Thanks to our ever-watchful jennybee for pointing us to The Reader trailer in various glamorously shabby QuickTime sizes. (Less gloomy movie still of the screen shot above after the jump.)

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Oscar-winning actresses, Palinized! Terrifying indeed, and yet none of these celebs fully embody the bottomless depths of hollow fraud and cataclysmic charisma of this year’s spookiest fright-mask facade — The Hokey Mom! So I’ve added an Awards Daily exclusive, and you can discover who she is by clicking the photo above (…if you dare!)

WWII Mission: Impossible.
ok, no longer skeptical. I’m hooked.

Zac and Disni Make a Porno — but they won’t let us see it.
Defamer taunts us with a Zac-tease. (WARNING: shirtlessness alert)

The big weekend box office for High School Musical 3 proves that Disney knows not to mess with a winning thing, and why should it? …Perhaps, then, the threat of tinkering with this equation was what Disney had in mind when they cut what was apparently a Zac Efron-led musical sequence in a boys’ group shower (!), the existence of which came to light after an Ebay seller included pictures of the number in a cache of HSM3 photos.

Zac Twist? Zac nasty! You didn’t go there to fish!

The trailer for Slumdog Millionaire yesterday showed us a vibrant side of urban India rarely recorded with such authenticity in Bollywood productions — and the difference is that Danny Boyle took the cameras out of the studio and onto the streets. Reuters UK has an interesting piece about the logistical difficulties of filming on the streets of Mumbai:

The production discovered that some days, travelling a distance of three miles to a location took — no joke — three hours. During some shots, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle found himself separated from Boyle by dozens of people even though the director was only a dozen feet away.

“It was bonkers,” Dod Mantle recalls about the constant crush of flesh.

The city and country are no longer just about Gandhi and cricket but rather are examples of capitalistic growth on crack. A location chosen six months earlier during preproduction could be the site of a sparkling new tower by the time the film crew arrived.

The most fascinating part of the article, for me is a glimpse at the techniques of total immersion the filmmakers used to remain as inconspicuous as possible when capturing crowd scenes. An explanation of how they achieved this cinematic anonymity after the jump.

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Fincher was asked to jot down his favorite films, “in no particular order,” and came up with this list.  It’s a good one, I think – if only because it is so similar to my own tastes.  It always boils down to narcissism.  I would probably have left off Animal House.

Source 1 2

Thanks to AD reader Iain for sending this in.  Pixar goes for Wall-E big time.  From Pixar Planet.

(click the pic for the yahoo trailer page)

Angels/Demons vs Frost/Nixon

Director: Ron Howard / Ron Howard
Original Music: Hans Zimmer / Hans Zimmer
Casting: Janet Hirshenson / Janet Hirshenson
Costume Design: Daniel Orlandi / Daniel Orlandi
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino / Salvatore Totino
Film Editing: Daniel P. Hanley, Mike Hill / Daniel P. Hanley, Mike Hill

Estimated Metacritic Score: 55 (?) / (?)
Estimated Worldwide Box Office: $600 mil / (?) mil
Estimated Number of Oscar Nominations: 0 / (?)

Phil Bronstein, editor of the SF Chronicle (and Sharon Stone’s ex) writes up the premiere of Milk.  He writes of Josh Brolin:

I’d walked the District 8 neighborhood with Dan White, doing a few stories about this seemingly earnest guy a bit in over his head. Josh Brolin’s hair-perfect presentation of the White character in the film was as eerily pitch-on as his George W. Bush. I sat across the aisle from Brolin at the premier and occasionally had to look over to gut check that it wasn’t Dan in the chair, as much as he was on the screen.

And of Penn:

Sean is pretty remarkable in the movie. I don’t know how you go from the scorching, tormented Irish thug in “Mystic River” to such a convincing Jewish/gay icon and diva in the same lifetime without some genius in there. I told him something like that, though scaled down, at the City Hall party afterwards. We’d hardly spoken since the fugue-like struggles he and I had over editing his Iran and Iraq pieces for the paper, nose-to-nose in the back of Tosca, manhoods challenged, accusations of traitorous conduct, duels with pistols suggested.

Isn’t it interesting that these Oscar movies are taking us back through history?  Nixon, Harvey Milk among them?

This is exactly the kind of thing no one should ever pay attention to — for one thing, it’s one person’s opinion and you all saw my opinion walking out of King Kong.  Maybe all opinion’s aren’t created equally, maybe some people are more “in the know” than others and who am I to judge?  But this little tid bit just popped up on Anne Thompson’s site, via Hollywood-Elsewhere:

“[It's a] two-hander for Leo and Kate, all grown up now as a married couple, unhappy but still in love. They go at it fiercely and you can sense the real-life bond that lets them really go for it, all defenses down.

“It’s powerful and also beautifully written and filmed. [American Beauty director] Sam Mendes doing suburban angst again, but this time in the 1950s. I daresay it may be a modern classic. The screenplay race this year is unusually light on adaptations, so this being an adaptation of the Richard Yates novel, I’d look for a nomination.”

What strikes me immediately, as with almost every one of these early hearsay “tips” is that anyone could have written it, without even having seen the movie.   And sorry to be the one to say it but anyone not looking for a nomination of not only Richard Yates’ novel but THAT Richard Yates novel ought to rethink this whole Oscar coverage thing.  Maybe we ought to rethink it anyway.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJs80eBGYlM[/youtube]

…And judging from the recent firings at the LA Times, they’re going to need it.  The Hollywood Reporter’s Steve Zeitchik thinks it’s time to once again elevate the journalist and that Frost/Nixon is just the film to do it

The timing couldn’t be better for such a message of uplift. Journalists, you may have noticed, are taking a beating on all fronts. There’s Sarah Palin, telling us how she’d rather go directly to the American people instead of through pesky and unnecessary filters; they just get in the way. There’s the Tribune Co., the debt-laden parent of the Los Angeles Times, cutting meat and bone and the entire animal. And then there’s all the media themselves telling us, tendentiously, how all the other media are too tendentious to listen to.

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If you live in LA why not take a shot to win a ticket to see Che at the AFI Fest, compliments of Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema. Deadline is 12pm PST, Friday, October 31:

Soon thereafter one of the monkeys will pick a name at random and contact you with the good news. You’ll win one (1) ticket to see the movie plus a voucher redeemable at the AFI box office for one (1) AFI screening of your choice (not including Opening Night Gala, Closing Night Gala, Tribute or Centerpiece screenings).

Nothing to it!

I feel sleepy already. Just like Time Bandits, except the only time stolen is two hours of your life.

Over at Hollywood-Elsewhere, Jeff Wells reports that both Milk and Frost/Nixon are pretty good, in his estimations.  He gives them both about an 8.5 on a scale of one to ten but says he doesn’t understand what the early impressions of Frost/Nixon were about and the so-called bad buzz he heard about Milk was also unfounded.  In the comments, Scott Feinberg, wrote:

Jeff, I was getting the same BS tips about “Milk” being a disappointment, and then I saw it today and happen to think it’s terrific, especially–but far from exclusively–Penn. The bad buzz actually only lowered expectations and made the movie all the more rewarding… but, still, you’ve gotta wonder where this stuff starts, and why it sometimes builds to the point that usually-credible people start circulating it to us.

I’ll take a stab at answering that, from a gal who’s been around the block shall we say: trust no one.

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