreciate acting and enjoy it, and like it, it wasn’t something where I grew up wanting to be a movie star. So when it happened I just took it as it came and always told myself that no matter what happened, how famous I became, whatever, I didn’t want to change the person that I am. That’s one of the reasons I still live in Northern California – it helps me stay grounded and to remember all those things. That must be all the more important given that you started acting so young. Exactly. But I definitely take it seriously. Well, Jen Lawrence also compared you to Paul Newman, so you must. [Laughs] I take it seriously, but at the same time I don’t let it get to me. You’ve got House at the End of the Street coming out but your last mainstream film was horror film, My Soul To Take . Next you’ve got Bates Motel . What’s behind this run of genre fare, and what do you feel like is pulling you toward this material? Honestly, I don’t even know. It’s funny, when I started acting I watched some horror films but I generally didn’t like the acting in them. I’d never thought about doing one, and then I did My Soul to Take and for that was like, well, if I’m going to do a horror film Wes Craven’s the guy to do it with. When this came along, to me it plays so much more as a thriller and not a horror film, and it’s a very different movie for the genre. The character was a character that I wanted to play, as opposed to just getting into this type of film. It’s tricky to talk about because we don’t want to spoil anything, but even as the story goes on the script reveals more and more to the audience. How tricky was that line to walk as a performer, conscious of what information is in the viewer’s mind at any time? It’s definitely hard to play because by the end of the film you hope that the audience goes, ok, and they look back at things that took place, or different expressions, and go, wow – got it! That’s why this happened. That’s why they made that face. It’s a tough line to walk as an actor to try and have that in scenes without giving away something. You know too much. You do. I know too much, but at the same time I want to show them something without having them notice that I’m showing it to them. It’s all about secrets, showing them a secret that they don’t even see until the end. You started your career with Catch That Kid , which was also one of Kristen Stewart’s first films. How did being a child actor influence your later choices? Well, Haley Joel Osment had some and Dakota Fanning had some roles that were very different and extremely challenging, but other than that the norm was these kind of normal sort of roles which to me weren’t that challenging. There wasn’t a whole lot of variety, you know? So once I got to an age where that started to change I made a decision to try and do a little bit of everything to not stay stuck in one category. How old were you when you were first conscious of trying to mix it up? 17 or 18. And since then it seems like I keep doing all this horror thriller genre stuff but that’s just the stuff that’s been in the public’s eye the most, because I’ve done like three movies that are waiting to come out that are all so different. In this Nick Cassavetes film Yellow I have a Southern accent in Oklahoma in the late ‘80s selling drugs and I have all these tattoos, and I put on a bunch of weight and got all buff, and in Foreverland I play a guy who has cystic fibrosis. Disconnect , which was just at Toronto and Venice, I play an internet webcam stripper, so I got buff and lost a bunch of weight and got all shredded for that, the way I felt an internet webcam stripper should look. [Laughs] I’ve really been trying to mix it up a lot since My Soul To Take. And we filmed House at the End of the Street two years ago, and since then I’ve done four movies or something. I only recently considered doing television and this last year I did a pilot for ABC for Roland Emmerich, so I’m open to that now and that’s how this Bates Motel thing came up. Alfred Hitchcock is so iconic in this business and in general and it seemed like a great opportunity to be a part of something that’s a 10 episode show, on A&E, for great producers, with Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore who are great actors. And yours is a new role we haven’t seen portrayed before – Norman Bates’ brother. It’s exciting too because as cool and fun and challenging as it is to play a character who’s never been played, it’s also fun to play something like this in such an iconic film now turned into a prequel to a TV show, because he’s unknown. You kind of know what you’re getting with Norma and Norman, but Dylan is this unknown guy thrown into the mix. Yeah, how messed up must that guy be? We know he doesn’t make it to the house later, but what happens in between? But honestly, this has all happened in the past few days, since like Friday. [Laughs] That’s when it all became official. I met with the team via Skype about a week ago, and we talked and all of a sudden the deal was happening. What was it like growing up with your family owning the San Francisco Chronicle, having such a history with institutions like that? It was interesting – I grew up actually hating the fact that my family owned the newspaper, because I was teased a lot at school as being the rich kid whose family owned the newspaper. It was hard because it wasn’t like the Press-Democrat, it was the San Francisco Chronicle. As a kid it seems people used to tease people over anything, and it seems like such a stupid thing to get upset, to get bummed out over something like that, but when you’re little it was like that. So I was happy when we sold the company. Like, great – now people aren’t going to give me shit. But it’s definitely something I appreciate and find to be fascinating, and obviously I’m just born into it, but I look at the history of it all and how it came to be. My great-great-grandfather started the paper in 1865 or something, and when the 1906 earthquake happened he separated himself from the Hearst family who owned the Examiner, and when the earthquake happened he was the only person to release a paper that day. He started it by literally typing it at home and selling it on the street corner. His last name was De Young and he had like four daughters so now there are no more De Youngs that are direct descendants from him… it’s interesting and kind of funny, and my family’s been doing stuff in San Francisco forever. It was also neat as a kid because the company sponsored the local sports teams, like the 49ers. I noticed from your Twitter feed that you’re a bit of a Niners fan. I’m obsessive about the Niners! One of my buddies from Sonoma County just got signed by them this year, so I’m like, yes – now I get to go to some games. That was probably my favorite part as a kid – we sponsored them, and the Giants, and the Golden State Warriors, so we always had company tickets and I took full advantage of that as a kid. There was a petition to get you cast in The Hunger Games as Finnick, which would have been a reunion with Jennifer Lawrence. How far did that actually get? They had specific people and they wouldn’t let others audition, so I didn’t get a chance to audition or anything. You’d think making out with Jen Lawrence for what seems like forever in House at the End of the Street would give you an edge of some sort. You’d think! I can shoot a bow better than anyone in that movie. But I’m over that now. I found a quote you gave in what must have been one of your first interviews, for Catch That Kid , in which you give the following sage advice: “Just be yourself and try not to be too over the top.” Nice. Does that still apply? Yeah! I think that’s still valid. Those are two very important pieces of advice for this industry. [Laughs] Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
‘House at the End of the Street’ co-star Max Thieriot tells MTV News about working with the actress before her ‘Hunger Games’ fame. By Jocelyn Vena Jennifer Lawrence in “House at the End of the Street” Photo: Relativity Media
Video game fans are naturally suspicious of movie conversions because they’ve been burned more often than charcoal briquettes. Which is weird, because pattern recognition is meant to be a gaming skill. Columbia Pictures’ announcement that it’s taking on the Metal Gear Solid license with Iron Man and The Amazing Spider-Man franchise producer Avi Arad has many gamers wary. The last attempt crashed and burned only two years ago, with Michael De Luca , producer of Oscar winner The Social Network , c iting vague but fatal incompatibilities between video game companies and the big screen. But as the game’s signature character Solid Snake once said: “Don’t regret your past! Learn from it!” With that in mind, here are four reasons the film adaptation might actually work this time. 1. Licenses Are Big Money Now: For a long time, the wide-scale sucking of video game movies wasn’t a tragedy, it was a kind of karmic blowback. Movies licensed for games were stamped into soulless, cookie-cutter platformers with less character than a game of Hangman. Similarly little care was put into the games’ development. In return, movie companies would buy a video game license, shred it, then spit a few random catch phrases from the game into a standard action movie script. In both cases it was because the adaptation meant a few extra dollars for whoever could be bothered to grab them. g Solid Snake: good at grabbing. But big money changes everything. The Resident Evil movies are making exponential profits, while comic-book heroes are now grabbing more cash than every one of their bank-robbing villains put together. (Just ask Arad. ) Studios are scrambling to get onto bandwagon, because it’s really a bank truck with the back doors open. An epic storyline and a quarter-century of rabid fandom means Metal Gear Solid is perfect for conversion. 2. It’s Already A Movie Pilot: Metal Gear isn’t a Street Fighter , where scriptwriters had to pad the game’s haiku-simple idea of two outlandishly dressed characters “punching each other in the head for 90 minutes,” and then did such a bad job you’d swear they wrote the padding after receiving the punching. The franchise is an established full-bore action story armed with politics, double-crosses, environmental messages and more character motivation than War and Peace. In essence, an elite agent comes out of retirement to infiltrate a terrorist facility. That’s a viable, if not entirely original, action-movie plot, and Metal Gear makes it smarter, more, um, solid. A direct translation of the plot would actually work. Of course that won’t happen, but that isn’t a problem because…. 3. Movie-fication will Help: Video games aren’t converted into movies, they’re flattened. An entire dimension of viewer participation is removed. Metal Gear ’s most iconic moments affect the viewer in ways movies can only dream of &mdash like Psycho Mantis breaking the fourth wall with music and controller-vibration, or the Sorrow’s attempt to end the game by convincing the player that it’s already over. This involvement will no doubt be lost in the game’s translation to the cinema screen. That said, the language of action movies is about streamlining: ideally, everything should fit into a neat 90-minute package, unless you’re Christopher Nolan. And that process inevitably requires the sanding down of a lot of important detail, Metal Gear maestro Hideo Kojima needs more streamlining than a supersonic jet. Still, he’s the unquestioned master of the series — to the point where the game franchise owner Konami seems unwilling to let him escape, constantly forcing him into sequels no matter how many times he publicly says “this is the last one.” (I genuinely think they’re using a real world Foxdie virus on him, set to trigger if he leaves. The next game’s going to include include Codec messages reading “Help me. They have my family!”) Kojima crafts masterpieces of stealth action. He also crafts epics of monologue to rival the Iliad and puts them on the same disc. This gave Metal Gear Solid a depth unseen in any “man-with-a-gun” game before or since. By the fourth installment, it was day long movie with some set pieces you were allowed to stunt direct. Tightening the script could sharpen the story and share it with a whole new audience. 4. The Special Effects Will Be Worth the Price of Admission: Perhaps it’s apostasy to write this, but the special effects in a Metal Gear movie are bound to kick ass. They must. The Metal Gear itself is the most perfect villain in any series: a giant walking tank which can also nuke anything on the planet. Action stars spend entire careers searching for an enemy that perfect. One of the most stunning moments in Metal Gear Solid was when this office-block sized monstrosity rose out of the ground in a cut-scene and you, with your mouth hanging open in the real world, stood still while it shot at you until you realized that the cut scene had ended and this techno-leviathan was about to smoke your tiny ass. IMAX-ing the movie alone will justify ticket sales. Sure, that’s no guarantee that the boys in Hollywood won’t screw it up, but let’s hope Columbia, Konami and Arad heed the wisdom of Solid Snake: “This isn’t a training exercise. Our lives are riding on this. There are no heroes or heroines. If you lose, you’re worm food.” Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
