Woody Allen continues his cinematic Eurotrip with To Rome With Love , which aims to repeat the formula of pitting navel-gazing privileged Americans against Old World locales with charming results. While it doesn’t go for the transformative magic of Midnight in Paris , will Woody’s Rome outing capture something special in Italy? Watch the first trailer below. To Rome With Love is comprised of four vignettes; one features Allen (in his first onscreen turn since 2006’s Scoop) and Judy Davis as a married couple; another stars Greta Gerwig, Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin and Ellen Page as Americans in Rome; a third features Penelope Cruz; and the fourth follows Roberto Benigni. While the trailer gives little away in terms of plot, it does provide a peek at how Allen’s brand of neurosis-comedy will play set against the streets and countryside of Italy. (Answer: Pretty much the same as it does in France, Spain, and New York.) Via Yahoo! : To Rome With Love debuts on June 22.
‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ Robert Kirkman tells MTV News about show’s future. By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Kara Warner Andrew Lincoln in “The Walking Dead” Photo: AMC “We’re all infected,” former cop Rick Grimes told his fellow group of survivors in the “Walking Dead” season finale — and boy, is that an understatement. In an action-packed episode that killed off multiple characters in brutal fashion, left the divisive farm completely in ruins, introduced a fan-favorite sword-wielding wanderer and teased the promise of a prison to come, it’s safe to say that the “Walking Dead” season two finale left fans feverish for more. The AMC zombie series, which returns for its third season in October, answered long-term mythological questions (The content of the CDC’s Dr. Jenner’s whisper? No longer a secret!) and pushed the characters into new places, both physically and emotionally. Perhaps most importantly for fans of the comic books, “The Walking Dead” has left the farm behind, with the prison very much in the near future. Between that change of scenery and the introduction of iconic character Michonne (with chained zombies in tow no less), season three is shaping up to be the best of the lot — a notion that executive producers Glen Mazzara and Robert Kirkman certainly agree with, of course. “When I think of ‘The Walking Dead’ book, I think about the prison. I think about the Governor. I think about Rick. I think about Michonne. That, to me, is the heart of that story,” Mazzara told MTV News about the future of the survival horror series. “That’s what I’m excited about writing and seeing come to life. I think that this has been a great chapter one. But now we’re moving into our best material. I’m really excited to see what the actors, the writers and the directors can do with that material.” Kirkman, who created the comic books upon which the TV show is based, is equally excited, if not more so, to revisit “the best material” of the original “Walking Dead” story. “When the camera rises over the trees and the prison comes into view, I did get a little choked up,” Kirkman confessed. “It’s a really cool, very bold promise to the audience. To show that and to say, just wait until you see what we’re going to do with season three. I’m intimately involved with this show. So knowing what we’ve already discussed and knowing the different things that we want to do, I can say that we are at the very beginning of this show. We haven’t quite gotten to a lot of the big things we’ve been building to just yet. If you’re a big fan of ‘The Walking Dead’ and you enjoyed season one and season two, then you haven’t seen anything yet.” “We’re just getting started,” Mazzara agreed. After the season two finale, we’re inclined to agree. What did you think of the “Walking Dead” season finale? Are you looking forward to what comes next in season three? Tell us what you think in the comments section! Related Photos Zombies Take Over New Jersey In Annual ‘Zombie Walk’
Nicki announces 15 European dates for her Pink Friday Tour beginning June 8 in Stockholm, Sweden. By Jocelyn Vena Nicki Minaj Photo: Ronald Martinez/ Getty Images Nicki, Roman, Martha and the rest of the one-woman gang are headed across the pond. On Monday morning (March 19), Nicki Minaj took to Twitter to announce 15 European dates for her Pink Friday Tour. So far it looks like the Young Money MC will start her trek on June 8 at the Annexet in Stockholm, Sweden. After that, she will touch Norway, Denmark, France, Italy and London for 15 dates. The presale for Nicki’s Oslo, Norway, date began Monday, and tickets to the Stockholm show will be pre-sold Tuesday. Tickets for subsequent shows will go on sale in the coming weeks. The Harajuku Barbie’s sophomore LP Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded is scheduled to be released on April 3. On Friday, Nicki released the track list for the album and revealed collaborations with Chris Brown, Nas, Cam’ron, Rick Ross and of course her Young Money cohorts Lil Wayne and Drake. “April 3 is gonna be a doozy. It’s gonna be crazy,” Nicki told MTV News after her NBA All-Star Game performance in Orlando, Florida, last month. “It’s gonna be important for just hip-hop culture and pop culture. It’s gonna be very big.” Nicki Minaj’s 2012 European Tour dates:
‘I’m just warning [Jionni]: two years,’ the now engaged and pregnant ‘Jersey Shore’ star told MTV News in January. By Christina Garibaldi, with additional reporting by Matt Elias Snooki, Deena, JWoww and Sammi Photo: MTV News Snooki officially has a baby onboard! The “Jersey Shore” star confirmed Wednesday (March 7) that she is expecting her first child and is set to walk down the aisle with fianc
In an Ironic twist, the US beat Italy at their own game. The lazy title to this story would be “The Italian Job” but that’s pretty much what transpired in Italy on Wednesday. The Americans soaked up the pressure, fought like lions at the back, and took their one chance thanks to Clint Dempsey . The US continued to try and implement Jurgen Kilnsmann’s vision of playing high pressure and moving forward… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Opposing Views Discovery Date : 29/02/2012 22:32 Number of articles : 2
Source: DeeVazquez In the latest PROFILE video series, Dee Vazquez chops it up with Wiz Khalifa. Juicy J’s interview ad-libs are hilarious. Broadcasting platform : Vimeo Source : illRoots Discovery Date : 29/02/2012 19:15 Number of articles : 2
Jose Altidore blocked three Italian defenders, beautifully setting Clint Dempsey up for this goal in the 55th minute against Italy Wednesday. It proved to be the game-winner. Please follow Sports Page on Twitter and Facebook . Join the conversation about this story » See Also: WATCH: Clint Dempsey Does It Again With His 10th Goal WATCH: This Is One Of The Luckiest Soccer Goals We’ve Ever Seen 9 Ill-Conceived… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Business Insider Discovery Date : 29/02/2012 22:10 Number of articles : 2
“All the options from here are bad, I am afraid” is how MEP Daniel Hannan describes the way forward in Europe in this FOX News interview. In one of the clearest and least status-quo-hugging explanations of what has occurred (gentile and bloodless coups in Italy and Greece), the ‘cruel and irresponsible behavior’ of European leaders stuns him and all in the name of the ‘wretched single-currency’. When… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : zero hedge Discovery Date : 17/02/2012 10:00 Number of articles : 2
There were many happy faces among critics on Saturday, the third day of the Berlinale. Because despite what I wrote yesterday about the criticism the festival has faced in recent years, particularly in terms of the films chosen for competition, nearly everyone I’ve spoken to thinks this year’s festival is off to a promising start. Of the six competition films that have been screened so far, not one has set any of my random sampling of critic friends howling with derision, or walking around wearing a perpetual scowly-frowny face. When the festival lineup was announced, friends who had to write pregame assessments had a hard time finding even one or two movies that, sight unseen, had the potential to stand out. But on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, it appears that the best of this festival, whatever that might be, will again come from left field, as it did last year with Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation . Not every edition of every festival starts out that way, with a sense of adventure and anticipation. Don’t quote me yet, but we may be onto something special here. We can attribute part of the buoyant mood to the reception of the screening of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die on Saturday morning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Taviani Brothers rode high, on an internationally cresting wave, with pictures like Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars . But in recent years, mentioning their name would be likely to elicit a blank stare or a “Taviani Who?” Even though the brothers have been steadily making films in Italy since then, they’ve dropped off the map in the United States, and even at home their profile hasn’t exactly been blazing. But Caesar Must Die may reignite the fortunes of this octogenarian directing team. The picture is stark and alive in its simplicity; rendered mostly in black-and-white, it’s gorgeous to look at — you could practically use it as an illustrated textbook on framing and composition. Caesar Must Die is a sort-of documentary that tells the story of a group of prison inmates — incarcerated at Rome’s maximum security Rebibbia — who mount a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Footage from the actual performance frames the picture: In the opening scene, we see a bunch of stubbly, rough-looking guys, wearing simple, stylized costumes that give the whole affair the aura of a children’s holiday pageant, doing some pretty interesting things with Shakespeare’s language. Not all of those things are, in the strict sense, good. But even the “bad” actors among this bunch — and remember, they’re not just nonprofessionals but convicted criminals, for Christ’s sake — contribute to the intense, quiet power of the final work. Most of Caesar Must Die is devoted to watching these men work their way through the material during rehearsal, learning its ins and outs, its dips and dives, and teasing out nuances and details that mean something to them. Sometimes the Tavianis draw the parallels between art and life a little too starkly. We don’t really need to hear the inmates reflecting on how Julius Caesar speaks to them when we can see how, in their proto-method-acting way, they bring every scrap of their experience to rehearsal: They touch each other warily but tenderly; when it’s time for a character to draw a knife, you can tell the actors respect it as both a weapon and a symbol, even though it’s presumably made out of plastic. You can bet these guys know a lot about duplicity and betrayal and power struggles, and they bring all of that to bear as they tangle with this challenging material, and with each other. The most wonderful sequence in this overall very fine picture may be the montage of the actors’ auditions, as they meet with the play’s director – a professional brought in from the outside – and try to impress him with their swagger and capacity for pathos. Many of them have both in spades. Some are awkwardly touching; others come off like they’ve spent too much time channeling Robert De Niro; and some are simply naturals, able to summon that deep-rooted whatever-it-is that makes magic happen in live performance. The picture also features a lovely, haunting Bernard Herrmann-inflected score — in places I could hear shadows of Taxi Driver . When Caesar Must Die eventually shows up in American theaters — and it will — it’s going to be easy as pie for marketing people to sell: An uplifting story about prison dudes finding meaning in art can pretty much sell itself. But even though that line essentially describes what happens in Caesar Must Die , it doesn’t come close to capturing the simultaneously joyous and mournful resonance of the picture. Caesar Must Die is really just about the way art lives on through people, sometimes in unlikely ways. There’s no way to keep it behind bars. Saturday’s press screening of Barbara, from German director Christian Petzold, didn’t draw the same kind of rapturous audience affection that Caesar Must Die did. But then, it’s a very different type of movie. In Barbara , a beautiful but rather blank-faced young doctor – played by the superb German actress Nina Hoss — arrives in a small East German town to take a new job at a tiny hospital. She doesn’t seem too happy to be there, though clearly the doc in charge – Ronald Zehrfeld, who somewhat resembles Brendan Fraser and is equally charming — takes an immediate shine to her. It’s 1980, as the movie’s press notes tell us, though if you go in cold, you probably won’t be able to immediately discern when and where the action is taking place. That’s probably intentional, and the approach works. This isn’t The Lives of Others, where the East-West divide is practically a major character; instead, it’s just a story about people living in constrained (and at times dangerous) circumstances and yearning for something more. Barbara is a drama and a romance, and it’s also laced with dry, delicate humor. There were times when the German members of the audience would laugh at a joke that I couldn’t quite get, and yet Petzold — the director behind the 2007 drama Yella, also featuring Hoss — is such a master of tone and mood that I could feel the vibrations of the movie’s subtle humor, even if I’d be hard-pressed to articulate it. Barbara starts out slow and then moves even slower — but by the end, somehow, it got me in its gentle clutches. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There are instances when reviewing intentions would be so much easier than reviewing actual movies, and Red Tails, which was directed by first-timer Anthony Hemingway but conceived, shaped and willed into being by George Lucas, is one of them. Red Tails is – or is intended to be – a rousing comic-book adventure based loosely on real-life events: The picture follows a group of Tuskegee Airmen as they shoot down German fighter planes and blow munitions transport trains to smithereens. In between missions, they fight more personal battles, against insidious racism and bigotry. It’s a great idea to make a movie, in 2012, about the Tuskegee Airmen, who broke ground as the U.S. military’s first African American aviators: They represent a chapter in history that’s been underexplored, certainly in the world of movies. But it’s a shame the idea had to come from George Lucas, whose enthusiasm for his subject translates mostly into a peculiar strain of inept awkwardness. Even if Red Tails becomes a hit – and it just might – it still represents a missed opportunity for greatness. Red Tails focuses chiefly on two fictional pilots, Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker) and Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo), both members of the Air Corp.’s 332 nd Fighter Group stationed in Italy, guys with very different styles but bound by years of friendship. Easy follows all the rules, rarely straying from the straight-and-narrow (though he does, as it turns out, have his own demons to fight); Lightning is the hotdogger who’ll go out of his way to shoot down that random Nazi, even when it means going against orders. He also has the kind of confident swagger that earns him the love of a pretty Italian girl, Sofia (Daniela Ruah); he’s so charming and well-mannered that even Sofia’s old-world mama approves of him. The cast of characters milling, and flying, around Lightning and Easy include Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds), who wants nothing more than to be a fighter pilot even after an injury compromises him, and David “Deke” Watkins (Marcus T. Paulk), the only truly religious pilot in the gang, who keeps a holy card emblazoned with the figure of the deity he refers to as “Black Jesus” close by at all times. In the air, these pilots show a desire to fight hard for their country, and they’ve got the skills to do so. But military brass doesn’t get it – in their eyes, the Tuskegee pilots are inferior and are thus relegated to routine assignments, flying in rickety old junkers. But Colonel A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) pulls off a minor miracle, getting a plum assignment for his boys. That pleases pipe-smoking Major Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to no end – his men have been champing at the bit for a chance like this, and at last they’ll have the chance to prove what they’re made of. The problem isn’t that Red Tails paints its story, and its characters, in brilliant, admittedly corny comic-book colors. (The script, filled with dialogue along the lines of “Germans! Let’s get ’em!”, is by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder.) The approach could have worked, particularly when you’ve got a cast of actors as charismatic as these. Gooding and Howard, both known quantities, are perfectly serviceable here – Howard, in particular, makes even the most stilted dialogue sing, thanks to his silky purr. But even the lesser-known performers here, like the British actor Oyelowo, have some astonishing moments of grace – it’s frustrating to watch them working so hard in a picture that can’t, in the end, do them justice. Because there’s just no way around it: Red Tails is, for the most part, simply a clumsy piece of work, one that revels in ’40s comic-book style without managing to capture any of the emotional resonance of comic-book style. There’s no dramatic rhythm or flow to Red Tails . A terrible thing might happen to a character, only to be rapidly erased by this or that handy distraction. It’s as if Lucas were simply afraid of human feeling, any kind of human feeling, even the kind you often find in comic books. The movie has touches of comedy that, for reasons that are almost impossible to fathom, don’t come off as comic. At one point a white character tells one of the pilots that under cover of night, he’ll be safe from the Nazis: “At least they won’t see you in the dark.” The line should be a joke – it is, in fact, a marvelous if obvious joke – but it falls flat, almost as if Lucas and/or Hemingway (it’s hard to tell who’s at the steering wheel here, though we can safely put most of our money on the former) suffered from a failure of nerve and decided to neutralize it. The picture is full of clunker moments like that, instances where the initial impulse may have been good but the execution is nothing but blundering and inelegant. This is Hemingway’s first film, though he has previously directed episodes of Treme, The Wire, and CSI: NY . If he has a distinctive style, it’s impossible to identify it in Red Tails. The handprints all over the movie clearly belong to Lucas. That’s especially true in the technically impressive dogfighting sequences, which are the best reason to see Red Tails . Watching those planes swoop and skim through the air, sometimes flying in ballet-like formation, at others approximating a chaotic streetfight, is the greatest pleasure the movie offers. That’s not surprising when you consider that Lucas, the eternal, wide-eyed naïf among his generation of filmmakers, presented an early cut of Star Wars with old-movie dogfight footage substituting for the space-combat effects he’d fill in later. Yet not even these glorious, effusive sequences are nearly enough to carry the picture, and in some ways, they do it a disservice. Red Tails is a project that has been dear to Lucas’ heart for years. According to a profile of Lucas in the New York Times Magazine , the filmmaker first commissioned the script in the early 1990s, and although 20th Century Fox is distributing the picture, Lucas is footing all the bills himself. Lucas has admitted that with Red Tails he’s using the comic-book approach to lure a younger audience; he wants them to engage with the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, and his intentions are noble. If only his passion had translated into a more graceful movie, one that didn’t squander the considerable gifts of its cast. In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
