“In the Star’s Trailer” Archive
Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
The Mighty Macs is not a new movie about a fast food sandwich.
In fact, “Mighty Macs” is the nickname for the women’s basketball team at Immaculata University, a team that won three consecutive AIAW national championships from 1972 to 1974.
The film based on the Mighty Macs’ first season took almost as long to come out as the Macs’ reign.
In the movie, Carla Gugino plays Cathy Rush, a former hoops star who becomes the Catholic college’s novice coach. Married to NBA ref Ed Rush (David Boreanaz of TV’s Bones), the blonde-haired force of nature faces the absence of a gym, little funding and no support from the school’s Mother Superior (Ellen Burstyn).
Written and directed by Tim Chambers, the film was completed in 2009, but only is now making its way into theaters. The G-rated indie effort sounds like—and often plays like—Hoosiers in skirts, which is not such a bad thing. Along with the Cinderella story of the underdog winning all and the formula sports stuff you’d expect, there’s a girls’ empowerment theme that speaks to kids, ‘tweens and young adults alike.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Jonah Hill is everywhere.
He showed up on the MTV Video Music Awards, bantering and handing out a statue with Niki Minaj. He then took the stage at ESPN’s ESPY Awards, where he was dwarfed by the Minnesota Timberwolves’ power forward Kevin Love.
Hill’s picture has been snapped at the Toronto Film Festival for the world premiere of his new film Moneyball, getting into theaters now. Also at your local multiplex: the trailer for The Sitter, a December release in which he plays a college student unprepared for watching his neighbor’s three wild kids.
Meanwhile, the animated hit Megamind, featuring Hill’s voice, has been popular on home video over the past few months; on TV in October comes Allen Gregory, an animated comedy for Fox about a seven-year-old genius forced into attending regular school. Hill co-created the series, for which he provides the lead character’s voice.
That’s not even mentioning the various projects on the not-so distant horizon.
He’s managed to make time to get to a Philadelphia hotel suite, albeit for a brief stop. The purpose is to discuss Moneyball, but, really, how can you ignore everything else, all the work—and all the weight the slimmed down- actor has lost?
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
You can take the actor out of Niles Crane, but it’s tough to take Niles Crane out of the actor.
As the psychiatrist sibling of radio shrink Frasier Crane on the smash Cheers spinoff Frasier, David Hyde Pierce won four Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy during the series’ eleven-season run. While the actor retired the erudite, fussy Niles a few years ago, the characterization seems to keep popping up in unusual ways.
Consider a new film Pierce stars in called The Perfect Host, which recently opened in theaters and debuts on DVD and Blu-ray on August 23. In this diabolically entertaining indie thriller, the 52-year old actor plays Warwick Wilson, an erudite, fussy bachelor who lives in a stylish Los Angeles apartment. When John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), a scuzzy criminal who just pulled off a bank robbery, invades his home, Warwick is the kind of guy that’s concerned about the crook’s bloody foot—because it’s making a stain on his carpeting. But by film’s end, the character of Wilson proves less Niles and more nasty, as the film reveals his unsettling hobby and other surprises.
“I wouldn’t call him Niles, but part of the appeal of the role is that the way the movie starts out, he’s cut from the same cloth as Niles,” explains Pierce from New York. “He’s sophisticated, he has good taste, he’s having a dinner party and serving wine to his guests.
“For me, as an actor, I can take him on a journey. It works for the film because just like his character in the movie, they see me and relax. Audiences say ‘we get this,’ and it’s more surprising when the twists come that they don’t expect.”
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Selena Gomez is carrying around her nude stiletto-heeled shoes, apologizing.
“I’m sorry, but I need to take these off,” she says in her Philly hotel suite. “Please excuse me.”
Gomez, dressed in a sparkly gold sweater, sits down, now unencumbered from her ache-inducing footwear. She stretches, and then says she’s sorry for being late.
But she’s actually at least ten minutes early, which unheard of in the world of publicity tours, especially one as whirlwind as this one.
Politeness isn’t always something you expect from Disney-fied triple threat stars. Especially in light of the problems faced by other celebs groomed by the Mouse House in recent years, such as Miley, Lindsay and Britney. But the soon-to-be 19-year-old Gomez appears to be cut from a different cloth.
Gomez’s mission in Philly is geared to the release of Monte Carlo, but it is really three-fold. First, she’s promoting the movie, a teen-girl riff on The Prince and the Pauper, in which she plays two roles. As Grace, she joins her small-town gal pals Meg and Emma (Gossip Girl co-stars Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy) on a trip to Paris that gets re-routed to Monaco. In the meantime, normal gal Gomez is mistaken for Cornelia, a snotty heiress. Romantic and comic complications ensue.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Paging Dr. Carter. Paging Dr. John Carter. Please come to the ER where you will be…battling aliens!
Dr. John Carter, brandishing a rifle and leading a militia against marauding extraterrestrials? What in the world is going on?
Hell, what has Noah Wyle’s career come to?
At first glance, you’d surmise that the man who played the sharp, young emergency room physician on the highly rated doc show ER is making a break for it, a change of pace from the parts you normally see him in. Or is he?
In Falling Skies, the new hour-long show on TNT, Wyle plays Tom Mason, a Boston history professor whose wife was killed six months prior by invading space aliens. In addition, one of his three sons has been abducted by the scaly, multi-tentacled monstrosities, which forces him to use his military knowledge and join forces with his neighbors in defending their families and finding the loved ones who have been abducted.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Breckin Meyer grabs a handful of hard candies and begins chucking them at Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who tries to swat them away with his hands.
You don’t expect to see this in the conference room of the posh Rittenhouse Hotel, located in a high rent district off of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square.
But if you watch the actors in Franklin & Bash, their new show on the TNT channel, the behavior should not come as much of a surprise.
In the show, Meyer is Peter Bash and Gosselaar is Jared Franklin, savvy, smart-alecky lawyers used to working the streets of Los Angeles.
To paraphrase Muhammad Ali, Bash likes to float like a butterfly, using his smooth professional manner to win over judges and juries, while Franklin stings like a bee, bucking authority whenever the opportunity presents itself. The one-two punch is what has made them successful legal eagles.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
At first glance, Bridesmaids looks like the female version of a surprise hit movie from two summers ago about a group of guys at a drug and alcohol-fueled bachelor party in Las Vegas which has a sequel coming out next week.
But guess what? It’s not.
Certainly, the film has plenty of chances to go there. Thankfully, it doesn’t. On its own terms, Bridesmaids is a rollicking R-rated farce filled with sharp dialogue, memorable characters and hilarious moments. Directed by Paul Feig (creator of the beloved TV show Freaks and Geeks and director of many episodes of The Office and Arrested Development), the film has producer Judd Apatow’s magic touch of scurrilous and sweet.
It also has Saturday Night Live star Kristen Wiig in the lead, and, as evidenced on the big screen, it will make the woman who regularly plays “The Target Lady,” “Gilly,” Suze Orman and Nancy Pelosi a movie star. This is her first time to take center stage in a film after scene- stealing work in Knocked Up, Adventureland, Whip It and Paul, and she makes the most of it.
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guest-blogs | FanFare Guests, In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Guest blogger Laurence Lerman of Disc Dish writes:
Disc Dish recently had a sit-down with actress Sally Hawkins to talk about her latest film, the lively, up-lifting Made In Dagenham, which opened theatrically last fall and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 29 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Directed by Nigel Cole ($5 A Day, Calendar Girls), the movie tells the real-life story of a 1968 strike conducted by a group of nearly 200 women sewing machinists employed at a Ford Motors plant in the London suburb of Dagenham. Hawkins portrays Rita O’Grady, a spirited wife, mother and factory worker who leads the ladies in their protest to earn the same pay (or close to it) as the plant’s thousands of male employees. And they win.
Ms. Hawkins, who we loved in such recent movies as Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and Woody Allen's Cassandra’s Dream (she was actually the best part of it), had been a been a little under the weather the day before we met, but was in an enthusiastic mood nonetheless, cheerily assuring me that she was “past the contagious stage.”
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Mary-Louise Parker head the cast of the new action-comedy Red. But it was veteran thespian Ernest Borgnine who really made an impression on actor Karl Urban.
“Having Ernest Borgnine on set when he was 93 years old, putting in a full day at the office with a twinkle in his eye was part of the special moments of the film for me,” says Urban, the New Zealand-born actor who plays William Cooper, the CIA supervising operative out to assassinate older spook Willis and cronies Freeman, Mirren and Malkovich in the film.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Urban, a workmanlike actor, would be impressed with the achievements of Borgnine, an Oscar winner for Marty and a veteran of hundreds of other movies and TV shows.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
For years, Amy Ryan amassed a list of impressive credits, moving fluidly from television to stage to movies. She was one of those ever-reliable actresses who possessed a chameleon-like appearance, comfortable in large and small roles, and adept in movies both serious and light.
Then—boom! Ben Affleck cast her in a big supporting part in his 2007 drama Gone Baby Gone. Cast as the drug-addled mother of a young Boston girl who has been kidnapped, Ryan turned in a tour de force performance that made audiences sit up and take notice. It also earned her several year-end critics’ awards and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
It’s been nearly 20 years since Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was in theaters, charming the world with its fairy tale blend of magical story, gorgeous animation, colorful characters, memorable romance and wonderful music.
For Paige O’Hara, who supplied the talking and singing voice of the book-loving heroine Belle, you would believe that watching the film in its new special Blu-ray edition would bring on a sense of deja vu.
But according to O’Hara, you would think wrong.
“Watching it on Blu-ray was actually like a new experience,” says O’Hara, 54, during a stop in Philadelphia. “The colors, the depth of field, the sound…all of the elements are spectacular.”
Working on both the new DVD and Blu-ray editions of the only animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards did bring back many memories for the singer-actress.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Star's Trailer, Movie Buzz
Even when he’s dressed smartly with a sleek black shirt and dark sports jacket, his snazzy straw hat lying on the table nearby, John C. Reilly can’t help but elicit one adjective he just can’t shake: craggy.
Perhaps it’s his hound-dog eyes or maybe it’s his mop of curly hair. Or it could be his distinctive voice, reminiscent of Tex Avery’s Droopy Dog character. Whatever. The guy looks like he just rolled out of bed.
Talk to him, however, and you soon learn that not every picture tells the correct story. The 45-year-old Chicago native and alumnus of the Windy City’s revered Steppenwolf Theater Company turns out to be smart, witty, down-to-earth and perceptive when it comes to acting. Perhaps you sort of expect the latter, since he’s been performing for 22 years, 21 years in the movies, beginning with small parts in two 1989 Sean Penn films; Brian DePalma’s Vietnam drama Casualties of War and the comedy We’re No Angels with Robert DeNiro.
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