Everybody’s Fine stars Robert DeNiro as a widower whose grown children (Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore) all cancel on him for Christmas dinner, so he embarks on a hijinks-filled road trip to find out what their hilariously quirky problems are. Supposedly it’s a remake of Guiseppe Tornatore’s Stanno Tutti Bene (Italian for… wait for it… EVERYBODY’S FINE), written and directed by Waking Ned Devine’s Kirk Jones. But it looks basically like Four Christmases from the parent’s perspective. i.e., sort of generic and lame. But you never know if that’s the movie’s fault or if the trailer editor guy just didn’t know what he was working with. Wait, you mean no one gets hit in the crotch? How am I supposed to let people know this is a comedy? And where the hell am I supposed to put the record scratch? I’m telling you, this is a fool’s errand. Someone fetch my “sproing” sound.
Usually Robert Rodriguez is pretty uncreative when he’s casting a movie. “Eh, I’ll just stick my slutty girlfriend in it,” he’s fond of saying. But Variety recently reported on the actors in line for Machete, which began production this week, and it’s like all my most feverish coma fantasies come true!
I don’t know how they ever got insured — with Danny Trejo and Michelle Rodriguez on the same set, they’ll have enough Latin machismo to power 1000 lowriders. I also hear that craft services won’t be offering any food, just cigarettes and Eagles records.
The world dropped a collectively load in its sweatpants today when it was revealed that Robert DeNiro actually stole his most famous line in Taxi Driver. From Bruce Springsteen.
De Niro made the admission to Springsteen’s bandmate Clarence Clemons - who coached the actor to play the saxophone for movie New York, New York.
Clemons tells the New York Daily News, “(He) had been to one of our concerts and the audience was yelling out ‘Bruce!’ In those days, Bruce would stop onstage and say, ‘You talkin’ to me?’
“De Niro was kind of channeling him.” [DailyExpress]
I’m not that disillusioned, if only because I never assumed it was something DeNiro wrote in the first place. He’s an actor. Actors are good at dressing up like other people and saying things other people say. It’s just strange that this is only coming out now. It’s probably because people never ask the black saxophone player what he thinks. He’s just supposed to sit there and laugh at all of Jay Leno’s stupid jokes. Ha, hunting with Dick Cheney, good one, Jay.
Eh, you buyin’ dis watch? I don’ see no watch wit better quality den dis, so you must be buying dis watch.
Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino are suing Tutima watches and a distributor using their likenesses without permission for Tutima ads linked to Righteous Kill.
“De Niro’s and Pacino’s policies concerning commercial endorsements and tie-ins are common knowledge in the entertainment industry,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants’ actions have damaged De Niro’s and Pacino’s valuable reputations and diminished the commercial value of their name and images.”
Both men were very careful about product endorsement, the lawsuit said, with De Niro only endorsing a product or service “under very specific and compelling circumstances.”
“Pacino, over the course of his lengthy career, has never commercially endorsed any product or service in the United States,” the lawsuit said. [THR]
Their case would be a lot more believable if the movie hadn’t been Righteous Kill. At that point you might as well just do a commercial. At least that might be less predictable. Ooh, I wonder if these watches are good.
Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a former casino executive once called the greatest living expert on sports handicapping and the man on whom Robert DeNiro’s character in Casino was based, has died at the age of 79.
Officials said Rosenthal died from a heart attack in his Miami Beach condo.
Rosenthal, who once survived a car bomb, ran the Chicago mob-owned Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda and Marina casinos through the 1970s and into the mid-1980s. [CNN]
**pours out a little coffee on the floor for my homeboy** Here’s to you, Lefty, I hope you’re up in Heaven right now trying to bang that chick from TLC. Oh wait, he was Jewish? Nevermind about the Heaven thing. …Hey don’t look at me, I don’t make the rules, Jesus does.
