James Franco recently told an MTV interviewer (our old pal “Cuddly Josh” Horowitz, same guy from the last post) that he’d have no problem doing “sex for real” on camera for the right role. Oh, you mean the guy who watched a male prostitute have gay sex, carved “Brad Renfro” into his arm for art, sold people “invisible art“, filmed naked dudes playing basketball, and used money from Gucci to film himself walking around Paris with a dick strapped to his face is willing to do crazy things for his art? Friends, please recommend a good pearl cleaner, for I fear I’ve smudged mine from all of the clutching.

Things get really real in “Interior. Leather Bar.” — including the sex scenes.
The film is James Franco’s re-examination of Al Pacino’s 1980 flick “Cruising,” and it has some real-life sexy times in it. While Franco avoids getting in on any of the action in the NSFW flick — which just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival — he did tell MTV News that, for the right project, he would consider pulling a Shia LaBeouf and have sex for real with the cameras rolling.
“I’d say under the right circumstances. There are a lot of circumstances,” he said, with co-director Travis Mathews by his side. “Who’s involved? Both behind-the-scenes, behind the camera, in front of the camera.”

Oh please, Shia LaBeouf is like a child’s crude drawing of James Franco. Shia LaBeouf only does weird stuff in the hopes that someone might subconsciously associate him with James Franco and start thinking of him as something more than a cut-rate Logan Lerman. The weird thing about Franco is that once upon a time, he seemed genuinely, refreshingly self-aware. Taking money from Gucci to walk around Paris with a dick strapped to his face in particular was brilliant, Bill Murray-level performance art. But at some point, between bragging about his blogging awards and feuding with Gawker, and writing a name-droppy poem for Obama, all his self-awareness seems to have evaporated. Is the combination of fame and academia simply so corrosive that it leaves one defenseless against the inevitable onset of self-seriousness? Or is this just Franco’s long game, setting us up for an even deeper dicknosing? The only person who can answer that is Brad Renfro, and Brad Renfro is dead, my friend. But I hope so. I so adore a dicknosing.

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Dakota Fanning actually turned 18 last February, an event that probably would’ve been accorded more fanfare if she didn’t seem so damned normal. She never seemed like a stereotypical child actor, which makes it that much weirder that she went and did a nude scene as soon as she was legal.

Dakota Fanning might be one of the “Very Good Girls” in her 2013 coming-of-age drama, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t get the chance to show off her bad self in the flick. The actress bares more than just her soul in the film, going nude for the first time on camera.

Get it? “Much more than her soul?” I think they mean her bewbs (.) (.) – ({})

“Yeah, well, I’ve never done that before and I’m very newly allowed to do that,” she explained to MTV News at the Sundance Film Festival, where she was out promoting the movie. “I was newly 18, so yeah, it was, it’s kind of a sensitive thing, but it’s a part of life.”
Fanning grows up big time in the film, which follows her and her pal, played by Elizabeth Olsen, as they embark on their journey through adolescence, on a quest to lose their virginity, and all the repercussions that come along with it. It also means that Fanning had to capture that life-changing moment in the film. [MTV]

Like I said, even as an avowed pervert, this feels weird. I don’t believe in body shame except as it pertains to myself, so if a girl wants to jam out with her clam out, that’s kool and the gang, but this definitely tilts the Dakota Fanning dial that was firmly pointed at “normal” back towards “stereotypical child actress.” But then again, I smoked about eight billion cigarettes the day I turned 18, just because I could, and if the government had said minors couldn’t buy dog poop, I probably would’ve smeared it all over my body like Predator. So I guess I get it. All I know is, she keeps doing nude scenes, she’s going to have to change her name to Dakota FUNning, am I right? (*bow tie spins, gets yanked off stage*)

I can’t believe I made it through this entire post without mentioning Chloe Moretz. Read the rest of this entry »

Poor Lindsay Lohan has been having a rough time lately. First, there was the 7,000-word profile in New York Times magazine about what a pain in the ass it was to work with her on The Canyons. Then The Canyons got rejected from Sundance. And now, it’s been rejected by South by Southwest, with a source saying the film has “an ugliness and a deadness to it.” And that’s just when they were looking into Lindsay’s eyes! You’re welcome, Jay Leno, now you don’t have to write that joke tonight.

Sources tell THR that SXSW has joined Sundance in rejecting the erotic thriller. A festival insider tells THR that the Bret Easton Ellis-penned, Paul Schrader-directed Canyons — which features tons of nudity, including au naturel shots of Lohan — suffers from significant “quality issues.”

Says a festival insider, “It’s got an ugliness and a deadness to it.” Canyons producer Braxton Pope says the filmmakers are still awaiting official word from the festival. [hollywoodreporter]

Moar like the CanYAWNS, am I right? If I saw this Lo-han-ging piece of Pope, I’d drive Easton until my car James Deened into a tree. /fakeGeneShalit

I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve seen some shithouse films at film festivals (*cough* Buried *cough, cough*), and to me this smacks of film festivals desperately needing to assert that they’re somehow “above” this kind of celebrity. See also: Robert Redford slamming Paris Hilton for showing up to Sundance. So yeah, it’s fun to make fun of Lindsay Lohan being a train wreck, but festival organizers don’t get a pass on being smug hypocrites either. They’ll say it’s about the quality of the film, but more likely she just doesn’t have the right kind of celebrity for them. They want stuff like Adrien Grenier doing a documentary about paparazzi, or Turtle’s lyrical, semi-autobiographical think-piece about the nature of celebrity (doesn’t exist yet, thankfully). The movie itself will be just as insufferable as The Canyons, but the star will show up and wear a nice scarf and pretend it’s all about the art while collecting the same gift bags, and everyone’s happy. Why, we can’t have Lindsay Lohan coming here turning our nice fart-sniffing festival into some playground for dilettantes! Think of the scandal!

By the way, how were the reviews for the last Bret Easton Ellis-scripted film presumably of sufficient quality to be admitted to Sundance, hmm?

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I didn’t cover the NY Times’ epic piece on the Bret Easton Ellis-scripted, Paul Shrader-directed, Lindsay Lohan-starring The Canyons, only because the extent of Lindsay Lohan’s fascinating yet predictable brand of crazy would be hard to fit into a block quote. Basically, she was constantly late, would disagree with her director and fight with the cast and crew, would disappear for days on end, run up huge bar and restaurant tabs that kept the crew from getting paid, lock herself in rooms when she was supposed to be shooting, and generally be a huge pain in the ass. Pulled a Lohan, say. Yet through it all, director Shrader still wanted to cast Lindsay in his next film and even felt confident about The Canyons getting into Sundance.

Welp:

The producers of Lindsay Lohan’s film, “The Canyons,” are stunned that their flick has been rejected by The Sundance Film Festival and they think it’s largely Lindsay’s fault.
We’re told the Sundance people reached out to producers to screen the movie, and we’re told producers were led to believe it was a shoo-in.
But we found out Sundance passed on the film recently, and the film’s producers believe it might be due in part to the hijinks of its troubled star.  They think Lindsay was a “turn off” to the highfalutin Sundance folks.
“The Canyons” producer, Braxton Pope, tells us his agents William Morris/Endeavor are having a screening for buyers at the end of the month and a number of big companies are interested. [TMZ]

“Braxton Pope” is the most Hollywood rich kid name I’ve ever heard, but if they thought having Lindsay Lohan in their film was going to help them get into Sundance, they severely misjudged their audience. For Sundance you’d be better served casting Jennifer Lawrence’s brother or Adrien Grenier’s band, and the movie better have someone living with a disability, or living a rich fantasy life. “Hushpuppy Hears a Who,” starring Braden Lawrence and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, say.

This? This just looks like a porno but with fighting instead of sex. So… like another Lifetime movie, I guess. Also, Paris Hilton already did the “oops I can’t find my phone thing.”

Why does he have an iMac on his bookshelf?

Here’s how they describe this scene in the NY Times piece:

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The Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood’s premiere celebration of Hollywood insiders celebrating the outsider, recently released their programming schedule, and with the 2013 fest just a few weeks away, Laremy Legel and I decided to attempt to explore just what makes a good Sundance movie. Is it scarves? Non-linear narratives? Magical realism? Melancholic, semi-autobiographical tales of romanticized bohemian narrators trying to find their place in an increasingly alienating world with the help of a manic pixie girls? Is it, as David Sedaris once wrote of hanging out with filmmakers in college, “grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtlenecked men slogged the stony beaches, cursing the gulls for their ability to fly”?

Laremy and I are a lot like the Supreme Court in that we may not be able to tell you exactly what makes a Sundance movie, we just know one when we see one. While we most likely won’t be making the trip ourselves this year (trivia: we met there two years ago), that doesn’t mean we can’t still drool over the program guide like a pair of old yuppies reading a Zagat’s Guide, and then make wild generalizations as to its content.

Here, using the actual program guide, we tried to rank the Sundanciest Sundance Films in terms of Sundanciness (a very scientific measure, though we didn’t include all of them), as only people who would quote David Sedaris in an article about it could do. And if you’re attending the festival this year, we helpfully included some pairings to help you get the most out of each. Boner Appetite!

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