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Every week, Vulture faces the big, important questions in entertainment and comes to some creative conclusions. This week, we gave you the lowdown on upfronts, a farewell to The Office, and much as we can to feed your Arrested Development appetite. You may have read some of these stories below, but you certainly didn’t read them all. We forgive you.
The Office ended and Arrested Development is coming back, how do you celebrate each?
More strange stories from Cannes: Someone — "a crazy guy," according to police — brought a starter pistol to a French TV broadcast and fired off two blanks during the taping. Christoph Waltz and Daniel Auteuil were among the people being interviewed; you can watch them get rushed off the program below. The man in question was arrested, and the show continued. Since there were no actual bullets in the pistol, everyone is fine.
It’s wild and wooly out there in the world of streaming video. As movies and TV shows become increasingly accessible through a variety of services, it has also become increasingly difficult to keep track of what is available where, what is expiring when, and what is actually worth watching. So every Friday, Vulture will have a list of recommendations of movies and TV shows that are new to Netflix (as well as Hulu, Amazon, On Demand, and other streaming sites), those that are expiring, and those that you should watch just because.
A sad, moving sports doc, a smart slasher pic, and a Star Trek wormhole
Last summer at Cannes, Harvey Weinstein held a special press conference to show off forthcoming film footage from The Master, Silver Linings Playbook, and Django Unchained — three major works from A-list auteurs. The Weinstein Company slate isn't stacked in quite the same way this year, but Weinstein held another event earlier today at the Hotel Majestic, at which he ran down the company's entire slate, padding some of the first looks — including a five-minute reel for Nicole Kidman's Grace Kelly biopic — with lots of trailers that we've already seen from films like August: Osage County and The Butler. Still, you couldn't help but notice that Weinstein's upcoming slate was packed with prestige films starring black actors, including Forest Whitaker, Michael B. Jordan, and Idris Elba. Always a canny awards-season presence, could Weinstein push all three men into a history-making Best Actor category?
We haven't had more than one black nominee for Best Actor since 2006.
"This weather, what the fuck?" That was Rooney Mara's jovial and very appropriate greeting to Harvey Weinstein at Thursday night’s annual IFP- and Calvin Klein–sponsored celebration of Women in Film, usually one of the most reliably fun nights at the Cannes Film Festival. The combination of body-fat-deficient actresses in slinky, sleeveless Calvin Klein dresses plus a monsoonlike storm driving rain directly onto the ocean-side red carpet made for a stunningly miserable affair (that is, until everyone got inside the heated tent and got a lot of Champagne into their bellies). Goosebumps covered honoree Carey Mulligan in a tight strapless black dress as she rehashed Gatsby yet again, this time for the foreign press corps, and talked about which women in film she wants to work with: Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman (who followed her down the red carpet; let's hope the two struck a deal inside).
Sarah Polley frowns. We're seated opposite each other in the conference room of a Beverly Hills boutique hotel, and I've just asked what I thought was an innocuous question about her new documentary, Stories We Tell. "I'm hesitant to talk to you about that specific thing," she replies to the query in question. "It's such a spoiler." That's the sort of answer you might expect to get from an actor guarding superhero movie secrets, but not from Polley, a 34-year-old actress-cum-director who's made an indie documentary about the skeletons in her family closet.
But Stories We Tell is no ordinary documentary, and that's by design.
Aaron Eckhart (who’s already had one action hit this year with Olympus Has Fallen) is apparently out to claim Liam Neeson’s mantle: Just like in the Taken films and Unknown, he’s playing an ex-black-ops guy who has to protect/save/find his family in this Europudding action thriller. The title, Erased, even sounds like a Liam Neeson film. (It was originally called The Expatriate, which was presumably nixed because Americans won’t know what the hell an expatriate is.) Five years from now, it’ll be an inevitable source of confusion: “Wait, what was that Liam Neeson movie? Abducted? Disappeared? Vanished? Erased?” “No, dummy, Erased starred that other guy…what’s his name?”
Actually, for its first half, Erased is pretty solid. But then...
(SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!) After the first Star Trek reboot opened big in 2009, J.J. Abrams mused about having Khan be the villain in a sequel. And then he spent the next four years refuting the idea, swatting down any evidence that suggested it. Right up until today's premiere, he's been maintaining that Benedict Cumberbatch's villain is named John Harrison. (SERIOUSLY, THIS IS YOUR LAST SPOILER ALERT. SAVE YOURSELF!) Now the movie is open, and critics weighing in have had to decide just how much detail they are going to go into when describing Cumberbatch's bad guy. These reviewers split into three camps: complete avoidance, waffling hints, and flat-out shouting it to the space rafters.
After a series of hate letters to humankind, Noah Baumbach has fashioned an ode to his girlfriend Greta Gerwig’s galumphing adorableness (they co-wrote the script). Frances Ha is black-and-white and has a French New Wave gloss, along with a soundtrack that quotes Georges Delerue’s theme from King of Hearts. (It cranks up when Baumbach needs enchantment.) Gerwig plays a childishly enthusiastic would-be dancer walloped by grown-up life in our most heartless metropolis, New York. Sophie (Mickey Sumner), the best friend she cherishes (hugs, holds hands with, tells “the story of us” to), pulls away. She loses the gig that would pay her rent. The camera holds on her open face as she takes each blow. She blinks to signal disbelief, curls her mouth, and bites down on her lower lip. But she galumphs on.
Frances Ha has the trappings and suits of love, but it’s full of sour tones.
When we first heard the reports that Sofia Coppola would open her new movie The Bling Ring with a quote from Nicole Richie's Twitter account ... well, had anything ever seemed so perfect? And yet, when the movie premiered yesterday at Cannes, no such tweet was to be found! What gives? Last night at the movie's Nikki Beach after-party, we cornered Coppola to solve the mystery. "The quote from her was 'Life is crazy and unpredictable … my bangs are going to the left today,'" laughed Coppola. "I started looking at Twitter a lot while I was working on this movie, and I thought it was funny." Still, she doesn't mourn its absence from the screen: "I always just had it on the first page of the script, just to kind of introduce it, you know? But I wasn't planning on putting it in the movie." Well, at least she'll always have Paris.
And another Marvel blockbuster hits ten figures: Iron Man 3 has now passed the $1 billion benchmark worldwide, and it also just broke $300 million domestically. Everyone loves Guy Pearce in a nice cropped pant. (Also: superheroes.)
The Smurfs sequel, smartly named The Smurfs 2, may star (the voices of) Katy Perry and Neil Patrick Harris, but it also will include a new, PG-rated track from Britney Spears. Recently departed from the set of The X Factor, Brit's got the likes of will.i.am on her side, and is reportedly back in the studio. Movie's out July 31 and "Ooh La La" is undeniably reminiscent of "I Wanna Go," with a little Ke$ha influence thrown in there. She raps! Well, actually, she speaks: "Turn it up till the speakers pop." Go ahead, do it.
If you've seen The Great Gatsby, you know that Daisy's daughter Pammy appears onscreen only once, at the very end of the movie. Should we have seen more of her throughout? "Right up to the last minute, we were experimenting with doing more with the child," director Baz Luhrmann told Vulture at the premiere earlier this month. "We even did a scene where the child was there." Carey Mulligan, who plays Daisy, said there were "endless" discussions about how much to point out that Daisy was "adult Daisy: mother of one." Luhrmann ultimately decided to keep overt reminders to a minimum. "Carey does an amazing job of maintaining empathy for the character of Daisy. I think you go, 'She's got a family. She's got a child.' You sort of understand it. She may think she should have gone with Gatsby, but you realize she's constrained by her social reality."
Sofia Coppola landed one unlikely cameo for her fact-based crime caper The Bling Ring, which premiered yesterday at Cannes: Paris Hilton, whose mansion was repeatedly burglarized by the titular teenage thieves nearly five years ago. The heiress appears for a quick moment in a nightclub scene, but more significantly, she lent Coppola her actual house to film in for two weeks so that the director could re-create the burglaries onscreen. "I was really emotional watching it," Hilton confessed to me last night at the movie's hot-ticket Nikki Beach after-party. "During some parts of it, I literally had tears in my eyes and I wanted to cry. I knew what happened with the burglaries, but I had never actually seen it — so watching it happen, I was like, 'Oh my God, this really happened to me. These kids were really in my house and did this to me.' It's so violating. It just made me really angry and upset, and when I see these kids, I want to, like, slap them."
It looks like Spike Lee will follow up his Oldboy remake with Gold, a film that was originally set to be directed by Michael Mann. "Based on a true story about the 1993 Bre-X Mineral Corporation mining scandal, Gold is set in the nineties and follows a rough-around-the-edges prospector who stumbles onto one of the largest gold mines in the world in the Indonesian jungle," reports TheWrap. Casting hasn't begun yet, but production may start this fall.
A couple days after the news that Chris Pine and Jake Gyllenhaal are considering Disney's Into the Woods, Emily Blunt is nearing a deal to join the adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1986 musical. Blunt would play the film's female lead, a baker's wife. Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep are set to star. There's no start date for production, but this cast is getting impressive enough to reasonably hope things will get rolling quickly.
When the news about Last Vegas was first going around, it was hard not to chuckle at its silliness. It so just The Hangover: Old People Edition that you have to assume it was pitched that way. However, the first teaser trailer is out, and it can kind of make you wonder if maybe, just maybe, this thing might’ve turned out great. Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline, and Morgan Freeman are fantastic actors, so anything is possible. We will see when it’s released on November 1. At minimum, the trailer will make you wish you can watch drunk Morgan Freeman constantly, forever.
First, some explanation, in case you have not finished your assigned YA reading and/or just happen to be a grown adult: Shailene Woodley is the star of not one but two adaptations of major YA best sellers currently in the works; the first is Divergent, the Hunger Games-y trilogy written by Veronica Roth, and the other is The Fault in Our Stars, a weepy (but funny!) cancer story by John Green. Since these are big-deal movies, the Tumblr set has been busy fretting over the rest of the casting choices, and last weekend they finally got a big one: Augustus Waters, the male lead and love interest in The Fault in Our Stars, will be played by 19-year-old Ansel Elgort. As it turns out, Elgort also has a role in Divergent, which seems like reasonable teen synergy until you find out that he plays Woodley's brother. Now The Fault in Our Stars is a cancer story about Shailene Woodley making out with her onscreen relative.
Many years before starring together in the unavoidably massive Hangover series, Zach Galifianakis and Ken Jeong were just two struggling open-mike comics. And, as this video from 1998 shows, they were friends! We know it’s 1998 because of how young they both look and because a beardless Zach is wearing a polar-fleece vest. Watch them have a fun, slightly racist time together!
I meet Benedict Cumberbatch the afternoon after an awkward appearance on Letterman, where he was promoting his part as John Harrison, an intergalactic terrorist, in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness. It’s a summery spring day in New York, and we’re on the patio of his room at the Bowery Hotel. Cumberbatch—his dead-white complexion shaded by a newsboy cap—is “chuffed” by his posh digs; it’s his first starring role in a blockbuster, and he’s not used to this level of star treatment—well, from everyone except David Letterman, who has not, apparently, been following the actor’s rise as avidly as the actor’s Internet fan club, the Cumberbitches. Not only did Cumberbatch have to follow an animal act, but Letterman, who began by referring to Star Trek as Star Wars, asked his guest—a veteran of twenty movies, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse—if he was new to major motion pictures. (The actor, being the polite, Harrow-educated Brit that he is, jumped in to save his host: “This major? Yes!”) I tell Cumberbatch that, given Letterman’s cluelessness, I was surprised there weren’t the usual efforts to wring a laugh from his name.
Ex-black-ops guy must flex muscle to protect/save/find his family.
By Bilge Ebiri
Noah Baumbach has a hard time letting go of the notion that drama means building to humiliation.
By David Edelstein
J.J. Abrams directs the sequel to his 2009 reboot.
"Presented" by Tyler Perry, but written and directed by Tina Gordon Chism.
By Bilge Ebiri
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