While Ricky Gervais is busy working on his routine for hosting the Golden Globes, the folks orchestrating the Academy Awards are feverishly hunting for a host of their own.
Hugh Jackman, last year's master of ceremonies, has already turned down the gig, and now it appears that the dynamic duo of Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. have declined the opportunity to host in tandem as well. The obvious questions is, what is it about the Academy Awards that's putting these prospective hosts off? Does Oscar have something in his teeth?
Maybe it's a simple matter of not asking the right people, since Hollywood has no shortage of talented professionals that could do the award ceremony justice. If I were in charge of selecting a host, here are some of the folks that I'd consider. 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
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...
FROM SPLASH PAGE: While chatting with Marvel Comics' Spider-Man editor, Steve Wacker, about "Spider-Man: The Short Halloween" (written by "Saturday Night Live" regulars Bill Hader and Seth Meyers and previewed on Splash Page), the conversation turned to the famous wall-crawler's return to the big screen. Naturally, I had to ask Marvel's go-to Spidey guy who he'd like to see Peter Parker battle in "Spider-Man 4."
"I like The Vulture," Wacker told MTV News. "The flying around would be cool, and if you cast Larry David in that role, I'll watch forever -- even if it's just a beginning fight, with Spider-Man beating on Larry David with wings."
"Morbius would be awesome, but who do you put in that?" added Wacker. "I guess you put the guy from 'Twilight,' right?"
To continue reading about Marvel Editor Steve Wacker's "Spider-Man 4" villain picks, head over to SplashPage.MTV.com.
