BuzzSugar

Hope Davis Replaces Julianne Moore in Hillary Clinton Role

BuzzSugar — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:41:26 -0700

As much as I like Julianne Moore as an actress, I had a tough time picturing her as Hillary Clinton in the HBO Films/BBC Films movie The Special Relationship (is it sad that whenever I see that title I think of Hugh Grant, as Prime Minister, saying that to sleazy US President played by Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually?). Now, due to a scheduling conflict, Moore has pulled out of the project and Hope Davis has taken her place.

This makes much more sense to me, as Davis resembles Clinton a bit more, and I think she is such a versatile, engaging actress, and she deserves more roles and more recognition. I can't wait to see what she does with this one. She'll be working alongside Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton and Michael Sheen (reprising his role from The Queen) as Prime Minister Blair. Written by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Queen, Peter Morgan, the movie "chronicles the unique and sometimes turbulent political relationship between newly installed British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s."

Who Should Play Bill Clinton - Now and Forever?

BuzzSugar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:30:36 -0700

I've been monitoring some interesting casting news for a movie titled Special Relationship, about the Clinton White House, which will be written and directed by Peter Morgan (of Frost/Nixon). The project is the latest in a group of movies penned by Morgan - including The Queen - and it will "show how Bill's 'inappropriate relationship' with White House intern Monica Lewinsky nearly ended his time in power." Yowza, right? Morgan is associated with and respected for his personal, fictionalized portrayals of those in power, so this will most likely be more than a melodramatic retelling of the the former president's indiscretions.

Anyway, there have been lots of rumors about who's playing the ex-prez, but the latest is Dennis Quaid! Can you believe it? Supposedly, Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, and Tim Robbins were also in the running. Julianne Moore has been cast as Hillary Clinton, and Michael Sheen will once again play British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Now, Clinton is no stranger to having actors fill his shoes on the big and small screens (John Travolta played a character based on him in Primary Colors, and both Darrell Hammond and the late Phil Hartman portrayed him on Saturday Night Live) but I'm curious who you guys imagine playing Bill Clinton in a movie like this. Is it Quaid? Or is there someone else you picture in your mind forever and always as Bubba?

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What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday

BuzzSugar — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:30:16 -0700

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue.

Smart People
I had high hopes for Smart People, mainly due to the stellar cast that includes Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, and Dennis Quaid.

The story takes place near the Carnegie Mellon campus and centers around a family headed by a widowed professor (Quaid) who are all having a terrible time relating to each other and the outside world, despite how book smart they are. When the professor's free-spirited brother (Church) crashes into their lives they all start to thaw out a bit and discover how far a little humanity can go.

The movie didn't quite meet my expectations but it's certainly a worthwhile rental if you're looking for a few laughs and a genuinely talented ensemble cast.

Special features include interviews with the producers, cast and crew of the movie, commentary from the director and writer, a collection of outtakes, nine deleted scenes and exclusive footage from the premiere of Smart People at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Two more new options on DVD if you read more.

The Wire: Season Five
I still have not totally come to grips with the fact that this final season of The Wire was overlooked by Emmy voters. The show has spent years as one of the most consistently well reviewed shows on television, though its ratings were never high. Today the final piece of the puzzle, the show's fifth season, is out on DVD, and marks the final chapter of David Simon's epic saga about Baltimore with a critical look at the media.

The season got more criticism than most (maybe because the media had to see themselves, rather than police officers or teachers, through Simon's bleak lens), but that didn't make it any less satisfying for me. The 10 episodes wrap up many of the stories Simon and series co-creator Ed Burns had been working on for years, and even at the end, nothing about The Wire is ever too neat or tidy. Once again, the lines between good guys and bad guys end up blurred, and that's a big part of what makes the show so captivating.

Special features include "The Wire Odyssey: A Retrospective of the First Four Seasons," "The Wire: The Last Word - A Documentary Exploring the Role of the Media," and six audio commentaries with Simon and members of the cast and crew.

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer
I just happened to read something yesterday about how difficult it is for studios to embrace and market smart movies that are for and about women, even after the huge success of Sex and the City. So, it's an interesting coincidence that an example of this phenomenon is out on DVD today. I hardly heard anything about this film, even though it received an 84% on RottenTomatoes and stars one of Hollywood's biggest young stars. What the heck?

Anyway, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer is about three generations of Mexican women grappling with issues of romance and sexuality - at all stages of life. It looks compelling, thoughtful and relatable and I, for one, am stoked to see this. The movie stars America Ferrera, Elizabeth Peña, Lucy Gallardo, and Eliana Alexander and was screened in competition at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. (Yeah: 2005! Sheesh.)

Earth Day Movie Night: Environmental Disaster Movies

BuzzSugar — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:30:50 -0700

As I was researching environmental disaster movies it was interesting to see how long this idea has been around that humans could destroy the earth simply by taking its resources for granted. Long before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, filmmakers and fiction writers were clearly aware that manmade pollution has a chance of bringing about an apocalyptic scenario here on earth. So, in honor of Earth Day I present a few movies that, in their own over-the-top ways urge audiences to heed the warnings of the day lest we succumb to a future worse than what these films imagined.

The Day After Tomorrow
This is probably the first cautionary global warming tale that springs to most people's minds when you think "environmental disaster." In The Day After Tomorrow the rising temperature of the planet speeds up the disaster effects some real-life scientists predict will happen eventually. The film stars Daniel Quaid as a sexy - wait for it - paleoclimatologist who tries to save his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the other survivors stuck in New York after the city is flooded and then frozen over by the rising ocean. The movie is all CGI effects and silly one-liners but the action is heart-pounding and Quaid and Gyllenhaal are easy on the eyes.

For more movies that may scare you into recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs, read more.

Logan's Run
Before Star Wars wowed audiences with stellar effects, there was the campy and slightly corny Logan's Run. The film is based on the bestselling science fiction novel of the same name that was written in 1967. The movie takes place in the future (23rd century to be exact) where the earth has basically been destroyed by overpopulation and pollution. A few survivors live in a domed society which would be rather lovely if it weren't for the fact that everyone must die at age 30 (population control). The movie stars Michael York (a.k.a. Basil from Austin Powers) and actually won an Academy Award for visual effects at the time. It's a bit dated, but is still an interesting look at a scary dystopian future.

Soylent Green
Similar to Logan's Run, Soylent Green was released in the '70s, but this time takes us to the year 2022. Now that overpopulation and global warming have led to a world where food like fruits, vegetables, and meats are rare, most of the population lives off "soylent green" processed food. Charlton Heston stars in this classic thriller about the potential for corruption when resources are scarce and humankind is desperate.

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Smart People: Emotionally Unintelligent

BuzzSugar — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:30:08 -0700

Smart People has a lot of good stuff going for it: a great cast (including Ellen Page in the follow-up to her star-making Juno role), sharp and funny dialogue, and a studied look at familial dysfunction.

The movie takes place in a dreary Pittsburgh near the Carnegie Mellon campus and is centered around a family headed by a widowed professor given a name that could only go to a serious blow-hard: Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid). He is father to high school senior Vanessa (Page) and Carnegie Melon student/talented poet James. Lawrence, we quickly learn, also has an adopted brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), who's a major slacker and/or free spirit who comes to crash with the family when he's run out of money.

The story isn't the most original idea ever scripted, but if told right, it could have been a nice little movie about learning to love and appreciate the crazy nut-heads we're all dealt in life: our relatives. Unfortunately the loving and appreciating comes far too late and as a result, we end up watching a lot of seriously miserable people roam around being miserable without much point. To see what I think rescues this film from being a total Debbie Downer, read more.

The Wetherholds, save for Chuck, are, as the title suggests, extremely intelligent (in the "we wear tweed and get published in The New Yorker" kind of way) but completely emotionally withdrawn. It takes a new love interest (Sarah Jessica Parker) to begin to melt the ice around the professor's heart and the fun-loving uncle to get the family to reveal an ounce of humanity to the outside world. Thankfully, they're so darn smart that when they take verbal jabs at each other, they're witty and biting enough to make for some good laughs.

Page, in particular, plays her politically conservative, uptight character with the same smart-aleck timing as slacker-teen Juno MacGuff - so it's funny, but not an acting stretch. However, some of the best moments of this film come during her scenes with Church, who takes an interest in getting his stick-in-the-mud niece to loosen up a little. They smoke pot together, get drunk, and have some really wonderfully touching, offbeat moments of bonding that are the result of two fine actors bringing out the best in each other.

Quaid's character, on the other hand, is really quite repellent. He is withdrawn, shows zero interest in his students, takes his children for granted and is that guy who talks about himself for 45 minutes on a date without asking the woman a question. Why would any woman, much less an attractive, accomplished doctor, want to be with him?

Unfortunately, the professor doesn't begin to see the error of his ways until it's much too late and as a result, it's hard to care about him - and, by extension, his family. At least there is one character who found the Wetherholds' repressed, socially awkward personalities unpleasant and indulgent. As Chuck, Church mastered a facial expression during exchanges between these unhappy people that perfectly expressed what I as a viewer was thinking: "Man, and they call me the idiot?"

To see the trailer and more clips from Smart People check out movies.ivillage.com.

Photos courtesy of Miramax Films

Link Time! 4/10

BuzzSugar — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:31:21 -0700

TV Squad is all ga-ga over the packaging of the Mad Men DVD set - and for good reason!
So, according to Vulture, maybe David Archuleta didn't have such a tough time deciding to sing "Angels," after all.
Someone on Pushing Daisies is gay, and if you want to know who, head to AfterElton.

After watching another schlubby guy-hot girl movie (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Cinematical asks, where are the movies where unattractive women score hot guys?
Hey, it's Give Me My Remote's first Office Thursday in months!
Cute alert! The Paste Magazine blog alerts me to the fact that Shel Silverstein's books and albums are being reissued.
Sure, Lifetime's gaining Project Runway - but, as Popwatch points out, that might not offset its loss of The Golden Girls reruns to the Hallmark Channel.
This week's Hump Day Hottie on FilmExperience was Dennis Quaid, which I find totally awesome.

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Vantage Point: A Pretty Solid Action-Mystery

BuzzSugar — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:29:56 -0800

Here's what I liked about Vantage Point: It's a gradually unfolding thriller-mystery with elements of an action movie thrown in. Here's what I don't like about Vantage Point: While it benefits from being both thriller-mystery and action flick, it also falls into the same traps as many other movies in these genres. In trying to keep our attention, the film employs this tactic of repeatedly winding back the clock to show what's happening in every character's story in a certain time span. But while this is neat the first few times, it becomes laughable after a while - literally, laughable. The audience I was with started to anticipate the rewind and would roar with laughter every time it happened. As an action film, there's a lot of gunfire and bombing and people betraying other people by killing them, all of which is fine. But then there's an impossibly long and exhausting car chase that makes this hour-and-a-half movie feel twice as long.

Regardless of those minor criticisms, however, Vantage Point is still one of the finer movies like this to come out in a long time. The action centers around a speech the President is supposed to make in Salamanca, Spain, yet everything goes awry when two shots ring out across the square and the President is struck down. Soon after, two bombs explode in the city. Rewinding the clock several times allows us to follow many different points of view and piece together the full picture of what went down. That's just the basic outline of this tense, twisty tale, though, so read more.

There's a wide range of characters to follow, centering mostly on a shaky Secret Service man, Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) who took a bullet for the President a year ago and is on this job to try and prove that he's back to normal. There's the American news crew (led by a sharp Sigourney Weaver) that captures important footage while covering the speech. There's a Spanish couple: a policeman and his shady girlfriend. There's the sweet, friendly American tourist (Forest Whitaker, who I adore more every time I see him in a role) using his handheld camera to film everything around him - including key moments in the day's events. Every story, rewound to the same point in time, provides more clues to who's out to get the President - and who's getting in the way. And in the middle of it all is a car chase scene that seems to last forever.

It has the same tone and similar plot points as the show 24, which is compelling for fans of 24, though also leaves no real reason to see this movie on the big screen. Still, I found myself lost in this mystery, anxious to figure out how each of these storylines intersects with the others. I rooted for some characters and wanted to boo others. The dialogue is sometimes ridiculous, and despite the gasp-inducing twists and turns, the ending is so predictable it elicited hearty laughter from the audience. The Bourne Ultimatum it isn't, but it's much more successful than many movies that try to do similar things.

Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures

Sundance Spotlight: Ellen Page, SJP in Smart People

BuzzSugar — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:30:19 -0800

I have been sulking ever since I couldn't into the premiere of Smart People at Sundance. The cast is fantastic and the buzz surrounding it has been good. The family dramedy stars Dennis Quaid as an acerbic widowed professor with some sassy kids (including Vanessa, played by Ellen Page) whose life gets complicated when he falls in love with his former student (Sarah Jessica Parker), and his adopted brother (Thomas Haden Church) re-enters his life.

After the jump there are a couple clips from the movie, featuring Ellen Page once again making wisecracks like someone beyond her years. I'm still sad that I didn't get to a screening for this one, but the clips help a little. To check them out, read more.