Kanye West and Spike Jonze made a short film together. According to Videogum, the film, which premiered yesterday at the LA Film Festival, was originally meant to be a music video for 808’s & Heartbreak. And then somehow it became all about a day in the life of Kanye — VIP rooms, beautiful women, and bathroom vomit scenes. [Insert lame Where The Wild Things Are joke here.]
It was a crazy week for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. First they pulled a fast one by doubling the number of films you’ll feel obligated to see this year, and now they’re making it a lot harder for the Best Song category to even exist. According to Arts Beat, “the academy said it will have no nominees and award no Oscar in the best original song category if no one song hits a high enough mark, that being 8.25, in its scoring system for song nominations.” Is it weird that all we can picture is that now broken up couple from Once, softly weeping?
Remember when we told you about that Steven Soderbergh/Brad Pitt baseball movie that Sony canceled? Hollywood Elsewhere has the dirt on the poorly-revised script that caused the ruckus via ScriptShadow’s Carson Reeves: “I couldn’t even tell you what the A’s secret to success was in Soderbergh’s draft. It’s implied that there’s a spreadsheet involved but the explanation stops there. A spreadsheet of never-explained numbers? That’s how the team wins? That’s your hook for the movie?”
The Guardian claims that Michael Jackson’s death has prompted a last-minute cut to Brüno thanks to some scenes Sacha Baron Cohen has with LaToya. “The offending scene features Cohen, in the guise of Brüno, attempting to find Michael Jackson’s phone number on LaToya’s BlackBerry. After Brüno reads aloud what he claims to be the singer’s number, an apparently enraged LaToya terminates the interview and storms off the set.” Sounds rather tame, right?
Are you excited for the Ethan Hawke vampire movie? Yeah, we didn’t know about it either. Cinematical pointed us to the newly-released trailer for Daybreakers, a film that’s set in 2019 in a world that’s overrun by vampires thanks to some plague. Hawke plays the researcher who is hoping to save the human race. Watch it below. Looks kind of silly, but fun, right? Typical Lionsgate fare.