With the holidays now officially upon us, we can think of no more festive activity than gathering around Elisha Cuthbert, dousing her arm in lighter fluid, and setting it ablaze.
· Kiefer sighting! 12 million of them, in fact, as Sunday night's 24: Redemption returned Jack Bauer to sneering, skull-cracking form with modest (at best) ratings. His next appearance is scheduled for January — when 24 returns as a series — or in a heartwarming holiday video, should the inspiration strike this year. [THR] · Let's hear it for Catherine Hardwicke! Her $70 million weekend for Twilight made it the highest opening gross ever for a woman director. [BBC] · Steven Seagal's law-enforcement hobby is evidently serious enough for A&E to feature him in Steven Seagal: Lawman, a new reality series showcasing the actor on duty as a deputy sheriff in Louisiana. [Variety] After the jump: What actress is set to join the Mile-High Club with George Clooney?· Vera Farmiga will play George Clooney's requisite romantic interest in Up in the Air, Jason Reitman's Juno follow-up about a man chasing down his life's goal of accruing 1 million frequent flyer miles. [Variety · Speedy the Diet Supplement will be just one of the cartoon characters easing kids into Fox's planned Weekend Marketplace, a two-hour infomercial block that will replace the network's Saturday-morning cartoon programming. [Variety] · Robert De Niro is the latest player to belly up to the Middle East gravy bowl, franchising his Tribeca Film Festival to Qatar for an annual event to screen in the capital city of Doha. [Variety]
Now that our Kiefer is free as a bird and more velvet-voiced than ever, he's opening up about the seven-week jail stint that made shower soap negotiation almost as perilous as saving the free world. Speaking to Men's Vogue, he details the jail's living conditions (bad, but at least it wasn't the plebeian hellhole inflicted upon Raffaello Follieri) and the cerebral, mercifully short-lived experience that was his sobriety:
The two-hour premiere of the new season of 24 is about to hit the internet in advance of the show's premiere next month. A mere 16 month after the show's last season ended, 24's producers have tried to silence complaints about haphazard plotting and unbelievable Deus ex machinas by plotting out the show's entire season in advance for the first time. Bauer's ceaseless torturing of his enemies will get a new setting this season, and Republican fans of the show about to lose a president will still have Jack Bauer, the last remaining relic of the Bush years.At the beginning of the recently released second trailer, Jack's torturous methods are questioned in court by the dad from That '70s Show, for some reason. "Don't expect me to regret the decisions I made," Jack tells the judge. All you can think is: did the conservative leaning series really have to return after an 18 month layoff with an apologia for the Bush-Cheney administration?
The Gossip Girl kids have gotten political. Two of them at least, Penn Badgley who plays Dan and his off-screen ladylove Blake Lively, who plays his on-screen ladylove Serena. They're appearing in a MoveOn.org anti-McCain ad in which regular kids—including these two soap stars at that Hannah girl from that American Teenager documentary—condescend to their McCain-voting parents as if they were about to drink or take doobies. Har har. So Gossip Girl is a bit liberal, but it's not the only politicized show on the air. No indeed there are others, subtly (or not so) spouting rhetoric from both sides of the aisle. Our Photoshop expert Steve Dressler has created a simple chart that we'll explain after the jump.
Free to Good Home: IMDb yesterday uncorked about 6,000 movie and TV titles available for free viewing via Hulu, including recent episodes of The Office, 24 and Battlestar Galactica; site officials also noted that new episodes of some series — 30 Rock among them — will be available in advance of their airdates this fall. Not so with the site's full-length features, however, which, beyond classics like The Night of the Hunter and Some Like it Hot, include Dude, Where's My Car?, Liar Liar and The Scorpion King, finally testing the critical consensus that their makers can't give these films away. We shall see! [IMDb via NYT]
Shutdown Fever! Hot on the heels of 24 stopping production to work out script issues, Joss Whedon's upcoming Eliza Dushku vehicle Dollhouse is grinding to its own quality-mandated halt. Already, Whedon was instructed by a tinkering Fox to shoot a second pilot (the original will air as Dollhouse's second episode), and the additional order left him too busy to bring future scripts up to snuff. Currently on its third completed episode, Dollhouse sets will go dark for two weeks while Whedon works out the kinks, though Fox claims its midseason debut won't be affected. Firefly fans, commence your worrying. [Zap2It]
At this point, 24's seventh season has been hit with more obstacles than the beleaguered Jack Bauer — so what's one more? After suffering through a WGA strike, a one-year delay, and a stint in jail for lead Kiefer Sutherland, the Fox drama is once again shutting down production, says EW. Producer Howard Gordon tells the mag that he was unhappy with the scripts for hours 19-24, so the show will power down until writers can start from scratch. Still, thanks to the eight episodes banked before the strike, producers don't expect the season premiere to be delayed any further — which is more than can be said for the Lifetime debut of Project Runway, now pushed back to January 2009. Originally slotted for this fall, where it would have followed quickly on the heels of its Bravo swan song, producers couldn't make the abbreviated schedule work. The delay lends Lifetime the extra time it will need to craft an all-important needlepoint challenge and secure the participation of "fashion legend" Meredith Baxter Birney as final judge at NY Fashion Week. [EW]
So we hit the open warehouse, and let's just say, if we had $5 million kicking around, we'd have found the ideal windowless converted foundry from which to run our punk rock mini-empire/host all-night after-Junction ragers with a few hundred of our closest neighborhood drunks. Yes, Kiefer is leaving us, friends. But that doesn't mean we can't still check in with him from time to time, albeit in the altogether less intimate arena of nationally televised talk show appearances. On Late Show last night, Kiefer recalled our collective nightmare—his incarceration for a parole-violating DUI—from inside the Glendale City Jail. Explaining that his celebrity status (translation: perky little ass) earned him unwanted attention, the simple act of communal showering became a perilous maneuver worthy of Jack Bauer himself, requiring slippery neck-snappings and shivs-to-the-eye if he planned on getting out with his bitch-virginity intact.
There are few things in this world that can thwart 24's Jack Bauer — few things, that is, besides a WGA strike and an untimely stint in the Glendale City Jail. Forced to postpone the premiere of 24's seventh season from January 2008 to January 2009, Fox promised a make-good for tortured fans in the form of an additional two-hour prequel, set to air this November. Now, though, it's looking like those two hours are going to come out of the next season's twenty-four. Prequel costar Robert Carlyle gave Premiere the scoop:
*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
Now that she's quite pregnant, 24's Mary Lynn Rajskub is doing what any red-blooded American mother would do-getting into firearms! As the adorable actress explains, "I have a family to protect." Video after the jump.
When Bertolt Brecht said, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it," well, he was just being an egomaniacal auteur. But it's quite possible that he was right — if you're willing to classify network television as art, that is. Consider the case of two recent seemingly unthinkable societal shifts — Barack Obama's presidential nomination and the recent decision to legalize gay marriage in California starting today. Both were the plots of popular television shows before they actually happened. Could the paranoid social conservatives be right? Does what people see on TV actually change their opinions? Do Kiefer Sutherland's powers of persuasion extend beyond Defamer? Consider the evidence after the jump.
I haven't watched Fox's 24 since like the second season, but I'm thinking I'll have to tune in next year now that supercool Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance legend Jon Voight is joining the cast. "Jon Voight has been cast as the villain on the upcoming season of the Fox drama '24.' The seventh season kicks off in January, though Voight will make his first appearance during a two-hour 'prequel' episode to air in November, Chris Alexander, a spokesman for the show, said Friday."
In a Forgetting Sarah Marshall inspired moment of honesty, Kiefer Sutherland told his girlfriend, Siobhan Bonnouvrier, that he doesn't care that much for the clothing she picks out for him. Sutherland told his gal pal that he's far more comfortable in a V-Neck from American Apparel than the giant scarves the 24 star has been forced to wear lately. She quickly corrected him, explaining that there's a BIG difference between a scarf and a pashmina. Sutherland started to remove the pashmina and said, "Well, whatever it is, I don't like it and it's spring so why I am even wearing it?"
Like a desperate terrorist handcuffed to a suitcase nuke and eyeing a nearby hacksaw, shooting on the new season of 24 found itself barbarically cleaved in two by the writers strike. Since Season 7 won't now premiere until January 2009, producers have announced the filming of a 24 TV movie to tide audiences over until then. Whether audiences even bother returning after the series's last predictable and outlandish season remains to be seen. By the time the movie airs in the fall, however, we'll at least have a better idea of whether they should have stuck with the African American-president template, or were wise in switching it up to the Cherry Jones model instead. [THR]
Every TV nut (well, isn't that all of us here?) has, at one point or another, spent a little time fantasizing about certain fictional characters on their favorite shows. These fantasies tend to be either soft-focus daydreams (say, dreaming up elaborate schemes in which they "bump" into you at a party) or something a bit more hard-core (picturing them while giving your significant other the old in-out). On that note, the clever list-makers over at EW decided to compile a Top 30 reader's choice collection of the small-screen boys and girls who most frequently make cameos in those illicit fantasies. But, with no offense to the site's readers, we have some serious vetoes to charge. After the jump, our picks for who falls under Strongly Agree (the predictable Jim Halpert) and those we brand as a Vehemently Disagree (four words: Bree. Van. De. Camp), as well as the most erroneous, mind-boggling oversight missing from the group:
After yesterday's Wisconsin primary, a convincing win by Barack Obama in a largely white state, the prospect of a black Democratic nominee, and a black president, looks possible, even likely. And it only took 232 years! Of course, oh-so-progressive Hollywood got there long ago. Here's the ultimate list of black presidents, from movies and TV. They range from President Camacho of Idiocracy through to the weary statesman played by Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. (If we've missed any, let us know.)
· 24 co-creator/primetime-torture advocate Joel Surnow is leaving the series to follow his muse, having previously ceded day-to-day control of the show to fellow executive producer Howard Gordon. Surnow explains his decision to officially pass on Jack Bauer's interrogation-speeding belt-sander to his colleagues: "I've done seven years, almost eight years at the same place with the same great group of people. During the strike I started thinking about different things I'd like to do independently, and decided it was time to see if there were other opportunities I wanted to pursue." [Variety]
· Hoping to pressure SAG leaders into opening negotiations with the studios long before the June 30th expiration of their contract, "several top stars" may launch a public campaign in hopes of preempting a second industry-crippling work stoppage, possibly in the form of a series of "Don't Be Fucking Crazy. No One Wants Another Strike For At Least Three Years" ads in the trades featuring actors like George Clooney, Ben Affleck and Teri Hatcher hugging moguls such as Peter Chernin and Les Moonves. [Variety]
