Savannah Guthrie to the rescue? Not after one installment of The Today Show at least. The new anchor’s debut episode was met with a resounding response by her program’s chief rival this week, as Good Morning America scored its first ratings win on a Monday since 2006. Fast affiliate numbers show GMA garnering an advantage of 6,000 households over Today in the key demographic of 24-54-year olds (1.68 million over 1.674 million), along with a 356,000 lead in total viewers (4.425 million over 4.069 million). It’s very, very early, but the dismissal of Ann Curry certainly has not paid immediate dividends for NBC. It looks like the 100 Meters at this month’s Olympics won’t be the only race that network is heavily invested in this summer.
Well, it’s certainly great to be cast in a hit franchise that producers are itching to see the good times roll on. Scarlett Johansson ‘s portrayal as the Black Widow in Marvel’s The Avengers was one component in a half-dozen super-heroes that has brought in over $1.45 billion since its release in late Spring. With money like that rolling in, no point in jiggering with a winning formula. And to keep the good times going, the producers have offered up a record-breaking paycheck for Johansson to reprise her super-hero role. The Hollywood star has been offered a cool $20 million in order to lure her back in the skin-tight black suit for more flips, punches and acrobatics for future adoring audiences in the franchise’s next installment, according to the New York Post . That is “slightly” more than the $19 million Angelina Jolie reportedly received for her turn in The Tourist If that pans out, that will be quite a pay raise from the current film, which is the biggest of the summer tentpoles so far. According to The Hollywood Reporter in May she made between $4 – 6 million plus bonuses, similar to Samuel L. Jackson, but much less than Robert Downey, Jr.’s reported take (Chris Hemsworth, Chis Evans, Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo made about half that). Last month, Forbes magazine dubbed Kristen Stewart the highest paid actress in Hollywood between her Twilight and Snow White and the Huntsman gigs. The two made her a celestial $34.5 million between May 2011 and May 2012. If Johansson accepts the twenty mill. and adds in another pic for good measure, she could well be on her way in topping Stewart. [Source: NY Post via The Huffington Post ]
Well, it’s certainly great to be cast in a hit franchise that producers are itching to see the good times roll on. Scarlett Johansson ‘s portrayal as the Black Widow in Marvel’s The Avengers was one component in a half-dozen super-heroes that has brought in over $1.45 billion since its release in late Spring. With money like that rolling in, no point in jiggering with a winning formula. And to keep the good times going, the producers have offered up a record-breaking paycheck for Johansson to reprise her super-hero role. The Hollywood star has been offered a cool $20 million in order to lure her back in the skin-tight black suit for more flips, punches and acrobatics for future adoring audiences in the franchise’s next installment, according to the New York Post . That is “slightly” more than the $19 million Angelina Jolie reportedly received for her turn in The Tourist If that pans out, that will be quite a pay raise from the current film, which is the biggest of the summer tentpoles so far. According to The Hollywood Reporter in May she made between $4 – 6 million plus bonuses, similar to Samuel L. Jackson, but much less than Robert Downey, Jr.’s reported take (Chris Hemsworth, Chis Evans, Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo made about half that). Last month, Forbes magazine dubbed Kristen Stewart the highest paid actress in Hollywood between her Twilight and Snow White and the Huntsman gigs. The two made her a celestial $34.5 million between May 2011 and May 2012. If Johansson accepts the twenty mill. and adds in another pic for good measure, she could well be on her way in topping Stewart. [Source: NY Post via The Huffington Post ]
Jessica Simpson, her fiance Eric Johnson and daughter Maxwell Drew Johnson posed for a cute photo July 4, with fireworks as the fitting backdrop. Aww. Two-month-old Maxi, who came into the world on May 1, was proud to help America celebrate its 236th birthday along with her happy parents. Here’s a cute and festive family photo: Jess and Eric sure look proud, but Maxwell manages to upstage them, and the fireworks display with an adorable onesie (fortunately not a bikini onesie ). “Hope everyone had a great 4th!” wrote Simpson, 31, who dressed in an appropriately patriotic ensemble for the holiday (no cleavage this time sadly). She’s clearly taken to parenting in these past two months. “From how I sleep to what I think about,” she said earlier this summer, “Maxwell has definitely taken over everything life has completely changed.”
What was Rob Reiner’s last noteworthy film? Was it Ghosts of Mississippi in 1996? The American President , the year before? 1992’s A Few Good Men ? Reiner has continued to work steadily since a phenomenal mainstream movie run in the ’80s into the early ’90s that included, among others, This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally… , though you wouldn’t be faulted for not having paid his recent output much mind. As a director, his tendencies toward sentimentality have thickened and clotted over the years, and films like The Bucket List and Flipped haven’t had enough else to them to balance out what comes across as cloying and clumsy at best and shamelessly pandering at worst. The Magic of Belle Isle , which Reiner directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman, is as sticky-sweet and textureless as a bowl of pudding, though an amused central performance from star Morgan Freeman continually finds nuance and the unexpected where there ultimately isn’t any. The film is set in the present day despite the fact that it opens with the tinkle of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” and offers up a vision of small town life so glowing and nostalgic it’s practically golden-hued, the kind in which a young girl’s befriending and spending a lot of alone time with the older man who’s new to the area is regarded fondly instead of with any alarm or suspicion. Freeman plays that older man, a widowed, wheelchair-bound former writer of successful westerns named Monte Wildhorn who’s set aside his typewriter in favor of a whiskey bottle. For a grumpy, misanthropic alcoholic, he’s still awfully adorable, something that’s partially due to Freeman’s inherent savvy charisma but which is mostly the fault of the script, which wants to sum up Monte’s frustration by having him yell in an empty room. “What’s he yelling at?” asks Finnegan O’Neil (Emma Fuhrmann), who lives next door. “Life,” replies his nephew (Kenan Thompson) sagely. That nephew’s found Monte a house to stay in for the summer in exchange for some pet-sitting, and soon the man is befriending (or being befriended by, despite his objections) the family next door — the recently divorced Mrs. O’Neil (Virginia Madsen) and her three daughters, among them the teenage Willow (Madeline Carroll), middle child Finnegan and little Flora (Nicolette Pierini). Will he find romance, bond with the girl who’s an aspiring writer, discover a new lease on life and start writing again? To quote the wisdom of the Magic 8 Ball, “You may rely on it.” Over the course of The Magic of Belle Isle , Freeman gets to play off of a dog, several cute children, a party clown, a developmentally disabled young man named Karl who likes to bunny-hop around, an eccentric local (Fred Willard) and, of course, Madsen’s winsome, piano-playing divorcée. With all respect to Freeman’s other co-stars, it’s the dog with whom he’s best, delivering wry, eloquent monologues about proper names and behavior for canines and trying, unsuccessfully, to coax the animal into chasing a ball. (“I see the concept of fetch eludes you,” he observes.) Monte’s tentative courting of Madsen’s character, whom he too-cutely insists on calling “Mrs. O’Neil” just as she keeps to calling him “Mr. Wildhorn,” progresses, chastely, only because the two seem to realizes it’s expected rather than because of any convincing touch of romance between them. Freeman and Madsen are, however, good together when not under the burden of conjuring up sparks. Similarly, Finnegan’s hiring of Monte to “teach her about imagination” is structured in ways that are almost intolerably corny — he instructs her, for example, to “look out there and tell me what’s not there” in order to encourage her to make up stories. The only hint of stakes in The Magic of Belle Isle are glanced over briefly in the film’s beginning, when a surly Monte threatens suicide when he’s shuttled off to his temporary home. But aside from that moment, Monte never seems so glum as to be serious about ending things — he’s living in a beautiful house in an idyllic town and has a clear enjoyment for people, which makes the movie easier while making its ideas about depression seem flimsy. The film moves along by the numbers, making no sudden or unexpected movements, and Reiner doesn’t offer any stylistic choices worth mentioning; everything gets creakier toward the end, with the expected mild disagreements and disappointments to be resolved. The only question mark this unexceptional feature leaves open is why Monte initially turns down the Hollywood star who comes in person to ask to buy the rights to his gunslinger character. “Most of the time real life doesn’t measure up to what’s in your head,” he explains to the actor, saying that for once in his life that’s not the case. But there’s no reason why selling his book would necessitate making any lifestyle changes — he does it only to enable the eventual happy ending. In a movie in which nothing happens that you can’t see coming from miles away, it’s proof that you can still manage moments that feel startlingly artificial. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
A bootleg fireworks fail on some random guy’s street? You almost expect that on July 4. But the seventh-largest U.S. city screwing up? That’s more noteworthy! The July 4 fireworks show in San Diego ended abruptly after a malfunction on three barges in the city’s coastal bay caused all the explosives to go off at the same time. An extravaganza that was supposed to last 25-30 minutes was compressed into about that many seconds. Silver lining: those 25-30 seconds were awesome!! San Diego Fireworks 2012
First, Anderson Cooper . Then, Frank Ocean . Now… Megan Rapinoe. In the latest issue of Out , the U.S. soccer star says she’s never hidden her sexuality, but she’s never made it official, either. Until now. Simply put, Rapinoe tells the publication : “For the record: I am gay.” A midfielder for the Seattle Sounders Women, Rapinoe is preparing for the Summer Olympics in London and makes it clear she understands her responsibility now as a role model. “I feel like sports in general are still homophobic, in the sense that not a lot of people are out. I feel everyone is really craving [for] people to come out. People want – they need – to see that there are people like me playing soccer for the good ol’ U.S. of A.” Rapinoe has been dating an Australian soccer player for about three years.
This week in ill-advised moves by would-be comeback starlet Lindsay Lohan : A photo shoot with skeeze-photography specialist Terry Richardson in which Lohan plays with what appears to be a real gun, putting it to her head and even in her mouth. Fun! Richardson, who of late has cornered the market on jiggly Kate Upton coverage, posted the Lohan photos to his Tumblr ” Terry’s Diary ” today but has since apparently taken them down. Of course, this being the internet, nothing’s ever deleted fast enough, or permanently. The photos that remain up feature Lohan in a sheer bra, which might be headline-making enough on their own if the gun pics weren’t so much more disturbing (via Oh No They Didn’t ): After making their way around the blogosphere, the pics have disappeared from Richardson’s Tumblr, and for good reason; this is the last thing Lohan’s team needs as they attempt to explain away her brush with paramedics the other week, and her car accident before that. It’s unclear when these photos were taken, though the original post says they were taken at the Chateau Marmont. And what does it mean? Cavalier art shoot or red flag? Meanwhile, Richardson’s Tumblr features a bounty of titillating artsy-exploitative photos and videos of Upton, including the palate-cleansing, strategically-featured distraction GIF entitled ” Kate Upton getting out of a pool. ” And for more fun with starlets, you can see basically all of Paz De La Huerta ( NSFW ) as photographed by Richardson. [ Terry’s Diary , Oh No They Didn’t ]
The Magic Mike director gave insight into his future endeavors once his hard stop to movie making begins in six months. He told Reuters that a book and even television work may occupy his interests, following in the footsteps of a number of filmmakers who are crossing over to the small screen in the past several years. “I’ve been planning this for five years … I gave myself an out date and I’m right on schedule. I turn into a pumpkin in January,” Steven Soderbergh told Reuters . He also noted that he’s over making what he dubbed as “important movies,” adding that Che satisfied that desire. Following his latest, Soderbergh will finish off the thriller The Bitter Pill starring Channing Tatum, who also stars in Magic as well as Rooney Mara. And he also has the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon shooting this summer. Candelabra may be a window, in fact, into the Oscar winning director’s future since it’s an HBO production. “After I take my self-imposed sabbatical, if I’m going to come back and do something, I think it’s more likely that it would be on television than it would be a movie,” he said.” What do you think of Soderbergh’s move to TV? [Source: Reuters ]
