Movies

The Los Angeles Times' Rachel Abramowitz has a somewhat dismal interview with Woody Allen on his new, Scarlett Johansson-helmed movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He talked about experiencing life from his bed, how fame and fortune is devastating and thankless, and how he laments that he can't play some cool guy in a movie like Robert DeNiro can so he's stuck playing the intellectual or the lowlife.

She wrote:

From the way Allen is talking, one would assume it's the eve of the release of one of his misfires, the platoon of piffles including "Celebrity" and "Anything Else" that followed the public scandal of his 1992 breakup with Mia Farrow, the ugly accusations (denied and never proven) of child abuse and his later marriage (now 10 years running) to Farrow's adopted daughter, then-22-year-old Soon-Yi Previn.

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Oi gevald! It's official: Brad Pitt will play one of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards in the director's "spaghetti western." Mr. Pitt will star as Lt. Aldo Raine, a Southern beau who leads a band of Jewish rebels to fight the Nazis in German-occupied France.

A source familiar with the script told Reuters that Mr. Pitt will play a Samuel L. Jacksonin Pulp Fiction-type outlaw character who says things like "we're gonna be doing one thing, and one thing only, and that's killing Nazis." Work that scowl, Brad!

The Weinsteins are banking on Inglorious Bastards returning them to box office glory. They plan to start shooting Oct. 13 and hope to have it finished for the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The riveting tale of one-time real estate baron Robert Durst – estranged older brother of developer Douglas Durst – has been made into a feature film starring Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling. Called All Good Things, the film will debut in 2009.

Its release will mark yet another painful episode for the otherwise upstanding Durst family, which is known in New York City for its impressive property holdings (including the new One Bryant Park and the Conde Nast headquarters at 4 Times Square), its environmentally sustainable building practices, and its upstate organic farm.  read more »

Tropic Thunder, the latest from writer-director-actor Ben Stiller, doesn’t open till August 13, but the trailer has been playing in theaters (and on laptops everywhere) for seemingly forever. The very funny—and often razor-sharp—big-budget film about the ridiculousness of big-budget films lampoons just about everything under the Hollywood sun. Per the previews, you probably know that Ben Stiller plays a fading action star; Jack Black, a tubby Warhol-wigged comedian; and Robert Downey Jr., an Australian method actor who undergoes an experimental pigmentation procedure in order to play an African-American soldier. All three are thrown together on the set of yet another Vietnam War picture (cue CSNY and the majestic helicopters!), where Steve Coogan is their bedraggled director.  read more »

A kind of Judd Apatow-style male version of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love will be made into a movie (before the book it's based on is even published). Ha! Take that, Oprah! It's called Drink, Play, F@#K!

The Hollywood Reporter reports:

The soon-to-be-published "Play," by comedy writer Andrew Gottlieb, tells the fictional story of Bob Sullivan, a man who, seeking solace after his wife leaves him, goes on a bender in Ireland, takes a gambling jaunt to Las Vegas and a embarks on a sex-tourism trip to Thailand. Grove Press is scheduled to publish the tome early next year.  read more »

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SIXTY SIX
Running time 93 minutes
Written by Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor
Directed by Paul Weiland
Starring Greg Sulkin, Eddie Marsan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Newton

Paul Weiland’s Sixty Six, from a screenplay by Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, based on a story by Mr. Weiland, reminds me of a Brazilian film I saw not so long ago. That film climaxed with Brazil’s victory in the World Cup competition just as Sixty Six commemorates the year that England won the coveted international soccer title. I must say that the Brazilian movie on the subject had a more interesting political subtext than Sixty Six, which has been subtitled in the production notes as A True…ish Story, and is reportedly patterned after Mr.  read more »

ELEGY
Running time 108 minutes
Written by Nicholas Meyer
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Starring Penélope Cruz, Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard

Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, from the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the short novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth, enters a metaphysical region between life and death that few films have ever dared to explore. Ms. Coixet and Mr. Meyer have managed to capture much of the bittersweet humor of Mr. Roth’s brilliant confrontation of old age, his own included. The director and the scenarist are aided in no small measure by a very accomplished cast headed by Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh, Mr.  read more »

We had high (heh) hopes for Pineapple Express, the latest boy-bonding-bordering-on-romance comedy from the prolific Judd Apatow universe. After all, it had what seemed like a perfect storm of elements going for it: the onscreen reunion between Freaks and Geeks’ Seth Rogen—who co-wrote the script with Superbad partner Evan Goldberg—and James Franco; a quirky, entertaining premise (more on that later); and behind the camera, indie favorite David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls). We went in wanting to fall in love. We left feeling confused and—gasp!—questioning the staying power of Apatow and his gang.

Pineapple Express asks this question: What would an action movie look like if the two would-be heroes were as constantly high as an elephant’s eye? Mr.  read more »

Mark Ruffalo is getting in the director's chair for his new project: Sympathy for Delicious. It's a movie starring Mr. Ruffalo's friend Chris Long as an L.A. DJ "Delicious" Dean O'Dwyer who is paralyzed in a wheelchair (Mr. Long is actually paralyzed in a wheelchair in real life).

Delicious develops some kind of divine gift to cure the sick, according to Variety. Mr. Ruffalo will be making his directorial debut and starring in the movie as a priest who helps out Delicious; James Franco (yum) will play a trickster singer in a rock band who tries to "exploit" Delicious's gift.

James Franco gave an interview to MTV about the movie last week:

The project, a “drama that’s got comedy in it,” as Franco described it, has been kicking around since at least 2004, when Ruffalo mentioned the film while doing press for “13 Going on 30.

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Sarah Jessica Parker's The Ivy Chronicles will get a sinful treatment from the writer producers just hired. Aline Brosh McKenna, who scribed The Devil Wears Prada, will get typing soon.

As we told you, Ms. Sex and the City will play Ivy Ames, an upper-middle-class New York single mom who gets divorced and loses her high-powered job in one fell swoop. The plot is based on chick-lit writer Karen Quinn's novel. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the project has drawn comparisons to Prada as well as to The Nanny Diaries and The Starter Wife.