Despite bombing at the box office this past weekend with Jennifer’s Body, Oscar-winner Diablo Cody has a new gig to announce today. Of course, it’s not an original story like Jennifer’s Body, which probably did so poorly — in Hollywood’s eyes — for not being based on a familiar property or previously filmed material. Fortunately for Cody, she’s apparently always wanted to adapt the Sweet Valley High books, so both she and Universal are happy.
But are the fans? Personally, I’m not too familiar with the books, but if there’s anything I’d dread more than a beloved property being mined by Hollywood it’s a beloved property being adapted by Cody with her widely derided, trademark Diablo Codyspeak.
Between this, the promise of a future Archie movie and now the news that Universal’s also tackling a Barbie movie, it seems a big week so far for projects involving properties popular among young girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cody wants the Archie adaptation, too, especially if she’s familiar with its minor inspiration on Heathers, which is an obvious influence on her “clever” dialogue.
Of the three, though, I’d actually like to see her script the Barbie film, though it would then have to be an ironic and negative take on the doll brand (obviously a reference to the infamous “math is tough” catchphrase is very necessary) and also Todd Hayneswould have to direct it.
Check out what the other film blogs are saying about Cody’s new venture after the jump:
The news that Disney is buying Marvel for $4 billion has taken the entertainment industry by surprise. But while the deal itself came out of nowhere, it’s not too shocking that these companies would see the benefit of coming together. They each involve an enormous universe full of characters, stories and, most importantly, licensing opportunities. And at a time when original plot ideas are difficult to come by, this acquisition could mean a surplus of comic book and film synopses based solely on the possibilities of team-ups, battles and other crossovers between the Disney and Marvel worlds.
To give you an idea of where this deal could lead, we’ve come up with ten potential movies that we’d love to see come out of the Disney-Marvel relationship. Check them out after the jump. …Read more
As what used to be called The Entertainment Media melts down into one big, incestuous, pageview-mad morass, occasionally something happens that reminds us of why The Good Old Days — when the people who gossiped about startlets and their cocaine habits were not the same people assigned to even half-seriously analyze trends in cinema — were So Much Better. Today the movie nerd contingent on Twitter is piling on The Pool Movies That Ruined a Generation’s Greatest Directors, a Gawker listicle in which author NatashaVC cites where and when a number of “90s directors” (such as Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and, um, Jonathan Demme) sold out by making movies obviously intended to pay for their luxurious lifestyles, embodied by new swimming pools. Even if we’re to take this post as being tongue-in-cheek, the author’s lack of long-term perspective and number of casual errors are fairly stunning. A refutation of points follows after the jump.
No, this is not movie news, but it is a complete horror show, and its a totally slow news day, so I feel justified in posting it. A publicist just sent me this link to a stream of “Lindsay Lohan’s all new single ‘Bossy’ from her upcoming album due this fall.” It’s your standard unremarkable club track, but for whatever reason, this slightly-robotocized male ad pro voice keeps interrupting to remind us that what we’re listening to is “from Lindsay’s upcoming record, in stores, this fall!” Also, there are some pretty amazing lyrics about how people are touching her without her permission.
Oh––here’s a movie angle: would Avant Retarde crapterpieceI Know Who Killed Me have been more successful if a) it had been released now, as Lindsay’s “comeback” film, rather than as the coincidental symbol of her gutter fall? and/or b) she had recorded one plot song for each half of his dual role? Wouldn’t this one be good for the stripper part––wouldn’t it be amazing if acting Lindsay stripped to “real” Lindsay singing (or, at least, “singing”) about not wanting to be touched? Discuss!!!
UPDATE: Um, it looks like the song has actually been floating around for over a month. The fact that someone like me who spends 20 hours a day online had no idea it existed explains somewhat the need for a publicist, I guess.
Ain’t It Cool has pictures from the Morocco set of The Green Zone, a Paul Greengrass film about the war in Iraq starring Matt Damon. AICN’s tipster says the U.S. military has refused to provide props for the film because of the script’s critical stance towards the war. I don’t know that it’s exactly standard practice for the military to lend equipment to Hollywood productions anyway, but LIBERTAS says this is just one more sign that filmmakers who question the war are “enablers of evil willing to squander tens-of-millions in the hope of watching untold numbers of abandoned Iraqis fed into the meat grinder of death squads and terrorists.”
Eugene at indieWIRE notices the similarities between the new poster for Baghead, and the poster for 60s sex farce Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (starring young Elliott Gould….drool). I think the Baghead poster is kind of awesome––I love it that it downplays the totally (and I’m sure somewhat intentionally) unconvincing horror aspect of the film.
Vulture counts down budding filmmaker Madonna’s five worst in front of the camera contributions to the music video canon. The big loser is the partially-animated “Dear Jessie”, which is truly awful, but also enough of an oddity that it’s a shame it’s already been removed from YouTube.
To close the day on the most prurient note possible: the tabloids say Lindsay Lohan’s drinking again, but Radar says she’s just an avid Facebook updater who takes both her sobriety and alleged lesbian lover Samantha Ronson very seriously.
Egotastic has a couple of artfully lit but not particularly safe for work clips from Elegy, which feature a naked Penelope Cruz in bed with Ben Kingsley. I don’t know much about this film––it premiered at Berlinale, where Jurgen Fauth described how Cruz’s “breasts even become a plot point”––but surely, this is the most pre-release attention ever given to anything directed by Isabel Coixet, and that’s probably ultimately a good thing. Still, it points to an alarming trend of indie/art films which position the 65 year-old Kingsley as a sex symbol to much, much younger women. If it takes three examples to make a trend, we can easily find the other two in Kingsley’s next film to hit the American marketplace, Sundance crowd pleaser The Wackness.
Matt Dentler offers exciting news: the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop, which began as a panel at SXSW featuring the sometime George Bluth, Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne, is becoming an actual acting workshop at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Extra layer of excitement: The Playhouse is the very place where Your Blogger was part of a young adults theater company in the early 1990s. There might even be a picture of her at age 13, in heavy stage makeup, on the premises. Be afraid.
Regardless, the class begins June 2nd, and it’s open to the public. Matt has details on how to sign up at his blog, where he also points to the above clip from the SXSW version…courtesy of the YouTube auteur who brought us Howl (For Lindsay Lohan).
With news that a memorabilia collector has purchased a Marilyn Monroe “sex tape”, we now see the old starlet meets new starlet trend coming full circle. As if Lindsay Lohan’s aping Marilyn in her recent New York spread and Mamie Van Doren’s recent nipslip weren’t enough to show us both that today’s darlings are nothing compared to yesterday’s and that the media’s crucifixion of Lohan, Britney, Paris and the rest ignores the fact that actresses have been comfortably wild since before most paparazzi photogs were born, now we have an historical artifact that seems to validate Paris Hilton’s breakthrough via her sex tape “1 Night in Paris.”
Unfortunately for Paris, in her being validated, we also learn that in the 1940s, fellatio was perhaps a surer step to real movie stardom than it is in the 21st century. Of course, I also think that if Marilyn were alive and just starting out today, she would have enough talent to circumvent the “casting couch” and still become a bigger star than Paris. In the context of today, though, she probably wouldn’t become nearly as iconic nor would she have appropriated the same dumb blonde image. So, it’s difficult to tell where she’d fit in.
Back in October, we brought you a guide to finest examples of on-screen cleavage from the days of pre-code Hollywood. In our ongoing quest to revisit Hollywood history through the nip-slip and up-skirt crazed lens of the celebrity coverage of today, we now point you to the World Of Wonder blog, where Chip Duckett has nothing but praise for a recent “accidental boob reveal” by Mamie Van Doren. “This woman is 77 years old, and is frankly hotter than anybody on the planet one-third her age,” Duckett writes. This, he says, is how the “oopsie! semi-nip-slip…is done properly in 2008.”
Van Doren, seen at her heyday at right, was Universal’s card in the Marilyn Monroe copycat craze of the late 50s, the star of such not-quite-classics at Ain’t Misbehavin‘ and High School Confidential!She’s been pretty much off the radar since the end of the Fantasy Island era, but with the tenuous Marilyn connection intact, can we assume this is Van Doren’s entry in the Monroe–>Lohan–>Musto self-promotion-via-calculated toplessness sweepstakes? Let’s hope!
If Lindsay Lohan can drive a print publication’s subscription revenue up by a low five figures by pretending to be Marilyn Monroe, why can’t columnist/VH1 talking head/soft-sculpted middle-aged gay man Michael Musto do the same for the Village Voice? Interestingly, this slideshow seems to be a trojan horse used to smuggle a cranky old man essay into the weekly, complete with grumbles that today’s nip-slipping, up-skirt courting starlets “never claim an affinity for anyone esoteric, like Barbara Payton, Carrie Nye, or Tippi Hedren.” Cool it with the history, old man––just show us your tits!
Focus Features has set a 1000 screen-wide, September 12 release date for the George Clooney starring Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading. David Poland wonders is this is a thinly-veiled dump: “[H]ave The Coens asked to be pulled out of the Oscar race next year? Has the studio seen a first cut of the picture and decided that it wasn’t a racer? Or is Focus just going to pull out the stops for Harvey Milk and pushing this high profile distraction out of the way?”
“It’s astonishing, not only to think about the challenges Paul [Sturtz] and David [Wilson] faced in creating a regional non-fiction festival that would take place in a small mid-western town during the winter, but also to consider how quickly the festival has earned the respect and goodwill of the international documentary film community—as well as the people of Columbia, Missouri.” Joel Heller introduces a podcast interview with the co-directors of the True/False Film Festival.
Mental Floss quizes your knowledge of Universal’s classic 1930s monster movies.
Lindsay Lohan has been replaced as the celebrity face of Jill Stuart by Hillary Swank. Yes, it’s exactly that kind of news day.
Jessica Alba may be appearing in a lot of movies these days, but I wouldn’t exactly say she’s been keeping busy. It can’t be too much work to play the role of “Eye Candy” again and again and again. This time she plays a girl who is used in exploited for a vengeful ploy by a husband (Aaron Eckhart) to invoke jealousy in his cheating wife (Elizabeth Banks). The character could have been played by any pretty face (in fact Alba replaced Lindsay Lohan in the role), but Alba seems to be the most appropriately cast, because she’s one of the hottest actresses right now and yet she seems to be easily accessible to any filmmaker who wants to employ her. Last week we looked at another movie starring Alba, The Love Guru. In that she seems to have a more disposable role — she’s not really introduced until halfway through the trailer, and even then it’s unclear what purpose her character serves other than to invoke erectile gags from Mike Myers.
Meet Billpremiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was merely titled Bill. Apparently it wasn’t met with much excitement, despite the obvious appeal of watching Eckhart as a sad-sack (unlike Alba, he’s cast against type) in a comedy that looks part classic screwball and part Rushmore (with roles switched all about). The odd thing about this trailer is that with Alba playing the part of “Eye Candy”, she ought to be featured wearing lingerie for marketing purposes (see trailers for Good Luck Chuck)rather than Banks. Sure, Banks is also gorgeous, but Alba is the one that Americans obviously prefer to be objectified.
At the beginning of this week, Lindsay Lohan horrified classic nude starlet photo-shoot purists by revealing her apparently very real breasts in otherwise not-so convincing homage to Marilyn Monroe. We wondered, at the time, if aligning herself with the ultimate image of female celebrity self-destruction was really the best way for Lindsay to prove her post-rehab worth. Turns out, we were wrong––Lindsay just got a job! In a Jack Black movie! About renaissance fair nerds! Case closed, right? Also, with subscriptions currently going for about $20 each, New York Magazine made at least $10,000 off the spread. And thus, the career of one actress and the whole of the magazine industry are rescued in one fell swoop. Rejoice!
There’s a lot that could be said about Lindsay Lohan’s “performance” as Marilyn Monroe in this mostly-nude photo shoot for New York Magazine, aping the latter’s stars famous champagne-fueled “Last Sitting” with photographer Bert Stern from 1962. Just the frame-by-frame contrast above says a lot about how Marilyn and Lindsay approached the, um, role. Where Marilyn seems caught in a moment of abandon, Lindsay’s frozen in rabbit-toothed defiance, her wig shalacked into the antithesis of bedhead, nostrils flared as though she’s holding her breath. We could go through each of the pictures and talk about all that stuff, but that would seem to be giving the endeavor more credit than it deserves. As Perez Hilton so astutely notes (no, that’s not a typo), “She has no movie coming out. That new album won’t be released for a while. Lindsay has NOTHING to promote, other than herself.”
So you have to wonder what the Lohan camp sees as the endgame of this. …Read more
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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As what used to be called The Entertainment Media melts down into one big, incestuous, pageview-mad morass, occasionally something happens that reminds us of why The Good Old Days — when the people who gossiped about startlets and 
No, this is not movie news, but it is a complete horror show, and its a totally slow news day, so I feel justified in posting it. A publicist just sent me 
Ain’t It Cool has pictures
Focus Features has set a 1000 screen-wide, September 12 release date for the George Clooney starring Coen Brothers film 
At the beginning of this week, Lindsay Lohan horrified classic nude starlet photo-shoot purists by revealing her apparently very real breasts in otherwise not-so convincing homage to Marilyn Monroe. We wondered, 
