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Nine
1 hour ago
Federico Fellini told me that the theme of his life and of his work was "dreams are the only reality." "No one ever perceives the real world," he said. "Each person simply calls private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision. "My films are often based on my dreams. When I wake up, I put them down as funny little drawings. "For me making films is making love. I'm most alive when I'm directing. But before I started making 8½, something happened to me which I always feared could happen, and when it did, it was more terrible that I could ever have imagine. I suffered my greatest fear, director's block. "Director's block is like writer's block, except that it's public rather than private. My 8½ crew called »
- Charlotte Chandler
Jonathan Bricklin: Susan Sarandon's New Boyfriend? (Photos, Video)
1 hour ago
Is Susan Sarandon dating a 31-year-old ping pong aficionado named Jonathan Bricklin? That's what a few other outlets hear. For her part, Sarandon denies it (via publicist Teal Cannaday). ABC News reports: "The rumors are absolutely untrue," Cannaday told ABCNews.com. "Susan's relationship with Jonathan Bricklin is strictly a business one." (Scroll For Pics, Video) Late Wednesday Sarandon, 63, and Tim Robbins, 51, announced they'd separated after 23 years and two sons together. Thursday Page Six writes of Bricklin. Sarandon was recently rumored to be involved with 31-year-old Jonathan Brinklin, a partner in Spin, the Flatiron District pingpong club Sarandon invested in. Before opening Spin in September, Brinklin was known for hosting Naked Ping Pong, an occasional party at a TriBeCa loft attended by models, hipsters, and celebs as diverse as 50 Cent and Salman Rushdie. Reached for comment earlier this month, Brinklin denied to »
- Katherine Thomson
Cameron's Avatar: Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas
2 hours ago
"...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." ~ Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act V, Scene V James Cameron made two films that are high on my list of favorites: Terminator 2 and Aliens -- not least because powerful women are central to the stories (even though he gave them the most conservative and clichéd motivation for heroism: maternal protectiveness). He was a taut, visually inventive storyteller once. But all his films after The Abyss increasingly resemble the Hindenburg: bloated, self-indulgent, lacking originality and subtlety in all but F/X. The latest iteration, Avatar, is the culmination of these traits and a poster boy of the industry's tendency to let CGI spectacle be the sole concern. A quarter of a billion dollars went into the film, the Gnp of a small country, yet they couldn't pay a decent Sf writer a paltry sum to »
- Athena Andreadis, Ph.D.
The Most Festive Night of the Year!
3 hours ago
Spoiler alert: Don't play the video clips (below) unless you have already enjoyed the annual television extravaganza. There is a great American holiday tradition that flies under the radar annually. It's not only funny, but heartwarming and wildly entertaining. Every December 23rd, or the last weeknight before Christmas Eve, Late Night with David Letterman celebrates the holiday season with a special show that is not advertised or hyped. This show feels like a secret Xmas gift from Dave and the gang to me. I love this show as much as anything I've ever watched on TV. While the longstanding traditions of the show don't sound like much in isolation, taken together they make one of the most rewarding hours of television each year. After the monologue and usual opening bits, the festivities begin in earnest when Dave pleads with Paul Shaffer to do his »
- Gary Stager
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree
3 hours ago
Well, I've had better Christmases -- thanks to learning a few days ago that my magazine, Editor & Publisher, faces a January 1 expiration notice after publishing for only 125 years. So, to cheer myself up, I launched earlier this week the trailer for my upcoming (and first) Web series, "The Incompleat History of Rock 'n Roll." Perhaps it will get you, in the immortal words of Brenda Lee, to start "rockin' around the Christmas tree" yourself. In any case, David Wild, longtime writer and contributing editor at Rolling Stone, this week at Huff Post called it "the most promising upcoming Web music series." It features clips of Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. A photo that John Lennon gave me in my Crawdaddy days that finds him "just »
- Greg Mitchell
Alec Baldwin Gets Star Struck (Video)
4 hours ago
Even Alec Baldwin gets starstruck sometimes. On Letterman Wednesday night Baldwin described what happened when he was filming "The Good Shepherd" with director Robert De Niro. Every time De Niro yelled cut the first few days to give notes, Baldwin was lost in his head having "Raging Bull" fantasies. He then told the story of being in an elevator with Burt Lancaster. Baldwin did an impression of the screen legend standing in profile, knowing he was being stared at, and letting Baldwin soak him in. Baldwin is currently doing promotion for "It's Complicated." Watch: »
- Katherine Thomson
Kevin Smith: Why 'A Couple of Dicks' Was Renamed 'Cop Out'
4 hours ago
The new trailer for the upcoming buddy cop comedy Cop Out just hit the internet, but anyone who had been following the project knows the film, out February 26, 2010, had long gone by a more distinctive title: A Couple of Dicks. Fortunately, the film has an even more distinctive director: Kevin Smith, the hilariously profane indie film hero (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) making his debut as a director of a script he did not write himself. Smith was more than happy to give EW his frank perspective on how A Couple of Dicks became Cop Out -- in a nutshell, blame the networks »
- ew.com
Free Flick Fridays: A Charlie Brown Christmas
19 hours ago
What's the true meaning of Christmas? Your good old friend Charlie Brown is about to find out in this smart, earnest, and adorable classic. A Charlie Brown Christmas Dir. Bill Melendez (1965) "Christmas is a big commercial racket, run by an Eastern syndicate." Feeling a little Christmas ennui? Then this is the TV special to watch and turn it off-(oui!). It takes a guy like Charles M. Schulz to send up the creeping commercialism of the most wonderful time of the year, and from the mouths of (actual little kids) babes... This Christmas special has Charlie Brown on a search for the real meaning of Christmas, and through going to Lucy-as-psychologist, directing the Christmas play, and finding the world's saddest little pine tree...well, you know what happens next. It's an absolute joy to watch. Have a wonderful holiday season, everybody! Watch the film »
- Tribeca Film
Susan Sarandon Dodged Tim Talk On Tuesday's "View" (Video)
19 hours ago
Susan Sarandon has been out promoting "The Lovely Bones" while staying silent about her break up from Tim Robbins (until releasing a statement late Wednesday), and, as seen below, she deftly dodged a question about her ex lover on "The View" Tuesday. Sarandon took one of her sons to the movie's premiere, talked to Letterman about her dogs and had distracted most talk show hosts from asking about Robbins, from whom she split over the summer, but Joy Behar snuck one in. Sarandon's sisters were in the audience at "The View" Tuesday, and after the hosts asked them about the holidays with their famous sibling, Behar interjected with, "Who gives better gifts, you or Tim?" Sarandon breezily responded, "Oh, everyone gives good gifts in our family," as a large shot of the former couple loomed on a screen behind her. She then changed »
- Katherine Thomson
An Unusual Composer in Residence
20 hours ago
In case you have not noticed, 2009 has been The Year of Sputtering Rage. Talk radio lives on it. The evening news seems calculated to foment it. The Senate Republicans would be utterly lost without it. Sputtering rage is "pure" and is alleged to embody "common sense" at high volume. It requires no thinking; in fact it is the polar opposite of thought. And the one thing that all of the sputtering rage has in common is the belief that any idea that is different, unconventional or creative must of necessity have been propounded by an idiot. When I first heard the news that the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery (a part of King's College, London) had engaged the Irish composer John Browne to serve as composer in residence for a year, sputtering »
- Ivan Katz
Obama's "Naughty" and "Nice" Takes On The Internet
21 hours ago
Leave it to garrulous Vice President Joe Biden to be both naughty and nice when it comes to the Internet - all in the space of a week. Than again, he's not alone. At the end of the year, there were plenty of naughty and even some nice. On Dec. 15, he hosted a meeting for the crème de la crème of Big Media, which by all accounts, like this one and this one brought top government officials together to focus on combating the scourge of "piracy." All the hottest industry moguls were there. Among those on the list: Philippe Dauman, the chairman of Viacom, Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Barry Meyer, the chairman of Warner Brothers Entertainment, Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBCUniversal (soon to be a unit of Comcast), Edgar »
- Art Brodsky
Reverend Fred Phelps: 'God Hates Lady Gaga'
21 hours ago
The Reverend Fred Phelps hates fags (not to mention Jews), and Lady Gaga loves everything gay. So somehow by the transitive property, it makes sense that the Kansas pastor would declare that God hates Gaga. Here's the Reverend's press release with info on where you can join him and the Wesboro Baptist Church to picket Gaga's concert on January 7: "Thou hadst a whore's forehead, thou refusedst to be ashamed...Will He reserve HIs anger forever? Will he keep it to the end? Behold, thou hast spoken and done evil things as thou couldest." Jer 3:3,5 "Art" and "fashion" are the euphemisms, the guise under which proud whore Lady Gaga teaches rebellion against God (incidentally, her claim to the title of "lady" is sound only if she tacks on "of the night," thereby alluding to another euphemism of what she is.) As much »
- Katy Hall
2009 in Review: Worst Movies of the Year
22 hours ago
Generally speaking, I rarely do worst-of lists, simply because I try to make a point to avoid movies that I probably won't enjoy. However, 2009 contained a number of surprise stinkers, as well as any number of bad films that I saw through work or in order to cover them for this site and my other outlets. So this year I saw enough genuinely unfortunate misses to make a plausible list. There are certainly allegedly terrible films that I haven't seen (The Ugly Truth, Alvin and the Chipmunks 2) and would-be losers that I probably won't see (All About Steve), so I can't promise that your least-favorite flick made the list. I chart the year's-worst not to gloat but to mourn. Here are ten misses in alphabetical order, plus the year's worst movie-going experience. Bride Wars This is the »
- Scott Mendelson
Robin Kelley's Transcendental Thelonious Monk
22 hours ago
Robin Kelley's superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as audibly lyrical, as passionate, as thrilling as this one, but I can't bring it to mind. There's a vastly detailed, fresh take here on an immortal jazz pianist and composer whose life is often remembered as freakish, at best impossibly mysterious. Not that jazz players hadn't known from the early 1940s that young Monk was a giant, and ever afterward that those odd, distinctive Monk tunes (nearly 100 of them) are the exotic orchid-like treasures of the American song book. But this was »
- Christopher Lydon
Brittany Murphy's Mother-In-Law: Simon Monjack Has Lost The Love Of His Life
23 December 2009 9:54 AM, PST
Brittany Murphy's British mother-in-law has opened up to the Jewish Chronicle about the family's loss. Linda Monjack, a hypnotherapist and mother of screenwriter Simon Monjack whom Brittany married quickly and quietly two years ago, talked about the complete devastation her son and Brittany's mother, Sharon, are experiencing. "He has lost the love of his life. It's very hard for everybody, especially Simon and Brittany's mother," she said. Sharon was the one who found Brittany collapsed in the shower and surrounded by vomit Sunday morning. "I've spoken to her mother and she is distraught," Linda said. "Brittany was an only child and her mother was living with them." Simon, 39, told 'Access Hollywood' Monday that his world had been destroyed, and his mother said he's still a mess. "I was up at two o'clock in the morning talking to him last night," Linda »
- Katy Hall
Brittany Murphy Funeral On Christmas Eve: Report
23 December 2009 9:53 AM, PST
Brittany Murphy will be laid to rest on Christmas Eve, RadarOnline.com reports. The funeral service will take place during the day at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, the same place Michael Jackson was buried, and is listed as "strictly private." Meanwhile a source tells People that plans for a more public service are still in the works. "The working plan is to have a small private family service in the next few days and then a larger memorial service for a larger group early in the new year," the source said. An autopsy happened Monday, but toxicology results won't be available for six to eight weeks. Get HuffPost Entertainment On Facebook and Twitter! »
- Katy Hall
Let Me Down Easy
23 December 2009 9:08 AM, PST
For the past three decades, Anna Deavere Smith has always performed barefoot - while at the same time walking in the well worn crocs of doctors, or trading them in for the stilettos of super models without breaking her stride. She has lived in the dying bodies of cancer-patients, solemnly donned the cassock of a priest, and inhabited an inmate who had lost any hope of salvation. She believes that words dress the soul. Regardless of their age, gender, race, or profession, she has taken the words of countless real-life characters and, like an amplifier, has magnified and articulated their most inner thoughts and feelings to theater-goers around the country. As a student of life, she has traveled across the U.S. and beyond, using theater as a tool to "meet people and explore ideas." An award-winning playwright and actor, she »
- Yazmany Arboleda
Recreating the Vision of Tennessee Williams
23 December 2009 8:34 AM, PST
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is a new drama based on a recently rediscovered original screenplay by legendary writer Tennessee Williams. Starring Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Evans, the Paladin release will open in New York and Los Angeles in late December, with expansion to major markets following in early 2010. Academy Award-winner Ellen Burstyn, Academy Award-nominee Ann-Margret, Mamie Gummer, and Will Patton co-star in the film which was directed by award-winning short filmmaker and stage and screen actress Jodie Markell, in her feature debut. This is the first dialogue scene in the film, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond. Fisher Willow (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a wealthy, yet rebellious young woman who has driven all night from a debutante party in Memphis to her father's plantation in Mississippi to ask a young man, Jimmy Dobyne (Chris Evans), »
- Jodie Markell
Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, Dexter and More: The Ten Best TV Shows of 2009
23 December 2009 8:32 AM, PST
Following last week's Alternative Ten Best of 2009 list, here are my choices for the Official Ten Best television programs of the year. Mad Men (AMC) - Series creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner continued to earn his cred as the most gifted creator of scripted television working today by boldly ripping apart the extraordinary narrative canvas he so meticulously crafted during Mad Men's first two seasons, plunging most of his characters into unexpected personal and professional chaos -- especially following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As this standout season concluded there were emotional upheavals at every turn, some of them loud and destructive, others quiet and thought-provoking, just as there were for all Americans during that tragic time. I can't wait to see what Weiner has in store for everyone as he moves through the tumultuous years that »
- Ed Martin
Brittany Murphy's Last Movie: 'Abandoned' May Be Released In 2010 (Video)
23 December 2009 6:42 AM, PST
***AP Text, scroll down for a clip from Murphy's last movie, 'Abandoned'*** Los Angeles - Brittany Murphy was a hardworking actress who was juggling multiple movie projects in the months leading up to her unexpected death. While none of the films boasted the big budgets of Murphy's "8 Mile" or "Sin City," directors who recently worked with the 32-year-old actress say she was dedicated, insightful and happy as she wrapped two indie thrillers and prepared to start shooting a romantic comedy next month. Murphy was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after collapsing at her Hollywood Hills home Sunday morning. The county coroner's office is awaiting the results of toxicology and tissue tests before releasing an official cause of death. Murphy spent the month of June shooting "Abandoned," a thriller in which she stars as a woman who embarks on a frantic search for »
- Katy Hall
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