NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards — a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine — the role we’d imagine Tarantino is hoping to land Brad Pitt for — described by the script as a “hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,” who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching. (“The scar will never once be mentioned,” Tarantino writes.) In a parallel story, Inglorious Bastards […]
MILESTONE: S.O.S. Celebrates 100 Years Of Distress
TIMES ONLINE: “Send SOS,” one of the Titanic’s radio operators supposedly said to another after the famous ship struck that infamous iceberg. “It’s the new call and besides this may be your last chance to send it.” That “new call” is 100 years old today, and people around the world who owe their lives to that piece of Morse code may reflect this morning on its importance. In the past century, “SOS” has become a firm part of popular culture used in everything from DIY programme titles to Abba hits. But it began life in a far more serious setting […]
CINEMA: It Was A Dark and Stormy Knight
ROLLING STONE: The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It’s typical of Ledger’s total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I’m Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there’s a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976’s Network, sign me up. Ledger’s Joker has no gray areas — he’s all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR The American Film Institute (AFI) has named the top ten American films in ten popular genres. From sci-fi flicks to classic Westerns, the lists include some of the most influential works in American cinema. Today’s Fresh Air presents archival interviews with several of the actors and a screenwriter whose work has been recognized on the new list: Eva Marie Saint, star the AFI’s seventh-ranked mystery movie, North by Northwest, speaks with Terry Gross about her career, her Oscar-winning role in On the Waterfront and being typecast as a “sexy spy lady.” Screenwriter Robert Towne and actress Faye Dunaway […]
BY POPULAR DEMAND: Men Who Wear Speedos
via SCRAPPLE TV RELATED: WTF Is Darren Finizio?
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Comedian Mike Myers has created a slew of memorable characters through his career: Dr. Evil, Austin Powers, Shrek, and Wayne’s World‘s Wayne Campbell all serve as cultural reference points. Now, Myers wants to add another indelible character to that list: The Guru Pitka. In his new comedy The Love Guru, Myers plays a spiritual guide charged with reuniting a hockey star with his estranged wife so that he can lead his team to winning the Stanley Cup. But The Love Guru may be too outrageous for some. Some Hindu groups fear that the movie promotes offensive stereotypes. Some […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR The critically acclaimed television series Weeds is back for its fourth season, and creator Jenji Kohan is relocating the satire from suburbia to the borderlands. Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker), suburban mother and drug dealer, trades her gated community for a beach town just miles from Mexico. The focus shifts from bourgeois hypocrisy to larger social issues such as immigration, free trade, and the larger effects of drug trafficking. Kohan is optimistic about the reinvention of the series and is eager to welcome actors like Albert Brooks to the cast. Before creating Weeds, Kohan also served as a […]
CINEMA: WTF Is Happening?
DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD: Also beaten up badly has been the other newcomer this weekend, M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated horror thriller The Happening from 20th Century Fox. The Mark Wahlberg starrer started out No. 2 Friday even after film critics and writers alike seemed intent on reviewing the writer-director-producer instead of the movie. (Only 11% positive on Rotten Tomatoes.) With a nasty tell-all book and several film flops behind him, Shyamalan no longer is the popular suspense moviemaker celebrated for his early hits like The Sixth Sense and Signs. Instead, he’s been branded as the hopelessly arrogant has-been, with media outlets […]
CINEMA: The Credible Hulk
VARIETY: To anyone wondering why the Marvel team would so soon embark on a makeover of the growly green giant after all the angst endured on the previous one, the answer is provided by the final scene, in which the star of the most recent Marvel B.O. smash unexpectedly turns up to ask, “What if I told you we were getting a team together?” New film thus marks the first step in the label’s plan to begin shuffling its major characters into films together, a la some of the comicbooks — a scheme that seemingly required the rehabilitation of the […]
ZOOEY STARDUST: Talking Mutter With Letterman
CARRIE RICKEY: As for The Happening, [M. Knight Shayamalan‘s] throwback horror flick that plays like The Birds meets The Blob, it’s beyond good and evil. It’s dumbfounding. At the hollow center of this unapologetic B-movie is Mark Wahlberg, typically the low-key everyman, in overwrought-robot mode. He portrays Elliot Moore, a Philadelphia science teacher (at Masterman High, for you homeboys and girls), called out of class one sunny morning and warned of a random plague — an airborne chemical toxin? — sweeping Manhattan, triggering suicides. From Massachusetts to Maryland, Central Park to Rittenhouse Square, urban greens are particularly perilous. As a […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Women We Love
FRESH AIR In her new film, Savage Grace, the actress Julianne Moore plays the wife of the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, a middle-class woman who’s married up, but who craves more than the comforts money can buy. As her emotional neediness gets entangled with her son’s, boundaries of all kinds get broken — and a tragedy looms. The movie, based on the true story of a scandalous high-society murder, is playing now in limited release; Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers says “Moore delivers a tour de force … [she’s] savagely moving in her haunting delineation of Barbara’s journey […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Thank You For Smoking
FRESH AIR Whether he’s lancing boils, getting crabs from thrift store pants or sitting in a hospital waiting room dressed only in his underwear, one thing is clear: David Sedaris is not shy about sharing those embarrassing, cringe-worthy incidents that members of the general population tend to save for diaries or therapists. In his sixth collection of essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris continues to bare his body and soul, detailing the aforementioned boils and crabs, as well as an uncomfortable incident in which he accidentally spits a lozenge into the lap of his seatmate on an airplane. […]
HBO: Extremism In The Defense Of Liberty Is No Vice?
STEVEN REA: Yes, Polanski was guilty of having sex with a minor. But after his arrest, after months in the public spotlight, dogged by TV cameras and the press — a press intent on resurrecting the horrid 1969 murder of Sharon Tate, Polanski’s pregnant wife, at the hands of Charles Manson’s homicidal hippie cult — the filmmaker became something of a victim himself. As revealed in Marina Zenovich’s 75-minute film, which premieres on HBO tomorrow night at 9, the Polish-born Polanski was at the mercy of a grandstanding, media-obsessed judge. Laurence Rittenband, a Santa Monica jurist who sought out celebrity […]