We don't plan on making a habit of leaving our blogging hovel, but we just returned from a leisurely lunch at Paramount's cafeteria. (Please, before you get any crazy ideas, we were eating in the downscale section, looking forlornly through a couple of panes of glass at the fancy people in the executive dining room.)
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Sharon Stone, an actress that is probably best known to a new generation of filmgoers for her work in Catwoman, is suing a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon for claiming that he performed a facelift on her. After some unintentionally hilarious passages that explain our culture's obsession with physical appearance and lamenting how talent alone is no guarantee of success in Hollywood, the suit then reminds the world that Stone's beauty is of the rare, natural kind:
· The latest on Miramax vs. Disney: In an SEC filing, Disney ominously states that production of Miramax projects may be "abandoned or otherwise impaired" after their deal with the Weinsteins expires. This is the closest Michael Eisner can get to threatening to kill Harvey Weinstein's children. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Hilary Swank gets the "femme fatale" role in the Brian DePalma adaptation of the James Ellroy novel The Black Dahlia. DePalma will now have to try and find a way to butch her up a little and put her right back in Oscar contention. [Variety]
· No matter how hard we close our eyes and wish for Brett Ratner to disappear, he stubbornly continues to show up in the trades. Robin Tunney signs up for Ratner's Fox drama Prison Break.[THR]
· NY Film Critics Circle jumps on the Sideways bandwagon. When will these critics stop blindly rewarding excellence, just like the Academy voters did years ago? [THR]
· NBC Universal Television pretends to humor Will & Grace star Eric McCormack's producing aspirations, sets up a shingle for him with offices across from the CBS Radford lot. How long will it take McCormack to figure out NBC provided him with cardboard prop computers from Ikea and Fisher Price telephones? [Variety]
At this point, there's nothing to do but wait until the day when an image of Paris Hilton's genitalia adorns the hundred dollar bill, when she can stare at herself at every point during a shopping transaction.
Tom Cruise has publicly credited Scientology for curing his dyslexia, but the cult's "tech" has seemingly replaced the learning disorder with a severe form of OCD: Every time Cruise sees a microphone, he feels compelled to talk about the "Church" until the offending audio equipment is removed. The actor's latest cry for help occurred at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert:
The Crude Futures blog notices an eerie similarity between two typefaces that have been ubiquitous during this holiday season. It's almost enough to drive a typographically-obsessed auteur back to his Big Book of Fonts, rocking back and forth for hours on end until he finds a new one that "feels" right. Eventually, realizing that going back and altering The Life Aquatic before its release this weekend is prohibitively expensive, Wes Andesron will have no choice but to capitulate and seek a promotional tie-in campaign between his movie and the gingerbread latte.
· A week after exposing reality television producers as script-happy charlatans, Joel Stein goes deep inside Hollywood's secret holiday gift-giving protocols. You will never be able to see the letters VVIP again without a chill running down your spine. Trust us.
· LA.comfidential catches the very underage Mischa Barton getting shitfaced at the Flaunt party on Friday night. We're shocked—shocked!—that Barton could manage to get drunk at a party in Beverly Hills. Come on, we're not talking about a criminal genius like Lindsay Lohan here.
· And while we're invoking the name of Lohan, she popped in to "Weekend Update" to once again assure the world that her chest is real. Somewhere, there exists a publicist-drawn battle plan entitled. "Re-Educating the World About Lindsay Lohan's Absolutely Natural Breasts," and there's a check next to the action item, "Enlist Mean Girls co-stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in mammary damage-control efforts."
· Rhetorical question: What the fuck is wrong with people?
We've heard that the MPAA has once again summoned its team of heroic, pirate-hating lawyers for a fresh round of litigation against movie file-sharers (or as we like to call them, its customers), and the piping-hot lawsuits should be arriving sometime soon...like tomorrow. It seems that last month's opening round of legal intimidation somehow failed to immediately cease the scourge of movie piracy, necessitating this coming larger-scale offensive. We think we know why the earlier suits haven't driven downloaders to more savory expressions of their respect for copyrights: The idea of "lawsuits" is too abstract. How scary can a piece of paper with a bunch of big words on it be? If tomorrow's expected action fails to solve the problem once and for all, we recommend that the MPAA randomly select nine "example" pirates and nail one to each letter of the Hollywood sign. That would grab the attention of America's broadband-wielding scofflaws a lot more effectively than some stationary with Dan Glickman's signature on it.
· Tom Shone signs his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Summer at Book Soup. Perhaps he has an answer to the most pressing question of our time: "How can Jerry Bruckheimer be stopped?"
· Dustin Hoffman is honored by the Southern California Chapter of the ACLU at the Bill of Rights Awards Dinner at the Beverly Hills Hilton. Doesn't it seem like an eternity has passed since an actor has been honored for preserving our liberties?
· Monday's music: KCRW places its stamp of approval on Joseph Arthur's show at the Troubadour, while Thelonious Monster continues their Monday night residency (free cover; ergo, more money for booze) at Spaceland.
Paramount's premiere for Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events, the event movie the studio hopes will ease the pain of a forgettable, turmoil-filled year, featured some kid-friendly fun, Jim Carrey displaying his face's rubberlike properties, and a truly regrettable fashion mistake by an executive. And even though it looks like even The Big Studio That Can't couldn't find a way to fuck up the movie, they had a hard time impressing a couple of our party-hardened spies:
At the Ocean's Twelve after-party, director Steven Soderbergh repeats a faux pas he made numerous times during the movie's filming by mistaking Andy Garcia for a cater-waiter and loudly demanding that Garcia immediately freshen up his drink.
This supposed, hatchet-burying epistle from former MPAA head/pirate-hunter-in-twilight Jack Valenti to longtime nemesis Oliver Stone is sure to provide pullquote fodder ("Brilliant!" "Engaging and enticing!" "ALEXANDER...hammered...with a bad rap!") for whatever advertising Warner Bros. wastes on Alexander as it fades away into the annals of epic flop history. We can't be sure that the letter is authentic, so click on the above image and enjoy with all of the healthy skepticism you'd reserve for anything signed by Hollywood's legendary, elf-harboring, buccaneer-baiting former chief lobbyist.
· Let the end-of-year listmania begin: AFI releases its top 10 movies/television programs of 2004. [THR]
· The lovable drunks of Sideways take the LA Critics Assn. [THR], San Francisco Critics Circle [Variety, sub. req'd.], and NY Online Critics [THR] top honors. They're all just setting themselves up for disappointment when Miramax buys a win for The Aviator at the Oscars.
· The Desperate Housewives juggernaut outdoes all TV series in Golden Globe nominations, even beating The Sopranos by a count of five to four. Unfortunately, adulterous, teen-banging wife Eva Longoria is shut out. [Variety]
· Fox is so desperate to grab the Steve Levitan-Pamela Anderson pilot that it gives the still-unwritten project a six- episode, on-air commitment. Or, in terms we can better understand, three episodes per implant. [Variety]
· Kathy Bates is in negotiations to star in the Lifetime movie Ambulance Girl, about a middle-aged housewife who drives a fire truck. Kidding! She drives an ambulance. Naked. OK, not really. One nude scene per decade for Bates really is more than enough. [THR]
While the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild have already tasted the back of the studios' collective bargaining hand when they asked for a bigger cut of DVD cash, the Screen Actors Guild is still hoping their current talks will shake some more home video money out of the producers sitting across the negotiating table. But they're not going to do any better than the DGA and WGA if their negotiating position is ruined by agents bragging that their A-list clients are already making fuck-you money from DVDs, and don't need to be bothered by piddling matters like a strike over residuals:
Porn-seeking-missile sister site Fleshbot scores some video-captures of Vincent Gallo and Chloe Sevigny's infamous Brown Bunny blowjob scene [NSFW], thus saving us from our guilt from never ponying up for a ticket to get a look at it ourselves. (And our friends that had seen it are finally released from a continuing barrage of questions that they couldn't have answered without expensive forensic equipment.) Looking at this collage of vidcaps is a poor substitute for the acute sense of communal embarrassment one would get from sharing the full-motion, in-theater experience with other perverts, but we plan on printing it out, constructing a crude fellatio flipbook, and having some pals over to approximate the shame.
The Golden Globe nominations have been announced, and the wine-swilling members of the Hollywood Foreign Press have lavished seven nominations on Sideways, Alexander Payne's love poem to the kind of alcoholics who romantically perforate their livers with the fruit of the vine. A fitting choice, really, since the Globes ceremony is more notable for its highly amusing, shitfaced victory speeches than for its efficacy as an Oscar predictor. The red-hott Jamie Foxx was honored with acting nominations for Ray, Collateral, Redemption, and, oddly, a retroactive nod to his overlooked, prophylactic-seeking achievements in Booty Call. Miramax, maintaining an impressive ability to rise to the occasion for awards season, grabbed 15 nominations despite firing its entire staff. Congratulations to all of the nominees, whom we've already celebrated by chugging a bottle of three-dollar merlot.
Another Monday morning, another restorative tango through the weekend's box office estimates.
· Tara Reid, in an attempt to make nice with Page Six, sends them a fruit basket in thanks for being referred "demurely dressed and completely cogent." We suppose that backhanded compliment is still better than the Six Crew calling her vagina a "revolving man-door."
· We could spend all weekend in front of this montage of classic Maria Moments from this season's Apprentice. We won't, though, because that would be pathetic, and we'll be busy losing two days to a bottle of Vicodin we found in our friend's purse.
· Open All Night stalks Lindsay Lohan all over NY, so you don't have to bother with the frivolous stalker lawsuits yourselves.
· From GoldDerby.com's Golden Globes nominations preview: "Sideways [is] a fine film that probably owes its FANATICAL following to the fact that it glamorizes excessive boozing as being cool." It's not just any kind of boozing, though, It's the classy, wine-drinking kind of boozing, which always seems more acceptable than the kind where you drink straight from the Grey Goose bottle before dancing on P. Diddy's table.
