In Contention

Tag: Justin Timberlake

  • COMIC-CON: Fox brings ‘Apes’ and Andrew Niccol’s new vision of the future

    After all the “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” riff-raff cleared the drain this morning (sorry), I finally made it to Hall H in the afternoon, for 20th Century Fox’s panel. The slate of films previewed included Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” Andrew Niccol’s “In Time” and Rupert Wyatt’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”

    I figure I’ll start with the latter, since it’s fresh on the brain. This is actually a film I haven’t been able to really take seriously for quite some time. I have a blind spot for it and just have kind of ignored it (while admitting that the effects stuff we’ve seen is impressive).

    Well, after seeing two clips and a sizzle reel of the third act action sequences, I’m not only sold on seeing it, but I think it could actually be something great. Not to be all breathless. Maybe my expectations are so low that any favorable morsel would have been delicious, but I’m stoked for story elements now, not just technical aspects.

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  • Toasting the ‘Social Network’ DVD release

    Sony pulled out all the stops last night with a big to-do soiree on behalf of the DVD/Blu-ray release of “The Social Network.” You go to these things, you expect a certain level of restraint, and then I’m pulling up to Spago and they’ve got the red carpet rolled out and the flashbulbs are popping and, well — it wasn’t an intimate Il Cielo thing, that’s for sure.  It was a great time, though.

    Tons of cast and crew were on hand.  I finally got some face time with Jesse Eisenberg, who made me totally nervous, to be quite honest.  He has a flustered (but endearing) way about him, and is a true gentleman.  Nevertheless, it seemed to me he wanted out of there.  Hey, it’s a lot to deal with for a young, unassuming actor like him.  He’s right at the front of a massive Oscar campaign for a highly successful film.  What can you say?  Good luck to him.

    I’ve of course already spoken to composer Atticus Ross and film editor Kirk Baxter, but it was nice to put faces to the names.  Trent Reznor couldn’t attend.  Also from the crew was cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, a great guy.  His first film was Fincher’s “Fight Club” back in 1999.  And Fincher was there.  Didn’t get a chance to speak with him.  Aaron Sorkin and Armie Hammer as well.  A brief exchange with Andrew Garfield.  Most everyone turned out.

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  • 12/29 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Timberlake’s Harvard honor, ‘Kids’ and the “steak eaters,” HFPA/Clark tension

    • Golden Globes tension as Dick Clark and HFPA fued over contract. [The Wrap]

    • Justin Timberlake gets a prestigious Harvard award. [Pop Eater]

    • Anne Thompson on the obstacles her #2 film of the year, “The Kids Are All Right,” will face with the “steak eaters.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

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  • 12/10 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘The Fighter’ moves in, Sturgess taks ‘The Way Back,’ Timberlake gets serious

    • Elle Fanning: the next Golden Child. [New York Times Magazine]

    • Pete Hammond joins the flavor of the week: “The Fighter” is insinuating itself into the Best Picture race in a big way. [Deadline]

    • Anne Thompson chats with “The Way Back” star Jim Sturgess. [Thompson on Hollywood]

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  • 12/1 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Timberlake’s campaign, Portman’s weight loss and unused Ledger footage

    • Rumors fly concerning Heath Ledger’s Joker making an appearance in “The Dark Knight Rises” via unused footage from “The Dark Knight.” (Not gonna happen.) [Stuff.co.nz]

    • Does Natalie Portman’s “Black Swan” weight loss mean Oscar gold? [Movieline]

    • David Poland sits down with “Get Low” screenwriters Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell. [The Hot Blog]

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  • Jackman turns down Oscar hosting gig

    With the season now unshakeably upon us, it’s time to dust off the annual conversation topic of who should host the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony. I am prompted to do so, of course, by Deadline’s recent scoop that 2009 host Hugh Jackman — the first choice of new Oscarcast producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer — has turned down the gig, owing to a scheduling conflict with the shooting of of “Wolverine 2.”

    Many will be disappointed by this news, given that the Jackman-hosted telecast was one of the better-received of recent years. As one of its few detractors, I’ll admit to feeling relieved: Jackman’s song-and-dance schtick was amiable enough, but he lacked the comic zeal I prefer in an Oscar host.

    To be fair, the balance between comic and cuddly is a difficult one to strike at the Oscars. There’s ample room for error on either side of the beloved Billy Crystal school of sweet-and-sour satire: Jackman played it too safe for my liking, but neither do I want to see an encore of Chris Rock’s hostile, room-cooling barbs. The Academy Awards, as much as we might like to mock them, are effectively the industry’s prom night, and the tone should be appropriately celebratory.

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  • INTERVIEW: Patricia Clarkson

    “I’m going to bring back the letter,” a flustered Patricia Clarkson announces as she makes her way to our lunch table, ever-so-slightly rain-mussed but otherwise immaculate in black and cream, a jaunty matching fedora astride her familiar blonde mane. “I’m never late. I blame email for this. I’m only just getting acquainted with it.”

    She is, thanks to a slight communication muddle, late only to a degree most actors wouldn’t apologise for. Together with my lunchmate, Daily Telegraph critic Tim Robey, we’ve nabbed a cosy corner spot at Mayfair’s all-day Italian bistro Cecconi’s, a humming London institution of marble, green velvet upholstery and £40 white truffle starters. (Clarkson is more excited by other things on the menu: later, one eye on the menu, she interrupts her own sentence with the jubilant cry, “Meatballs! With spaghetti sauce!”)

    “This place is fabulous,” she says—that adjective’s first of many appearances in our two-hour conversation—settling into our banquette with a tidy collapse of a sigh. Patricia Clarkson, she does not mind admitting, is exhausted, and not just from her week of jury duty at the London Film Festival, where she presided over the panel that, we’d learn the next day, selected Russia’s “How I Ended This Summer” as best in show. (All she tells us is that she’s “very happy” with the “wonderful” winner they’ve chosen, though she successfully deflects our speculation as to what it might be. “Oh, the Russian film?” she shrugs, when Tim brings it up.)

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  • “I’m trying to take this seriously!”

    To preempt the inevitable, no, probably not worth a separate post, but I caught up with SNL on the DVR last night and it made me laugh:

  • 9/30 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Blind-siding Christians with ‘Secretariat,’ chatting up Gibney and Reznor, Armond strikes

    • David Poland sits down with “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” director Alex Gibney. [Movie City News]

    • On the innovative marketing strategy of “Freakonomics.” [New York Times]

    • Xan Brooks and Henry Barnes talk “Made in Dagenham” director Nigel Cole and actress Rosamund Pike. [The Guardian]

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  • The Cain and Abel of ‘Social Network’

    As much as the film ticks certain prestige-film boxes — hell, it’s a socially conscious biopic from a respected, Oscar-nominated filmmaker — I still find myself doing something of a double-take when I hear “The Social Network” referred to as the Best Picture contender to beat. When was the last time a film so steeped in contemporary youth culture found itself in that position? (And no, “Slumdog Millionaire” does not count.)

    Complementing the film’s preoccupation with a relatively recent chapter of pop culture is a bold stroke of new-generation casting: its three male principals are all under 30, and not yet tapped by the wand of major movie stardom.

    The long-ubiquitous Justin Timberlake aside, it’s not hard to imagine some older Academy members puzzling over their screeners: “Who are these kids?” (Then again, those same folks might also be wondering what the hell Facebook is. It’s only mental scenes like this that give me pause when considering its awards prospects.)

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  • 9/20 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Timberlake’s Oscar hopes, Brolin’s peculiar suggestions, flurry of Toronto purchases

    • Tom O’Neil wrangles up perspectives on Justin Timberlake’s Oscar potential for “The Social Network.” [Gold Derby]

    • Steven Zeitchik sits down with “Catfish” directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Debating the ethics of movie spoilage on a user-generated web encyclopedia might be the very definition of futility, but the Gray Lady gives it a shot. [New York Times]

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  • Schemers trying to control their little worlds

    It’s intriguing that two of the most press shy entrepreneurs of the internet age – Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker – have suddenly participated in two dense magazine profiles this month.  It’s almost as if there was a film depicting key moments in their lives set for imminent release and they want to set the record straight.  Oh…

    Really, though, I was struck reading this Vanity Fair profile of Parker that the character described is perhaps a bit more interesting than the more simplistic character Aaron Sorkin wrote in “The Social Network.” In the film, Parker is portrayed by Justin Timberlake as a paranoid, mean-spirited misfit.  A misfit (and party animal) he may be, but Parker is lauded in the piece as a “higher being,” “generous” and “loyal,” and frankly comes off as something of a saint.

    The writer does mention that Parker reached out to potential sources to smooth out his image, but even still, the accounts of generosity become a bit too consistent to ignore.  Parker works well as an antagonistic figure in the film, mind you, but I think an instance of some of this would have added a nice layer of depth to the character.  After all, Zuckerberg sure is dealt with in complex hues, and is all the more fascinating for it.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich

    (NOTE: This week’s Page to Screen text is the source material for David Fincher’s upcoming film “The Social Network.”)

    If, with its short, sketchy chapters and preponderance of surface-level description, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” resembles less a work of literary non-fiction than a treatment for a more substantially developed screenplay, that’s probably precisely what the author intended: after all, the movie rights to Mezrich’s thin, gossipy account of the birth of Facebook were snapped up well before he’d even finished writing it.

    Mezrich has turned this trick before: his 2003 bestseller “Bringing Down the House,” the story of a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who managed to swindle millions out of top Las Vegas casinos, was recently turned into a reasonably profitable (if rapidly forgotten) film, “21.” Mezrich’s work certainly commands more respect from Hollywood than it does from literary critics.

    A former sci-fi author, Mezrich delights in fudging (and often blatantly fabricating) the facts in his non-fiction work: a disclaimer at the start of “The Accidental Billionaires” acknowledges that numerous “conversations and scenes [have been] recreated and compressed,” verbs that sound decidedly euphemistic by the time the writer is casually describing the interior thoughts of people he admits to never having met. (Mark Zuckerberg, the young Facebook founder at the center of Mezrich’s story, refused any meetings or interviews with the author, giving this already skimpily researched volume a distinctly lopsided perspective.)

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  • 9/23 Oscarweb Round-up

    Hugh Jackman at the 81st annual Academy Awards• Hugh Jackman speaks out on his Emmy win and whether he’d return as Oscar host. [Vulture]

    • “A Serious Man,” Colin Firth the big winners in a Toronto critics poll. [indieWIRE]

    • Mary Pilon sits down with activist and star of “The Cove,” Ric O’Barry. [Speakeasy]

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  • Ryan Reynolds cast in ‘Green Lantern’

    Green LanternIt all started with a recent Hollywood Reporter piece claiming that Bradley Cooper, Ryan Reynolds and Justin Timberlake (WTF) were up for the lead role in WB’s “The Green Lantern” (a script I’ve had for a while but preferred to satisfy the inner geek in me by reading the Geoff Johns saga in full, leading up to this summer’s “Blackest Night” event).

    Of those three, with a gun to my head, I’d prefer Bradley Cooper, which was tossed into the mix by a Drew McWeeny report a few weeks back.  I love Timberlake and actually think he’s a fine actor, but I don’t buy him as a cock-sure-test-pilot-turned-intergalactic-police-officer, do you?

    But according to this Michael Fleming scoop at Variety’s new industry blog BF Deal Memo, the news strangely being dumped at the end of the week and the start of the weekend, it seems Warner Bros. is going with Ryan Reynolds.  Ugh.

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