Being on the bubble is real TV suspense
Michael Stecher, who has worked in Hollywood for 18 years, sees himself as high royalty in an unenviable kingdom. The El Segundo father of two has been fired so many times that he refers to himself as "The King of Canceled TV Shows." Twice he received pink slips at lunch.
"People don't realize how fast it can change," said Stecher, who has been let go five times. Now he's a camera operator for CBS' military action drama "The Unit." "There is zero security in this gig."
CBS just announced they will axe 'The Unit'.
Shia LeBeouf directs music video
Fliers and newspapers stenciled with Weathermen logos plaster the dingy, brown-stained exterior of a makeshift LA club, and the intoxicating scent of spray paint and glue hangs thick in the afternoon air. The alleyway borders the American Apparel warehouse parking lot and is the second location on day one of the “I Never Knew You” music-video shoot, the first single off rapper Cage’s upcoming album, Depart From Me, and the directorial debut for actor LaBeouf.
Directors start tweeting from the movie set
Some time over the past two months, in between posting over two thousand 140-character reports, replies, photos and live-streaming videos to his 11,000-strong Twitter tribe, Robert Luketic has been directing a Hollywood blockbuster.
The Lionsgate thriller, working title Five Killers, stars A-lister Ashton Kutcher as a retired hitman who is pursued by assassins. Kutcher is flanked by a stellar support cast that is headlined by Katherine Heigl, Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Mull.
At press time the film was still shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, after a fortnight stint in and around the glitzy locales of France’s Côte d’Azur.
Cannes best films are not in competition
Cannes’ more artistically successful offerings have been anything but lighthearted affairs, beginning with French director Jacques Audiard’s brutally intense and often quite brilliant prison drama, A Prophet, which follows an illiterate French-Arab inmate during his six-year odyssey from new kid on the (cell) block to holy underworld kingpin of the title. Along the way, Malik (impressively played by newcomer Tahar Rahim) learns how to read not only books but people, too, much of that education coming at the hands of a merciless but fair-minded Corsican gang leader (the electrifying Niels Arestrup, who was the father in Audiard’s previous The Beat That My Heart Skipped), until the pupil overtakes the master, playing every one of Paris’ rival gangland factions to his own advantage.
MOVIE OPENINGS – May 22, 2009
TERMINATOR SALVATION
Director: McG
Stars: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
The Plot: John Connor (Bale) is joined in his attempt to defeat Skynet and its army of Terminators by Marcus Wright (Worthington), a man who apparently has been rescued from the past, though Connor wonders if instead he's been sent from the future as a foil to his plan. As Connor and Wright push deep into the heart of Skynet, they get closer and closer to learning the secret behind the organization's mission to wipe humankind off the planet.
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN
Director: Shawn Levy
Stars: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Amy Adams
Studio: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
The Plot: Security guard Larry Daley (Stiller) infiltrates the Smithsonian Institute in order to rescue Jedediah (Wilson) and Octavius (Coogan), who have been shipped to the museum by mistake.
DANCE FLICK
Director: Damien Wayans
Stars: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans
Studio: Paramount Pictures
The Plot: Street dancer Thomas Uncles (Damon Wayans, Jr.) is from the wrong side of the tracks, but his bond with the beautiful Megan White (Shoshana Bush) might help the duo realize their dreams as the enter in the mother of all dance battles.
EASY VIRTUE
Director: Stephan Elliott
Stars: Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
The Plot: A young Englishman (Barnes) brings his glamorous American bride (Biel) home to meet his family, and she arrives like a blast from the future, blowing their entrenched British stuffiness out the window.
THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Stars: Sasha Grey, Chris Santos
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
The Plot: A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl (Grey) meeting the challenges of her boyfriend (Santos), her clients, and her work.
Drag Me to Hell: Sam Raimi’s Genre Curse
If there's one film magazine connected with the Cannes festival, it'd probably be Positif or Cahiers du Cinema, French journals whose passionate seriousness perfectly suits the movies that usually show here. This year, though, the festival's journal of record should be the American horror-movie mag Fangoria.
The official Cannes selection has included all manner of genre films: a sexy vampire shocker (the Korean Thirst), a guns-n-guts crime film (Vengeance, from Hong Kong) and two gory psycho-thrillers about devoted mothers gone bad (the Korean Mother and Lars von Trier'sAntichrist). Also, to stretch the point just a little, we've had three movies, in radically different tones (Pixar's Up, Pedro Almodovar'sBroken Embraces and Antichrist) about the stages of necrophilia — people coping not with the death of a loved one but with the love of a dead one. And this is only the eighth day of the 12-day bash.
Now comes Drag Me to Hell — a great genre title if there ever was one — from Sam Raimi, who made zillions with his Spider-Man movies but is revered by horrorphiliacs for another trilogy, his cheapo-creepo Evil Dead movies. Taking a break from A-movie budgets, subjects and actors, Raimi and his brother Ivan concocted a script about the effects of a gypsy curse on a basically nice person who does One Bad Thing.
Pedro Almodovar “Embraces” ’50s melodrama in new film
While making a light comedy, a director and his female star engage in a passionate love affair that prompts emotional fireworks, jealousy and betrayal, not only for them but for those close to the pair, in "Broken Embraces." These dual movies -- the on-set comedy and the off-set melodrama -- allow the prolific and always engaging writer-director Pedro Almodovar to speculate on cinema itself, on its imagery, iconic touchstones and capacity for clandestine observation.
While the movie as a whole is thoroughly engrossing and all the movie references and subplots involving the cinema world undoubtedly enrich his story, this is a pretty minor film from the filmmaker. It feels like more of an exercise in plotting and movie nostalgia than a story about real people.
Porn star Sasha Grey gets a mainstream role
Oscar-winning writer-director Steven Soderbergh isn't coy about his motive for casting Sasha Grey in his low-budget indie drama "The Girlfriend Experience." In a movie entirely populated by nonprofessional actors, who better to portray a $2,000-an-hour Manhattan call-girl than one of the most prolific and in-demand adult film stars working the so-called San Pornando Valley?
Still, he cops to a certain degree of exploitation. Soderbergh gave Grey the lead role in the film (which opens Friday) fully intending to milk her X-rated fame for all it is worth. "I was very much counting on the fact that the interest in her would be greater than the interest in the movie," Soderbergh said. "We would be drafting off her notoriety rather than vice versa. I needed her. That's no different than getting Brad Pitt to be in your movie, albeit in a different context."
Tarantino’s “Basterds” surprisingly tame war movie
History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino.
While his "Pulp Fiction" arrived late at the Cannes Film Festival and swept away the Palme d'Or in 1994, his World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds" merely continues the string of disappointments in this year's competition.
The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.
Drag Me to Hell: Sam Raimi’s Genre Curse
If there's one film magazine connected with the Cannes festival, it'd probably be Positif or Cahiers du Cinema, French journals whose passionate seriousness perfectly suits the movies that usually show here. This year, though, the festival's journal of record should be the American horror-movie mag Fangoria.
The official Cannes selection has included all manner of genre films: a sexy vampire shocker (the Korean Thirst), a guns-n-guts crime film (Vengeance, from Hong Kong) and two gory psycho-thrillers about devoted mothers gone bad (the Korean Mother and Lars von Trier'sAntichrist). Also, to stretch the point just a little, we've had three movies, in radically different tones (Pixar's Up, Pedro Almodovar'sBroken Embraces and Antichrist) about the stages of necrophilia — people coping not with the death of a loved one but with the love of a dead one. And this is only the eighth day of the 12-day bash.
Now comes Drag Me to Hell — a great genre title if there ever was one — from Sam Raimi, who made zillions with his Spider-Man movies but is revered by horrorphiliacs for another trilogy, his cheapo-creepo Evil Dead movies. Taking a break from A-movie budgets, subjects and actors, Raimi and his brother Ivan concocted a script about the effects of a gypsy curse on a basically nice person who does One Bad Thing.