Hello little darlings… and big darlings. Darlings of all sizes are welcome here! Enough of darlings… let’s get to what’s going on.
Let’s start with some Office news. Steve Carell has signed on for three more years of the American version of the show. Also, Amy Ryan (the blonde that replaced Toby in the last episode) is said to be on for about five episodes next season. In spinoff news, it has been revealed that Aziz Ansari (Human Giant, Flight of the Conchords) has joined the new cast. The new show will begind airing after the Super Bowl.
Hey, want to see the new kick ass James Bond trailer? Click HERE now… before they take it down!
New Punisher War Zone posters can be seen here. Not sure how I feel about the movie. I did enjoy Thomas Jane as The Punisher… we’ll see.
When Ben Kingsley walks into a room, no introduction is needed. His grace and presence cancel out the Sir in front of his name. Kingsley is one of the best of the best. He is in the top of his league. With Ghandi, Sexy Beast, Bugsy and The House of Sand and Fog under his belt, Kingsley has not only made it, he’s surpassed all.
In Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, Kingsley plays Dr. Squires, a therapist badly in need of therapy himself who befriends a teenager to soon find out that they’re more alike than they both previously thought. Recently, Kingsley took time out to speak to LA.CityZine for his latest release The Wackness. Continue Reading
This week in industry news: Scientologists, robots and egotistical actors! Welcome to Hollywood, what’s your dream?
The Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith (remember when he was married to his high school sweetheart and then dumped her for Jada?) are funding a private school that is scheduled to open in Calabasas in the fall. The school is sparking controversy because, even though the Smiths insist they are not Scientologists, a number of the school’s faculty are and the school will be employing teaching methods first written about by Scientologist founder L. Ron Hubbard. I think we’re missing the point here: these kids are going to have to be in Calabasas! That cannot possibly be a good learning environment.
Pixar’s WALL-E debuted at number one with $62.5 million and Wanted opened at number 2 with $51.1 million, over $100 million between the two of them. As far as summer activities go, that’s like, 10 trips to Disneyland, so, not bad.
He’s a man of few words but a whole lot of deadly looks. Actor/ Musician, Common is the deadly force behind those eyes, co-starring across from Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, and Morgan Freeman, in Timur Bekmambetov’s new film Wanted. Common, aka “The Gunsmith,” is a bad-ass killer who knows his way around a gun, but in real life it’s hard to find anyone more calm, cool, and nonviolent.
Common took a moment to sit down with LA.CityZine to talk about his role in Wanted, inspiration he gathered from his co-stars, his upcoming role in the Terminator across from Christian Bale and rumors of him playing the Green Lantern.
Ever since Toy Story in 1995, each new Pixar movie has opened to more and more anticipation and this year’s Wall-E is no exception. Though clever and touching dialogue from unassuming characters thrust into extraordinary situations like Toy Story’s Woody and Ratatouille’s Remy is one of the hallmarks of these films, Wall-E uses a similar scenario but boldly contains very little dialogue.
Wall-E is a robot whose role is that of a glorified trash compactor, tooling around an abandoned and post-apocalyptic earth collecting knick-knacks, compacting trash and watching Hello, Dolly! His existence is simple but futile on the massive planet that has been overrun with garbage. One day, a ship lands near Wall-E’s home and releases another robot – slick, white and focused on one directive: find life on earth. Wall-E is instantly smitten with the new companion, not-so-subtly named Eve, and his pursuit of her eventually finds the pair of them back on the ship, surrounded by humans who have been cruising aimlessly around space, waiting for a time when it is safe to return to earth.
Though the story has few turns that are surprising, the depth of the characters and the sympathy that is elicited for these non-human beings through little more than computerized grunts is truly amazing. Both Wall-E and EVE develop distinct personalities and their friendship blossoms slowly but surely into something that cannot be dismissed as less than human.
It goes without saying that the animation is beautiful, clean and creative. As he did in Finding Nemo, director and co-screenwriter Andrew Stanton uses small characters in big circumstances to tell a simple and sweet story. What was truly surprising was how easy it was to forget that the protagonists that you cared about the most were robots.
The music in the film is appropriate but not overwhelming, despite the lack of dialogue. The character design is slick and the voice-work is really compelling. I’m unsure how award-winning sound designer Ben Burtt created the voice of Wall-E, and the same goes for EVE’s Elissa Knight, but Jeff Garlin is perfectly cast as the hapless ship captain. Fred Willard is the only human that appears in the film (he sure appears in a lot of films) in video clips of a long gone president, but even the animated humans lack a little bit of luster and you never care much whether or not they make it back to earth because you’re too concerned with Wall-E and EVE. After all, they’re the future.
It’s a Jacques Demy-fest in Santa Monica this week, with a nice selection of his fantastical work. Most famous for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, a sung film about lost love and innocence with Catherine Deneuve and a lot of striking colors, he ploughed his vision of a candyfloss but heart-tugging cinema of light and music into several features, including Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (also starring Deneuve, plus sister Françoise Dorleac and featuring Gene Kelly). This last is spoiled for some by the overreliance on / homage to American musical forms, as opposed to the perfectly French Parapluies, but both films boast splendid operetta scores by legendary French soundtrack dude Michel Legrand.
Well, it’s another big summer weekend with two VERY different films going head to head. WALL-E an animation about a curious robot and Wanted about a young man (played by James McAvoy) being recruited by a group of insane, bad-ass assassins. Although the odd part it, WALL-E actually has a number of deeper, apocalyptic issues that it deals with and Wanted is more of a fantasy film for adults. For those of you looking for something a bit different you haveGunning for that #1 Spot, which is a story about a kid on his way to becoming the number one basketball player and the challenges he faces in just being an everyday kid. Or you have Finding Amanda, with Matthew Broderick, which is a story about an addict and a hooker both being forced into rehab. Sounds like fun!
So here they your! This weekend’s new releases with cast and crew information, reviews, showtimes and tickets! Enjoy!
I’m not a huge fan of most action films. In fact there are a very few action films that I like. Most of the time I feel like they are dumbed down dramas that bank on violence and 13-year-olds naivety in order to make a profit. This was not the case for Timur Bekmambetov’s latest film,Wanted, which is more of an artistic, violent, day-dream for adults than an action film starring Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy. What I like about Wanted is that is doesn’t try and dumb anything down for the kiddies, it relishes in it’s R rating. This film was made to appeal to a slightly older generation, one that can understand the monotony of a desk job and need to escape into their imagination.
The point of the film is not to blow things up, it’s to escape. The graphic violence is so outlandish and impossible to understand that it is enjoyable. Although I still don’t exactly understand how one bends then bullet, that seemed like a minor part of the whole and one that I could easily accept. Hell, I’ve watched a man get injected with something to make him a green monster, another man fly around in a suite of iron armor, and an kid fly through the trees with monkeys, I don’t think bending bullets is that far out there anymore.
When is comes to explaining every little detail, sometimes things are better left unsaid. The film does not waste time with those kinds of logistics, it gives you an explanation and then moves forward prompting you to jump on for the ride. At the end it even wraps it’s up with a “nice” little message to boot.
Wanted was made to be more of a fantasy film for adults than an action film for teens, and overall I think this film was better put together than ANY of the action films I have seen this summer.
The violence in this film, although quite graphic, is really more artistic and sarcastic than grotesque. In a way, it’s almost less graphic than many of the PG-13 movies out there because it has to need to justify itself to reality. Wanted lives in a dramatic, fictional, painting, rather than trying to give into realistic images or reactions. Recently, when LA.CityZine spoke with James McAvoy about why he decided to take this role, he seemed to agree that the violence in it made it something different:
“…the fact that they weren’t making this movie for all the family. They were making this a very violent R rated film for adults and I’ve not seen that a lot lately. They’re all superhero movies that are incredibly violent actually, but they’re just filmed in a kind of slightly sanitized way. Like Indiana Jones. Ants crawling inside somebody’s body and eating them from the inside, that’s incredibly disturbing but done in a kinda slightly cutesy way so you can give it to 12-year-olds.
Some people are not happy because the graphic novel is actually much more violent than the film. In the graphic novel the assassins, kills good guys, not bad guys. The Director Timur Bekmambetov decided to change this. He said to LA.CityZine that “I don’t think it’s good for millions of people to see a movie about a person just killing people for fun.” Even though he’s willing to show violence, he doesn’t see a need to show it from that dark of a perspective. His perspective is more sarcastic, fun, and possibly even hopefully than the comic. Timur definitely wanted people to know that although some are comparing his film to the Matrix, that was not his intent at all, Wanted is “another type of food, it’s a different meal â it’s not the same. Matrix, there’s no sense of humor in Matrix at all. It’s very serious and humor we are very funny”
For those who don’t know Timur Bekmambetov, he directed two of the top grossing Russian films ever made, Day Watchand Night Watch and he is just breaking into the American film industry with Wanted. We asked Timur why he chose to make the changes he did and why he added a message and he stated:
“I really believe that the movies without a message don’t work. I saw many movies with no messages. There is no reason now why I spent two hours, paid money, and why I need it. I really believe that movies are so powerful, so influential. It needs a message, it needs something, that you want to tell people and take with them in their life.
The best part about this film for me was the ending. No one races up a tower, no one falls off a bridge, is shot tens times in the head and then somehow survives and keeps going. The ending of the film is simple, entertaining, and shows that even though this is a fantasy film Wanted seems to comprehend reality more than many other films out there, because part of understanding reality, is understanding one’s need to escape from it.
Overall, that is what sets this film apart, a fun and yet important message. Everyone takes being serious, so seriously. Why not play around with it a bit? I think what people need to know is that this is a FUN film. Even at it’s most serious moments, it’s still just a piece of fun, visually stimulating, piece of art.
So, in the spirit of Wanted: What the fuck are you waiting for? Go see the movie and enjoy the ride!
This week in industry news: Scientologists, robots and egotistical actors! Welcome to Hollywood, what’s your dream?
He’s a man of few words but a whole lot of deadly looks. Actor/ Musician, 
Ever since 
Well, it’s another big summer weekend with two VERY different films going head to head. 
