Image Credit: Glen Wilson
Now that the Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis romantic comedy Friends With Benefits has finally hit theaters, we can legitimately compare its plot with that of the similarly-themed, hooking-up-with-an-otherwise-platonic-buddy Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman romantic comedy No Strings Attached. Turns out, they’re not quite as alike as you may have thought. SPOILER ALERT! READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Dale Robinette
No doubt, Natalie Portman has had plenty of victories in 2011. In the beginning of this year alone, she snagged a graceful man (fiancé Benjamin Millepied), a little man (a baby boy), and a very little man with big clout known as Oscar. Still, has 2011 proven to be a bad year for the Black Swan star?
That’s what the Hollywood Prospectus blog is claiming, at least. Using Rotten Tomatoes, the blog calculated the post-Oscar movie scores of all the Academy Award-winning actors with 2011 movies (11 in total) to determine which one “tarnished” their Academy Award the most during the course of the year. READ FULL STORY »
If you saw the trailer for the upcoming Justin Timberlake/Mila Kunis comedy Friends with Benefits and thought to yourself, “Hmm, haven’t I seen this before, except it starred Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman and it was called No Strings Attached?”, we wouldn’t blame you, friend-o! In fact, you needn’t look further than the meticulously edited FWB/NSA mash-up trailer of the two 2011 comedies to see that just about everything from the glossy love affairs that don’t end in bitterness to the wacky sidekicks to even wackier parents, is strikingly similar. To be fair, we can’t really say how much Friends With Benefits resembles No Strings Attached, since the former has yet to hit the big screen yet (we’ll have to wait until July 22). But as long as the line “I’m warning you, if you take one step closer, I’m never letting you go” doesn’t wind up in Friends With Benefits, I’ll automatically consider it the better of the two.
Watch the full trailer below and see if you can tell the difference between the flicks. Tell me PopWatchers, is this the best been-there-done-that trailer this year or does that title still belong to the Hangover 1 and 2 mash-up? I smell a new Golden Trailer category! READ FULL STORY »
Remember that wacky Final Fantasy movie, where one of the main characters looked exactly like Ben Affleck but was voiced by Alec Baldwin? There’s a similar cognitive dissonance at work in the trailer for 2012′s Tomb Raider videogame reboot, in which the iconic Lara Croft gets de-aged. (Muppet Babies-style preboots are so hot right now.) Young Croft sounds strikingly like Keira Knightley… but her face looks exactly like Natalie Portman. (Of course, Knightley used to look so much like Portman that she played her double in The Phantom Menace. Ow, my brain!)
At least, I thought she looked like Natalie Portman. Portmanologist Adam Markovitz says I’m crazy, and claims the new Croft is a dead ringer for Lacey Chabert. Meanwhile, Photo Editor/Facial Recognition Expert Connie Yu thinks she’s a digital clone of Jessica Biel. Rorschach alert! PopWatchers, which of us is right? Watch the trailer and decided for yourself: READ FULL STORY »
First, Natalie Portman’s Black Swan body double Sarah Lane told EW that she, and not the Oscar-winning Portman, had performed 95 percent of the full-body dance shots in the ballet thriller. Then, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky and co-star Mila Kunis denied Lane’s claims. Finally, Portman danced around the controversy in her one and only comment on the topic to E!, saying “I’m really proud of everyone’s work on the movie and of my experience.” And now comes video that has no bearing on the controversy whatsoever (though many will likely try to spin it into an argument defending or criticizing Portman): Footage of the actress dancing at the Stage Door Manor Performing Arts Summer Camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains as a pre-teen. (You can see Portman starting at the 2:30 mark.) Though it certainly does not prove Portman’s dance skills during the filming of Black Swan — this was, after all, shot more than a decade earlier — the fun footage does at least show that Portman did had a passion for the art. Watch the video after the jump. READ FULL STORY »
Stephen Colbert had harsh words for Friend of The Colbert Report Mike Huckabee on last night’s show. To begin with, he took offense to Huckabee using Oscar winner Natalie Portman as an example of someone glorifying having children out of wedlock. “Look, I’m no fan of single mothers either. But it’s Natalie Portman we’re talking about. That kid she’s pregnant with is Luke Skywalker,” Colbert said, mouthing think, think. “So logically, if you’re against her pregnancy that means you’ve aligned yourself politically with Emperor Palpatine. You’re alienating all of Tatooine. It’s a swing planet.” Watch the clip below. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Andrew Evans/PR Photos; David Livingston/Getty ImagesLess than a week after her Best Actress win at the Oscars, Natalie Portman has been criticized by former Arkansas governor (and potential presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee for helping to “glorify and glamorize” the idea of children born out of wedlock. “People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married… and they’re doing just fine,” said Huckabee during a Feb. 28 radio interview on The Michael Medved Show (which is just making the rounds now), according to a transcript posted on Media Matters. READ FULL STORY »
James Franco may not have won the Best Actor Oscar, or the hearts of Oscar watchers (save our Ken Tucker), but according to Tweetbeat, which tracks the most talked about things on Twitter, he was by far the most tweeted about personality during last night’s Academy Awards. Of the estimated 400,000 Oscar-related tweets logged — half as many as the Super Bowl — 21,117 of them involved the actor/cohost. Anne Hathaway was the second most mentioned person with 14,530 tweets — though users were kinder to her than Franco. See the full Top 10 list below, along with other fun stats such as: the Top 3 most tweeted designers during the red carpet, the moments that caused “unexpected spikes of tweets” (hello, Melissa Leo!), which films were referenced the most (and whether those sentiments were positive or negative), and who Kirk Douglas bested… READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images Record 20902344By tomorrow morning, Natalie Portman will have accomplished more this week than most of us do in a lifetime, adding an all-but-certain Oscar nomination for Black Swan to the $20 million opening she already racked up for her rom-com, No Strings Attached, this weekend. And that’s on top of the news that she’ll have five movies in theaters this year. Five! Come on, Natalie: You’re making the rest of us look bad.
The success of both Black Swan and No Strings Attached proves that Portman can pull off just about any genre. But let’s imagine for a second that you’re her manager, plotting her next move. Would you advise a comedy or a drama? Things to keep in mind: She already has the stoner fantasy Your Highness coming out in April, followed by the big-budget Thor in May. And theoretically, she’ll be taking a little time off in the coming months to welcome a bouncing baby into her life. She may well win an Oscar this March, so it might be a good idea to add a little levity to her image with something lighthearted. But in that case, wouldn’t you also want to capitalize on her post-Oscar clout to set up a heavy-hitting passion project, like, say A Tale of Love and Darkness, the Israeli memoir that Portman has said she’d like to direct someday?
Okay, PopWatchers: Put on your best Hollywood hotshot face (spray tan, shades, Bluetooth) and pick Portman’s next part: Should it be a comedy or a drama? Or something else entirely?
Read more:
With five films due in 2011, is Natalie Portman (and other stars) in danger of overexposure?
Natalie Portman in ‘The Professional’: PopWatch Rewind takes aim at the ‘Black Swan’ star’s debut
Natalie Portman’s laugh is the new Brendan Fraser clap
‘Your Highness’: James Franco gets stoned, Natalie Portman gets raunchy in red band trailer
Natalie Portman is everywhere right now. Just a week after winning a Golden Globe for her soul-baring, body-punishing, Mila Kunis-kissing performance in Black Swan, Portman is headlining the change-of-pace romantic comedy No Strings Attached. That’s just one of the five movies she’ll appear in this year. Portman’s also newly engaged and pregnant with her first child. What better time to look back at where it all began? Portman’s first movie was The Professional, in which an emotionally detached hitman meets a chain-smoking orphan who becomes his companion, his student, and his unrequited love. It’s a plotline that could seem icky — Lolita with a sniper rifle — but great performances by Jean Reno and Portman make The Professional (also known by its international title, Leon) into a uniquely tenderhearted thriller.
Keith Staskiewicz: Before he started producing all those English-language, Euro-financed, An American in Paris Shoots People movies, Luc Besson was quite the rising star. La Femme Nikita would spawn two TV shows and a remake, but it was The Professional that brought him into the mainstream. It’s a fascinating movie. It exists in this Bizarro-New York that doesn’t ever feel like real New York. Instead, it’s some strange fairy tale idealization of the city as it existed in the ’70s or ’80s.
Darren Franich: It reminded me a little bit of the snow-globe Manhattan of The Royal Tenenbaums, right down to Besson’s preference for Andersonian wide-angle lenses. I love how, in The Professional‘s New York, no one can ever hear anything through the walls of an apartment building. A bomb can go off in the apartment next door, and nobody notices. READ FULL STORY »
