The 1980s were a golden age for wonderfully weird independent films. Films like Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Alex Cox’s Repo Man. Actually, that last one may be the strangest movie of the bunch. But unlike the other directors on that list, Cox never managed (or wanted) to cross over into the mainstream. Instead, he got swallowed up by his own idiosyncratic obsessions and continued to make films that fewer and fewer people went to see. It was clear from the beginning of his career that this was not a guy that was going to play ball with the big studios and wind up cranking out a Spider-Man, a Good Will Hunting, or even a Mulholland Dr. one day. The closest he would come is the brilliant Sid & Nancy. Since then, Cox has remained a true oddball. And like most oddballs in Hollywood, he fell off the map….
Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like we officially have 2010’s version of “The Macarena” and “Who Let the Dogs Out” — Larry Platt’s “Pants on the Ground”. The 63-year-old debuted his loopy rap on American Idol last week, where resident meanie Simon Cowell said, “I have a horrible feeling that song could be a hit.” Well, right again, Simon. Since then, Platt’s ditty has gone viral on the internet. And this morning he appeared on The View to perform his rapping sensation. Is he in on the joke? Who knows? And isn’t that part of the weird fun of the thing anyways? Take a look at what you missed below and afterwards begin the countdown until Platt snags a three-picture deal with 20th Century Fox.
I’m not the kind of person who gets choked up watching emotionally manipulative commercials on TV. I’ve seen Terms of Endearment a ton of times and never felt a lump in my throat. And I certainly don’t have a problem keeping it together when I hear Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” on the radio. I’m not saying I’m a heartless robot. Just that my threshold is pretty high when it comes to crying from the stuff I watch and listen to.
But we all have our soft spots. I remember once my friend Adam and I went to see the movie Deep Impact, which as you may or may not remember is about a giant asteroid hitting earth. It’s not the kind of film anyone would classify as a tearjerker. But there he was bawling his eyes out as Tea Leoni and the dude playing her dad embraced as they were about to be swallowed up by a giant tsunami. My wife can sob at the drop of a hat, too. Watching American Idol last week, her lip quivered every time some kid with a three-hankie backstory got their ticket to move on to the Hollywood round. I’m not totally impervious to these things. I think I felt something when Spock “died” in Wrath of Khan. And I’ll admit I got a bit misty watching Dennis Quaid in The Rookie, where he plays a former pitcher-turned-school teacher who gets one last shot to tryout for the major leagues thanks to his encouraging students. See, I’m not made of stone.
Anyway, all of this is a long build-up to say that I just saw the trailer for a new movie called Hachi: A Dog’s Tale and lost it. You’d think the movie would be terrible. Because even though it’s directed by Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat) and has an all-star cast that includes Richard Gere, Joan Allen, and Jason Alexander, it’s going straight to DVD on March 9th. Hachi, which I’ve also seen titled as Hachiko, is about a professor (Gere) who adopts a lost Akita puppy that grows up to be the most loyal dog ever (even after a tragedy that’s vaguely alluded to in the teaser). Take a look at the trailer and let me know what you think: did it put a lump in your throat? And while you’re at it, what movie or movies make you sob like a baby?
Before he made Avatar, before he was the King of the World, before he brought us Aliens and Ah-nuld as the Terminator, James Cameron was a hack. There’s no judgment implied in that word. Everyone has to start somewhere. And for James Cameron in the late ’70s, that meant working for B-movie maestro Roger Corman, building sets and designing cheesy creatures for basement-budget sci-fi craptaculars and Jaws rip-offs like 1978’s Piranha.
Now, for those of you who haven’t experienced this schlocky slice of bloody underwater mayhem, Piranha’s actually a pretty good little movie. It’s no Alligator, mind you. But still, it more than gets the job done. Which probably has something to do with the fact that it was an early collaboration between director Joe Dante (Gremlins) and screenwriter John Sayles (Eight Men Out). On its own modest terms, Piranha was a hit at the box office. After all, who wouldn’t want to watch some killer fish tear unsuspecting teenagers to pulpy chum at a drive-in on a Saturday night?
Not surprisingly, the money men behind Piranha immediately pounced on the idea of a sequel. Coming up with a plot for it wouldn’t be too hard, either, since the always-savvy Corman had persuaded Sayles to let some of the original film’s killer fish escape to the ocean at the end of his script, thus leaving a nice juicy opening for a part deux. The next question was, who would direct the Italian-produced sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning?
Enter James Cameron.
Cameron clocked his time on the first Piranha, designing some of the killer rubber fishies, which were filmed in an L.A. university’s swimming pool. In the sequel, Cameron gave the fish a fresh new twist — they could fly! Well, why not? Now they were just as lethal by air, land, or sea. Sweet! When Cameron began filming the sequel, it reportedly didn’t take long for him to “creative differences” with the Italian producer, Ovidio G. Assonitis. And there’s some dispute over just how much of the film belongs to the man who would go on to helm better aquatic epics like Titanic and The Abyss, and how much belongs to the producer, who apparently was keen on spicing up his horror flick’s maritime carnage with a procession of European babes in (and out of) bikinis (see clip below).
As you can tell from this clip, Piranha II: The Spawning is junk. But it’s delicious junk. Transcendent junk. Junk that satisfies the sweet tooth of any trash cinema lover. The only recognizable face in the film is Lance Henriksen (who would later re-team with Cameron in Aliens). And the movie is wall to wall with patently phony f/x, laughable dialogue, and dubbed women in various states of undress. Which, depending on your point of view, may be three reasons to avoid it, or three reasons to put it atop your Netflix queue, stat. One of the things I love about the film, though, is that you can already see Cameron experimenting with ideas that he would realize later in his career on better movies. For example, if you go back and watch that clip again, at the 27 second mark, you’ll see the screaming woman waving a harpoon (or whatever that stick is) right at the camera — a beta version of the 3-D f/x that Cameron would later bust out in Avatar, perhaps?
It’s almost too easy to dismiss Piranha II: The Spawning as a lousy movie. And for some apparently, its influence is still being felt. As we speak, the Weinstein Company is putting the finishing touches on a third installment called Piranha 3-D starring Elisabeth Shue, Richard Dreyfuss (nice Jaws connection!), and Gossip Girl’s Jessica Szohr. Will it be as entertaining as Piranhas I and II? Who the hell knows? But if past is prologue, and history repeats itself, then Piranha 3-D’s director Alexandre Aja may be the next King of the World.
Denzel Washington — nominated for five Oscars and six Golden Globes–is one of the best actors alive. As of today, he’s also the man who unseated Avatar from the top spot at the box office. Not bad, sir! The Book of Eli raked in $11.7 million on Friday — about a million and a half bucks more than James Cameron’s 3-D-a-palooza. And if it holds up, it will mark yet another impressive opening weekend for an actor who’s got a resume full of them. Of course, we here at EW are interested in bigger things than mere dollars and cents. We’re interested in ranking things…because, well, it’s fun and, hey, it’s what we do. So, on this Washingtonian weekend, we’re asking you to rank your Top 5 favorite Denzel flicks. For example, is Glory better than Malcolm X? Is Philadelphia better than Remember the Titans? Is Training Day better than Courage Under Fire or Crimson Tide? Is there any love out there for his early performances in Carbon Copy or The Mighty Quinn? And does his better-than-we-expected remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 belong on the list?
Take a few moments to re-familiarize yourself with a few of Denzel’s greatest hits below and then let us know your top five ranked from best to worst — and please keep it to five because that’s what makes lists like this tough. (For the record, here’s how I’d vote — from best to worst: Glory, Philadelphia, Devil in a Blue Dress, Training Day, Inside Man)
As anyone who reads The Daily Bugle knows by now, Tobey Maguire will not be back for Spider-Man 4. Neither will Sam Raimi, the director who kick-started the superhero saga back in 2002. And since Sony, the studio behind the Web-slinger franchise, has no intention of letting their cash cow dry up, it’s currently in the process of rebooting Spidey in a younger, more contemporary direction with a (presumably) younger, less-expensive actor as Peter Parker.
So we’re wondering, which of Hollywood’s hot teens and twentysomethings should be considered to don the Spidey suit? Here are a few possibilities. Afterwards, let us know who your candidates are.
Zac EfronAge: 22 Why our Spidey sense is tingling: He’s already proven that he can put teenage butts in seats thanks to High School Musical, and he ’s familiar with bizarre, supernatural bodily transformations thanks to 17 Again. He can sing, he can dance, he can smolder and brood (but not too threateningly, mind you). Heck, he can even convincingly shoot hoops! What can’t this guy do? Compared to belting out pop songs in the cafeteria, swinging from a web and tangling with Green Goblin should be a cakewalk.
Robert PattinsonAge: 23 Why our Spidey sense is tingling: Okay, he’s British, pasty, and he’s got a pretty busy schedule, what with all these Twilight movies you may have heard about. But if I were a Sony bean counter, I’d be stuffing the ballot box for this guy. After all, this could be the ultimate parasite blockbuster. Think about it: First, you cast Kristen Stewart as Mary Jane Watson, then you cast Taylor Lautner as Harry Osborn (i.e., James Franco’s role), then boom!…just sit back and watch the greenbacks pile up. If I ran Sony and wanted to retire to a private island, this would be my choice. (Read full post)
While Hollywood’s bean counters are all in a tizzy, scrambling to predict whether Avatar has a chance of smashing Titanic’s record as the biggest box-office hit of all time, we here at EW are preoccupied with more esoteric questions — questions that reach beyond the mere philistine accounting of dollars and cents! Namely, is Avatar James Cameron’s best film? We realize there’s a lot of love out there right now for the visionary director’s brand new 3-D sci-fi-apalooza. And I think we can all agree that it’s a helluva lot better than 1981’s Piranha 2: The Spawning. But is Avatar a better movie than Aliens or Terminator 2 or even The Abyss?
Take a few moments to re-familiarize yourself with Cameron’s resume below and then let us know how you’d rank ‘em! (For the record, here’s how I’d vote — from best to worst: T2, Aliens, Terminator, Avatar, Titanic, True Lies, The Abyss.)
Lately, there’s been a lot of Oscar talk about Jeff Bridges’ performance in Crazy Heart, the new film in which he plays a hard-drinking, hard-living country musician. But Bridges has been down this road before. Four times to be precise, even though he’s never won. When we recently sat down with the 60-year-old actor, we asked him to look back at those nominations, here’s what he had to say…
*The Last Picture Show (1971) Bridges plays a fresh-faced, sexually frustrated high school jock about to ship off to Korea in Peter Bogdanovich’s nostalgic black-and-white coming of age story. ”I remember when I first got nominated for The Last Picture Show. I remember sitting with Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Timothy Bottoms, and Cybill Shepherd — we were all pretty green, but we all knew something was happening here. For my money, that movie sits by itself. It’s not like anything else. What an experience! That transcended all of your expectations. When I was nominated, I think I was living with [actress] Candy Clark in Malibu. We’d met and fallen in love on Fat City. I was asleep and the phone rang at, like, six in the morning, and they told me I’d been nominated. I thought it was a dream. I just couldn’t believe it.”
After all the months of hype and endless speculation about whether James Cameron’s super-sized sci-fi epic would be the next Titanic-sized hit or Ishtar-scented dud, Avatar has finally had its day in cinematic court. The verdict: $232 million and counting. Okay, so you’ve bought the ticket, seen the movie (maybe more than once), and you have questions. Burning, nagging questions. Like, for example,how much did the thing actually cost to make? Is it the most expensive movie ever after adjusting for inflation? Who will see all the money it rakes in? What does the film’s success mean for 3-D technology? Will every movie be in 3-D now? Is Sam Worthington now an A-list star? Will there be a sequel? Does it really have a shot at a Best Picture Oscar? Let’s hear what you got, PopWatchers.
A couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves sitting face to face with His Dudeness, Jeff Bridges, to talk about his excellent new movie, Crazy Heart. The actor had plenty to say about the film and his Oscar-buzz portrayal of an alcoholic country singer, which you’ll be able to read when EW lands in your mailbox on Friday. But since we were in the presence of everyone’s favorite stoned, strike-rolling cult hero, we had to ask about the 1998 Coen brothers classic, The Big Lebowski. Specifically, we asked Bridges what he does when he’s sitting at home in Santa Barbara, chilling, watching TV (with, one hopes, a White Russian in hand) and The Big Lebowski comes on. Does he turn the channel? Watch the movie from beginning to end? Stick around to see a particular scene? Here’s what Bridges had to say…
“The only movie that I’ll catch and watch all the way through is The Godfather. That hooks me in every time. I’ve seen that several times thinking I’m going to change the channel. With Lebowski, usually I’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ll just wait until Turturro licks the ball, then I’ll change it.’ And then he licks the ball, and I’ll keep watching.”
There you have it, folks. When it comes to John Turturro’s Jesus, even the Dude abides. Speaking of which, now that you know his choice, what’s your favorite scene from The Big Lebowski? Oh, and in case you need a refresher on the scene Bridges is talking about, put on that ratty bathrobe, pour yourself a Caucasian, and enjoy this clip (in Español, no less!).
For more on Bridges and Crazy Heart, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, on stands Jan. 1.
