Julia Child’s life is partially depicted in the new foodie film Julie & Julia, and while it’s as much fun to see Meryl Streep portray the famous chef as it was to watch Dan Aykroyd and Bill Cosby do her back in the day, we can’t help but wish the real Child had lived long enough to star in the film herself. We also wish the whole movie was based on her autobiography, My Life in France, rather than share-adapted from both that book and Julie Powell’s blog-turned-memoir Julie & Julia.

There’s a reason Child was a hugely popular TV personality and there’s a reason why Powell was an Internet writer. Just as you’d rather only watch Sean Penn as Gene Shalit in a movie and not bother with Michael Pitt’s portrayal of lowly film blogger Christopher Campbell, you could probably do without the Amy Adams as Powell stuff in Julie & Julia.

Outside of playing herself as a foodie heroine in a chick flick, what other kinds of movies could Child have acted in? Given her OSS background, we would have loved to see her fill in for Judi Dench in the Bond films as M. Alas, that will never happen, but if our gastronomical dreams come true, perhaps we might see one of the following TV personalities in his or her own blockbuster film someday:
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Two trailers hit today for highly anticipated new films by hip auteurs. The first, for the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man, is one of the most successful spots I’ve seen in a long time. Here’s a movie that has none of the Coens’ usual players and yet it’s unmistakably theirs (and not just because it looks like a repeat of another of theirs). Then there’s the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion animated kids’ movie based on a Roald Dahl book, which features a few of the director’s usual actors and some of his signature camera style, but which, to me at least, bears little resemblance to his previous work (and not just because it’s an animation). Honestly, this may be the first of his films I don’t have interest in seeing.

I’m going to focus on the latter trailer primarily because it’s dividing bloggers, whereas everyone pretty much agrees that the Coens’ latest looks awesome. I’ve never been a big fan of stop-motion (though I do enjoy Nick Park’s films, go figure), because it usually creeps me out. Also, I’m typically against huge stars being employed for voice work in animated films, and I honestly can’t get past picturing George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe and Jason Schwartzman while hearing their voices, and so I had trouble paying attention to the animals onscreen that are supposed to be the ones speaking.

I’m not alone in having no interest in this thing after seeing the trailer, but it seems some are still excited. Check out the rest of the film blogoshere’s reactions after the jump:
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If Tyler Perry gets an Oscar nomination for his acting in Madea Goes to Jail, can a washed-up actress scold him for taking away female roles? Actually, could it just be Cuba Gooding Jr. in drag, a la Boat Trip?

Seriously, though, Madea won’t be up for any Academy Awards next year, but damn is Perry’s character popular. Enough that the sassy matriarch has now evolved from a supporting character into the star of her own vehicle (which gave the filmmaker his biggest opening yet this past weekend). Yes, it’s true that Madea is a central figure in most of Perry’s films and has previously been the main protagonist in his plays (including the one Madea Goes to Jail is based on), but in the movie world she was introduced as a secondary role in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. So, now she belongs in that small club of supporting characters who’ve earned their own film(s); other members of which include Jay and Silent Bob, Bruce and Lloyd, Cousin Eddie, Marshal Samuel Gerard, the Scorpion King and Wolverine.

And Madea is one of the very few female characters to belong to the club, which is another good reason for an actress to scold Perry. But the problem also lies with the people who write woman characters, apparently, since in coming up with ten other supporting characters who deserve their own spin off, we managed to only include two females on our list. Perhaps if we’d permitted classic film characters there’d be more to choose from — though even then we might be more likely to include a Peter Lorre or a William Demarest role than a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden.
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In a couple of weeks it will have been 25 years since Ridley Scott’s hammer-tastic 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh was seen during Super Bowl XVIII. Though it wasn’t seen on television again until popular demand brought it back years later, it wasn’t for lack of quality. Ridley Scott was just coming off of Blade Runner, and the spot, which cost over a million dollars to produce, has been named the best television commercial of all time. Not too shabby.

But in a day and age of TiVos and DVRs, are commercials still relevant? In fact, it’s hard to remember more than a handful of commercials that have had the cultural impact of Scott’s 1984.

Ad agencies often turn to big talent to try and draw attention to a commercial, and the pendulum often swings the other way when Hollywood taps a commercial director to direct a feature. That’s what launched the careers of David Fincher, Michael Bay, and many other high-profile filmmakers. While 1984 might be the most famous commercial by a famous director, there have been a slew of others that have been equally as strange, from artists ranging from Spike Jonze to the Coen Brothers. Here’s a look at a some of the better ones, including both Ridley Scott’s 1984 (and it’s updated 2003 version, along with the Hilary Clinton version from last year’s Presidential race).

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Criterion, who had already shown the Wes Anderson love with their Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic discs, announced back in 2007 that they were going to be putting out an edition of Bottle Rocket. This was met with much joy, especially because the previously released version, which came out back in 1996, was about as bare bones as you could get. The only real special feature it could claim was widescreen on one side of the disc, and full screen on the other. Big whoop.

The new version, which just came out in late 2008 has a ton of features, and is available in both standard and Blu-ray editions. But it also contains one of the single most sour notes ever hit in an Anderson DVD. It’s so extremely painful that it makes the package almost worth avoiding.

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I had a chance to see Quantum of Solace last night, and while I didn’t enjoy it as much as Casino Royale (is Daniel Craig already wearing out his welcome as the new Bond?) it does have some spectacular action sequences. However, if the Blonde Bond wasn’t enough to shake up the franchise for long, what could happen if Bond were re-imagined by some of Hollywood’s top filmmakers? There are a lot of different things that could be done with the character if someone were given free rein to reinterpret Bond as they saw fit.

After the jump, we imagine the five hypothetical films that five wildly different working filmmakers might make if Bond were put in their hands. We’ve taken a bit of license here (although not a license to kill), so use your imagination with the Bonds that could be, no matter how extremely loosely interpreted.

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Yesterday we pointed to a clip showing that everybody and their Pokémon-loving little brother seems to be endorsing Obama. Well not so fast, my friends, we’ve got them right where we want them. What if some legendary Hollywood directors produced attack ads for the McCain camp? Then we’ll see who has an eleven point lead! Folkinz points us to a clip of what it might look like if John Woo, Kevin Smith, and Wes Anderson went GOP. Although it would never happen in reality, anything is possible on the internet!

The Wes Anderson piece at the end is particularly good. If McCain just put guys in yellow jumpsuits running through the background in slow-mo in a few of his ads, I think he’d get at least a two point bump. The John Woo bit is pretty funny, but it could have used a much bigger budget, to the tune of ten million or so. But with McCain’s current fund raising woes, it’s not likely. Maybe Palin can hire Michael Bay to do some ads for her inevitable 2012 bid. They’d better start financing and preproduction right now.

Everyone loves Bill Murray, but only the die hard fans recognize the majority of his work. The rest, unfortunately, concentrate too much on his greatest films, such as Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation and all of his collaborations with Wes Anderson. Yet while each of these films, and Murray’s roles and performances in them, are certainly deserving of their preferred and predominant praises, Murray is the kind of actor who is so talented and entertaining that he can be enjoyed in even the worst movies on his resume. In fact, he’s probably the only A-lister who could lend his voice to a bastardized CG version of a beloved cartoon character and get away with barely any contempt from his devotees.

This week, Bill Murray makes an appearance in the new kiddie sci-fi flick City of Ember as the selfish mayor of a doomed underground metropolis. And it’s sure to be one of his less-appreciated roles, whether because it’s in a children’s movie, because it’s a supporting part in an ensemble filled with many talented actors, or because it’s not Ghostbusters 3. But those who really love Murray will likely flock to the movie primarily to see him, just as they did and do for the rest of these movies with underrated Murray roles:

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• Wes Anderson has been hired out by Universal/Imagine to script a remake of Patrice Leconte’s Mon Meilleur Ami (My Best Friend), about a cabby hired out to pose as Daniel Auteuil’s pal. If Anderson also directs the film, I can see Bill Murray as either role, but let me suggest that the other be played by Richard Dreyfuss for a perfect What About Bob? reunion.
• Pirates of the Caribbean collaborators Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp are apparently going the way of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, but better, for a computer-animated film titled Rango, which will feature motion-capture technology unlike anything we’ve seen before in an animated feature.
• After sparking my interest again with Black Book, Paul Verhoeven is disappointingly returning to the genre of erotic thriller, according to Variety. He’s in talks to direct a movie about an intern who’s doing his boss’ wife, which is of course described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.
• At the midway point of the Toronto Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter notes the fest’s lack of Oscar buzz, except for the awards talk surrounding The Wrestler, Martin Landau (Lovely, Still), Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) and even Dakota Fanning (The Secret Life of Bees).

Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore, Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers, has been animated by a kind of communal, revisionist nostalgia. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola were teenagers during Murray’s first brush with fame in the early 80s, which would have made them extremely susceptible to the prototypical Murray character of the day, which hit its zenith with Ghostbusters.

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Craig McLean’s 3668 word profile of Natalie Portman in the Guardian is chock full of anecdotes about what a Great Person the actress is: she was nominated for an Oscar! She went to Harvard, and also reads books! She’s a vegetarian, and she’d stop eating eggs in a minute if it wasn’t so hard! But then there are the immediate fanboy takeaways…

First and foremost, Portman talks at length about her decision to disrobe for Hotel Chevalier, her feelings about the finished film, and the aftermath of being naked in a video distributed on the internet. “It’s not that I regret the actual thing. But it really depresses me that…it can be used afterwards for different purposes. My picture ended up on porn sites.” Which is pretty much what I said two months ago.

Portman also says she was hurt by negative reviews of her performance in the Star Wars prequels, which “made my confidence in myself go down, [with] people thinking I sucked after that!” Interestingly, she goes on to say that playing a stripper for Mike Nichols made it all better. More here.

Artist on Artist: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson

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Oh, what a difference a weekend makes. News broke on Friday that Wes Anderson was video taping an interview with Owen Wilson for MySpace, to promote The Darjeeling Limited. It was to be Wilson’s first interview since his apparent suicide attempt this summer. The clip wasn’t scheduled to debut until midnight that night, so there was plenty of time to speculate as to what it all meant, and especially whether or not the two old friends would broach the topic of Wilson’s health and sobriety. Jumping the gun just a tad, Nikki Finke ran with the headline, “Hey, Barbara & Diane: You’re Obsolete. Owen Tells All Post-Meltdown To MySpace.” In the post, she pointed to what she described as “a really angry article about this on ABC News,” in which the network that owns Barbara Walters, who in turn owns the patent on teary celebrity confession, kvetches about changing paradigms. We’ll have to take Nikki’s word on that — the story no longer exists at the link in her story.

But of course, Wilson didn’t tell all at all.

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Fox Searchlight has (wisely, I think) decided to tack Hotel Chevalier onto prints of The Darjeeling Limited when the feature expands into wide release this weekend. According to this story in the NY Times, Searchlight is hoping that the short, which “in contrast to the feature, received nearly universal praise when it was shown alongside the longer film at some festivals,” and which has been downloaded legally on iTunes over 500,000 times, will lure audiences who would otherwise wait on Darjeeling for the DVD.

Surely, there will be some rib-cage fetishists who maintain that a big screen is mandatory in order to appreciate that single profile shot of Natalie Portman’s naked body in full, so it’s a gamble that might pay off. But it seems to me that the real crux of the story is the last sentence, in which Lia Miller reports that the studio “also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.” This would be significant, because as far as I know, it would make Chevalier the first short film to garner Oscar attention after officially premiering on the Internet.

But doesn’t AMPAS have rules about that? I know documentaries can’t qualify for Oscars if they’ve been distributed online before meeting their theatrical requirements. I consulted AMPAS’ Live Action Short rules, and found that a Chevalier campaign would be shady proposition at best. More after the jump.

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A number of films that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are either opening or expanding this weekend:

Across the Universe: Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical has grossed almost $9 million over the last month in limited release, mainly drawing (as I predicted) repeat crowds of young women. The weekend, it expands to just under 1,000 screens. I’m not personally much of a fan, but I figure every generation of teenage stoners-cum-theater brats need a Hair, and I can’t begrudge them that. Read my Toronto coverage here.

Control: I was a big fan of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic at Toronto. In hindsight, I do wonder if the film will fall flatter for those who don’t go in with an emotional attachment to Joy Division’s music. But it’s still a fascinating character study, and of course, the cinematography is tremendously satisfying. Read my Toronto review here.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age: Destined to become some kind of camp classic, this sequel to 1998’s Elizabeth is artless at concealing its Freudian metaphors in a way that only truly miscalculated films can be. At Toronto, I wrote: “The Golden Age plays out in a very binary, comic-book reminiscent universe, in which Spain isn’t merely a sovereign nation pursing interests in conflict to that of Britain–the country as a whole is a supernatural embodiment of evil…The Queen is able to bounce from emotional devastation to patriotic warmongering with a flick of a switch; for the rest of us, the transition may not be as easy.”

The Darjeeling Limited: Another shot of crack for fans of Wes Anderson’s visual style, but with a stronger emphasis on character than some of his recent outings. If the idea of a film revolving around a set of limited-edition Marc Jacobs luggage sounds really annoying, this may not be the film for you. But watch the short-film prequel, Hotel Chevalier, on iTunes, read my coverage from NYFF, and if your Anderson allergy hasn’t yet flared up, go see the movie.