Here they come.
Seth and Emma will do all the talking. ABC will do something unseemly, stretching out the experience (NBC is WORSE with the Golden Globes, so there’s that). And we’ll know when we know.
You know the drill — 830 AM Eastern you tune in to your local ABC affiliate — Good Morning America. And the announcements follow shortly.
Reactions here, there, and everywhere to follow.
I first noticed Joe Manganiello during his scene-stealing turns in “How I Met Your Mother.” A recurring character, the towering Joe M. would walk into a scene, nail a big laugh, and get out.
He’s like the Patrick Warburton in this “Seinfeld,” with that Warburton/Brad Garrett deadpan.
He’s one of the stars of “True Blood,” but the funny stuff is what stands out. He shows up in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” as the stud all the old-married guys idolize. He gets laughs.
“Much of my career, pre-‘True Blood’, was comedy. Theater and sitcoms.
‘True Blood’ put me on the map. It came at a time when I thought drama wasn’t going to happen for me.”
But happen it has. As one of the many ripped and randy Southern folk who are secretly vampires and werewolves, Manganiello, 35, has gotten used to doing a lot of acting with his clothes off.
The fact that he’s “quite a specimen,” as Channing Tatum put it, had a lot to do with Joe landing one of the key supporting roles in Tatum’s male stripper dramedy, “Magic Mike.”
A solitary figure, clad in gray, stumbles and weeps across a rainswept moor.
Yes, it’s “Jane Eyre” time again. One of the most frequently-film period pieces from the golden age of the corset is back, with Mia “Alice in Wonderland” Wasikowska in the title role.
The Jane served up by Wasikowska and director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) is a fiery, spirited woman in what amounts to open revolt against a woman’s lot in life in early 19th century Britain. She longs to travel, keep good company and not be enslaved to a man or a class. And she’s willing to go running off in the rain to get it.
Nick Swardson is the latest comic reclamation project to come out of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company. He’s been given a star vehicle, “Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star,” a comedy about a farm country dimwit who discovers his parents were once porn stars, and takes the bus to Los Angeles to follow in their, um, footsteps.
Two things about that. First, the concept, and the movie that comes from it aren’t funny. And second, Swardson wasn’t any more born to be a star than his character.
The “s” word is never used in “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” the first film of a planned trilogy of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. But it’s there in spirit, whispered off camera by the heroes of Rand’s exceptional-people-intent-on-doing-exceptional-things tale, saving the economy, fighting “the government” and succeeding in spite of a vast “pay your taxes” conspiracy aligned against them.
After years of teasing, tempting notions of how this book might be filmed, with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attached for the longest time, it arrives in theaters a lumbering, stale and retro feast for Rand’s converts — an eye-rollingly clumsy amble through a Middle Earth of Monopolists for the rest of us.
“The Undefeated” is a slick one hour and 50 minute version of those political convention hagiographies (“A Man From Hope”), so it’s not exactly an objective take on its subject, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. It’s just her and her friends “setting the record straight.”
Conservative documentarian Stephen K. Bannon (“Generation Zero”) makes a persuasive case that Palin was a more accomplished governor than the national media has ever let on and that she’s more of a “maverick” than we’ve been allowed to see. He captures some of the media firestorm that surrounded her upon her arrival on the national scene and the creation of her “media narrative” — naive, greedy, possibly corrupt and appealing to the nuttier elements of the GOP’s far right base. The film is designed to make her appear less alarming and as such, it works — until you start noticing what was left out.
It’s great to see Jesse Eisenberg break out of his nebbish trap, just a bit, as a swaggering, sarcastic slacker in “30 Minutes or Less,” his latest collaboration with his “Zombieland” director.
But it’s sad to see that Danny McBride can’t escape his raunchy redneck rube niche.
Their combination — Eisenberg as a pizza delivery guy kidnapped, strapped into a bomb vest and made to rob a bank by McBride’s dopey thug — makes “30 Minutes” a fitfully funny farce, a caper comedy with blood and bad language. Amusing at times, it still feels like a letdown after Ruben Fleischer’s gonzo “Zombieland.” For all the need for speed that this very short movie’s title implies, “30 Minutes” lacks urgency.
Note to any future filmmakers planning on using that played and played-out horror subgenre, the “found footage” film. Pay attention, please. It’s kind of important if your thriller is built on “found footage” that there be some way humanly possible for that footage to be “found.”
Thus, saying “84 hours” of secret NASA film from a secret final mission to the moon was uploaded to a website — go here, save yourself the ticket price – is laughable if what you’re claiming is that there were cosmonauts and astronauts killed by, um, something on the moon. And the video and FILM footage you claim to have uploaded was left up there with them.
Thus, every scene in the silly and short “Apollo 18″ is simply beyond the reach of that absurd claim.
“Soul Surfer” is the best faith-based film ever made, an uplifting, entertaining and wonderfully-acted account of surfer Bethany Hamilton’s life before and after a shark bit her arm off in the waters off her favorite Hawaiian beach.
It’s corny in all the right ways, from the voice over narration in which Bethany (AnnaSophia Robb of “Race to Witch Mountain”) explains how she was “born” to do this and the surfer’s credo that kept her going after that fateful day — “Life is an adventure, and sometimes you wipe out and land in the impact zone.”
Matthew McConaughey may be the only actor in Hollywood who can swagger while sitting down. He drawls and cracks out that toothy grin and it’s lock-up-your-daughters/hide granny’s mattress money time. You either fall for his charm or roll your eyes at his chutzpah.
“The Lincoln Lawyer” gives this charming devil his due, a role that plays right into his wheelhouse — a slick, smarmy, hustling lawyer whose clientele is the rough trade; hookers, pot pushers and biker gangs.
