Ryan Gosling has been given the green light to turn a screenplay he wrote into a major motion picture, and he's tapped Christina Hendricks to star in it.
Coming off an Emmy win and a succession of dues-paying mainstream offerings, Paul Giamatti has clearly earned enough clout to call his next shot the way he wants it. And while some guys would just just wander off to make the "most awful movie they can find," Giamatti has his heart set on a surefire American classic: Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She Vampires.The film would cap a dream dating all the way back to 2002, when Giamatti stumbled upon the cult hit Bubba Ho-Tep in a New York art house, submitting his sizable imagination to the story of an over-the-hill Elvis (Bruce Campbell in the role of his life), a black JFK, and their joint battle against a mummy cowboy in the nursing-home showdown of the century. As Vanity Fair notes today, the closing credits jokily promised a sequel, but the overwhelmed Giamatti wasn't letting Campbell or director Don Coscarelli off the hook. There would be a Bubba franchise, and Paul Giamatti would kick-start it to life, attaching himself as Elvis's doomed manager Col. Tom Parker:
In a summer where we seemingly can't go a full day without facing down some newer, denser wave of comic-book effluvia, the recently released Watchmen teaser is up there among the more nerve-rattling encounters we've endured. It may just be the destabilizing Billy Corgan whine, or poor Billy Crudup writhing in CGI anguish, or the idea that Zack Snyder is actually the "visionary director of 300" to which the ad copy refers. Or maybe it's just that the only teasers that seem to captivate our attention any longer feature either vaguely racist chihuahua dance numbers, Brad Pitt aging backwards in Spanish or some permutation of men saving Earth — usually brooding and often in slow-motion. Maybe it's just that we need to get out more. In any case, here you go. Did we mention Billy Corgan whines? Never mind. [Empire]
No sooner did the Universal logo appear onscreen than straight men around the world shrugged at the sight of the new Mamma Mia! trailer, a glittering, sensory-overloading hint at this summer's forthcoming tribute to the revolving institutions of ABBA, Meryl Streep, and general gayness.
Last Wednesday, we momentarily paused from the unrelenting gloom of our StrikeWatching activities to sneak in a smile at the goat-despoiling adventures promised by an ad for Kill Buljo, a Norwegian import in which a katana-wielding, Boratesque protagonist embarks on a Kill Bill-inspired quest for revenge upon the fiends who slaughtered his family. Today, we again briefly pause from our unhealthy immersion in the ongoing labor strife to share the film's dubbed, English-language trailer; while we were disappointed there's no cameo by the cloven-hoofed object of Buljo's affections, it does feature a poignant reaction shot of a startled cow (and a mysterious flash of a pelvic thrust), happily suggesting that our hero's appetite for ruminant-buggery might extend to comely members of the bovine family.
Should we be surprised that the largest visual Beowulf marketing placement in Tinseltown is a customized gift-wrap of the Public Storage facility squatting at the corner of Santa Monica and Highland? Nay! The well-researched placement is simply Paramount's attempt to sequester a share of the eyeballs normally reserved for Apple's longstanding "We are fucking huge, and we are here to stay" tribute to dancing and antisocial behavior directly across the street.
Today, the creative dream team of American Idol host/tireless megaproducer Ryan Seacrest and America's Got Talent judge/off-key finale-stealer David Hasselhoff have announced their promising collaboration on Tales From the Hoff, a scripted E! series that should provide a much-needed respite from the celebrity-fellating network's nonstop countdown-related programming. If you've ever furrowed a brow at the actor's repeated attempts at sustaining a post-Baywatch show business career and thought to yourself, "This man's sad quest to remain relevant to a generation that's never even heard of Knight Rider would make a darkly funny television show," then this upcoming project will quickly find itself on your Season Pass list, according to Var:
Hoping to further exploit the seemingly inexhaustible demand for stories about the Denali-jacking, coke-panted, briefly-incarcerated-but- frequently-rehabbed starlets whose misadventures move as much tabloid product as the public can choke down, producer Joe Nasser—you may know him as the mastermind responsible for the upcoming Willa Ford vehicle Anna Nicole—today announces his intention to eventually bring Celebutard: The Motion Picture (inferior working title: Hollywood Brats) to the big screen. Reports the Times:
[Note: video possibly NSFW] The release of the red-band trailer for Beowulf finally provides a promising demonstration of the powerful motion-capture technology director Robert Zemeckis has been trying to perfect over the last handful of years. While earlier versions of his moviemaking technique were able to produce nothing more impressive than disturbingly dead-eyed, animated children in The Polar Express and somewhat less disturbingly dead-eyed, animated children in Monster House, the director's mainframes can now generate computer-enhanced images of a naked, golden Angelina Jolie so compellingly lifelike that audiences will momentarily forget about all the fantasy-destroying, do-gooding baggage she's accumulated since acquiring her debilitating orphan-collecting addiction.
Back in the good old days of the web—say, circa April of 2007—when one's CAA-backed, Will Ferrell-supported comedy video-sharing site had an amusing clip starring an attention-grabbing A-list talent one wished would go "viral," one simply posted it and let the internets work their magic, confident that endlessly forwarded links would efficiently deliver their work to the eyeballs of bored employees across the globe. Now, however, we live in far more complicated times, when newly retained PR firms dare not leave anything to chance, as evidenced by this e-mail invitation enlisting the help of the "internet press" to turn Bill Murray into Funny or Die's next drunken, swearing baby:
Every time we attempted to watch more than 30 seconds of Dog the Bounty Hunter, we always found ourselves wishing that someone would replace the pro-wrestler-looking guy with the ass-length mullet with a bunch of
chicks who would occasionally type on laptops, roundhouse-kick heavy bags, and say things like, "We're gonna have to Tazer this guy!" or "I'm gonna bring him out with my big, sexy, luuurrring ways." A thank you, then, is owed to Court TV for so thoroughly meeting all our bounty hunting show needs, as demonstrated in this Today clip. We might finally have something else to check out on the network after we're done watching freakishly thin Star Jones learn to live with the decreased capacity of her walnut-sized stomach.
In the interest of bringing a small amount of closure to the Lohan-related events we've so exhaustively covered this week, we note the unsurprisingly low Tomatometer score for her cinematic sideshow I Know Who Killed Me, which, in fairness, reflects the opinions of only a small group of critics due to the studio's understandable decision (really, hasn't everyone suffered enough?) not to pre-screen it for the media. But to judge from this first wave of nearly unanimous negative reviews, not even the prospect of sharing an inappropriate laugh in a theater sparsely populated by fellow trainwreck fans is worth the price of a ticket.
Last night's edition of brain-smoothing dinnertime celebrity newsmagazine Extra offered up a crazy-flavored appetizer for the upcoming Bravo reality series, Hey, Paula!!!, in which the American Idol judge unscrews the top of her head and allows the world an opportunity to climb inside and stroll around the church-parking-lot-quality carnival that is her mind. The brief clip reveals little, but now we do know this: her "best friend" is her stylist (always a sign that a famous person has disengaged from reality), there are many fluffy dogs—some of which will defecate on camera—underfoot to provide believable excuses for medication-induced mishaps, and we will get some glimpses of the Idol-related "exhaustion" incidents that are the reason the show exists in the first place. Unfortunately, we have to wait until late June before the star can officially welcome us into her home, a greeting that we expect will be followed by Abdul handing us a shopping bag full of half-empty prescription-pill bottles and urging us to makes ourselves at home.
While we're well aware that it's the rapidly approaching Transformers premiere that's inspiring the look of "Look upon my hacky works, ye mighty, and despair!" pride on the face of Michael Bay, we imagine that not everyone who finds themselves confronted with the countdown clock currently ticking away on the fauxteur's web presence will know exactly what will happen when it reaches zero. Still, the unlabeled doomsday timer is an appropriately unsubtle reminder that no individual Bay blockbuster is larger than the blowing-shit-up visionary behind it, even if that movie will soon be launched in one of the most over-the-top promotional orgies ever staged in a city known for its love of excess. Reports the LAT:
