Baby don't hurt us.

While I sit here waiting for someone to finally give me the ultimate mashup of movie characters making fart noises, I suppose I can settle for today’s best effort of some of Hollywood’s hunkiest A-list male actors saying, “I love you.” There are also some people in this that have no business having ever been cast as a romantic lead *pauses screen, gives middle finger to Josh Radnor* but this post is all about what you ladies want today (or until the next post).

So why don’t you draw yourself a nice, hot bubble bath, pop a bottle of bubbly, strap on a blindfold, lay back and pretend like Matt Damon, George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Colin Firth, Ben Affleck, Shia LeBeouf, Brad Pitt, Zac Efron, Leo DiCaprio, Robert Pattinson, that guy from Scrubs and Paul Rudd are saying those awesome three little words to you. Also, while you’re blondfolded, I’m going to steal your TV.

(Via Pop Sugar)

You Luhrmann'd my Gatsby! You Fitzgerald my Luhrmann! Either way, this Carraway is completely Tobey'd!

For lovers of Jazz Age literature, I thought it couldn’t get any better than Woody Allen’s fictionalized depictions of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (to say nothing of Hemingway) in Midnight in Paris. But in case the tongue-in-cheek time travel movie wasn’t, you know, sumptuous enough for you, vis a vis visual feasts, Warner Bros just released the first official publicity stills from Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby (not to be confused with a batch of set pictures I posted a while back). Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan gets to keep her regular hair as Daisy Buchanan, and Tobey Maguire embodies the dandy fancyboy rube role he was made for in Nick Carraway. The man was practically born with a carnation on his lapel.

On a separate note, if this succeeds in bringing back flapper headbands for girls again, I’m going to punch somebody.

One more picture after the jump, plus a Hemingway clip from Midnight in Paris, because I couldn’t resist.

[pics via TheFilmStage]

"Coloreds? This is highly irregular."

As if hipsters didn’t already have enough reason to buy vintage clothes, Baz Luhrmann is directing a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby set to open next Christmas, sure to be a sumptuous visual feast for everyone from the casual fan to the die-hard Luhrmaniac. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, along with Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Joel Edgerton, and Isla Fisher. DiCaprio as the title character cuts a dashing figure in these new pictures from the set in Sydney’s Centennial Park, but something about the way Tobey Maguire rocks the collared sweater and floppy bow tie (as would-be writer Nick Carraway) absolutely steals the show for me. Tobey Maguire was born to play the Little Lord Fauntleroy role. He looks like what would happen if you brought a wedding-cake figurine to life and taught it skip around whistling jazz tunes. He’s like a human Jiminy Cricket.

What has two pinkies and loves plum puddin’? This guy.

Yeah, just in case it wasn’t already easy enough for Leo to bang supermodels, we had to give him a cane and wingtips.

I feel like Carey Mulligan would be dressed like this anyway.

Women be gossipin’. Some things never change.

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[via Celebuzz]

Last night, Apple released the new trailer for Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, which will hopefully be awesome like Gran Torino and Mystic River and not sh*tty like Invictus and Changeling. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the (snicker) titular J. Edgar Hoover, alongside Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, and Armie Hammer. Oh, poor J. Edgar Hoover. The guy practically invents modern law enforcement as we know it, spearheading fingerprint databases and the kind of forensic science that would eventually become the basis for countless terrible Jerry Bruckheimer TV shows, and here all I can do is make cheap gay jokes because he maybe liked to cross dress and had a manservant. But honestly, what am I supposed to say when the lynchpin line is “I want you to be my number two man,”? Especially when he says it to Armie Hammer while he’s making this face:

"I desperately want to be your number two man."

I couldn’t have come up with a better euphemism myself. Well, okay, maybe, “Mr. Tolson? I’d like for you to work tirelessly underneath me.”

Anyway, in addition to the gay stuff, I hope we finally get to see some hot Eleanor Roosevelt lesbo action. It’s been hinted at for too long, I want to see the old broad strap it on.

[Embed via ComingSoon, Trailer in HD at Apple]

When Deadline recently reported that Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Departed writer William Monahan would be working on a remake of the semi-autobiographical, 1974 tale written by James Toback, The Gambler, James Toback was sad, because no one had called him :-(. Now, if that doesn’t seem like a story worth 3,000-plus words, then you don’t know James Toback, one of the all-time Hollywood blowhards, who could probably go name-drop for name-drop with Bob Evans. Toback wrote a tome of a response for Deadline, which starts with a reference to Brett Ratner (Toback’s housemate) and culminates with an insanely circuitous way of saying “Scorsese is rude.”  I’d urge you to check out the entire thing, but either way, I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting some of my favorite, most blowhardy moments here. Savor it with snifter of brandy, a fine cigar, and your own farts.

Perhaps my inability to view this “tribute” as primarily flattering was additionally influenced by a recent and infinitely more felicitous experience which involved remarkably similar circumstances. My movie, Fingers, was remade as a Cesar prize-sweeping film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard, the great French filmmaker who called me from Paris and then flew to New York to discuss Fingers in great detail before redoing it, apparently not sharing the current group’s quaint — if indeed entirely legal –notion that as long as they “own” something — even a movie — they are fully entitled to do whatever they wish to it without even bothering to consult its creator.

Of course, the French have always had an entirely different set of laws and values governing intellectual property based on the poignant notion that a writer’s work cannot be tampered with by anyone even including someone who paid money to take ownership of it.

BOOM, DOUBLE SARCASTI-QUOTES! Take that, Scorsese! You could learn some manners from the French, all of whom I know, having personally sat at their tables to break butter. But instead, it seems you’ve become the victim OF A DISS MOST SUBTLE! Thesauruses at dawn?

From there, Toback takes the opportunity to weave a florid and similarly verbose tale about his favorite subject: himself, and how awesome he was! Or as Toback says it…

I would like to offer an unexpurgated chronology of the history of The Gambler since the movie seems, after 37 years, to have ignited the energies of all these busy and important people. So here it is, covering all incidents — in the words of Winston Churchill — “from erection to resurrection.”

Well it’s about time. Too many chronologies get expurgated these days, and without nearly enough throwaway Churchill references, I always say.

After graduating from Harvard in 1966 I taught literature and writing in a radical new program at CCNY whose additional faculty included Joseph Heller, John Hawks, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Adrienne Rich, Mark Mirsky and Israel Horovitz.

A RADICAL NEW LITERATURE PROGRAM THAT WOULD INEXORABLY ALTER ALL FUTURE CITY COLLEGE LITERATURE PROGRAMS THROUGH THE POWER OF NAME-DROPPING! But wait, James, weren’t you MORE than just a peer of Hawks and Heller?

I also wrote articles and criticism for Esquire, Harpers, The Times, The Voice and other publications. Most of all, I gambled — recklessly, obsessively and secretly. It was a rich, exciting double life with heavy doses of sexual adventurism thrown in for good measure.

Phew, thank God you threw in that last part, I don’t know how I’d be able to parse this precipitous parable without picturing your big, dimply ass pounding some unfortunate coed.

Inspired by the life and work of my literary idol, Dostoyevsky, I embarked on the writing of The Gambler intended originally as a novel.

Well of course. One doesn’t simply write a novel, one embarks upon it, on the advice of dead Russians.

At this point, my dear, beloved and late friend, Lucy Saroyan, daughter of the great and hilarious William Saroyan and a budding actress said: “I know the actor you must use. I study with him. I’ve fooled around with him — but that’s not why I’m telling you he’s the one. It’s because he’s a genius. I’ve known Marlon since I was a little girl. I’ve f*cked Marlon. I love Marlon. And this is the only guy on earth who is going to be as great as Marlon — Bobby DeNiro.”

“My dear departed friend for whom I have nothing but respect, once told me about Robert DeNiro, an anecdote I couldn’t possibly share with the world without mentioning that she also banged Marlon Brando, and any other actor who happened to blip onto her slut radar.”

Lucy set it up. Bob and I had an instant communion. He read the script. He didn’t just learn it — he digested it. He became Axel Freed. And since Axel Freed was I, he became James Toback. (He even got a Caesar haircut from Carol at Vidal Sasoon because that’s where I had my hair cut and how I wore my since vanished locks.)

“He didn’t just eat it up, he masticated it into a fine paste, slowly passed it through his esophagus, denatured its proteins in four separate stomachs, absorbed its nutrients in his small intestine, and shat it into a pair of fine Tiffany Cufflinks, which to this day I still wear to gala openings and celebrity bat mitsvahs.”

I flew to London and met Karel Reisz. Within a week Karel and I formed not just a friendship and highly constructive working relationship, but a mutual love as well which lasted to his death in 2002 and which continues in my heart to the present.

“It was that love, combined with a build-up of HDL cholesterol, that caused me to have my first triple bypass back in ’04.”

“I don’t know this world of yours,” he said, “but I read your autobiographical memoir on Jim Brown and I think I see possibilities in your script that you haven’t fully developed.”

Autobiographical. Memoir. On Jim Brown. Must… resist… urge… to unpack…

I had been in psychoanalysis for two years with Gustav Bychowski, one of Freud’s last proteges, and my meetings with Karel often resembled analytic sessions in the Freudian style.

Translation: We did a F*CKLOAD of cocaine.

Late that night Karel did call and asked me to come over to Joel Schumacher’s apartment which he had sublet.

Schumacher may seem completely unnecessary to this story, but I mention him only because he once saw Karel with his shirt off, and the man had so much nipple hair that some say he inspired the design of the batsuit in Batman Forever.

Early screenings of The Gambler drew rhapsodic responses. Evans, Sue Mengers, David Begelman, Freddie Fields, Sidney Beckerman, Dick Zanuck, Ron Meyer, the Schneiders, Robert Towne, Warren Beatty himself and many others who effectively ran Hollywood got the word out that The Gambler was the thing! Frank Yablans was equally excited and appeared in a 60 Minutes segment on Lauren Hutton, an actress in the movie, to bless it with his personal proud send-off.

Shel Silverstein, G. Gordon Liddy, Alfred E. Neuman, the Deluise brothers, Howdy Doody, George Washinton Carver — they all loved it! It was the elephant’s eyebrows, I tell ya, biggest picture in town!

So learning of the plan to “remake” my movie at the same time and in the same fashion as any other devoted reader of this esteemed column, I suppose I should feel… what? That a tribute is being paid to a creation I left behind? I suppose. But one doesn’t always feel what one is supposed to feel.

For instance, I haven’t been able to feel my face since 1997. I blame the psychoanalysis.

As the late, great Jackie Wilson sang:
Just a kiss
Just a smile
Call my name
Just once in a while
And I’ll be satisfied.

Rudeness, on the other hand, and disrespect yield their own unanticipated consequences.

Yikes, that’s cryptic. I shudder to think what those consequences might be. Quick, someone call James Toback and sing his fat ass a lullaby before he goes Columbine on us all.

"It takes two to make an accident." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3

Director Baz Luhrmann is currently in Australia shooting his adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo Di Caprio (Jay Gatsby), Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), and Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan). Hopefully it turns out better than Australia (WOOF), but in the meantime, here’s a few pictures from the set. Either they’re just driving around the set in these and not actually shooting, or the costume designer decided to go real casual. “This is set when? Eh, I dunno, just throw on a t-shirt.”

Oh, and I thought the banner picture could use a little Gyllenhaal to brighten it up.

[FlynetPictures via ComingSoon]

"It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5

"It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Tobey - it increased his value in Leo's eyes."

Tobey Maguire’s double life as a high-stakes poker player is coming to light as a result of an FBI investigation into a an embezzling hedge-fund manager who was also a degenerate gambler (shocking, I know).  Basically, this guy, Brad Ruderman, whose name couldn’t possibly sound more like the name of a douchey hedge-fund manager, lost $25 million of his clients’ money in secret poker games with Hollywood stars like Maguire, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Webster.  Okay, I made that last one up. Now, some of Ruderman’s clients say they’re entitled to Maguire’s winnings, because they were acquired through illegal means, and because the money Ruderman money lost was rightfully theirs.  Yeah, yeah, and America “rightfully” belongs to the Indians, here’s me playing the world’s smallest invisible dick violin with my dismissive wank hand.

As Ruderman sits in a Texas jail until 2018, convicted on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of investment adviser fraud, lawyers for the clients whose funds he embezzled are filing a series of civil suits against those who won big in the illegal poker dens, in the hope of recouping some of their lost savings.
Ruderman lost $311,300 to Maguire, including one losing hand of $110,000, on July 30, 2007, it’s claimed.
The games were “exclusive events, by invitation only, and that there was a regular roster of players consisting of wealthy celebrities, entrepreneurs, attorneys and businessmen,” according to the lawsuit.
Tinsel town A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon also played in the no-limit Texas Hold ‘em games held on a twice weekly basis in suites at the luxury Beverly Hills hotel, Four Seasons, and the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, which had a buy-in of $100,000, multiple members of the ring told Star.  DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon are not being sued.
Others who were part of the secret society and are facing hefty lawsuits include billionaire businessman Alex Gores, The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes, Welcome Back, Kotter star Gabe Kaplan, Paris Hilton’s infamous sex tape partner, Rick Salomon, record label owner Cody Leibel and Las Vegas nightlife entrepreneur and real-estate developer Andrew Sasson, among others.
Maguire won as much as $1 million a month over a period of three years, one source told Star, which is on newsstands Wednesday.
“That means he could have made up to $30 to $40 million from these games,” the whistle-blowing card shark predicted. [RadarOnline]

And I’m sure that’s an accurate estimate, because if there’s one thing I know about poker, it’s that your earnings from it are as constant and reliable as Old Faithful. One Hollywood A-lister whose name you WON’T find among the invitees to the games, however, is Paul Walker, who was no doubt presumed to have an unfair advantage. If you’ve seen any of his movies, you know the one thing that guy’s got going for him is an impenetrable poker face.

RELEVANT

Because Martin Scorcese just can’t quit Leo DiCaprio, he plans to shoot him in The Wolf of Wall Street, his very next film (after he finishes post on Hugo Cabret and directs his adaptation of a Shusaku Endo book starring Benicio Del Toro, but who’s keeping track).

After crying wolf before [I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE], Martin Scorsese now plans to follow through and direct The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, with Boardwalk Empire‘s Terry Winter having adapted the Jordan Belfort memoir [Vitor's brother, I assume]. They will announce financing and a start date in Cannes.

DiCaprio will play a Wall Streeter with a raging drug habit and hard partying lifestyle that ultimately brings him down. Belford spent 22 months in federal prison for stock market manipulation. Despite the sound of that, I’m told the script is funny, dramatic and fast paced, and manages to make something of a sympathetic character out of a stockbroker who supervises a cadre of brokers who squeezed clients to buy stocks that paid off–for the brokers, who used the funds to live extravagantly until they were brought down by the feds.

Hmm, the rise and fall of a brash stock broker… I get the strange feeling I’ve seen this before, but I’m sure it’s just deja vu.  STOCKS! BONDS! JAGER BOMBS! STRIPPERS! BUY! SELL! MONEY PORN FOR A-HOLES!  I hope it’s not too critical of finance culture.  We can always just get the team of coke-addicted spider monkeys who punched up Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2 script.  NEEDS ANOTHER MONTAGE! (*flings poop*)

Better idea: The wolf of Wall Street is an actual wolf, and the part of Leonardo DiCaprio will be played by Strutting Leo Cat.  You’re welcome, Hollywood.

This isn’t the most gracefully-edited mashup I’ve ever seen, and four minutes and thirty seconds is a long time to watch Leonardo DiCaprio freaking out, but still, it is four straight minutes of Leonardo freaking out.  I also could’ve used more Leonardo in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.  But then I also said that about Schindler’s List.  That mashup and more, after the jump!

(*climbs into metallic pink smart car, speeds away*)

(NSFW for language)

I know it’s not technically a “freak out”, but any time is a good time for “Een Afrika, et’s ‘Bling Bang’.‘”

[via TotalFilm]

Below: Natalie Portman’s dorky laugh at the Golden Globes

(The Great Catsby, obvi)

When I first heard Baz Luhrmann would be making a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, my first thought was, “BUT WILL IT BE DARK AND/OR GRITTY?   CAN IT BE UPDATED FOR CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCES? AND WHAT OF ADDING VAMPIRES?”  Looks like I might not be disappointed…

Praising the 3D format, director Baz Luhrmann told The Hollywood Reporter that he has workshopped his upcoming project The Great Gatsby in 3D, though he has not made a call about whether to shoot in the format.

I imagine the final call will depend on whether Luhrmann thinks the bulky 3D camera rig will be maneuverable enough for all the car chases and wire work.

(barely related)