A post Jenny Craig (sorry, Jenny) Mariah Carey paid The Rosie Show a visit yesterday. The pop diva opened her talk show appearance by arriving on a giant, suspended disco-glittery moon. This is the same woman who played her own 1995 live performance of “Fantasy” during the birth of her new twins Moroccan and Monroe so they would be born to the sound of applause. (Yes, really.) The singer’s awkward lunar landing calls to mind many celebrity talk show appearances where the stars veered off topic — sometimes avoiding it completely — and humiliated themselves in front of the world with oddball behavior and confusing conversation. Click through to revisit some seriously weird celebrity talk show moments, and let us know who you’d add to the list below. Read More »
This week Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary opens across the country. Based on an early novel by the good doctor of gonzo journalism, the role of Thompson’s stand-in, journalist “Paul Kemp,” is being played by Johnny Depp — who has, with this film, pretty much planted is flag for good on the island of “cinematic portrayals of Hunter S. Thompson.” After the jump, we’ll take a closer look at Depp’s ongoing onscreen personification of the late Thompson, and nine more actors who became the cinematic avatars for distinctive writers and filmmakers.
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got ten new trailers this week, from biopics to historical epics to documentaries to thrillers; check ‘em out after the jump.
1. In her capacity as creative director of Polaroid, Lady Gaga has designed the GL10 Instant Mobile Printer, a device that allows you to print photos from your smartphone via Bluetooth. We assume Polaroid uses the term “designed” loosely. [via NME]
2. Your daily actor/project Mad Lib: Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio are collaborating — as both executive producers and stars — on a cop drama for NBC. The working title is Blue Tilt. [via Deadline]
3. Yesterday, the Internet got all worked up over the news that Real Housewife of DC/White House party crasher Michaele Salahi had been kidnapped. The story of what actually happened is fairly complicated, but in case you have as little time for this item as we do, here’s the punchline: She ran off with Journey guitarist Neal Schon. Really. [via LA Times]
4. Roman Polanski was famously arrested in Zurich at the request of the US Justice Department back in 2009, but he will return to the city September 27 to receive the lifetime achievement award the city’s film festival had hoped to bestow upon him before he was taken into custody. [via Guardian]
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got an even dozen trailers for you, and most are for the kind of prestige pictures that the end of the summer movie season usually has us salivating for. Not to worry, though, fans of things that are awful: there’s also a new Ghost Rider. Check ‘em all out after the jump.
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got a surplus of thrillers, plus a legal drama and vibrator comedy. So, variety, eh? Check ‘em all out after the jump.
Last Friday, during our weekly trailer roundup, we asked a glib but honest question: “Are we all agreed that we’ve passed the tipping point with Samuel L. Jackson?” The query was posed in response to the release of the trailer for Arena, a (from all indications) aggressively stupid straight-to-DVD video-game-centered action flick — and just another in a long, long line of terrible movies from an actor once considered to be among the finest of his generation. Jackson certainly isn’t alone, though; there are plenty of film actors who have proven themselves capable of brilliance but have apparently made the conscious decision to (barely) expend their energies on lazy, paycheck roles.
Nicolas Cage, arrested early yesterday morning in New Orleans, was released within 8 hours, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Apparently, a cabdriver called the police after witnessing a drunken Cage arguing with his wife over their rental address. When the police arrived, Cage got belligerent and yelled “Why don’t you just arrest me?” Needless to say, they obliged, charging him with domestic abuse, disturbing the peace and public drunkenness.
Though the cabbie says he saw Cage grab his wife, Alice will not press charges and claims there was no physical contact. Reality TV “star” Duane “Dog” Chapman — yes, the Bounty Hunter — posted the $11,000 bail. His wife Beth later tweeted, “My guy just walked out of the jail damn new Orleans 8 hours holy cow that’s a lot of time to Process one guy.”
Good news for those who were worried about the fate of Nicolas Cage’s stolen comic books (c’mon, admit it, it’s kept you up a few nights): Los Angeles police have recovered his first edition copy of Action Comics No. 1 (aka the first appearance of Superman), which was stolen from his West Los Angeles home over a decade ago. The Holy Grail of rare comics — valued at $1.5 million — turned up last month in a storage locker in the San Fernando Valley, along with Jimmy Hoffa’s body and the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons. (Okay, we made the last two up.) The L.A. Times reports that the LAPD is investigating the unidentified man who found the comic among the contents of an abandoned storage container, which he purchased at an auction.
Cage responded to the discovery with typical understatement: “It is divine providence that the comic was found and I am hopeful that the heirloom will be returned to my family.” Incidentally, the comic book was stolen right around the same time the actor dropped out of Superman Lives, a never-realized cinematic reboot of the character — which would have been, as Patton Oswalt noted at the time, “finally the moody, whiny Superman that we’ve always wanted.” Also among Cage’s comic book collection (just a sliver of his comically over-the-top stable of oddball purchases) were Detective Comics No. 1 and Detective Comics No. 37, the first appearance of Batman. Neither of those turned up in the storage locker; if they remain missing, Cage might have to pursue the thieves himself — which, based on his films, we’d imagine involves putting on a goofy, stringy wig and yelling a lot.
Few actors have careers as mystifying as Nicolas Cage’s. On one hand, he’s sometimes absolutely wonderful, in excellent films such as Adaptation, Wild at Heart, and Raising Arizona. On the other, he’s also been known to totally phone it in for crap like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the National Treasure movies. So we’re loving this Approval Matrix-style infographic that charts Cage’s biggest successes and WTFs, by the folks at The Shiznit. Our only quibble? Valley Girl is definitely “mental,” but we’d also argue that it’s pretty “brilliant.” See a larger version of the graph here. [via /Film]
