The trailer for Mel Gibson’s latest film has hit the web along with news that it’ll skip theaters entirely and head straight for the On Demand market.

On the one hand this can be seen as a testament to the fact that Gibson is not marketable to American audiences anymore. On the other hand this is exactly where the movie industry is heading as filmmakers seem to be finding alternative means to releasing their own films (i.e. Kevin Smith taking “Red State” on the road and selling it with the winning addition of a live Q & A segment).

Looks like the old Mel is back and ready for action. “Get the Gringo” probably never had a shot in the current movie market. It seems way old school and not in an ironic sort of way. It looks like a film Gibson completed in the ’90s (minus the grey hair) and has been storing away for some time. The film should have anyone desperate for some “man- fiction” ready to take a ride this May when it hits … well … your television.

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ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE ROBERT DOWNEY JR.

Found this at Hollywood Elsewhere:

I’d so much rather be doing this than some little indie movie that everyone says is fantastic and it kinda sucks and is boring.

Now that I’m back home and have room to spread out my DVD collection again, I’ve been going through the actual physical cases as I organize. It’s been a trip down memory lane, and what has most struck me is how many independent films from the 1990s I purchased and still love. Over the last ten years, though, that indie movement (with rare exceptions) is an embarrassment of pretension, nihilism, pseudo-edginess, and horribly self-conscious acting. Because most of the small studios that produced these films are gone or have been swallowed up by the majors, instead of a movement it’s now a “genre” and therefore a parody of its once glorious and interesting self.

‘JAWS,’ UNIVERSAL CLASSIC HORROR FILMS SET FOR 2012 BLU-RAY RELEASE

Something to look forward to:

Easily the most important news of 2011 is The Digital Bits landing early word that Universal Home Entertainment is slotting Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws for a Blu-ray release on August 14, 2012. Spielberg told AICN earlier this year that the release (thankfully) won’t be amended (like he did with E.T.) in any way leaving in all wires and other visible bruises.

There’s really nothing all that wrong with cleaning up an old film’s special effects, especially wires and the like. The wires holding up the Martian ships in my DVD copy of the original “War of the Words” are pretty distracting. Imagine how much worse the Blu-ray will be. The problem is the slippery slope of intrusive alterations, so a complete hands-off approach is probably better.

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The strangest thing about the poster for Mel Gibson’s upcoming action film “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” is that seems completely oblivious to the actor’s current standing within the Hollywood community and with the public in general. And you know what? That’s probably what’s so great about it.

The poster shows Gibson holding a gun like the action star he is. The film poster comes complete with a ’90s tag line – “Plan Your Getaway” – and is promoted as being from the producers of two great action pictures (“Apocalypto” and “Braveheart”). If this poster doesn’t get you excited for a cool prison escape shoot ‘em up then nothing will.

Well, actually if it doesn’t get you excited that’s probably because you’re looking forward to the next Michael Moore propaganda piece or Roman Polanski feature.

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Box Office Analysis:

1. Puss In Boots $33M – With a total of take $75.5 after two weeks on a $130M budget, DreamWorks is probably feeling better after what looked like a weak opening. Still, this will have to make somewhere close to $300M to break even, and that’s a long ways off.

2. Tower Heist: $25.1M — If that cast (Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick, Dave Chappelle, Tea Leoni, and Casey Affleck) can’t open a high-concept comedy/thriller this close to the holidays, no wonder Hollywood is worrying about… everything. This was supposed to be a no-brainer.

3. Harold and Kumar 3D: $13M — Opened below its predecessor, which means that this is likely the last big screen entry into what was never a hugely popular but still profitable franchise.

4. Paranormal Activity 3: $8.5M — A five million dollar budgeted creeper has already made $95 million without a single “bankable” star.

7. Real Steel: $3.4M – Only $79M after 5 weeks.

8. The Rum Diary $3M — Did Hollywood really think all the stoners who get high to their ”Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” DVDs would turn this $45M film into a hit?

10. Moneyball: $1.9M — Everyone who saw this loves it, the reviews are through the roof, and it’s going to top out at right around $70M. Maybe there really is a disturbance in the box office force.

11. The Three Musketeers: $1.7M — $75M budget plus $18M take in two weeks equals disaster.

In other box office news: Foreign Box Office: ‘Tintin’ Takes No. 1 Spot for Second Straight Weekend to Jump $100 Mil

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The death of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko instantly comes to mind when seeing Mel Gibson’s ‘Edge of Darkness.’

Why?

Premeditated, homicidal radioactive poisoning.

Such an assassination by a personalized nuclear weapon has only one notable precedent, and that is the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Since Litvinenko died under British protection, and the producers of ‘Edge of Darkness‘ come from a BBC television series, one can’t possibly deny these connections between fiction and fact.

However, the mainstream press and Wikipedia seem deliberately deaf, dumb, and blind to the obvious. For them, the radioactivity theme is an “environmental issue.”

BBC’s most recent attention to the Death of Alexander Litvinenko as a dissident of neo-Soviet Russia, September 12, 2011, is here.

Not only is Vladimir Putin implicated in this murder, but the book on Litvinenko’s assassination, authored by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander, stresses the strong connection between Putin and one of his major benefactors, George Soros.

Hmmm …

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To paraphrase Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, “Lord I know we are your chosen people, but once in a while, can’t you have Mel Gibson choose someone else?”

Gibson’s career reads like a Shakespearian Tragedy.  After becoming arguably the biggest star in Hollywood he began displaying his hubris, spewing hatred against different ethnic groups, much of it against the Jews (or as he has called them “oven dodgers”). Gibson’s hatred nearly destroyed his career turning him into at best a b-player.  But announced last week, Gibson successfully wrangled funding for a big Hollywood project withy Warner Brothers.  He will be producing and possibly directing and starring in a movie based on Jewish history, the story of Judah Maccabee.

This is not the first time Gibson has tackled Jewish History, just the first time he’s attempted it in film. In 2004, Gibson was interviewed by Peggy Noonan for Readers Digest.  Noonan asked Gibson if he believed the Holocaust happened. He answered by questioning the number of Jews slaughtered by the Nazi’s and seemed to downplay the Holocaust as a Jewish experience. 

“I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game. I mean war is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million people starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Okay? It’s horrible.” 

These are just a few of many anti-Jewish acts made by Gibson, the most famous of which occurred during a drunk driving arrest in 2006 when he kept screaming “f***ing Jews” and  later stated that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”  

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THR:

Mel Gibson’s decision to make a biopic of the Jewish religious icon Judah Maccabee is the latest twist in the star’s long, tortured history with the Jewish community.

In a May 2003 interview with National Catholic Reporter Jesuit Fr. William J. Fulco, who translated the script into Aramaic and Latin, assured the nervous Jewish community, “In no way do I experience it as offensive to Jews or anyone else.”

But as Gibson began to screen the film to selected Catholic and Jewish leaders, accusations of anti-Semitism sounded louder and louder in the media. Unhappy with the film’s tone towards the Jewish people and their culpability in the crucifixion of Jesus, leaders such as New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

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I believe in redemption and that Mel Gibson is a uniquely talented filmmaker. What more is there to say?

DHD:

This subject matter is a decided departure for the filmmaker famous for directing The Passion of the Christ. But in a way the subject matter is in his wheelhouse: Maccabee is a close cousin to William Wallace, leader of the Scottish rebellion against the British in Braveheart, the film that brought Gibson two Oscars: for Best Picture and Best Director. Gibson last directed Apocalypto about the Mayan civilization and a tribesman who escapes human sacrifice and saves his family. While Gibson has experienced tremendous success as a producer and director, his recent star turn in front of the camera in The Beaver was a box office failure even though it received a rousing ovation at this past Cannes Film Festival.

This new deal also marks a major return to filmmaking for Joe Eszterhas, once Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter for pics like Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, and Flashdance. His credits also include two films that focused on Jewish themes: the 1987 Betrayed, which starred Debra Winger as an undercover FBI agent probing white supremacists, and 1989’s Music Box, which starred Jessica Lange whose Hungarian immigrant father is accused of engaging in atrocities during World War II. …  (more…)

In light of the devastation to our civilization directly resulting from the collectivist policies of our ruling elite, there’s probably never been a better time to look at one of Hollywood’s best-loved genres – the end-of-the-world movie.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what films qualify for this category – one list of doomsday movies includes dozens of very different films, with plots ranging from the world blowing up to society suddenly changing dramatically into something unfamiliar, dystopian, and creepy.  A documentary about the last two-and-a-half years would qualify as the latter.

From the Cold War nuke paranoia of Fail Safe (1964) to the “Oh s***, it’s a comet” catastrophes envisioned by flicks like Deep Impact (1998), they run the gamut.  Sometimes society is teetering – think California – and sometimes it has fallen completely into the abyss – think Detroit.

But at their best, these movies show us something about ourselves and about enduring truths, challenging our intellects and asking vital questions about the nature of man.  But mostly they’re just cool and fun to watch.

And sometimes they are Zardoz (1974).  This is an utterly insane 70’s freakshow starring Sean Connery that can best be described as what it must be like to party with Anthony Weiner and Eric Massa in Thailand with an endless supply of bad Woodstock acid and a substantial NEA performance art grant.  Gotta respect any movie that offers the straight-faced line, “The gun is good, the penis is evil.”   (more…)

Jodie Foster’s The Beaver was one of the more controversial releases this year, thanks to the latest highly publicized incidents during the production surrounding its lead actor, Mel Gibson.  Once Hollywood’s greatest working leading man, Gibson has descended to a new low in terms of public opinion.  Yet in light of these incidents, he delivers his most personal performance yet in this movie.

Gibson plays Walter Black, a hopelessly depressed man, whose level of self-loathing has forced his wife, Meredith (Jodie Foster), to kick him out of the house.  In a drunken haze, Walter find a beaver hand-puppet in a dumpster and takes it to his hotel.  Walter attempts suicide in a moment of desperation, but is put off by the cockney accented voice of the beaver puppet, which proclaims is out to save his life.  Hiding behind his newfound beaver puppet persona, he returns to life with confidence and swagger, though it causes confusion and frustration to those closest to him.  Meanwhile, Walter’s awkward son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), makes money writing papers for kids a school.  When the silently troubled head cheerleader at his school (Jennifer Lawrence) approaches him to write her graduation speech, he’s forced to face his own family issues while trying to help her tackle her own demons as well.

The Beaver has one of the most bizarre, interesting, and beautiful performances of Mel Gibson’s career.  The vast majority of the film is spent with the actor in beaver-mode, as he skillfully belts out a cockney accent, along with perfect puppeteering to go with it.  One could be forgiven for mistaking Mel’s accent for the voice of Ray Winstone.  Gibson hides behind the puppet in what seems to be a defense mechanism in the movie’s toughest scenes, even when the film delves into truly strange territory, the man sells everything that’s going on with his performance.

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The Nominees:

“Braveheart” – Mel Gibson’s stirring epic would take home a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, perhaps deservedly. I know I’ll get crushed, but I don’t love it. Just my $.02; these types of historical epic action dramas aren’t my thing. I appreciate the movie more than I enjoy it. I never got the whole controversy, which painted the movie and Mel Gibson as homophobic. The supposed outrage felt completely inorganic, manufactured, and just plain phony.

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“Sense & Sensibility” – Never seen it. Look, there are people who don’t go see “Fast Five” one time, much less three times, and there are people like me who do. The people in the latter camp typically don’t watch movies like “Sense & Sensibility.”

“Apollo 13″ – Good movie that spawned the lamest catchphrase of the decade and made “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” a wee bit less challenging.

“Il Postino: The Postman” – I seem to recall it was the dark horse favorite to win Best Picture and the odds on favorite to make me throw up in my mouth. It didn’t win. And, whoa, I kinda liked it.

“Babe” – Seriously. No, really, seriously? A talking pig movie?

What should have been nominated: (more…)

Speaking at a press conference in Cannes for her new film “The Beaver” Jodie Foster said she believed Mel Gibson is ‘probably the most loved actor in Hollywood’.

It’s not often that a popular actor sunk in disgrace and surrounded by media and movie-biz hostility can mount a comeback. Fatty Arbuckle—who was famously railroaded—never managed it; and Jeffrey Jones probably never will. So The Beaver is a triumph for Mel Gibson. Diving down into the alcoholism and manic depression he has implicated in his appalling behavior in recent years, Gibson has resurfaced with one of his most moving performances. This is all the more remarkable because the film’s premise seems so wildly unlikely, if not ludicrous.

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Gibson’s character is Walter Black, the successful—or once-successful—CEO of a New York toy company. Walter is being crushed to the ground by clinical depression and has just about given up hope. He’s tried some desperate therapies—from drum circles to self-flagellation—but now maintains on heavy meds. At work he’s a zombie; his staff is demoralized and profits are down. At home he spends most of his time in bed, smothering his pain in sleep. His loyal wife, Meredith (Jodie Foster), has stuck by him; but while the youngest of their two sons, Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart), still loves his dad, the oldest, teenage Porter (the excellent Anton Yelchin), has turned away in contempt.

Rooting around in some castoff junk one day, Walter finds an old hand puppet, a cute, nubbly beaver. When Meredith finally reaches the end of her marital tether and tells him to move out of the house, Walter takes the beaver with him. Checking into a motel, he gets drunk in his room and suddenly hears a voice: “Oi!” The Cockney accent is familiar, and at first we wonder if Walter has suddenly been joined by Michael Caine. But no—it’s the beaver. “I’m here to save your goddamned life,” says the puppet, no longer quite so cute.

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Watch monologue below…

Reuters:

Gervais’s jokes were so incendiary that when he went missing during the second half of the show, the Twitterverse lit up with suggestions that he’d been fired backstage. Clearly, Gervais had done so much damage entertaining the viewers at home (or appalling them, depending on their belief in decorum), that he became the story of the night. …

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Returning Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais did indeed let it be known that he wasn’t going to hold back in skewering Hollywood’s most famous celebrities. And, in what will undoubtedly be his last hosting gig for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (and, who knows, maybe any Stateside awards) he didn’t disappoint.

But in the process of making searingly funny jokes at more than just the obvious targets (Charlie Sheen, Mel Gibson, the HFPA itself), the heat he put into the punch lines might have made him more of the story than the actual winners.

And yet, it made for compelling — if sometimes wince-inducing — television. Given the staid lameness of most awards shows — hello, Emmys — at least he kept those who are not in the industry laughing uproariously. (His “I warned them” line came after a particularly funny joke about Hugh Hefner’s new fiancee, complete with physical comedy and facial expressions). (more…)

Every year we regular folk are blessed with wisdom from Hollywood’s elite: how to vote, worship, eat, what to drive, raise our kids, who in corporate America is making too much money, and who we should love and who we should hate. All while stars gorge themselves on private jets, third homes, and shaped tofu holiday dinners at 5-star resorts.

While we at Big Hollywood are quick to point out that celebrities can use their soapbox to do some good, but each time they open their mouth to tell us how to behave, they run the risk of losing the magic of their screen persona.  So to help remind you who spoke up on behalf of “all people” this year, here is a rundown of the 10 most asshat celebrity comments of 2010:

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10.  When Whoopi Goldberg went on O’Reilly to discuss her reason for walking off The View (i.e. plug her new book Is It Just Me?: Or is it nuts out there?”) rather than defend her position about the world having a “Muslim problem,” the two also touched on the issue of whether a Jewish kid or a Muslim kid is more likely to be bullied in the US because of his religion.  O’Reilly had the facts but like most good, Hollywood liberals, Whoopi just said, “I don’t believe it.”

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9. Mel Gibson finds himself on the list for having a long history of racist rants, drunk or not. He gets an extra asshat mention for not checking for a wire when being honest in the face of a Russian. (more…)

To paraphrase Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, “Lord I know we are your chosen people, but once in a while, can’t you have Mel Gibson choose someone else?”

It seems as if every time Mel Gibson starts digging out of a hole caused by his bigoted tongue he falls right back in. Right on the heels of the announcement of a new “comeback” movie “Beaver,” Winona Ryder gives an interview to GQ and tells story about Gibson’s Antisemitism and Homophobia.

“I remember, like, fifteen years ago, I was at one of those big Hollywood parties. And he was really drunk. I was with my friend, who’s gay. He made a really horrible gay joke. And somehow it came up that I was Jewish. He said something about ‘oven dodgers,’ but I didn’t get it. I’d never heard that before. It was just this weird, weird moment. I was like, ‘He’s anti-Semitic and he’s homophobic.’ No one believed me!

On one hand, we only have Ms. Ryder’s word on this incident, but these bigoted words by Gibson are  not much different from other things the actor has said.

In 2004 Gibson was interviewed by Peggy Noonan for Readers Digest in 2004.  Noonan asked  Gibson whether he thought the Holocaust happened.  He  answered by questioning the number of Jews slaughtered by the Nazi’s  killed in the Holocaust and seemed to downplay the Holocaust as a Jewish experience.  But added that its all OK because some of his best friends are holocaust survivors.

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Welcome to today’s edition of Hollywood Values:

Mel Gibson goes on a racist tirade and becomes a Hollywood pariah whose career is pretty much over. So over that he’s kicked off of ”Hangover 2″ and HuffPo feels the need to run polls like this.

Fair enough…

Meanwhile, Roman Polanski, a child rapist who fled from justice, is currently in accolade Heaven over a pretty marginal movie and already gearing up for his next one.

And no, we will never stop reminding Hollywood of this. (more…)

Jodie Foster is a two-time Academy Award winner and one of the most respected and well-liked movie stars of our time. She minds her own business, does her job better than most and exhibits nothing but old school class in her personal life. If anyone’s ever had an unkind word to say about her, I haven’t read it and I most certainly haven’t written it. Like many, I was disappointed when she signed on for Roman Polanski’s new film but wasn’t about to judge someone I’ve respected for decades over a single misstep. There’s just too much goodwill there and you can add to that the points she earns for consistency in her willingness to publicly stand by her longtime friend and colleague Mel Gibson, when almost no one else will — including many vigorous and outspoken supporters of a fugitive child-raping director.

The raving left-wingers at Salon, however, have decided that Foster’s loyalty to the embattled Gibson not only warrants criticism (fair enough) but an entire Orwellian “rethink” (their chilling word, not mine) of her as a human being and as an actress. In a piece subtitled, The movie icon continues to go to bat for her embattled friend. Maybe it’s time to rethink the acclaimed actress, Salon writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, unsheathes the long knives of the New Blacklist:

The time has come to admit it — Jodie Foster is not all that. …

Yet even when she’s not aligning herself with rageaholics and fugitives, Foster’s cinematic track record is something of a head scratcher. Her powerhouse glory days of movies like “The Accused” and “Silence of the Lambs” are now two decades in the past. She did a neat turn in “Inside Man,” but “Flight Plan,” “Panic Room” and “Nim’s Island” doesn’t exactly amount to a stunning body of recent work. (And if you want to blame it on her age, note that Laura Linney, Joan Allen, Hope Davis, Patricia Clarkson, Mary Louise Parker and a slew of other actresses of Foster’s generation seem able to find challenging, award baiting roles in quality films.) Foster can pick and choose. And often, she chooses dreck. …

She’s made a string of forgettable to downright offensive movies. And she thinks Mel Gibson is “incredibly loved.” So why are organizations like Elle handing her accolades? Why are fans, especially women, especially women who fell in love with her sometime around “Bugsy Malone” not coming out and saying, she is no longer our role model?

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, this is the same publication that was so freaked out over “Secretariat” being openly marketed to we churchy types that one of the nicest things they screamed at it was “master race!” (more…)

We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over a period of many years, these talented thespians stopped surprising us. They ceased bringing to life fleshed out individuals and  began using and reusing tired sets of predictable quirks and tics.

Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves. (more…)

Clichés have to come from somewhere.  Believe it or not, there was a time when the by-the-book cop’s partner was not on the edge, where hordes of interchangeable henchmen packing high tech automatic weapons did not roam our cities, when the hero was neither on the verge of retirement or too old for this . . .  stuff.  Then, long ago, everything changed.

For the movie anthropologist, Lethal Weapon (1987) is the missing link.  It is the Big Bang of movies with big bangs.  It is the well-spring of a hundred lame imitations, a few good ones, and a lot of parodies.  It is where the most hackneyed of buddy-cop movie clichés were born.  At the time, they were awesome.

It is a movie about many things beyond the slam-bam action and witty banter, including about getting older and looking back, which is particularly apt here.  Looking back at the 1980’s, which I spent in high school, at UC San Diego (go whatever the hell your mascot is – I was too busy partying to care) and the Army, what is striking is how many definitive movies came along and how they led to Hollywood’s present – for better or for worse.  Lethal Weapon remains an archetypal specimen of the kind of movie only Hollywood can make well (despite how often it does it badly) – slick popcorn adventure/comedies with memorable action set-pieces paired with laugh-out-loud hilarity and featuring big stars and top shelf production values. (more…)