Vince Vaughn is my Hero of the Week for pissing off Reese Witherspoon on the set of Four Christmases. Apparently the man who has made a career out of playing a lazy bum has taken his method acting a little too seriously, and Princess Legally Blonde has taken offense to his lack of any sort of work ethic. An insider source claims “Vince rolls onto set in the morning looking like he just came in from a night out, while Reese will arrive early looking camera-ready.” Furthermore, Gamma Phi Beta sorority member Witherspoon - who has a really annoying mouth and whose acting debut was in a Nashville florist’s local commercial - has her self-professed “super-efficient acting methods”, and is irked that Vaughn won’t adhere to them. I want to know where her acting methods were two years ago (Just Like Heaven anybody?). “Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he's an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes. She's a one-take perfectionist and Vince likes to try it a few different ways. Sometimes Vince will be standing behind her and he has this look on his face that he just wants to kill her!" Unfortunate rumours have emerged from that he has yet to actually do this however.

Vatican Officials (presumably Catholic) have ordered a boycott of the anti-Christian Golden CompASS, as it “promotes a cold and hopeless world without God”. Sounds like London. Maybe filmmakers can blame the official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano for the film’s disastrous box office takes, which have put in jeopardy the sequels, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The editorial claimed the film as “the most anti-Christian film possible”. I would beg to differ. Had the director Chris Weitz, who also made American Pie, rewritten the script to include a scene in which Jesus fucks Lucifer in the ass (Lucifer being a metaphor for Apple Pie), it would be more thoroughly un-Christian. And probably a better film. Though no longer for kids so much.

Kevin Kline sold his nose for $3000. But the money was for charity. Apparently Kline, playing the titular Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway, sells his prosthetic proboscis in an auction each night, and last week saw a record figure. I think it’s kind of weird.

According to Video Watchdog magazine, seven different cuts of Blade Runner have been shown to the public, culminating in this month’s 25th anniversary DVD release of The Final Cut, which strangely enough includes reshot footage. Replicant Sean Young (who should have really remained in the 80s), seems to be oblivious to the cult following and various readings of the film. When asked what her favourite version was, she naively replied “The first one. To be honest I don’t really notice a difference”. Really? Like whether or not Harrison Ford’s a Replicant? I guess one has to acknowledge that this is a woman, who after being replaced by Kim Basinger in Batman due to a horse-riding injury, dressed up as Catwoman and confronted Tim Burton on the WB set to try to get him to reconsider her as the vampy villainess in the sequel. Nothing but class.

A movie I can’t wait to miss is Zombie Strippers (Tagline: Live Dead Nudes). A government re-animation chemo-virus gets released into an underground strip club, turning the dancers into “Super Zombie Strippers”. It stars Robert “Freddie” Englund and Jenna “Porn” Jameson. Best Bit: the First Assistant Director is someone I had the displeasure to work for, who boasts a name straight out of the worst kind of Manga rag … Mimi Mui.

Nu Image and Millennium Films saved Jessica Simpson’s latest, Blonde Ambition, from a straight-to-DVD release, by funding a limited Christmas run. Their marketing strategy – 8 Texan theatres, native to Simpson (whose mother claims she has a 160 IQ) and her co-star Luke Wilson (whose mother won't even bother lying) – reaped dividends this past weekend: the movie grossed $1,322, which translated to under 2 tickets per screening. In other news, Simpson recently discovered that she is allergic to cheese, wheat, coffee, chocolate, tomatoes, corn and hot peppers. And worthwhile movies. Meanwhile the film has yet to receive a single review on RottenTomatoes due to producers keeping it away from critics by hiding it in Texas.

UPDATE: For anyone familiar with my friends, I just noticed the part of "Cute Blonde Girl", played by Molly Sullivan, and thought 'I know her'. Alas - though the description fits, it is another. The Real Molly Sullivan is found here.

Movie #3572
Havoc
Barbara Kopple, 2005, USA
Kopple’s career has come a long way from Harlan County, USA. Here she tackles the overlooked plight of the bored high-schoolers who live in the Pacific Palisades, but act like Wiggas. Best of all is seeing Anne “Princess Diaries” Hathaway act all gangsta, singing hip-hop, bonding with Mexicans and in general trying very hard to act. The scenes where her and Bijou Philips rap and then roll around on the floor are particularly strong, as are three offensively gratuitous displays of Hathaway’s breasts.

Movie #3574
Veronica Guerin
Joel Schumacher, 2003, USA
Cate Blanchett’s passable Irish brogue is offset by some truly cheesy direction from Shades of Grey fave Joel Schumacher (who used to be a Costume Designer, an obvious precursor to directing features). Colin Farrell makes an unnecessary cameo as a football hooligan in this limp drama. Best Bit: Schumacher, unable to handle the complex multi-layered narrative intrinsic to a real-life account of political unrest, instead opts for the end credit “Chris Mulligan is a fictional composite character based in part on several different people, and certain events in which the character is depicted have been fictionalised for dramatic effect.” Laziness, or just an inherent lack of talent and intellect? Schumacher also made Dying Young, so you decide.

So I recently put seminal Bollywood musical Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge as my Pick of the Week over at That's Rentertainment, and Paul Young - a writer for Smile Politely - picked it up. He's written a piece about it and asked me for a quote. You can read his article here. If you're interested in my full write-up about the movie, let me know.

Movie #3490
Factory Girl
George Hickenlooper, 2006, USA
True-Movie about Andy Warhol's mate Edie Sedgwick, who died typically tragically young of an overdose. Despite having a bunch of characters that should be interesting, they're just annoying and the film is just boring. Best Bit: Hayden Christensen plays a famous musician with whom Edie has an affair. I had my suspicions so looked it up ... Bob Dylan. And you thought I'm Not There had imaginative casting.

To my immense gratification, Russell Crowe has been named as Hollywood’s most overpaid star. Forbes calculated that he earns studios $5 for every $1 of his salary, which hardly seems like the happy returns most execs would hope for. Except for A Good Year, which despite it's big budget director-star credentials made a paltry $7,458,269 in the market-leading US. Coupled with his reputation as an arrogant piece-of-shit in real life, Crowe can now boast the appeal of an Acrington Stanley reserve side practise.

Sadly Nicole Kidman was deemed the most overpaid actress in Hollywood. Raking in sometimes as much as $15M per role seems bloated when you consider that since her Oscar in 2002, she has appeared in 11 movies, only one of which has turned profit. Offsetting challenging indie darlings (Birth, Dogville, Margot at the Wedding), with mainstream misses that parallel the quality of decisions in her personal life (Bewitched, Stepford Wives compared to marrying Keith Urban), consistency has only been found in Box Office failure:

Dogville ($10M, $2M worldwide)
The Human Stain ($30M, $6M worldwide)
Birth ($20M, $7M worldwide)
Fur ($16.8M, $220,914 US gross)
The Invasion ($80M, $15M US gross)
Margot at the Wedding ($10M, $1.41M after 5 weeks)
Golden Compass ($180M, opened to $25.8M in the US)

Which bodes very well for Baz Luhrmann’s long awaited follow-up to Moulin Rouge, the Australian war epic cleverly titled Australia, which is costing $120M. The only time Kidman has appeared in a movie to cross the $100M mark, was her bit part in 1995’s Batman Forever as the ludicrously titled Dr. Chase Meridian.

Have never been a huge fan of Scotland’s choice for Bond Gerard Butler, but hearing that he hit Hilary 'sWank in the head with suspenders, shutting down filming for five days as she recovered from the four-stitch wound, allows me to forgive him for Joel “Hack” Schumacher’s rendition of Phantom of the Opera. During the shoot for P.S. I Love You the Dracula 2000 star had “been doing this scene for a day and a half, stripping and dancing and then pretending that the suspender hits me in the eye. It got stuck behind me and flew over my head and hit her in the head.” Former Next Karate Kid Swank most incurred my wrath by winning an Oscar for M$B, allowing her the prefix “Two-Time Academy Award Winner” (which is marginally more ludicrous than “Academy Award Winner Ben Affleck”). Knowledge that the tom-boyish vegetarian ex-sister-in-law of Rob Lowe is trying to establish her as a romantic-comic lead can only augment the ill will I feel towards her. Which is plenty.

Ashley “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” Judd, chose to conveniently have her potentially lethal attack of appendicitis in a hospital. Shooting forthcoming film Helen (directed by Sandra Nettleback, who was dialogue coach on 1985’s Seduction: The Cruel Woman), she fell ill at the Ridge Meadows Hospital. Upon collapsing, she was put on a stretcher and taken to a nearby operating room. The actress claiming the incident as “a big stroke of luck” seems to be the equivalent in ‘lucky’ to getting run over by an ambulance. Gratuitous Snipe: the wise 39-year old once turned down a role in Kuffs due to the nude scenes, claiming that “"My mother worked too hard for me to take my clothes off in my first movie.” She would subsequently bare herself in Bug, Normal Life, Eye of the Beholder and Norma Jean and Marilyn.

Movie #3464
Southland Tales
Richard Kelly, 2006-7, USA

I know Mitch made fun of this prior to its release, but I chose – to my eternal regret – to ignore his warnings. Southland Tales is bad. And long. And really bad. The unintelligibly written and inexplicably long (2 hrs 25 mins) post-apocalyptic exercise in patting-your-penis-on-the-back showcases the worst ensemble cast ever assembled. And then it proceeds to cast them as inappropriately as possible. I salute Richard Kelly…

Justin Timberlake as a scarred war veteran who lip-synchs to The Killers
Kevin Smith as a big fat ball of prosthetics posing as a computer geek
Wallace Shawn in drag
Mad TV’s Will Sasso as a bloke named Fortunio Balducci
Mandy Moore as a spoilt rich girl
Jon Lovitz as a hard-as-nails killer cop
Christopher Lambert, in a movie. Again.
2 x Sean William Scott, as identical twins
Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star
SNL’s Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri as neo-Marxists
And The Rock as the leading man. Who helps save the world.

Movie #3455
Bratz
Sean McNamara, 2007, USA

I thank AirIndia for showing this on the plane.

If I could soak my written sentences with as much sarcasm as I would like to, I would say something akin to "the food fight sequence was so inspired that it briefly made me wish Kubrick had opted for the original ending to Dr. Strangelove". What I really want to say is "Bratz is to high art cinema as Dr. Harold Shipman is to mixologists".

I also want to utilise some choice quotations from Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) reviewers that perfectly articulate my own thoughts…

"One of the most blatantly offensive movies ever to be aimed at young audiences” (David Cornelius)

“A flat-out awful abortive trainwreck of a disastrous pile of worthless stupid garbage of an utter mess of a movie, even by the low, low standards of Movies Based on Toys” (Eric D Snider)

“Apparently Jon Voight can do worse than Baby Geniuses 2" (Peter Sobczynski)

Shame on Neil Minow, who was the only OFCS bloke to give it a positive review.

Movie #3459
The Fog
John Carpenter, 1980, USA
How is this a classic? This seminal snooze-fest is about a mysterious volitional precipitation which harbours killer pirates with a vendetta. Yet it’s worse than it sounds. Nothing happens for a really long time. Jamie Lee Curtis has casual sex with a stranger, and lives. My only kick came from the mother-daughter pairing of two iconic horror heroines: Psycho’s Janet Leigh and Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis. Only less time is devoted to them than to faux-scares courtesy of radios turning on really loudly. Which is hardly inspired stuff. And this was when Carpenter was supposed to still be good.

Director Clutching At Straws Of The Week
Steven Spielberg is to have the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind appear in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Lost Skull. The aliens will likely accept SAG minimum since their evident typecasting has seen them offered few roles of late.

Loser of the Week
Suffering even more than coffee shops due to the writer’s strike is one Kiefer Sutherland. His sentence for trying to pull a Jack Bauer whilst driving drunk was to be suspended until 24’s current season wrapped. Except it never started shooting, so Kiefer gets to be subjected to “laundry and kitchen duties” early. The new dates see him miss Christmas, New Year’s AND his birthday.

D’Oh of the Week
Keira “Domino” Knightley recently appeared topless for Interview magazine. “We ended by taking my clothes off. Why does that always happen? Because I say yes, I suppose!”. That would certainly be one factor.

Just in case anyone forgot what a dick-head Michael Bay looks like, here's a picture.

I always thought that Bad Boys 2 would be as political as the auteur behind the video for Meat Loaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love" could get. But "Frat Boy" from Mystery Men has been ranting about a Microsoft conspiracy that is responsible for the war between Blu-Ray and HD:

"What you don't understand is corporate politics. Microsoft wants both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads. That is the dirty secret no one is talking about. That is why Microsoft is handing out $100m checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu-ray. They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth."

In case you forgot again, here he demonstrates his striking resemblance to his latest franchise's logo:

Bay famously threatened to withhold Transformers 2 from Paramount as retribution for their exclusive alignment with HD DVD; a stronger deterrent would be the threat of Transformers 3 and 4, but hey.

Here he is again in Pensive Pink...

And a final gratuitous snipe: remember that movie The Island, which cost $126M and opened to $12.4M in the States? With Ewan McGregor as an American action hero? Good stuff.

Movie #3446
I Know Who Killed Me
Chris Sivertson, 2007, USA
Dumbest plot ever.
SPOILERS - highlight to read.
So Lindsay Lohan is abducted by a killer and tortured, and turns up missing her arm, leg and memory. The twist? She is the long-forgotten twin sister of the abducted girl, and is experiencing non-religious stigmata, i.e. she wakes up in the middle of the night and her leg has fallen off. The funniest bits involved supposed tension revolving around the batteries in her fake leg and arm dying. Kinda like a metaphor. For stupidity.

I, Legend by Angel

As long as nerds read books and steves make movies, someone is going to be unhappy with the faithfulness of movie adaptations to their source material. Fortunately for the movie-makers, those people typically shun confrontation and prefer Angel reruns to power-lifting. Still, there isn’t an actor who conjures more fear in a purist’s heart than Will Smith. If you were confused how Isaac Asimov’s hard sci-fi collection of placid short stories became the action romp I, Robot, you know what I mean. If, on the other hand, you are wondering who Isaac Asimov is, then you’re probably excited to see that Akiva Goldsman co-wrote Smith’s next big movie, I Am Legend.

“Gold”sman’s words have powered films such as Batman Forever and Batman & Robin (aka the Batman so good that Warner Brothers decided nothing could ever top it and that they should just start a reset the franchise), The Da Vinci Code, and of course I, Robot. Feeling he hadn’t enriched us enough with his writing, Akiva teamed up with Mike Protosevich to adapt I Am Legend not from the eponymous novel by Richard Matheson, but rather from a 1971 movie based on Matheson’s book, The Omega Man. Yes, it’s a screenplay based on a screenplay based on a book. They claim that it’s based on the script of The Omega Man and not the movie, so they’re not calling it what it is, a remake. Now I am explaining this, because it would be unethical to let Matheson fans enter the theater not knowing I Am Legend’s adaptation was about as faithful as Kobe Bryant in a seedy massage parlor.

However the source material has changed in its translation, the ad campaign for I Am Legend does do an excellent job of building mystery, while highlighting how visually stunning the movie is going to be; it could be 90 minutes of Big Willy alternating ass to mouth with Richard “the Octogenarian” Matheson, and I would probably still pay admission. Smith must also be given credit for trying to secure Guillermo Del Toro as the director (he declined). Movie-goers have otherwise been fortunate in I Am Legend’s lengthy production process, the project having slipped through the fingers of many inept hands. Imagine a universe where our fates diverged in the 90s: while Shadie enjoyed Ridley Scott’s mysterious directorial absence, some poor saps were sitting through his awful I Am Legend starring the miscast Arnold Swartzenegger. Again in 2003, the public almost receives Michael Bay’s I Am Legend starring Will Smith, but instead gets Bad Boys 2. Well, actually I am not sure we came out any richer on that bargain, but the bottom line is that I Am Legend has had so many opportunities to suck that it is virtually improbable that it will be a bad film.

SHADES OF GRAY - Natalie Portman is dumb and What Would Jesus' Evil Twin Brother Do?

Natalie Portman is not as bright as her Harvard education would suggest. First off she seems surprised her nude scene from Hotel Chevalier had been “misappropriated” (read “Now found on porn sites”). “My issue is that I feel it takes something away from what you’re doing”. Like clothes? Furthermore Nat, who was a member of the environmental song and dance troupe The World Patrol Kids under her real name Natalie Hershlag, has decided that she will partake in no more sequels. “When something works you don’t touch it” … does that mean she’d consider a sequel to Mars Attacks? It does rule out a long-rumoured The Professional / Leon bid for franchise cash-in, but she was more insistent on not revisiting her role as Padme in Star Wars. “I spent ten years working on these films. It’s time to let it continue on its own”. Someone should remind her that her character is already dead. She will however work on a rip-off, ahem, remake, of Danish film Brothers with soon-to-be serial plagiarist Jim Sheridan (who also plans on remaking Kurosawa’s Ikiru with Tom Hanks, of all blashpemous choices).

Robert Sigl’s The 13th Disciple is set to come to the silver screen amidst considerable controversy. A fictional narrative about Jesus’ evil twin brother and the pair’s reincarnation in modern times, the film is getting co-produced by Kraut sounding fieber.film and Indian investors. "The film is about two archeologists touring India to research about Jesus' lifespan in India”, explains producer Mario Stefan, who may have a little too much wine in his water. “The story reveals Jesus' evil twin brother who used to practice some different sect … the film is a piece of fiction and not based on true events”. No shit. Stefan expects his meagre budget of $5 and two fish to stretch around 5000 times further than would be expected.

Chyler Leigh, until now known for her role as Lexie Grey in Grey’s Anatomy, should achieve augmented and unwelcome notoriety thanks to her role in 1997’s Kickboxing Academy. A thoroughly bad B-movie certainly, it’s more awkward that she had a love scene with co-star Christopher Khayman Lee (the Red one from Power Rangers in Space), whilst only 15. Oh, and Lee is Leigh’s brother. The scene apparently involved the two locking tongues. I can't imagine a situation in which their actions are acceptable.

Barry Bonds’ [alleged] steroid abuse, and the whole accompanying legal shenanigans, will be the topic of a forthcoming HBO Films production. Once the writers strikes is settled, Ron Bull Durham Shelton will write and direct the adaptation of “Game Of Shadows”. For those unaware, the book is based on “secret grand jury testimony of Bonds and other athletes leaked by Troy Ellerman, a disbarred attorney sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison for denying under oath he was the reporters’ source”. The book claims Bonds was jealous of Mark McGwire setting the home run record, and so wrestled with himself, then started using steroids. There are at least two stellar montages in that sentence. Though casting is premature, Shades would like to see Michael Clarke Duncan as the protagonist. And by now we should know the mantra “If you build a baseball movie, Kevin Costner will no doubt come” … maybe as a wise batting coach who disperses advice and wisdoms as if they were letters of hope.