Results tagged “ewanmcgregor”

Only a few more days until the end of the year (and the cut off for the 2006 Oscar season), so of course the movie theaters are glutted with choice new releases.

This week, Sarah Michelle Gellar is back for more creepy girls hiding in her hair in the new sequel, out this weekend in the hopes that it will bolster rumors of a Stewart/Colbert ticket in '08.

The stories coming out of the courthouse where lawyers are trying to select jurors for John Gotti Jr.'s trial continue to be amazing. Apparently, the potential jurors have been less than smart, with Judge Scheindlin saying about one juror, "He wasn't the brightest bulb." And then Gotti's lawyer said, "We've had that a lot." There there was the juror, a "self-taught criminologist," who collected gangster memorabilia - he got bumped. Judge Scheindlin has been upset because on the questionnaire, potential jurors are asked to list three people in the history of the world they admire...and many people listed no one, arguing, "I'm not into that. I'm a working person. That's pretty much it."

The bright lights and craft services tables have worn out their welcome in DUMBO. The Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting have put a moratorium on production in the neighborhood. Current productions are allowed to finish. Driven by its "gritty urban realism, old factory buildings and sweeping views of Manhattan and the East River," DUMBO has been the go-to NY location for many production companies, but its popularity brings the conundrum of simultaneously wanting Hollywood money injected into NYC's economy but not wanting the quality of life to diminish with street detours, cranky PAs (who are very nice about letting Gothamist know what's filming), and mobs of people. One crazy instance of DUMBO filming is a car commercial that transformed a street into the desert, but against the Manhattan skyline, needing tons of sand. Gotta love art directors and the clients that buy off on the ideas.

It'll be a while before we see Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, but till then, there is Big Fish, about a young man trying to understand his dying father's life (more at Greg's Movie Preview). Albert Finney plays the father, with Ewan McGregor playing the father as a young man, and Billy Crudup as the son; Jessica Lange and Alison Lohman play the mother at different ages. And from the looks of the new trailer, it definitely looks beautiful and odd.

If it's fall, it must be time for the New York Film Festival. This year, the opening night film is Mystic River, the ensemble drama directed by Clint Eastwood. The cast is ridiculously loaded with great actors: Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laurence Fishburne. The story is dark, eliciting comparisons to Eastwood's tour de force western, Unforgiven, but its present day setting makes it more wrenching. Sean Penn also stands a good chance of being nominated come Oscar time, based on the buzz of his performance as a father whose daughter is murdered.

PowerPoint, the bane of many an office wonk's existence ("I can animate this slide with builds and sound effects - just give me an hour") gets reinterpreted by David Byrne in his new book and DVD, David Byrne: E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information). Unlike office wonks, David Byrne gets to look at PP with new eyes and use it in funny, "artistic" ways, like using an outline of Dan Rather's head (unless you work in network TV news) or photos of Dolly the sheep and create a book and DVD with similar far-out slides. His enthusiasm for PP can be read in his essay for Wired's September issue: "." Byrne's essay is followed by one from Edward Tufte that calls PowerPoint evil. Well, of course, it is - it's from Microsoft.

News comes that Catherine Zeta-Jones and Queen Latifah will perform at the Oscars, but not Renee Zellweger. Apparently she declined, and, Ms. Zellweger, we thank you for that. She even admitted not wanting to sing - in a Guardian article, she said, "I was not going to sing for anybody besides my dogs when I'm in the shower, and then Rob Marshall comes along and that was it." Damn you, Rob Marshall! I like Renee a lot, but the "can't sing" thing is bugging me out. CZ-J and QL will be performing the only original song from Chicago, "I Move On," which the original Chicago musical creators, Fred Ebb and John Kander, wrote specifically for the film. Elvis Mitchell described Zellweger: "[her] float-like-a-butterfly voice doesn't triumph over her my-left-foot dance skills"