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Finally, the remake of “Under the Tuscan Sun” America’s been clamoring for.

There’s more creativity in these billboards than most films these days. Director Christopher Nolan has an awful lot of hype to live up to on July 16th.

But if anyone can do it…

The Wrap’s Steve Pond:

The Cuban-born, Venezuelan-raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso will lead a protest against Oliver Stone’s documentary “South of the Border” when the filmmaker appears at a screening and Q&A for the film on Friday. …

Alonso says she will lead a peaceful protest … outside the Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, where Stone is scheduled to do a Q&A session after the 7:20 p.m. showing of his film.

“We’re just trying to let him know that we are against his film, that it is all lies,” she says. “That’s all we can do right now. We don’t have the money to make a million-dollar documentary like he did, so what else can we do?”

Alonso says she wants Stone to answer a couple of questions about his film: where did he get the money to finance it, and why did he “refuse to interview everyday Venezuelan people about their lives under this oppressive regime?” ….

In the past, Alonso has been an outspoken critic of actors Sean Penn and Danny Glover (her co-stars in “Colors” and “Predator 2,” respectively), who have expressed support for Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Both rulers are shown in a favorable light in Stone’s documentary, which the New York Times’ Stephen Holden called “a provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism.” (more…)

Kurt Loder at MTV News:

“Eclipse” might be as good as the “Twilight” films are going to get. The main actors have settled comfortably into their roles in this third installment of the franchise. Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed and Ashley Greene, the more interesting of the home-team vampires, have a welcome new prominence, and Robert Pattinson even has a scene in which he displays a twinge of character-development. The movie also has some actual action, as everyone must know by now — a big vampires-versus-vampires-versus-werewolves battle sequence at the end of the picture.

However, having imposed something like narrative clarity on the story, new director David Slade is still stuck with the story — which, deriving as it does from the paceless goop of Stephenie Meyer’s books, and having been wrestled into a script by Melissa Rosenberg, is a threadbare quilt of pre-teen romantic clichés padded out unconscionably with long character flashbacks and rambling dialogue that’s deader than any of the vampires in attendance. (The picture runs two hours, and might have been more enjoyable — and certainly less exasperating — if it had been cut down into a one-hour TV special.) (more…)

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CMI:

During the interview, Garofalo also expressed disappointment in President Obama. “It’s a drag that he’s such a conservative,” she lamented. 

Garofalo’s made her disdain for religion clear in the past. During a June 16 appearance on “The Joy Behar Show” on Headline News, she called prayer “anti-intellectual.” Behar later defended Garofalo on ABC’s “The View,” saying the comedian should have said prayer was “un-intellectual.”  (more…)

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Wall Street Journal:

“Little Obama,” the Indonesian film based on Barack Obama’s childhood years in the Southeast Asian nation, is nearing its June 30 premiere there and opening in wide release the following day. The film, titled “Obama Anak Menteng” in Indonesian, was directed by Damien Dematra, who also wrote the novel on which the movie is based. The fictionalized account of the U.S. president’s experiences in that country, where he lived with his mother 40 years ago, stars 14-year-old Hasan Faruq Ali, who, like the young man who would become president, is an American living in Indonesia.

(more…)