Get Paid To Promote, Get Paid To Popup, Get Paid Display Banner

Frankly My Dear...

    Frankly My Dear...

    Jamie Fox, Leo D. and Samuel L. are Tarantino’s stars for ‘Django Unchained’

    Posted: 14 Sep 2011 03:33 AM PDT

    Quentin Tarantino’s “Southern” Spaghetti Western, “Django Unchained,” landed another major player Tuesday when Samuel L. Jackson returned to the Tarantino team to play a heavy in the film, about a freed slave, vengeance, firearms, etc.

    Jamie Foxx has the title role. Christoph Waltz (a German bounty hunter) is in it, and Leo DiCaprio plays a sadistic plantation owner. There’s been talk that Tarantino has a re-invention role for Kevin Costner in it, too (the plantaiton owner’s henchman. And maybe Kerry Washington.

    Gerald McRaney of “Get Low” and TV’s “Deadwood” is also reportedly on board.

    It’s to be another all-star exploitation genre piece. Is he overwhelming it with A-listers and former A-listers? We’ll see. This thing sounds more “spaghetti Southern” (Tarantino’s own description) than Western the more one reads about it. Why do I keep thinking “Mandingo” — slave era exploitation picture — every time some new bit of news about it comes out?

    Julianne Moore, Nathan Lane, Greg Kinnear– ‘The English Teacher’

    Posted: 14 Sep 2011 03:22 AM PDT

    Craig Zisk — another vet of cable TV’s best shows (“Weed,” “The Big C”) — has landed a feature deal, to direct a comedy about a repressed high school English teacher (Julianne Moore) who steps out of character when she encourages the school to mount a  production of a former student’s play.

    Nathan Lane is the drama teacher (naturally), and Greg Kinnear? Not sure yet.

    Tonight’s screening: ‘Moneyball’

    Posted: 13 Sep 2011 04:29 PM PDT

    The buzz on “Moneyball” out of Toronto is deafening. “Oscar contender,” “Brad Pitt’s Oscar shot,” the works.

    I enjoyed the Michael Lewis book it is based on, love baseball, love the idea of stats nerds remaking the game by figuring out who REALLY has value as a player — whose walks and home runs lead to wins.

    So yeah, I am psyched to see this one in the Big O tonight.

    Tyler Perry — Forbes’ highest paid male in entertainment

    Posted: 13 Sep 2011 11:45 AM PDT

    It makes no difference that he wears a dress in his most lucrative films. Tyler Perry is getting paid, baby. And how.

    Forbes Magazine says that he pulled in $130 million, year over year, this past one. And that’s some $17 million more than super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, more than Spielberg. More than Elton John, for that matter. And they’re all over $100 million per year.

    Wowza.

    Perry owns his properties, produces his own films and takes the lions’ share of the back end distribution cash. So yeah, he doesn’t have to make $100 million hits every time out to get filthy rich.

    ‘Point Break: The Remake’ gets a green light

    Posted: 13 Sep 2011 05:20 AM PDT

    It’s one of those Interweb rumors that just wouldn’t go away, picking up steam around the time of Patrick Swayze’s death from cancer.

    Now, that “Point Break” remake is a go. Alcon and Warners are remaking the Keanu/Swayze/Busey heist picture from 1991, one of the early successes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Hollywood career.

    Keanu played a cop who infiltrated a surfing/skydiving gang of “adrenalin junkies” who wore Reagan and/or Nixon masks into their heists. As such pictures go, it wasn’t half-bad. It fought off Hollywood’s obsession with car chases and staged its best ones on foot.

    Truth be told, this may have been Swayze’s best role — as gang leader, guru, surfer ethos embodied. Seek that next thrill, he preached, and Keanu? Whoa. He listened.

    This should be a sought after property by Hollywood’s rising stars. Keanu, of course, would be perfect for the Bodhi role, this time around.

    Movie Review: Tabloid

    Posted: 13 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT

    Before he won his Oscar, before he starting studying infamous murder cases, before taking on Robert McNamara and the whole justification for the Vietnam War, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris was known for finding America’s most colorful eccentrics and putting their eccentricity on film.

    From his debut films, “Gates of Heaven” and “Vernon, Florida” through “Mr. Death,” Morris could be counted on to find all manner of rubes, obsessives and cranks, people who would tell their stories to the camera and let us appreciate both their humanity and how funny they were.

    “Tabloid,” which opens Friday at the Enzian, is something of a throwback film, a bizarre crime tale recounted by the loopy ex-beauty queen alleged to have committed it. And in Joyce McKinney, Morris has found a fittingly weird and funny muse.

    McKinney was somewhat spoiled rural Carolina girl transplanted to the Mormon mountain west. She wanted for little, became Miss Wyoming and then set her sights on this plump but earnest Mormon fellow her own age. But when Kirk, her intended, “vanished,” sent off to Britain to do mission work to perhaps keep him away from Joyce, the beauty queen didn’t take it lying down. She got together the cash, hired a bodyguard and a pilot and plotted a way to “liberate” her fiance, “to get him out of this cult.”

    Since this entailed flying to London, grabbing Kirk and tying him up for a weekend of corrupting, converting sex, the Latter Day Saints there called the cops. Next thing you know, “those crazy newspapers” had labeled Joyce “the beauty queen” who had “manacled a Mormon” to save him.

    Morris invented this gadget, years ago, that allows him to look his subjects straight in the eye when he’s interviewing them, causing them to answer directly and sincerely, to the camera. He usually lets them tell their stories, uninterrupted. But here, his chortles, snorts and incredulous questions off camera suggest a guy who is sympathetic to every version of this tale that each person telling it gives him.

    Thus, he indulges Joyce’s blunt, narrow-minded shots at Mormonism — “They made me think they were a CHURCH!” — her outright mockery of “Temple garments” (“Magical underwear”). He even uses a former Mormon missionary to buttress her accusations of the weirdness of this recent offspring of mainstream Christianity.

    And Morris encourages a bemused former co-conspirator and a couple of tabloid veterans who remember this late 1970s scandal to have a laugh at Joyce’s expense — at her obsessive behavior, her “acting” ability, the fun she seemed to have both in court and on the run from the law (silly but functional disguises).

    “It was a perfect tabloid story,” the Brit Peter Tory, who covered it, remembers.  “Kinky sex, religion, kidnapping, a beauty queen.”

    It’s a film shot and edited in a tabloid-mimicking style, with big headlines, sexy photos, ironic cartoons and sarcastic stock footage of 1970s fashions, Mormon values and the like.  And at its center is the riveting, riotously funny and yet seemingly sincere Joyce — plainly a bit delusional, plainly given to living her own lie about what really happened back then, but just as plainly a woman with enough credibility to make you wonder if her version of events isn’t closer to the truth than the one that hit the tabloids.

    Well, maybe just a teensy tiny bit closer.

    MPAA RAting: unrated, with nudity, adult sexual themes, profanity

    Cast: Joyce McKinney, Kent Gavin, Peter Tory

    Credits: Directed by Errol Morris, produced by Julie Bilson Ahlberg and Mark Lipson. A Sundance Selects release. Running time: 1:27