It’s been five years since Green Day’s multi-platinum, Grammy-winning album “American Idiot” came out, but work on the material is still very alive. A musical adaptation is set to debut at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theater in September and frontman Billie Joe Armstrong continues to push for developing the disc’s post-9/11 stories for the big screen. And he wants to do it in an unexpected way.

"I thought 'American Idiot' had a lot in common with something like 'Rocky Horror Picture Show,'" Billie Joe told The Associated Press. "It would great to see a film made out of it someday too." Read more...

“You’re being too nice!” Woody Allen would tell Larry David on the New York set of their upcoming comedy, “Whatever Works” (July 19). Sure, David’s suicidal physicist Boris Yellnikoff was calling friends and foes alike “cretins” and “inch worms” and “sub-mental baton twirlers.” But the director wanted his leading man to really lay into his fellow actors, whether it was a pre-teen girl he was teaching chess to or the naive runaway—Melodie St. Ann Celestine, played by Evan Rachel Wood—who shows up at his door needing a place to crash.

“At first it was odd because I never use those words,” David told MTV News. “It felt strange when they first came out of my mouth. But then I got very used to it and now I’m calling people ‘inch worms’ all the time!”

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FROM MTV.COM: "Whatever Works" isn't a good Woody Allen movie, even by latter-day standards. It is, however, a surprisingly offensive Woody Allen movie, inviting us, as it does, to sneer at benighted Southerners, idiot Christians, stupid kids and their hard-rock music — anything, in short, that wouldn't pass muster among the preening Big Apple sophisticates of whom the director is a longtime laureate.

Allen wrote the script more than 30 years ago, when he was making such incomparable films as "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan." Back then, his nebbish hostility had the fresh zing of underdog humor. Now he's wealthy and celebrated and 73 years old, and that youthful comic stance, transported into the present, just seems crabby and sour. And while casting Larry David as the film's lead character might sound like a masterstroke, it turns out to be an insurmountable problem. In his HBO series, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," David is an inspired improviser (and, in half-hour doses, an entertaining small-screen presence). He's not really an actor, though, and so here, confined to Allen's scripted dialogue, he seems wooden — you wait for him to bust out and soar, but he can't. He's just an amplifier for the director's vintage misanthropy, and he grinds you down.

Continue reading 'Whatever Works': Grumposaurus Rex, By Kurt Loder

Are those wedding bells or screams? Universal and Imagine Entertainment are getting set to resurrect the 1935 horror film “Bride of Frankenstein.” The original Mrs. F was played by Elsa Lanchester, a British character actress who first appeared in silent shorts by H.G. Wells. More than eighty years later, word is that filmmakers are gunning for an actress high on sex appeal. Of course, she’s also got to be able to invite audiences into her convincing, hair-raising Crazytown—population, one fiery bridezilla.

While there’s neither a writer nor a director officially attached to the project—Neil Burger (“The Illusionist”) is in talks for both jobs—it’s never to early too speculate about which Hollywood starlet is best fit to take on the title role.

Helen Hunt: The loveable spouse from “Mad About You”? The harried, vulnerable waitress from “As Good as It Gets”? Well, yes and no. Hunt may have graduated to everywoman parts, but in the early ‘80s she appeared in an after-school special—a cheesetastic performance in which she snorts PCP, goes insane, hurls herself out a window and starts screaming like a banshee, “I’m invincible,” as she slices her arm with glass shards. Hunt can bring the crazy, and Hollywood is always in need of a reminder that women in their 40s can also bring the sexy.

The 2003 indie flick “Thirteen” launched formidable careers for three of Hollywood’s current hottest commodities: Catherine Hardwicke, Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood. Half a decade later, Reed and Hardwicke reunited to launch the “Twilight” series on the big screen. But what about the third member of their troubled-teen triad?

This week, we checked in with the 21-year-old Wood to discuss her upcoming Woody Allen movie “Whatever Works,’ and couldn’t help but ask whether she recalled any “Twilight” talk from all those years ago. Read more...

He’s one of the most legendary filmmakers of all time. His status as a Hollywood personality is unrivaled. His talents have given audiences a new, wholly original film virtually every single year since 1969.

So, how do two young actors relate to Woody Allen? For starters, they look to “Whatever Works.”

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There was the Scooby Gang, there was the Buffy gang (who often called themselves the Scoobies), and then there are the Runaways (who don't call themselves anything). One's a witch, one's a mutant, one's an alien -- but they didn't know these things until they discovered that their parents were actually evil super-villains bent on destroying the world. So what did these teens do? They ran away, stealing whatever magical tools they could grab, and in so doing, became a misfit group of super-heroes, pledging to fight their parents and any other big bads who got in their way.

"Runaways" is a popular Marvel comic-book series, written by Brian K. Vaughan, who handed it over to Joss Whedon, and it's about to become a movie as well, with Vaughan scripting. We're confident he's got that covered, but what about the casting? Here are a few suggestions to get the "Runaways" moving. Read more...