File under bonehead move of the day: A 41-year-old man in Recife, Brazil was arrested and charged with using false documents and falsification of public document when he tried to open a bank account with a number of fake IDs in his possession, including one featuring a photograph of Jack Nicholson . According to Globo.com (via The Daily What ), the accused was attempting to open an account in the name of one John Pedro dos Santos when authorities caught on. “There is no resemblance between the suspect and actor,” notes the initial report. Closer inspection pegs the photo as Nicholson’s 2003 portrait by acclaimed photographer Martin Schoeller , published in the pages of EW years ago… so at least the guy’s got good taste? [ Globo via The Daily What ]
Gaga waxes poetic on pearls and baseball in the March issue of V Magazine: “I lay down on the airplane back from Japan, tossing around some dashi, fondling my pearls. I watched the movie Moneyball for the first time. I began to laugh and smile as [Brad] Pitt talked romantically about the game. I suddenly imagined that my pearls were teeny-tiny baseballs. When a player hits a home run, the baseball is flung into an abyss of enigma and screams so great. It travels so far that only rarely is one caught in the bleachers. Where do these balls go? Where do all these wins get encased? Are they in a heavenly baseball land floating around for players who pass to acknowledge? Or do they disappear?” [ V Magazine via Deadspin ]
This is lovely: Ridley Scott is executive producing the “self-portrait” doc Japan in a Day , in the crowd-sourced collected footage vein of Kevin MacDonald’s Life in a Day , to draw attention to and benefit the survivors of Japan’s devastating 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. Fuji will donate 200 cameras to the project, which will cull from submissions uploaded to Youtube on March 11 with all profits reportedly going back to the victims. Now that’s how you show support , Hollywood. [ Deadline ]
Any great awards show monologue skewers the nominees and sets the tone for the festivities to come, and this weekend’s awards tour didn’t disappoint — if you were watching the Film Independent Spirit Awards and not the Oscars, that is. Host Seth Rogen trumped Billy Crystal the day before the Academy Awards when he roasted Hollywood’s brightest along with Spirit Award nominees (like “creepy” — and apparently good humored — Michael Shannon). As for Rogen’s best joke? It’s got to be a toss up between his Ratner snipe (“Without awards season we wouldn’t know how much of a horrible bigot Brett Ratner is”) and his Lars von Trier hiding-in-Argentina bit. Hit the jump to watch the magic. Previously: Backstage at the 2012 Independent Spirit Awards Highlights from Oscar Night 2012 After Billy Crystal’s Tepid Turn, Who Would Make the Ultimate Oscar Host?
Late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s tradition of filming a post- Oscar movie-related spoof continued Sunday night with a “trailer” for Movie: The Movie , the ultimate star-studded epic to end all epics. In addition to featuring a host of stars, from Taylor Lautner to Helen Mirren to Tyler Perry (er, “Daniel Day-Lewis as Tyler Perry as George Washington”), the Kimmel-produced gag covered just about every genre and trope known to the movies. I give it a few years before some suit turns this into a reality. Among the stars in Kimmel’s ensemble: Ryan Phillippe, Jessica Biel, Ed Norton, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas, Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren, Tyler Perry, Meryl Streep, Jason Bateman, Matt Damon, and Colin Farrell. Okay, who am I kidding: I’d totally watch a K-9 buddy cop action sports movie starring Farrell as a SWAT officer partnered with a bomb-kicking Air Bud. Go ahead and make that happen, Hollywood. [via Jimmy Kimmel Live ]
Fully-certified flop Wanderlust might have sold a few more tickets if it had actually done anything remotely interesting with Jennifer Aniston and the rest of its talented female cast . It’s obviously not new that Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with comedic actresses (see also Faris, Anna ). But it is a little sad in the wake of Bridesmaids ’ commercial success – and its Oscars cameo over the weekend – that the rest of the film industry still. Doesn’t. Get It. I did enjoy parts of Wanderlust , when I could peer around all the lazy, tiresome clichés about How Women Act – but it would have been so easy to avoid them! So as a service to writers and female audiences everywhere, here are five suggestions for how to write comedy roles for women that are better than what Aniston had to make do with in Wanderlust . (Spoilers and feminism ahead.) 1. Stop using us as Eve. Bridesmaids was really good at creating drama out of its characters’ own bad decisions – they screwed up, they suffered the consequences, they (sometimes) figured out how to fix things. Wanderlust just blames Aniston’s poor Linda for everything. First she convinces her husband to buy a West Village apartment they can’t really afford – a plan that fails so spectacularly that the couple has to flee New York for, shudder, suburban Atlanta. Then she convinces her husband to stay in the hippie commune with free love, rampaging nudist men, and no doors on the toilet. Ensuing marital problems? Mostly her fault! “I drank the Kool-Aid,” she tells Paul Rudd’s George during their tearful climactic reunion. His better instincts to avoid the commune, its peyote and the bared abs of Justin Theroux are all vindicated, of course. 2. Write age-appropriate characters for protagonists older than 31. Don’t get me wrong, Aniston looks fabulous. I want her wardrobe and her legs. But she’s already played an unemployed 30-something unsure of what she wants to do with her life – six years ago, in Nicole Holofcener’s much sharper Friends with Money . By now both Aniston and the 42-year-old Rudd seem a little too old to play young Manhattanites still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up. And it would be funnier if Linda really embraced the hippie commune life after leaving a steady or rewarding job, not just because she doesn’t have anything better to do with her time. Maybe it’s just the looming prospect of my own 30th birthday and all the significance that’s supposed to have, but watching the 43-year-old Aniston still trying to “pick a major,” as her husband says during an argument, was just depressing. Like watching Private Practice . 3. Give us some friends! Come on, this is pre- Bridesmaids – the entire Sex and the City franchise succeeded by understanding that women like talking to, crying to, and criticizing other women. But Wanderlust weirdly goes out of its way to avoid giving Linda any family, friends or visible non-marriage relationships she can turn to in a crisis. After George loses his corporate bonus-slave job, we’re told that the couple’s fate is dire – so dire that staying with his loud, racist brother is apparently their only viable option (at least until the commune appears on their GPS). At no point is any reference made to any sort of connections Linda might be able to turn to. Wanderlust couldn’t get Catherine Keener to film one scene as an icy careerist sister silently disappointed in her unemployed younger sibling? Or at least make a reference to Linda’s wealthy parents, who lost everything with Bernie Madoff? (You don’t get to be 43 and still picking a major without having spent your adulthood on some serious family financial support.) 4. Character development means more than taking off our shirts. Despite the rumors , we do not see Aniston’s breasts in Wanderlust . We’ll just have to make do with her implied breasts. And in the final overall film, yes, there are probably many more manly bits than lady parts visible on screen. That still doesn’t change the fact that Linda’s major triumph as a character is flashing a TV camera crew, in a “protest” move that was dated by the time she was born. 5. Hot women tend to appreciate hot men, or at least cute men, or at least men who have a passing acquaintance with shampoo. Real-life relationships notwithstanding, Aniston really gets the short end of the free-love stick in Wanderlust . George wants to take advantage of the commune’s partner-swapping rules and sleep with blonde, freshly-laundered Malin Akerman, who’s popped by from a Self magazine cover shoot. Linda reluctantly agrees and succumbs to the shirtless charms of Theroux. He may be dashing in real life, but unfortunately for Linda and female audiences everywhere, he spends most of the movie looking like a squirrel crawled atop his head and died. And really, doesn’t equality start with eye-candy? Maria Aspan is a writer living in New York whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Reuters and American Banker. She Tweets and Tumbls .
“In the movie Wall Street I play Gordon Gekko , a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.” And with that, Michael Douglas stumps for the FBI in a new public service announcement warning investors against financial misdeeds. If Gordon Gekko himself says greed is no longer good, it must be true. Fraudsters, beware! [ FBI via Deadline ]
As The Hunger Games ‘ March 23 release fast approaches, Lionsgate is churning out a steady stream of stills and goodies and tie-ins to stoke the fires of fandom and they’ve put a surprising bit of marketing muscle behind not only star Jennifer Lawrence , but co-star Elizabeth Banks and her supporting character, Effie Trinket. On second thought, maybe that’s not so surprising; Effie’s strikingly gaudy visual look, representative of image-obsessed Capitol culture in the fictional nation of Panem, offers more in the way of marketing opportunities than Katniss Everdeen’s tomboy-turned-teen warrior ensembles. To wit: Effie, as played by Banks, is the face of the official Hunger Games nail polish line , comprised of different shades representing the districts of Panem. (“The odds are never in favor of homely nails,” she preaches on the Hunger Games offshoot site CapitolCouture.pn .) Ironically, Capitol fashions are thought of as ridiculously garish within the Hunger Games world, which explains Banks’s clownish getups as Effie, District 12’s government-assigned escort. The message gets a bit muddled when Lionsgate and its corporate partners sell ” Capitol Couture ” to fans with a positive spin to be coveted and replicated, but fans have a soft spot for Effie and the sentiment suggests more of a cosplay vibe than any legitimate espousal of Capitol culture. (Right?) Anyway, don’t be surprised if you see Effie’s garish styles mimicked IRL sooner or later; Halloween 2012 should be rife with Effie-inspired fan fashions, if the franchise’s enormous popularity is any indication. Here are a few of Effie’s looks to get you started — she never wears the same makeup with more than one outfit, airbrushes on pink foundation, and wears butterfly-adorned falsies, so we obviously already have that in common. [ Facebook , CapitolCouture.pn , Glamour ]
“Nothing will come from this if you win!” joked Seth Rogen as he opened his hosting gig at the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards . “Absolutely nothing. This won’t help you get paid anymore — if anything, it proves you’ll work for nothing.” That may be painfully true for many of the indie film nominees honored today at the annual Spirit Awards, held in a tent on the beach in balmy Santa Monica. But what does it mean that the night’s big winner was the Harvey Weinstein-backed awards season juggernaut The Artist ? The Oscar frontrunner swept the Spirit Awards Saturday in a precursor to what most pundits expect will transpire Sunday night at the Academy Awards ; the black and white silent film took home four awards, including Best Feature, Best Director ( Michel Hazanavicius ), Best Actor ( Jean Dujardin ), and Best Cinematography, further sealing its grip on the 2012 awards race. Along the road to Spirit Awards victory, the $15 million The Artist went up against the likes of more conventional indies. (Rules of eligibility includes films made for no more than $20 million.) In the Best Cinematography category, the Weinstein-backed favorite competed against, for example, Evan Glodell’s Bellflower , a film shot on a production budget of $17,000; for Best Feature it vied with 50/50 , Beginners , Drive , Take Shelter , and The Descendants . Additional winners on the night included Dee Rees’ Pariah , Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (which won Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Shailene Woodley), Asgar Farhadi’s A Separation , Michelle Williams for My Week with Marilyn , and Christopher Plummer for Beginners . (Full winners list here .) In other words – on the whole, not quite so different from the field competing tomorrow at the mainstream Oscars. Maybe that’s why, after Rogen’s fantastic Hollywood-skewering opening monologue, the Spirit Awards started to flag a bit in, well, spirit. By the time the absent Jean Dujardin won Best Actor about halfway through (co-star Penelope Ann Miller, the film’s mascot for the night, accepted on his behalf) the certainty of Artist domination seemed to loom in the air. Once Michel Hazanavicius arrived, fresh from the LAX runway with a police escort minutes before his name was called as Best Director, the sweep was sealed. Would any non-Oscar frontrunning independent filmmaker honorees have gotten the VIP treatment all the way down the 10? Were these the Oscar rehearsals, or the preeminent celebration of American independent film? Well, at least the show had its moments. Highlights included Rogen’s monologue; John Waters acting as MC for the night; Michelle Williams accepting her trophy with a nod to the very first Spirit Awards she ever attended, back when she wore her own clothes and cut her own hair and felt at home in the “room full of misfits, outcast, loners, dreamers, mumblers, delinquents, dropouts – just like me.” Backstage, winners trickled in throughout the night, sharing their own perspectives on craft and the awards show mania. Christopher Plummer , Best Supporting Actor: The jovial Plummer kicked off the winners’ room. “[Michael’s father, his character] was a true character and was written with such affection, such a lack of self-pity. It was fun to do, it made me so relaxed. His marvelous humor against all odds [is] a marvelous lesson to everyone who goes through cancer and dying. He treated it with a sort of carefree sense of humor, no self-pity at all.” Hinting at his next gig on an HBO project, Plummer addressed his continuing career at age 82. “I have to [keep acting] because I may croak at any moment – I have to keep going!” How did he keep from being upstaged by Cosmo the dog on the set of Beginners ? “We had a little private talk, and now that you mention it Cosmo and Uggie , I think our Cosmo was much more human than Uggie . Uggie was just a trickster – our dog had soul .” Shailene Woodley , Best Supporting Actress: “I’m so grateful,” Woodley began. “I don’t know if ‘surprised’ is the right word. I think gratitude kind of fills it all. It’s been such a beautiful experience for me in my life and totally transformed me as a human being, so I’m grateful to have been a part of the film and to have learned so many valuable amazing lessons.” “Every single person involved in the film was incredibly positive and had such gentle, kind, graceful souls. Being on the film as an 18-year-old and experiencing that right as I was about to start my life on my own, it was kind of the catalyst for me coming into my own. I don’t think there are words for me to express my gratitude for that.” As for the Oscars, Woodley has love for the Help star she went up against during the Golden Globes. “I am so stoked for Octavia [Spencer] – she is so awesome! She’s such a nice human being. [Pause] This is crazy. I was not expecting it and I got up there and said um a lot, I’m sure I’m going to be mortified when I watch it.” The Artist crew, Best Feature/Best Actor/Best Cinematography/Best Director: What did producer Harvey Weinstein bring to the film? “His weight,” joked producer Thomas Langmann, who credited Weinstein with taking a chance on The Artist when most backers balked. “We kept going to try to finance this meeting and we had very short meetings… nobody wanted to hear about this one. People told me this is against conventional wisdom. We managed to find the money and wanted to shoot here in Hollywood…” “This movie was made to be a tribute to Hollywood and cinema and especially American cinema. So to come back… and be rewarded by the Hollywood community, is a dream come true.” How’s life treating director Hazanavicius, who’s been on a nonstop tour through the home stretch of his award tour? “It’s not the worst job you can find,” he answered. “You come, you receive awards, everyone is smiling at you and is nice and they tell you you’re talented and have a very funny, charming French accent. [The police escort from LAX] was great. That was the best part.” “It’s physically tiring but the energy is so good that you don’t really feel it,” he said. “We’re really excited and are enjoying every moment we can enjoy.” Looking back to the beginning of their journey, did Weinstein promise the Artist crew he could get them to the Oscars? “Harvey knows how to promise things like that, yes. Sometimes he’s right.” Michelle Williams, Best Actress: “My friend was joking that until now I have been the Susan Lucci of the Indie Spirit Awards!” Williams said, beaming. “I have been luckier and luckier to be working with better and better people.” On how she found her way into Marilyn Monroe: “In a way you had to remove the fact that she was an icon, because that was too daunting… and think of her as an ordinary girl. There wasn’t a direct path in to her, I found. The only way in was time, so much time, and in a way letting her dictate, letting her take shape — letting all this information take shape instead of me trying to control it.” “I just do some work. I just sort of keep my head down, which is a very sort of Montana attitude. There’s this Amish thing, this Quaker thing I like – ‘Eyes to the ground and heart to the skies.’ I just keep focused.” Steve James, dir. The Interrupters , Best Documentary: “It means a lot for a film like this because this is a film about urban violence in Chicago, and when we were making it we never would have anticipated the reaction the film has gotten in the past year. It means a lot for what the film’s about and for us as independent filmmakers – I’ve been doing this now for 27 years, so it means a lot.” Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
It’s almost showtime, folks! Ready your Oscar picks, sharpen your wits, and join Movieline as Hollywood and Indiewood fete the best of the year. Your friendly Movieline editors S.T. VanAirsdale and Jen Yamato will be on hand at @movieline during Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards and Sunday’s Academy Awards , so synchronize your watches and join us in tossing back a few and Tweeting up a storm on the big day(s). First up is the Film Independent Spirit Awards, held annually on the beach in Santa Monica. The breezy affair celebrates the best of “indie” film — I put that in quotes since the word takes multiple meanings these days, though technically Film Independent considers films made for $20 million and under to qualify — and is hosted this year by Seth Rogen . A special credit this year goes to John Waters, who’ll provide “The voice of God” for the proceedings. Follow Movieline on Twitter for live-tweets from backstage in the winners’ room when the show begins Saturday at 1:30pm PT (the telecast will air on IFC that night at 10pm ET/PT) and check back here at Movieline.com for a wrap up of the night. Sunday, of course, is the big dance; join S.T. VanAirsdale and Jen Yamato for an 84th Academy Awards live-tweetstravaganza here at Movieline starting at 7pm ET/4pm PT with the red carpet, where we’ll watch as filmdom’s finest dazzles on their way into Hollywood’s glitziest shopping mall! Then let the bubbly-fueled snark rip at for the Oscars telecast Sunday at 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT , hosted by Billy Crystal . Make sure to leave your Oscar predictions in the comments section before the telecast on Oscar Sunday so we can assign bragging rights to a victor at the end of the night… Catch up on Movieline’s coverage of this year’s Oscar race. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
