1. Chewbacca is making a non-singing guest appearance on the Christmas episode of Glee. Why? According to Matthew Morrison, there’s “a special within the episode that’s a throwback to the Star Wars holiday special and the Judy Garland Christmas special.” [via THR]
2. Martin Scorsese has revealed that his next film project will be a long-delayed adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, a story which focuses on a group of Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan. [via Slashfilm]
3. This image of Viggo Mortensen on the cover of New York Times Magazine has us convinced that he would have made a much better Benjamin Button than Brad Pitt. [via Best Week Ever]
4. Can you picture Jason Stackhouse having a one night stand with Zooey Deschanel’s awkward New Girl character Jess? Neither can we (unless there was some V involved), but it looks like it will be happening in an upcoming episode of the show. [via Vulture]
5. It has been announced that Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood will compose the score The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film that’s believed to be based on the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Given how well this creative pairing worked for There Will Be Blood, we can’t wait to hear what Greenwood comes up with. [via Collider]
Bonus Buzz: Baby Chameleons Are Adorable
Lars von Trier is a great filmmaker, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d much like to hang out and have a drink with. Aside from all that Nazi stuff, his films tend to traffic in the grimmest possible subject matter: he’s tackled rape, slavery, the death penalty, paralysis, and genital mutilation, so it somehow seems logical that his latest picture, Melancholia (on demand now, in theaters Friday) is about nothing less than the end of the world.
Apocalypses are a popular topic for filmmakers — though most are more interested in the narrative possibilities of the post-apocalyptic world than the event itself. Melancholia distinguishes itself by being something of a pre-apocalyptic picture, delving into the anxiety and fear of those who are awaiting the earth’s possible collision with a foreign object (timely!). After the jump, we’ll take a look back at a few of our favorite cinematic apocalypses. Read More »
Hollywood stars make getting naked on camera look easy, but many will confess how incredibly uncomfortable or even boring it is to bare all on screen. There are tricks to overcoming this, of course, but for those who haven’t stripped for their audiences before things can get a little tricky. If you’re starring in a hotly anticipated film — like the one that spent three installments pretending their lead stars didn’t actually have genitals — the pressure is really on. This got us thinking about the most awkward nude scenes in cinema. How did the actors and actresses handle being in the buff? Some stars used awkward nudity for comedic effect, while others looked flawless, but felt terrible — and in a few cases, the unpleasant feelings we had were all in our own heads. Still, we wanted to know: did they find the experience as strange to shoot as we did to watch? Find out past the break where we revisit a few naked nightmares.
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Acting and writing are not so different. Both require discipline, facility with language, and the ability to disappear into a world that is not quite reality. And with more credibility than the all-too-frequent actor/musician vanity crossover, the actor-as-author subset has its own self-congratulatory cachet. With a slew of new books by better known screen personalities hitting stores this fall, here’s a tribute to ten thespians who have taken on the literary arena.
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Gray, empty, and full of collapsed architecture, the godforsaken landscape of The Road — which opens in theaters today — is true to author Cormac McCarthy’s lean, illustrious source.
Less a trained road warrior than a weary yet determined father, Viggo Mortensen carries this post-apocalyptic film and his family — namely The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) — on his raggedy back. The plot is as spare as McCarthy’s prose: father and son must rely on each other as they trek across this eerie, desolate world to the sea.
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Viggo is back. He has a frayed, wild look in his eye. His beard is ferocious. He is the lead in the film adaption of the Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road. From the looks of the trailer and today’s newly-screened clips from the film, The Road is shaping up to be equally as gripping as McCarthy’s previously adapted work, No Country for Old Men. Instead of some dude with a freaky haircut shooting people with a cow gun, as is the case with No Country, we are treated with something arguably more frightening: a post-apocalyptic world… with cannibalism galore.
After an unexplained natural disaster, an unnamed family — Viggo Mortensen as the Father, Charlize Theron as the Mother, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the Son — survive. Other people survive, too, but less fortunately as blood-thirsty, sun-deprived people/zombies. The film follows the father and son’s journey to safety. After the jump, we’re going to take you through the clips and back up why Tom Chiarella of Esquire is calling The Road “the most important movie of the year.” Read More »
