WEIRDLAND

Friday, March 19, 2010

Kristen Stewart makes a question to Dakota Fanning

Dakota Fanning on Jimmy fallon suprise video question by Kristen Stewart: what is it like to kiss Kristen Stewart?

"James Brennan doesn’t have any scientific proof of it, but he suspects that he might very well be the world’s biggest fuck up. He’s just managed to graduate college with a degree he’ll never really be able to use and, worse yet, he’s still a virgin. His European Trip graduation gift trip has fallen through as well, cause his dad has just got demoted at work, and now he’s stuck for the summer working at the local amusement park Adventureland. Things could be worse though as he’s got a bag of grass to last the summer, and he’s really getting a kick out of the Henry Miller book that he is so engrossed in. Even better are some of the friends he has made at the park like Connell, the repair guy who jammed with Lou Reed back in the day and especially Em, the coolest girl he has ever met.

He suspects that Em is the kind of girl that Alex Chilton wrote “September Gurls” for, and he finds the song playing in his head every time he looks at her". Source: mooninthegutter.blogspot.com

"The Bangles did a cover of “September Gurls”, and the Replacements did the tribute “Alex Chilton”, but it was R.E.M. who really set the table for Chilton’s late-’80s surge in popularity, a moment captured in last year’s movie Adventureland. The scene where Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg bond over “I’m in Love With A Girl” is a completely accurate picture of how it felt to discover Big Star in the Eighties, at a time when “indie rock” didn’t even have a name yet.

Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg as Em & James in "Adventureland" (2009).

Alex Chilton never seemed to have much interest in his career. He refused to milk the Big Star resurgence — by then, he was exploring a whole new sound, the lazy R&B raunch of records like High Priest. He was hilariously surly to fans requesting Big Star oldies. At a summer ‘88 show in New Haven, where some guy up front kept yelling for “Oh My Soul”, Alex just sneered, “Sorry — I don’t think this particular band has the capability to play that particular song.” Any time he faced the camera, he gave a mean glare and clenched his shoulders like a fighter. Despite years of hard living, he always seemed indestructible — and thanks to his music, he always will be.

Note: I didn’t witness that show in Roanoke. I heard about it from a Virginia girl I met in a bar, when the bartender put on Radio City. We both recognized the album, so we traded stories about Chilton shows we’d seen. A couple years later, we played Big Star’s “Thirteen” as the first dance at our wedding. Thank you for everything, Alex Chilton. You will always be the blue moon in the dark". Source: www.rollingstone.com

Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn -Cubist Blues- Dream Baby Revisited.

Kristen Stewart at "The Runaways" premiere in SXSW film festival

Dakota Fanning, Floria Sigismondi and Kristen Stewart.

Kristen Stewart wearing a strapless dress designed by Jasmine di Milo Spring 2010 at SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas.

Watch New Moon Extended Scene!

"Prince of Persia" first reactions

Here’s what we’re hearing through the grapevine so far…

Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) Visual Guide (Scans).

SvenRump: Prince of Persia: a rollicking good time. Swords & Sandals 2010 Bruckheimer Style
Slashfilm: Feeling let down by Prince of Persia. The production design, cinematography, costume design all amazing. But the plot, characters and casting is kind of a mess.
FirstShowing: Prince of Persia was good, not great, pretty much exactly what I expected. It moved VERY quickly but was still long. Not enough parkour. I like the plot, but there’s so much going on it was confusing at times, felt a little rushed and messy, but wasn’t bad. Just good I guess.
Schofizzy: No surprise that PRINCE OF PERSIA: SANDS OF TIME looks cool and that’s about it.
mattign: Just saw Prince of Persia. Fun movie.
bitmobshoe: Prince of Persia movie is a lot of mindless, summer blockbuster fun. The expected cliches were out in full force though.
entoncesmn: Prince of Persia is big and loud and and action-filled but all that didn’t make the story better. Source: screencrave.com

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) Visual Guide (Scans)

"Jerry, who was the mastermind of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, premieres the rough cut of his new summer film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with not one but two nearly simultaneous screenings in the Jubilee Theater at Bally’s and in Barry Manilow’s theater in the Paris. The epic action adventure directed by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire genius Mike Newell stars Jake Gyllenhaal , Sir Ben Kingsley and Gemma Arterton". Source: www.lasvegassun.com

Jake Gyllenhaal, Jordan Mechner, Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Teresa Palmer - plus Filmmakers Jerry Bruckheimer, Mike Newell, Jon Turteltaub and Lee Unkrich expected at San Francisco convention BURBANK, Calif. (March 11, 2010) — Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures has tapped key cast members and filmmakers from three upcoming films to take part in WonderCon 2010, one of the industry’s most popular comics and pop culture conventions, April 2-4, 2010, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures’ presentations include:

“PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME” - Jake Gyllenhaal (the film’s Prince Dastan), Jordan Mechner (executive producer and creator of the video game that inspired the film), director Mike Newell and producer Jerry Bruckheimer share insights about and footage from this epic action adventure set in the mythical lands of Persia. Geoff Boucher will moderate. Saturday, April 3, 2010, 12:15-12:45 p.m. Esplanade Hall". Source: www.thefancarpet.com

"The Runaways" new stills & reviews

At the photo shoot for our 2010 Hollywood cover, Kristen Stewart took a break from looking at once sultry and anguished to tell Krista Smith about playing rocker Joan Jett in The Runaways. And loath as the actress was to reveal what book she was reading (not Twilight) and what band she was digging these days (not the Runaways), she kindly obliged.

"Joan enthusiastically recalls, "I asked her if she was going to cut her hair and she said "Yeah!" Adds Kristen: "I would've felt like a fraud if I wore a wig. Dakota's wig looked amazing, though." There was one poignant scene where Dakota, as 15-year-old Cherie, cuts her hair to resemble David Bowie's sexy shag.
While Joan's fashion in the film consists mostly of leather and homemade T-Shirts, Cherie finds herself performing in the over-the-top looks. (Cherie was a clean-cut blonde Valley girl who was hand-picked to front the band for her look; but she quickly fell into the hard-partying rockstar lifestyle, using her glittery platform boots to crush pills so she could snort them.) Dakota says she "got to keep pretty much everything" from the wardrobe, including the platform glitter boots and a lingerie set she wears to perform "CherryBomb" in Japan". Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

"Enter Currie, a David Bowie disciple whom Jett and Fowley spot at a club. With the proper prompting, which consists mostly of being browbeaten and humiliated by Fowley, Currie learns to front a band, to spit out lyrics to songs like "Cherry Bomb" that make her seem way beyond the teenager she really is.

Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning at NY premiere of "The Runaways", on March 17, 2010 in New York City.

Jett and Currie form a sort of alliance, but Currie is eventually too lost in her own problems to keep the band going.
Stewart is surprisingly good as Jett; the head-down non-responsive attitude that is so annoying in the "Twilight" films is much more at home here. Jett is lost, after all, until she cranks up her guitar, at which point Stewart comes alive, as well. And Fanning, famous as a child star, is all grown up as Currie - or at least as grown up as Currie was allowed to be". Source: www.azcentral.com

"The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.

Early on, we see Kristen Stewart, as the black-shag-haired Joan Jett, in an L.A. boutique, where she has to coerce the saleswoman   into selling her a man's studded biker jacket. Stewart's casually likable, no-frills performance starts with Jett's tough-girl saunter — which is to say, the actress knows just how to walk like a skinny dude. At the same time, we meet Cherie (pronounced Sher-ee), who cuts her platinum hair into a David Bowie shag so that she can lip-synch to him at a high school talent contest.

These girls have their outlaw fashion bona fides down. But it takes Kim Fowley, the L.A. record producer who becomes their shrewd, hectoring Svengali, to teach them how to rock out like boys. Fowley, who favors red leather jackets and dog collars the size of tiaras, is a hyped-up hustler-manipulator who has seen through the rebel artifice of rock & roll yet loves it anyway. As played by Michael Shannon, the great actor from Revolutionary Road, he looks like a punk Frankenstein and shouts everything as if in mid-tantrum. He's a creep, and proud of it, but he knows what sells. He places Cherie in the band based on her looks alone, as if he were casting a porno film. That she's only 15 is just icing on the bad-girl cake.

There's a fun scene set in a grungy rehearsal trailer, where Fowley, with a little help from Joan, makes up ''Cherry Bomb'' on the spot and teaches Cherie to sing it with nasty glee. You can see the girls co-opting the male hormonal thrust of rock and making it their own.

When it gets away from the stage, though, and from the iconography of strutting she-devil-in-lingerie empowerment, The Runaways is a glumly episodic rock saga. It stays true to how the band's members were exploited, yet there's a special challenge in bringing this story to life, since the Runaways were really just little girls who fed themselves into a buzz-saw machine of record-industry hype". Source: www.ew.com

Michael Shannon talks about "The Runaways".

"The Runaways" - 'Rowdy First Gig'

"The Runaways" - 'Roller Rink Rockin' clip.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Chewing gum with Jake Gyllenhaal at Oscars

"As a headline on Wrigley’s website reads: “This is your brain on gum.’’
Reese Witherspoon - "InStyle" Magazine MARCH 2010.
Today’s gum is more than something to chew. It’s a benefit-delivery system that can help smokers quit, blast a dose of caffeine to the tired, and provide antioxidants to the anti-aging obsessed.

The manufacturers like to tout studies claiming various benefits, but what some consider gum’s finest hour had less to do with science than with Hollywood. At the Academy Awards last week, millions watched as Sarah Jessica Parker, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Morgan Freeman paraded before the cameras while chomping on gum.

Guy Pearce with Cameron Diaz at Vanity Fair Oscar Party
on 7th March 2010.

Parker gushed to a TV reporter about her Fred Leighton jewels and her Chanel Couture gown, all the while chewing as if she were in the schoolyard. Inside the Kodak Theatre, gum’s starring role continued. Look, there’s Cameron Diaz chewing while applauding for honorary awards recipients Lauren Bacall and Roger Corman, and “Avatar’’ star Sam Worthington enjoying gum on the Oscar stage itself, while presenting an award". Source: www.boston.com

Bubblegum and Lollipops: