When I see fan creations like the one above, I wonder how so many celebrity dolls turn out so crappy. I mean, they do all those fancy face scans and likeness tests, but half the time the little doll barely resembles the celebrity it's showcasing. Well, all of that technology is pretty much a waste when you take into consideration the image at the top of this post. The above Angelina Jolie doll is a creation of artist Noel Cruz, and was just featured earlier this month in The Daily Mail. However, this isn't some hand-made doll, born from scans and hi-tech gadgets. Actually, Cruz just "removed the factory paint" from an ordinary doll and repainted her Jolie-style. That's it. No extra molding -- just some perfectly whipped-up color and a wig. Talk about some stellar talent right there.
What would something like this cost? Well, a private bidder purchased it for £2,000 (or roughly $3,700) on eBay. Yeah, a little more expensive than the last Barbie doll you bought, huh? Those looking to save a little money can instead pick up an Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider doll on eBay for about $10 (sexy lips still included).
The last time Angelina Jolie received an Oscar nod was for playing a mental patient in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, for which she took home the statue for Best Supporting Actress. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, consider this: Winona Ryder -- and not Jolie -- was a box-office draw back then.
Now, after years of strong and sometimes overlooked performances (ahem, A Mighty Heart), Jolie is once again receiving battalions of Oscar buzz, this time for her role in Clint Eastwood'sChangeling (get your exclusive first look at the poster above).
Based on real events that transpired in 1920s Los Angeles, Changeling is the tale of a mother (Jolie) whose abducted son is seemingly returned to her by the LAPD. Turns out the boy is not her flesh and blood, however -- or so she adamantly claims -- and thus Mama Jolie sets out to wring the truth from a corrupt police department unwilling to listen to her.
Changeling opens in limited release Oct. 24 and expands wide on Oct. 31.
As we've started to get our fair share of trailers for the coming prestige projects -- Frost/Nixon, The Soloist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno -- I was curious as to why we'd yet to get one for Clint Eastwood's period drama, Changeling, if it were set to open by the end of next month. Particularly after Kim's Cannes review, I wanted to get a proper glimpse beyond a brief clip...
Perhaps hearing my prayers or just tiring of my complaints, Yahoo! Movies saw fit to post the trailer (watch it after the jump as well), in which a young mother (Angelina Jolie) in 1928 Los Angeles finds herself standing up against a corrupt police department when her missing son is returned, or rather replaced by a different child altogether.
Even if the same piece of score hadn't been used in both of their trailers, I'd still have felt a need to draw a correlation between this and last October's missing-kids-and-corrupt-cops powerhouse, Gone Baby Gone (of course, it doesn't hurt that Amy Ryan shows up in both of them). From Eastwood's end comes a particular tinge of Mystic River, and so far as I'm concerned, all of those signs point to something substantial waiting for us when Changeling opens in limited release on October 31.
Some people may consider the New York Film Festival a simple "Best Of" sort of event, but the fact that it compiles selections from earlier film fests and merely showcases them in a competition-free program is what I love about it. For those of us New Yorkers who can't always make it to the highlands of Utah and Colorado or the exotic seaside locales of Italy and Southern France, it's nice to know that major festival highlights will likely make their way to Lincoln Center in late September, early October.
This year, the lineup for the 46th NYFF is being noted for its inclusion of films that previously screened at Cannes back in May. Even Steven Soderbergh's four-hour Che(aka The Argentineand Guerilla), which played to mixed reactions in France, even while picking up a best actor prize for star Benicio Del Toro, has been given a spot. Also featured are Cannes leftovers Waltz With Bashir, Wendy and Lucy, Grand Prix-winner Gomorrah and Clint Eastwood's Changeling, which stars Angelina Jolie and has the honor of being NYFF's centerpiece film. Opening the festival is the Palm d'Or winner The Class, while the closing film is Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which premieres a few weeks prior at the Venice Film Festival.
Other exciting big name films include Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time: Redux, Lucretia Martel's The Headless Womanand Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours. Surprisingly, Charlie Kaufman's Synechdoche, New York, which screened at Cannes, is New York appropriate and is scheduled to open in October, is missing from the lineup.
The complete list of NYFF selections, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, can be found after the jump:
Remember how we told you about six weeks ago that it looked like Tom Cruise's next project would be an espionage thriller called Edwin A. Salt? In fact, the news was that Cruise was going to do Edwin instead of the political thriller The 28th Amendment. Well, now it looks like he's not doing either one. He's changed his mind on Edwin, and now the star of the film is going to be ... Angelina Jolie.
I'm not sure I would have considered Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie interchangeable, but that's Hollywood for you. According to Variety, Cruise was the latest in a long line of actors who have expressed interest in the project over the years, and after he backed out, Jolie threw her hat in the ring. The deal is pretty much set, and it was thrown together very quickly. I guess when Angelina Jolie says she wants to headline your spy thriller, you bring some people in over the weekend to hammer out the details.
The screenwriter, Kurt Wimmer, will make adjustments in the script to accommodate the protagonist's new gender, and obviously the title will have to change slightly. (Edwin A. Salt = Edwina Salt?) But considering Jolie has already played an action hero successfully in Mr. & Mrs. Smith and this summer's Wanted (pictured), I suspect all that'll really be necessary is a find-and-replace search of the character's name. It's not like Wimmer will need to incoporate a scene where the spy gets her nails done or goes shoe shopping.
So now the question is: After next year's Valkyrie, what will Cruise's next project be? I think Edwin would have been a great fit for him. Of course, f I were the one making Cruise's career decisions, a lot of other things would be different, too, so never mind what I think.
Last night Cinematical's James Rocchi was a guest on G4's Attack of the Show, where he and Chris Hardwick spoke about all those crazy Batman rumors spreading like wildfire across the internet. Ya know, how Angelina Jolie supposedly wants to play Catwoman, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin and/or Johnny Depp as Riddler.
As James points out, these are all "just rumors" right now and there's no way of telling which characters Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan Nolan have in mind without actually speaking to them. It should be noted that Cinematical has also confirmed that Chris Nolan currently does not have a deal to direct a third film, and if he does hop onboard, they'll have to negotiate something first. But enough of my babbling, check out James above, and much thanks to Attack of the Show for inviting us on.
Not even two full weeks after The Dark Knight arrived in theaters, we officially have our first Batman 3 rumor! (Speaking of, we have to decide what to call Nolan's next Batman movie. Dark Knight 2? Batman 3? NolanMan 3? Lets get on that ...) But anyway, the rumor actually comes from another Catwoman: Julie Newmar. Speaking to the New York Daily News, Newmar says, "Angelina would own the part. My industry friends tell me [she] has made inquiries about the role." She went on to add, "I can understand how it would pique her interest. Catwoman is Batman's one true love. She's tremendously popular with women because she's both a heroine and a villainess. When you look at the staggering box office of this current film, which actress wouldn't want to jump in?"
So is Jolie really looking to play Catwoman in a third (and possible final) Batman film from Christopher Nolan? No doubt Bale and Jolie would look good together on screen, and the woman definitely knows how to hold her own when it comes to action. What do you think? Do you Bat-fans want Brad Pitt's gal in Gotham City?
Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf took a lot of hits for its perceived silliness, a verdict I could never quite sign on to. First of all, silly compared to what? Have these people seen the 1999 space opera Beowulf starring Christopher Lambert? Compared to that, Zemeckis's Beowulf is a sober meditation on the human condition. Have they seen the Gerard Butler clunker Beowulf and Grendel? Come on, guys: considering what the movies have done to this story in the past, last year's high-tech effort seems like serious business to me.
What about the source material – the ancient Old English epic poem upon which these movies purport to be based? If you've ever read it (or tried to read it), the perversions of the adaptations shouldn't surprise you. It's both begging for action movie treatment and impossible to faithfully adapt into anything resembling a compelling action movie. The story is credited with generating many of the archetypes we see in our fiction, and indeed, it's so archetypical that by modern standards, it's a skeleton; there's nothing there.
Seriously – you know how people complain about movies whose plots can be fully described in one sentence? A faithful Beowulf would take this phenomenon to new heights. A synopsis would read something like this: Beowulf beats up Grendel, Grendel's mom, and a dragon, and dies. The end. Some complained that the Zemeckis version distorted Beowulf, but I'd have liked to see their reaction to an undistorted adaptation. Trust me, it wouldn't work. There's a reason that all these screenwriters have scrambled to add elements to the story.
Man, has this day brought us news of film-based video games aplenty -- one of which you can play for free right now and the rest of which some of you simply can't wait for.
But you'll have to. Wait, that is. They haven't made the darn things yet. Sheesh, hold your horses already.
Trade publication Variety tells us of these titles over the course of two separate articles. One piece points out Universal's plan to crank out several games based on their properties, but only names their highest-profile property at the moment: Wanted. If any of you have seen the film (and a $123 million gross would suggest as much), then you know just how well it should lend itself to the format, what with the bullet curving and knife fighting and Angelina Jolie ogling.
If Timur Bekmambetov is the Russian David Fincher, then Wanted is his Fight Club: bloody, brutal, funny, lightly satirical, and all about a nobody who shakes himself from his reverie and becomes a real man. There aren't many deep themes here (not as many as there are supposed to be, anyway), but who cares? The stylized violence and unapologetically ludicrous action sequences are the selling point, and Wanted delivers those by the blood-soaked truckload.
Wanted is about a Chicago office drone named Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) whose life is so insubstantial that he gets zero hits when he Googles himself. But like Neo before him (only played by an actual actor, rather than a plank of driftwood), Wesley is rescued from his drudgery by a secret organization that wants to tell him who he really is and what his destiny can be. That's right, the Mormons.
No, kidding. The group is known as The Fraternity (but they let girls in, too), and it began a thousand years ago when a group of weavers decided that weaving was boring and they should become assassins. Today the group is run by Sloan (Morgan Freeman), with headquarters hidden in an actual textile factory. Every guy in the place is tough and mean, a real brute of the loom, if you will, and they show Wesley the ropes of shooting people from a distance. That's right: Wesley snipes. (That concludes the pun portion of this review.)
Movie stars can get a stylist, remove those errant eyebrow and nose hairs, and even get some high-dose skin cleaner to make themselves smooth, shiny, and sexy; if all else fails, there are legions of makeup artists to make the men and women of Hollywood look as hot as possible. But there's not much they can do about their tongue prowess. Sometimes, the smooch or sex scene is so bad that it's even obvious on-screen, and on occasion, movie kissing is so bad that those who were forced to endure it remember the moment forever and tell tales about their bad kissing moments.
This past Sunday, The New York Times featured a popular City-section story about the first-ever prom held for students of Brooklyn's International High School. In case you don't like to read, you can simply watch the video accompaniment here. And if you don't like to read and you don't like documentary-style videos, and have a lot of patience, you can wait for the feature film, which will apparently be hitting theaters some time in the future. According to New York magazine's Vulture blog, a number of producers are interested in optioning the article, while Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have personally brought it to the attention of Paramount Pictures, where Pitt's Plan B Entertainment has a first-look deal. Supposedly an unnamed non-Paramount studio exec beat us all to the punch by joking that "maybe Maddox and the twins can star in it." Of course, he forgot about Pax and Zahara (and the twins aren't really international).
Actually, the first joke I thought about was the running gag on TV's The Criticabout the kid from Easter Island who attends the United Nations School. Then, the second joke I thought of was about Brangelina's adopted children. Then I kept thinking of other things, such as how thanks to Prom Nightpeople might assume this other prom-themed movie is also a horror flick. But that's not so much a joke as it is me trying to think on a studio exec's level (hey, we were synchronous with the Maddox bit) in order to contemplate what they'd call the thing. International Prom? A Prom for All Nations (ala the video's title)? Or will Hollywood appropriately go for one of those song-based titles? Been around the World, perhaps?
The flashy advertisements, the curving of bullets and Angelina Jolie make it pretty difficult to remember that Wanted was originally based on a series of graphic novels by Mark Millar. From early reports (including a review from Cinematical), the adaptation is a loose one, so you might be surprised to hear that Millar actually felt it was an improvement on his work.
He posted his enthusiastic response on his official message board. (If you choose to click, be warned, the place abounds with spoilers.) "Even the biggest change -- the loom stuff in the middle Timur wrote -- works really well. I think the fate thing really made the character more empathetic as the 'killing for fun' stuff would have made him a little hateful. They kept all the best bits and junked my over-indulgences. So I feel very happy as it was a kind of perfected version that made it to the screen. Could not be happier."
Millar also added that he's been approached by Universal about concocting a sequel. "They've asked me how I can develop some of the other stuff from the book into the sequel. We'll see what box office is like at the weekend, but everyone knows this is going to make a LOT of dough. Wall·E permitting." (He actually has a few choice words for the hapless robot, who really shouldn't be held accountable for his release date.)
The buzzing murmur for Sin City 2 has been going on for eons now, making fans die a slow death in anxious anticipation. And, for most of that time, Angelina Jolie's name has been in the mix. Back in 2006, Rosario Dawson said that Robert Rodriguez was putting the whole thing on hold due to Jolie's pregnancy. Since then, the project has remained in limbo -- a will they or won't they cycle that doesn't look like it will wrap up any time soon.
But now MTV has talked to Jolie about the potential project while discussing her new film, Wanted. Will she take on Ava Lord in A Dame to Kill For? "I don't know. I found the first Sin City impressive, but I don't know what they're going to do with the next one to make [it] as original as the first one." Well, it's more story on the folks of Sin City, so I imagine it will be a bunch of fresh chills and thrills in the same style -- I'm not so sure what originality she's hoping for.
Now, she did go on to say she would be curious if she was offered the role. I can't tell if she's being polite, or really interested. However, aside from her upcoming delivery and family tending, there's not a lot on her plate, so I imagine it would be easy to slip another dose of Sin City in. Is it time for the Dame? And should Jolie be Ava Lord?
As we've started to get our fair share of trailers for the coming prestige projects -- Frost/Nixon, The Soloist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno -- I was curious as to why we'd yet to get one for 
Remember how we 
Man, has this day brought us news of film-based video games aplenty -- one of which you can play for free right now and the rest of which some of you simply can't wait for.
Movie stars can get a stylist, remove those errant eyebrow and nose hairs, and even get some high-dose skin cleaner to make themselves smooth, shiny, and sexy; if all else fails, there are legions of makeup artists to make the men and women of Hollywood look as hot as possible. But there's not much they can do about their tongue prowess. Sometimes, the smooch or sex scene is so bad that it's even obvious on-screen, and on occasion, movie kissing is so bad that those who were forced to endure it remember the moment forever and tell tales about their bad kissing moments.
This past Sunday, The New York Times featured a popular 
The flashy advertisements, the curving of bullets and Angelina Jolie make it pretty difficult to remember that 
The buzzing murmur for 
