"With Revolutionary Road I think I enjoyed the concept more than the film itself as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet both offer up conflicting viewpoints and you are able to connect with both of them on one level or another. Kate Winslet’s character looking for a way to restart the marriage while DiCaprio’s character is right in line until a great opportunity at work and other contributing factors throw a kink in their plan to pick up and start their lives over in Paris. The film has some amazing performances and you will see Leonardo DiCaprio jump two spots as he, in my book, is a serious contender for Best Actor. Kate Winslet is good, but I have a feeling expectations may have led me to believe it would be amazing. I personally believe she is much better in The Reader.
Michael Shannon is unfortunately going to come in second to Heath Ledger with a performance that makes the film something special (Josh Brolin and his performance in Milk will suffer the same fate). This isn’t a review of the film, and like I said I like the ideas brought up in the film more than the film itself, which you will notice once you get to the Best Picture charts". Source: www.ropeofsilicon.com
"There is a reason for the unfairness – it takes an hour and a half for Winslet to get through hair and make-up and the production can’t wait; but, in the end, she can’t stand it any longer. She strides off to stand in for her stand-in and delivers every line as if her life depended on it. Winslet stays in character between them. For about eight minutes she inhabits another life that she has spent weeks imagining in every detail, a life defined by dark secrets, and quite unlike her own. After the second “cut” she exhales and hangs her head. Daldry comes over and massages her shoulders. I scribble in my notebook: “This is what they’re paid for.”
– The Reader is already being talked of as an Oscar contender. In fact, he almost agrees. “She certainly gets paid for going into an emotional state, and, first of all, understanding what the character needs to do,” he says. “In other words she has a huge intellectual facility, but married to a huge emotional facility that is just fearless.” The reader of the title first appears as a teenager drawn into an affair with an older woman, played by Winslet, who is working as a tram conductor. She then disappears without explanation – at least until the teenager, grown up (and played by Ralph Fiennes), is stunned to see her in the dock at a major postwar Holocaust trial. He is left to wonder how he could have loved her, and whether he has compromised himself in doing so. He is also mystified, almost to the end, by her true motivation. The book has been criticised as too willing to humanise the generation condemned by the historian Daniel Goldhagen as “Hitler’s willing executioners”. But it is also on school and college reading lists from Leipzig to Los Angeles.Schlink also agreed, but Winslet was busy starring in Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes, her husband. So Daldry turned to Nicole Kidman (she had won an Oscar as Virginia Woolf in Daldry’s The Hours). Kidman signed on, but then fell pregnant. Daldry went back to Winslet, who by this time was free. All he needed now was a male lead. He cast Ralph Fiennes.
Thus did the most talked-about German novel in a generation acquire a British producer, director, screenwriter and starring line-up. For good measure, Sydney Pollack and Scott Rudin, Hollywood legends both, joined Minghella as producers. Never let it be said that German nationalism lives on in the movies. Schlink and the German actors cast in The Reader’s smaller roles have – so far – expressed nothing but gratitude for the chance to work alongside an Anglo-Saxon A-team. Their careers all stand to benefit, not least because of the sheer weight of expectation that is about to settle on Kate Winslet’s shoulders: she has been nominated five times for an Oscar, but never won. Kate Winslet was nominated to Oscar for Best Performance in a Leading role for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in 2005.
“We’re in a whole new era.” It’s an era in which, just maybe, Daldry will go up against Kate Winslet’s husband for an Oscar, and, with the help of at least one of them, Winslet will finally get one of her own". Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
"He died halfway through the film I'm currently making, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. We had finished shooting in London on Saturday night. On Sunday, I went to Vancouver to prepare for the next stage and Heath went to New York. He was supposed to be turning up in Vancouver on the Friday. On Tuesday he was dead.
None of us could deal with it. It was impossible - that was the problem. It was absolutely impossible that this could be a fact. But there it was. I was working in the art department when I heard the news, and we stayed there all afternoon. At sunset, thousands of ravens flew over the window and I thought: those are the ravens from The Brothers Grimm, and they are all going to salute Heath.
In terms of his acting, it still rankles with me that he's dead because he would have been streets ahead of anyone else in his generation. He just kept getting better and better. He was fearless. On Parnassus, he was improvising all the time and it was better than what we had written. I don't normally encourage that kind of improvisation, but in a sense I felt Heath was writing this film. He was an incredibly funny performer when he wanted to be - his comic timing was just extraordinary - and then he could break your heart the next minute. When he died, there were all these nonsensical stories coming out about Heath Ledger, James Dean and River Phoenix, all destroyed by the system - but that's bullshit. What happened was an absurd accident. I still don't understand it. I know he was exhausted - the last thing he said was that he was so tired and just wanted to sleep. You actually think at certain times angels come down to earth and Heath might have been one of them. And then he's gone and you think: this is all wrong, all the other people should be dead. He should be leading us all into a wonderful world of adventure".Source: www.guardian.co.uk
"Now that Heath Ledger has been posthumously nominated for a Golden Globe, there's maneuvering behind the scenes as to who will accept the award should he win.
"Kim desperately wants to do it," one cognoscento tells us of Heath's father. "But the studio and the producers would rather have Michelle receive it on behalf of Matilda" - the couple'sdaughter.
Some Hollywood insiders have speculated that the foreign journalists who decide upon the Golden Globes choose some nominees based on their attractiveness and star power, to goose up their televised awards show's ratings. Michelle Williams, who broke up with Ledger four months before he died in January, is a lot purtier than the senior Ledger, who accepted an "Aussie" award for his son last weekend.
But a friend of the family tells us, "Why would Michelle be involved? She had nothing to do with the movie. They weren't even together when he passed away. Would you have your ex-wife accept your award? And they weren't even married. [Director] Chris Nolan or [star] Christian Bale would make more sense. Michelle makes no sense. It's like those rumors that she would go to the premiere of 'Dark Knight.' That was never in the realm of possibility."Source: www.nydailynews.com
"Onscreen he wears angst and desperation like a badge of honor. Raging in the existential cult drama "Donnie Darko" (2001), crossing the fine line between passion and obsession in "The Good Girl" (in which his character, one Holden Worther, lugged a beat-up copy of The Catcher in the Rye across Texas in writer-director Miguel Arteta's shout-out to Salinger's protagonist), mourning the loss of life and youth in "Moonlight Mile", Jake Gyllenhaal has become the movies' poster child for outsider, misfit characters".Chelsea Clinton: "I would encourage people to read it in the hope that maybe it would have a similar inspirational effect. Did you feel Holden Caulfield-esque while you were making "The Good Girl"? Do you even agree with your character's interpretation [of the book]?
Jake Gyllenhaal: "There's something about him that makes me think he's only read that one book. He's so lost that he just sort of takes on this "Holden" persona because he understands it's universal". Source: www.highbeam.com
Q: Why do you like to play outsider types?
Hirsch: I don't know. There's something about the good-hearted guy fighting the system. I just love that. That's how Speed is. He's a really focused guy with a heart of gold and the corporations are trying to crush him and use him for his skills to make them more money. And when he doesn't want to play ball, they want to destroy him.Source: chud.com/articles
"Wendy and Lucy", director Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her 2007 indie marvel, "Old Joy", returns to a Pacific Northwest of equal parts natural beauty and desolation. Dressed in androgynous clothes, her hair chopped and boyish, Michelle Williams stars in Wendy and Lucy as a slacker waif adrift in a subculture of neo-hippie train jumpers building bonfires in the woods, bruised blue collars and a collection of vets and disabled hard-luck cases waiting at the corner store to exchange cans for change. As Wendy is hauled away to jail, Lucy remains tied to a bicycle rack, one more tragic loss in a string of escalating disasters.These losses come with a devastation comparable to that in Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neo-realist masterpiece, "The Bicycle Thief". Unlike Emile Hirsch’s adventuring, Alaska-bound dropout in "Into the Wild", Wendy’s is not a purposeful estrangement from the world. There are foils and fairy godfathers along the way, but the overall impression Reichardt creates is of a cold, hostile world as immune to individual suffering as the Depressionera America of "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" or "The Grapes of Wrath".The only comfort Wendy finds is from the drugstore security guard (Wally Dalton) who first rousts Wendy from sleeping in his parking lot and then watches her contend with the ruined car and lost dog. His gestures of kindness are pitiably small, compromised by his own limited means. Reichardt allows us so little access to her interior life that she seems opaque, her comatose demeanor hard to identify: Is it deep depression or soft-headedness? "Old Joy" went deep inside the loneliness and need for connection of its heroes, and Wendy and Lucy’s impact often resides in external events. Wendy can feel more like a symbol of economic despair than the soft and pulpy realer-than-real men of "Old Joy". But thank goodness for Reichardt’s committed focus even on symbols in the escalating miseries of our own hard times. Source: www.nypress.com
Happy belated 23rd Birthday to the talented and lovely actress/singer Amanda Seyfried!This is a musical video dedicated to her. Songs "Honey, Honey" sang by Amanda Seyfried in "Mamma Mia!" and "Pale Blue eyes" by The Velvet Underground.
Amanda's most famous roles have been the Plastic Karen Smith in "Mean Girls" (2004), Samantha in "Nine Lives" (2005), Mouse in "American Gun" (2005), Lilly Kane in "Veronica Mars" series (2004-2006),Julie Beckley in "Alpha Dog" (2006), Rebecca in "Wildfire" series (2006), Sarah Henrickson in the series "Big Love" (2006-2009), and her first lead role as Sophie Sheridan in the film version of the musical "Mamma Mia!".
Amanda joined the cast of the dark horror film "Jennifer's Body" (2009) written by Diablo Cody, playing the title character's best friend Needy Lesnicky. Her upcoming roles are Savannah Lynn Curtis in "Dear John" (2009) and Paige Prideaux in "Boogie Woogie" (2009).
"With Revolutionary Road I think I enjoyed the concept more than the film itself as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet both offer up conflicting viewpoints and you are able to connect with both of them on one level or another. Kate Winslet’s character looking for a way to restart the marriage while DiCaprio’s character is right in line until a great opportunity at work and other contributing factors throw a kink in their plan to pick up and start their lives over in Paris. The film has some amazing performances and you will see Leonardo DiCaprio jump two spots as he, in my book, is a serious contender for Best Actor. Kate Winslet is good, but I have a feeling expectations may have led me to believe it would be amazing. 
I personally believe she is much better in The Reader.
special (Josh Brolin and his performance in Milk will suffer the same fate). This isn’t a review of the film, and like I said I like the ideas brought up in the film more than the film itself, which you will notice once you get to the Best Picture charts". Source: www.ropeofsilicon.com
"There is a reason for the unfairness – it takes an hour and a half for Winslet to get through hair and make-up and the production can’t wait; but, in the end, she can’t stand it any longer. She strides off to stand in for her stand-in and delivers every line as if her life depended on it.
Winslet stays in character between them. For about eight minutes she inhabits another life that she has spent weeks imagining in every detail, a life defined by dark secrets, and quite unlike her own. After the second “cut” she exhales and hangs her head. Daldry comes over and massages her shoulders. I scribble in my notebook: “This is what they’re paid for.”
The reader of the title first appears as a teenager drawn into an affair with an older woman, played by Winslet, who is working as a tram conductor. She then disappears without explanation – at least until the teenager, grown up (and played by Ralph Fiennes), is stunned to see her in the dock at a major postwar Holocaust trial. He is left to wonder how he could have loved her, and whether he has compromised himself in doing so. He is also mystified, almost to the end, by her true motivation. The book has been criticised as too willing to humanise the generation condemned by the historian Daniel Goldhagen as “Hitler’s willing executioners”. But it is also on school and college reading lists from Leipzig to Los Angeles.
Schlink also agreed, but Winslet was busy starring in Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes, her husband. So Daldry turned to Nicole Kidman (she had won an Oscar as Virginia Woolf in Daldry’s The Hours). Kidman signed on, but then fell pregnant. Daldry went back to Winslet, who by this time was free. All he needed now was a male lead. He cast Ralph Fiennes.
Kate Winslet was nominated to Oscar for Best Performance in a Leading role for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in 2005.
