As expected, the Boy Who Lived raked in oodles of galleons over the weekend, and ought to broom-fly well through Thanksgiving on a raft of positive word-of-mouth. The rest of the movies this weekend? They mostly cowered in fear.
America, this is getting ridiculous. All Wall-E tried to do is save Earth, and now you're repaying the little robot with a series of awards snubs that put its Best Animated Film Oscar into question.
· In their highly anticipated return to rumors of reuniting, Martin Scorsese is attached to direct Robert De Niro in I Heard You Paint Houses, based on the story of a mob hit man reputedly linked to the death of Jimmy Hoffa. Steven Zaillian will adapt the source book. [Variety] · With the Jetsons movie permanently stalled and Huckleberry Hound resting snugly on the bottom of the Hanna-Barbera remake barrel, Warner Bros. has defaulted to Yogi Bear as its live-action/animation hybrid to make entire generations cringe in 2010. [THR] After the jump: Kung Fu Panda reups in 3D, Fringe reups in 2D, and crisis! grips! Bollywood!· Jack Black and Angelina Jolie will return for a 3D Kung Fu Panda sequel, prompting the Chinese scientists so humiliated by the first one to ramp up their pursuit of a fourth dimension for their eagerly awaited response. [THR] · The number of new DVD titles released through August is down almost 15% from the same time last year, 8,661 to 7,381. Come on, Hollywood — let's get going! Harvey can't keep up this pace all by himself! [THR] · The Bollywood film industry is in a standstill today after 147,000 workers in 22 unions (even the dancing girls!) went on strike to protest substandard pay and work conditions. In related news, Warnari Bros. Studios drew fan wrath after the stoppage forced them to delay the release of Hari Puttar 2 to summer 2009. [Variety] · You wanted it (we think), you got it: Fox ordered a full season of JJ Abrams's Fringe. [THR]
On one hand, we're sort of ashamed to have doubled our knowledge of Chinese culture today with one glance at the Los Angeles Times. On the other, a spoonful of sugar — or, more specifically, of Kung Fu Panda — made the medicine go down that much easier as we learned the deep angst gripping China in the wake of the film's success. It's not frustrating enough, evidently, that DreamWorks usurped Chinese authority over everything from animation to the sacred panda itself; rather, the hero Po's abject laziness and mild prurience has an angry 1.2 billion souls searching as we speak:
With the summer solstice finally arriving in our rear-view mirrors over the weekend, join us in recognizing the first real box-office hits and misses of the season:
A just-about-perfect L.A. weekend is now over. Stir a little extra Hazelnut Coffee Mate into your World's Sexiest Assistant mug, and bite absentmindedly into some raspberry-jelly-filled box office numbers. We'll get through this:
Whether you spent your Sunday pridefully snorkeling Jäger bombs in WeHo or simply watching the Lakers' Championship hopes slip away, chances are, you're feeling pretty gnarly this morning. Here's some box-office-numbers hair of the dog to ease your crushing hangover:
Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your regular cheat sheet to what's new, noteworthy and/or doomed among the week's movie releases. Today we break down the hand-to-hand combat between a violence-prone bear and an equally vicious Israeli hairdresser, determine which also-ran will look on pitiably from the sidelines, suss an underdog for the multiplex-allergic among you, and review the best and brightest new DVD's. As always, our opinions are our own, but in keeping with the spirit of this week's Big Two, they are also reliable and brutally precise.
Certainly the sight of Angelina Jolie topless comes as nothing new to even the most casual Jolie breast enthusiast—but that shouldn't mean that every fresh specimen isn't something worth celebrating. Take for example a recent series of photographs, shot by a paparazzo with a telephoto lens the size of a small corn silo, of the actress on a Cannes balcony. Whatever discomfort we may have experienced over this mild invasion of privacy were quickly offset by the excitement of stealing a double-helping glimpse of her Brad-only goodies. We've obfuscated the offending, glorious bits with the star of her latest animated voiceover project: We like to imagine censor-dot Kung Fu Panda is thinking, "Boobies!" to himself in a voice that sounds unmistakably like Jack Black's.
The pandas have been euthanized and Sean Penn is still lighting up despite you on the first full day of the Cannes Film Festival, which we continue to study from our vantage point in the salt mines. We continue to wince at the reaction to the opening-night film Blindness, whose bad buzz we were nervous about back when the festival waited forever to announce its selection. Variety's Justin Chang piled on this morning — "Blindness emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision" — with an only slightly happier James Rocchi following suit at Cinematical.
Then there's the anticipation for Indiana Jones and Whatever the Fuck, whose anxious makers are taking precautions to dodge the lynch-mob on their own tail:
As we noted yesterday, Jack Black took the liberty of announcing that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are expecting twins during a pre-taped interview on The Today Show, which we all got to see for ourselves this morning. One would think Black’s blooper would ruffle Jolie’s feathers, but as this clip shows, Jolie handled the situation with breezy laughter and an amicable Oh Well! shrug. And as it turns out, Black wasn’t the only Kung Fu Panda co-star to fill everyone in on The Chosen Two’s glorious impending arrival. Once again for no apparent reason, fading funny man Dustin Hoffman decided to reveal the twins’ due date during the same segment. When Brangelina is expecting and which nationality Jolie has selected for her next soccer team members, after the jump.
Despite the fact that just about everyone and their favorite blog have known that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are expecting two Chosen Ones this time around, heroin dabbler-turned-UN Ambassador Jolie had yet to officially confirm the news. And until a Today Show interview taped today in Cannes, featuring Jolie and co-star Jack Black promoting their upcoming animated flick Kung Fu Panda, we’re pretty sure the very pregnant actress would have kept her lips sealed until the day those magical spawns open their cherubic eyes for the first time. But thanks to an impromptu joke made by Black, Jolie was put on the spot, and clever Today host Natalie Morales took full advantage of it...
Some day we'll bite the bullet and experience the magic of the Cannes Film Festival first-hand, but in the meantime, there are advantages to keeping one's distance. For starters, we're insulated from the horrors of marketing rituals like the one foisted on the international press this morning, when Jack Black strolled into Cannes with a few dozen minimum-wage costume slaves panda bears in support of his upcoming Kung Fu Panda. As evidenced by the accompanying video, much hammy ass-kicking and a sort of loin-churning, interspecial sexual chemistry ensues.
