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Paul Rudd

Film

Flavorwire’s Guide to Movies You Need to Stream This Week

By Jason Bailey on

Welcome to Flavorwire’s streaming movie guide, in which we help you sift through the scores of movies streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and other services to find the best of the recently available, freshly relevant, or soon to expire. This week, there’s good stuff from Bradley Cooper, Ethan Hawke, Paul Rudd, Julie Delpy, Amy Poehler, Zach Galifanakis, and Akira Kurosawa, plus a must-see documentary and one of our favorite stand-up specials. Check them out after the jump, and follow the title links to watch them right now. … Read More

Film

Why Can’t Hollywood Get ‘The Great Gatsby’ Right?

By Jason Bailey on

Hollywood took its first stab at adapting The Great Gatsby for the screen only a year after its publication, and has been trying intermittently ever since — and, for the most part, failing. What is it about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic that makes it so impossible, so utterly untraslatable? It’s certainly not that the film industry hasn’t been trying hard enough: Baz Luhrmann’s new film is the fifth official adaptation. In the course of a week, I watched all of them that can be seen (and another, looser adaptation besides), and came up with a few theories. … Read More

Film

The Best and Worst of Tribeca Film Festival 2013

By Jason Bailey on

The 12th annual Tribeca Film Festival came to a close Saturday night with a rare, special screening of The King of Comedy, perhaps the most underrated collaboration between Martin Scorsese and festival co-founder Robert DeNiro. That event ended a week and a half of premieres, screenings, and events, and while your film editor was only able to sample a fraction of the dozens of movies at this year’s TFF, all of them made an impression — for good or ill. … Read More

Television

The Embarrassing Early TV Commercials of Your Favorite Comic Actors

By Jason Bailey on

Last week, the folks at Gawker did a bit of celebrity archaeology, discovering a 1993 TV ad for the NRA that featured a very young Molly Shannon. The soon-to-be Mary Catherine reached out to the site, emphasizing that she appeared in the spot when she was — direct quote, with emphasis — “A STRUGGLING ACTRESS,” and while we understand her taking pains to separate the spot from her own views, she’s hardly the first future famous funny person whose early work was only humorous in retrospect, and unintentionally. After the jump, we’ve got early commercials by several of our favorite comic actors — all equally embarrassing. … Read More

Film

Tina Fey’s ‘Admission’ Is Smarter and Savvier Than it Looks

By Jason Bailey on

If the bad news about Admission, the new Tina Fey-Paul Rudd vehicle from director Paul Weitz, is that it won’t quite fill that already gaping 30 Rock-size hole in your heart, the good news is that it is an altogether smarter and more interesting film than its trailers promise. It is neither a broad comedy nor a dopey rom-com; it’s actually, surprisingly enough, a seriocomic drama in something resembling the Alexander Payne mold, a slightly eccentric examination of flawed people doing their very best. It’s less traditionally comic than Baby Mama and Date Night, Fey’s previous — likable and utterly forgettable — big screen vehicles, and finds her moving slightly but surely out of her Lemon-esque comfort zone. This is a good thing. … Read More

Film

The 10 Most Inexplicably Expensive Movies Ever Made

By Jason Bailey on

Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful is out this Friday, in case you haven’t looked at a magazine or a television or the side of a bus recently, and while we know it’s a big-budget would-be Mouse blockbuster, attempting to replicate the astonishing (and frankly inexplicable) success of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland three years back, we still had to pick our jaws up off the floor when we got a look at its monster budget: $325 million in production and marketing costs. Yes, you read that right: 325. No extra numbers in there. … Read More

Film

Sundance 2013: Awards, Deals, and When You Can See Them

By Jason Bailey on

Indie producers at Sundance would be wise to steer your film editor away from their screenings, since (for the second year in a row, to say nothing of Tribeca and SXSW) practically none of the films I saw over my six days in Park City managed to grab any prizes at Saturday night’s big award ceremony. I’m all out of theories for why I’m so bad at picking these things — but it’s something we’re all going to have to come to terms with, apparently. Not to worry, though; many of the very good films I did manage to see will be coming your way over the next few months, so let’s take a look at films that won both awards and big-money deals. … Read More

Film

The Best and Worst of Sundance 2013

By Jason Bailey on

This time last year, the out-of-nowhere indie Beasts of the Southern Wild emerged at the Sundance Film Festival, knocked out everyone who saw it, and embarked on a thrilling year-long ride to become a critical fave, indie smash, and multiple Oscar nominee. Of course, when you have a big hit, everyone’s looking for a sequel — and most of the press out of Park City has been eager to buzzkill, assuring us that no, there’s not another Beasts in this year’s bunch. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an incredible… Read More

About

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Here’s the new trailer for Admission, a quirky dramedy in which Paul Rudd plays a typical Paul Rudd character and Tina Fey is basically doing a slight variation on Liz Lemon — not that we’re complaining.

2. In other movie-related news, this first teaser for Mobius — an Inception-esque,… Read More

Film

Exclusive Supercut: Big Hollywood Stars in Their Early Horror Roles

By Jason Bailey on

Many a young actor has come to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, only to discover that the road to success is a long and difficult one, with plenty of detours and diversions along the way. And many have found that, in their early, hungry days of trying to make it as a working actor, the horror genre always has a (meager, but cashable) paycheck for a rising young talent with stars in their eyes. And as a salute to those young, starving artists, we give you this week’s special, Halloween-tinged supercut, in which we’ve tracked down and collected some of the more entertaining and surprising of those early roles. Check it out after the jump. … Read More