Recently in Movies Category

What you do know is that Jason Segel's movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall - that he wrote and stars in - came out on Friday. What you might not know is that he is a Harvard-Westlake School graduate and was part of the Wolverines state basketball championship team in the 1995-1996 season. In fact, Segel actually quit playing ball in his senior season to focus on trying to be an actor - then he appeared in the movies Can't Hardly Wait, Dead Man on Campus and SLC Punk! two years later. His big break came in 2000 when he met Judd Apatow and began appearing in his many projects including the shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and the movie Knocked Up, among others. He is now a regular on the TV series How I Met Your Mother, which recently featured guest star Danica McKellar - also from Harvard-Westlake.

In a story about Segel that appeared in the Daily News on October 30, 1996, Segel said that he would invite his then-basketball teammates - including now-NBA players Jason and Jarron Collins - to his first movie premiere. I wonder if he did.

The 2007-08 Oscars have been handed out and whether you agree with the winners or not, you have to admit, this had to have been the most interesting and diverse group the Academy has ever nominated.
Here's the scorecard of some of the more interesting elements of some of the nominees.

Diablo Cody - winner, Best Original Screenplay - a former stripper with a big visible tattoo of a scantily-clad woman on her arm. Right after the Oscars, semi-nude photos of her showed up on the internet and were labeled 'controversial.' Uh, that shouldn't have surprised anyone. Hello...stripper?

Viggo Mortensen - nominee, Eastern Promises - along with an actor, he's a very accomplished photographer and painter as well as a published poet. His paintings were seen in his movie A Perfect Murder (1998). Speaks several languages, including Danish. The mother of his son is a famous singer from a punk band. Never mind the Lord of the Rings stuff.

Daniel Day-Lewis - winner, Best Actor - Like Mortensen, an extreme Method actor. Day-Lewis sequesters himself during movie shoots. He lived in the wild for a month before he shot The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and not only learned how the shoot that giant rifle he carried thoughout the movie, but he also learned how to hunt and skin animals and he built his own canoe. He is also a skilled woodworker and worked as a cobbler during a long break between movies.

Johnny Depp - nominee - Nothing needed here. We know about him. Particularly his playing the cross-dressing, classically-bad director Ed Wood in the movie of the same name; his creating the Jack Sparrow character by combining Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew together and the characters of Willy Wonka, Edward Scissorhands and real-life writer Hunter S. Thompson. Just the tip of the iceberg with this dude.

The Coen Brothers - winners for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director - very interesting material in each movie. Fargo (1996) illustrates the banality of living in the South Dakota/Minnesota area. While writing Miller's Crossing (1990) they got writer's block and turned to writing something else - which became Barton Fink (1991) - to solve the problem. Barton Fink is about a writer with writer's block (among other things). When they write their scripts, every single sound said by the actors in the film - including the pauses and the 'uh's,' 'um's' and the swearing - is scripted exactly. In each movie, they do everything themselves and together. They edit their own movies under the pseudonym 'Roderick Jaynes.' Even though it's them under an alias, they talk about Roderick Jaynes like that's a real person - an angry and bitter 80ish curmudgeon who they say was bitter about losing in the Best Editing Category.

George Clooney - He was Batman. Like Depp, started on television in the 80's. Was on two different shows about a hospital in Chicago. One called ER and one called E/R. His Dad Nick was a newscaster in a variety of places, including Ohio, where he also hosted a daytime talk/variety show. Aunt was Rosemary.

Paul Thomas Anderson - nominee, as writer and director - his Dad Ernie was an actor who created and popularized the character 'Ghoulardi,' the host of a horror night on a local Cleveland television station. Nevermind that the younger Anderson made Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). What's with the frogs raining down on people in Magnolia?

Tilda Swinton - winner, Best Supporting Actress - openly admits to having a open relationship. Is in a relationship with a painter who is 18 years younger than her, but yet lives platonically with the father of her twins - who is 20 years older than her.

Saorise Ronan - nominee, Best Supporting Actress - nominated at age 13. Her father is actor Paul Ronan. Paul acted with Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in The Devil's Own (1997).

Jason Reitman - nominee, Best Director - son of director Ivan Reitman

Tony Gilroy - nominee Best Director and Best Screenplay - His father Frank is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and writer.

Tamara Jenkins - nominee, Best Screenplay - after being a performance artist, wrote an autobiographical script that became the film The Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) that she directed. Her husband Jim has already won an Oscar for writing the film Sideways (2005).

Julian Schnabel - nominee, Best Director - also a painter and artist. Painted the album cover of a Red Hot Chili Peppers album By The Way. Directed Javier Bardem to his first Oscar nomination in the early 2000's.

Javier Bardem - winner, Best Supporting Actor - third generation in a family of actors. His grandfather performed at the beginning of Spanish cinema and his mother as still active in her career. Bardem doesn't actually drive, but yet did in No Country For Old Men.

Cate Blanchett - twice nominated in acting categories this year - at age 38, already been nominated five times. Twice for playing Queen Elizabeth I in two different movies that weren't related to each other and were ten years apart. Won for playing another Oscar-winning actress (Katharine Hepburn) and nominated for playing musician Bob Dylan in a movie where not only was she Dylan, but so was Heath Ledger and so was a black kid.

Ruby Dee - at age 83, became the second-oldest Oscar nominee.

We all know about Tommy Lee Jones going to Harvard with Al Gore. Oh and don't forget about Marketa Irglova - the young girl who won for Best Song and got the rare opportunity to come back out to do her acceptance speech after Bill Conti chased her off with music. Today's her 20th birthday.

Fresh off his first Oscar Nomination last year, Eddie Murphy wins three Razzie Awards in three different acting categories today for his multiple performances in Norbit. That's a first. Nice job Ed.

He got the awards for Worst Actor

Worst Supporting Actor

and Worst Actress

Ironically, it is also nominated for an Oscar for Best Makeup. (See above)

Just saw the cover of VIBE magazine with an interview with Robert DeNiro and Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson. They are in a new movie called Righteous Kill with some guy named Al Pacino. The cover photo is the best...notice the bat a la The Untouchables.

here is the shot and a still from the film - out in the summer it looks like.

The planning for the 2007 Academy Awards is still in the very early stages. In fact, the pundits predicting frontrunners based on gossip -- without having seen so much as a trailer -- have plenty of time to reposition their forecasts. But I'm really, really hoping that Sacha Baron Cohen wrangles a presenter position. If the ceremony is dragging (and Ellen DeGeneres can only do so much), a little moment with Borat, Baron Cohen's Kazakhstani alter ego coming to the big screen on Nov. 3, could be the right touch to deflate the stuffy self-importance of the event.

Of all the lies and dramatic posturing being lobbed between Tom Cruise's defenders and the studio that just broke its ties with the superstar, Viacom/Paramount boss Sumner Redstone's assertion that "we don't think someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot" is probably the dumbest statement made by anyone who's supposed to be in the creativity business.
The first half of it, anyway. I have no doubt that Cruise's overbearing offscreen behavior of the past year or so has cost Paramount some ticket sales. Women, his most avid fanbase for a couple of decades, have been turned off in droves by - well, the four or five televised outbursts that I had a good time laughing at like everybody else, but am utterly bored with whenever they're referenced now.
But that's fiscal damage, not creative suicide. And whatever you think of Cruise personally - control freak, religious fanatic, the guy who's holding poor little Katie hostage, whatever - the only reason anybody cares about him in the first place is because a lot of us enjoy his work. And the last time I checked, he wasn't slacking on his fierce commitment to deliver the best work that he possibly could.
Mission: Impossible III, his "disappointing" summer blockbuster that triggered the rift with Paramount, was far from a perfect movie. But it was an interesting, ambitious take on the action espionage genre, like both previous installments Cruise starred in and produced. Writer-director JJ Abrams - whom Cruise chose after a long and painstaking development cycle - brought a new intimacy to the franchise that depended as much on good acting as it did pyrotechnics. And Cruise both delivered on the added, anguished thespic demands and gave a plot-hauling star turn, as well as expertly pulling off some death-defying stunts most stars would leave to their doubles.
You may or may not have liked this approach to the franchise, but you can't say that MI:3 was just another lazy sequel. There is never anything slack about a Cruise performance, whether he's stretching his abilities in daring new directions (Collateral, Magnolia, Jerry Maguire), letting great directors do whatever they will with him to fulfill their vision (Spielberg most successfully in Minority Report, Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut, Stone in Born on the Fourth of July), or channeling his charisma and energy into saving grace notes for misbegotten efforts (Last Samurai, Vanilla Sky).
To me, that's all that really matters about Tom Cruise, and why I'll still look forward to every movie he makes - unless the movies give me reasons not to. I'm sure I'll also enjoy making fun of any megalomaniacal outbursts that come from him in the future, and will share wicked laughs with friends over the embarrassing rumors yet to be cooked up about him - until they become as tedious as the current overworked crop, anyway.
But jeez, shouldn't good movies be the primary thing fans, studios and stars want? I know that sounds simplistic and, in today's irrational pop culture, utterly unrealistic. But that doesn't make it wrong. And it makes a star with the creative vitality of Tom Cruise an even more valuable asset.

Well, you can blame everything from overhyped Internet interest to the title to people just not being much in the mood for airborne fright films in these terrorism-troubled times for Snakes on a Plane's disappointing box office debut.
But let me suggest one thing that wider evidence seems to indicate might have earned the Sam Jackson cult item a few million more bucks - and a lot more respect: they should've screened the mother#%@&*! thing for critics.
SoaP got a majority of positive reviews after it opened late last Thursday night. They just couldn't be printed in time to make the Friday newspapers, where both critical OKs and the very mention of the movie would likely have had the same effect it does on most films: convince thousands of fence-sitters that it was worth spending their money on.
Some fright films released earlier this year that did have the courage to let critics preview them, such as Hostel and The Hills Have Eyes, enjoyed better opening weekend attendance than the uber-promoted SoaP did. Admittedly others, like the acclaimed Slither, did not, and unpress-screened horrors such as Underworld:Evolution and When a Stranger Calls opened a little better than any of the movies mentioned above.
But evidence is accumulating that even the supposedly critic-proof segment of the moviegoing public is getting the message that, if there ain't reviews on opening Friday, the movie's gotta suck. The Duff sisters disaster Material Girls had a pitiful opening of under $5 million this weekend; it wasn't shown to critics. The previous weekend's Zoom and Pulse also suffered embarrassing debuts without benefit of reviews, good or bad. Step Up, on the other hand, made a surprisingly strong, $20 million-plus bow over the August 11 weekend (about $5 million more than SoaP did a week later); it wasn't exactly a critics' darling, but anyone who wanted to could read a review of it on opening day.
Of course, many other factors influence these recent results; Step Up, for instance, was heavily promoted on MySpace, which makes the Soap-related cries of R.I.P. for Internet movie marketing seem a bit premature. But one thing is looking more and more plausible: the idea that movies of a certain genre or aimed at an undiscerning target audience don't need reviews is just what it has always been, a marketing fad that's destined to fade.