Tomorrow is shaping up as a pivotal day in Jennifer Aniston’s movie career. If you don’t already know, she’s opening in "The Break-Up" with unofficial real-life boyfriend Vince Vaughn. The reviews are scathing; the movie is said to be terrible. If Aniston’s built-in audience doesn’t show up tomorrow night, there’s going to be trouble.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Aniston has a couple more comedies and a thriller on the horizon. Unfortunately, the material doesn’t look terrific and except for George Hickenlooper, the directors attached to the projects aren’t very promising.
It’s hard to say what’s gone wrong here: in person Aniston is a friendly, generous soul who so far has not played the diva card. She’s accessible and amiable.
If "The Break-Up" is really as shrill and annoying as the advance notices indicate, Aniston may really have trouble attracting audiences in the future. She really should take a page from the playbooks of Goldie Hawn and other actresses who needed custom-made material to get out of ruts. And fast!
Aniston fans gotta band together this weekend! After the jump is Jennifer Aniston leaving the Tracie Martyn Salon earlier today, which is located at 59 5th Avenue (bet 12th and 13th St.) British import Tracie Martyn is known as the go-to girl for age-defying facials — "The Facialist to the Stars". More pictures in the gallery!
Don’t forget that “The Fabulous Life: Brad & Angelina’s Baby” premieres this Sunday, June 4 @ 8:30PM ET on VH1. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at all the companies sending Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt truckloads of free swag. From closets full of designer baby duds to the most pricey baby bedding to her very own one-of-a-kind 17K gold and diamond studded pacifier. Don’t miss it!
UPDATE :: Scans of People, inTouch and Life & Style have been added to the gallery compliments of SoulieJolie!
The coming week’s tabloid covers with Angelina on the cover: People, US Weekly, InTouch, Life & Style, and Star.
Jennifer Aniston (2006) and Brad Pitt (2005) both leaving the Tracie Martyn Salon in New York City.
New York, NY :: Expecting mommy Maggie Gyllenhaal had lunch with fiance Peter Sarsqaard and brother Jake Gyllenhaal yesterday afternoon at a little take-out shop in Greenwich Village — Bonsignour Café, located at 35 Jane Street, bet 8th Ave and Hudson. No double date, unfortunately. Maggie, 28, announced back in April that she and Peter, 35, were on their way to becoming pround parents. More pictures in the gallery!
Jake Gyllenhaal plays it casual in shorts and an Art Alive t-shirt.
Brother-sister team Jake and Maggie look picture perfect! They’re both looking and walking in exactly the same way!
New York, NY :: Actress Julianne Moore, 45, walked the streets of Manhattan yesterday afternoon with daughter Liv Helen Freundlich, 4, and husband / writer / director Bart Freundlich, 36. Julianne’s next film, Children of Men (Release Date :: September 29, 2006), has her play Julian, the leader of an underground opposition group, in her opening this fall on Friday, . Children of Menis directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y tu mamá también) and co-stars Clive Owen, Charlie Hunnam, and Michael Caine. More pictures in the gallery!
Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker is to star in a horror movie. She will play a wife in Vacancy, battling depraved perverts who kill people and film the murders. Last night, an insider revealed: "It’s a very controversial role for Sarah. Since Sex and the City, she’s just starred in gentle romantic comedies. "Vacancy will be extremely violent and explicit. It’s a million miles away from her previous work." In the movie, Sarah and her husband check into a motel unaware there is a hidden camera in their room. The insider added: "She has to watch as the film makers torture and kill her husband."
New York, NY :: 41-year-old actress Sarah Jessica Parker swept up the trash in front of her Manhattan apartment this past weekend. She wore an INSPI(RED) t-shirt, a nod to the Global Fund, which raises funds to help women and children with HIV/AIDS in Africa. SJP and huband Matthew Broderick make cameos in the much-delayed big-screen version of Strangers With Candy, which finally comes out on June 28. It’s based on the 2001 Comedy Central series that’s like an after-school special gone awry in which Amy Sedaris plays Jerry Blank and Stephen Colbert plays her not-very-closeted teacher. More pictures in the gallery!
GO FOR :: English accents! A farcical French brothel scene! Dominic Cooper as the dreamy Dakin! Samuel Barnett as the uncomfortably homosexual Posner! Two actors from the Harry Potter movies! A smattering of song and dance (accompanied by the very talented Jamie Parker-as-Scripps on the piano)! Unusually perceptive (yet still hilarious) one-liners!
THE GIST :: 8 smart (and smart-assed) boys at grammar school in the North of England return to school for extra cramming and classes to prep themselves for the rigorous entrance exam that will get them accepted at Oxford and Cambridge. They’re guided in this by Hector (played by Harry Potter’s Uncle Vernon, Richard Griffiths), who is filled with deep appreciation of literature, culture, and motorbiking (among other things); Irwin, a young teacher hired because he knows just how to twist history into a standout essay; the Headmaster who’s only interested in the bottom-line; and Frances De La Tour (HP6’s Madame Maxine) as the sensible female voice.
THE TAKEAWAY :: Well-acted (and well-staged if you do not sit in the first 20 rows on the far-right),History Boys shouldn’t be missed while it’s on Broadway with its current cast. It’s a really wonderful play that illuminates what our views on culture have become in a way that is both perceptive and witty, heartbreaking and hopeful. And no, you don’t have to go see the play twice like I did!
Dominic Cooper makes his Broadway debut as the dreamy Dakin. Many more pictures of The History Boys in the gallery!
We always wondered how breast enlargement emails every made any money for the spammers but now it seems we have an answer: Sienna Miller. Sienna had to lose weight for her role in the forthcoming film The Factory Girl and lost her boobs at the same time. She has apparently dropped down to a 32B cup and is desperate to build them up again. According to Grazia magazine, she is taking £200-a-pack herbal capsules and has told friends: “I don’t even need a bra now. It’d be wonderful to have some womanly curves again, I dream about it.”
New York, NY :: I just had to share that hilarious rumor above. Tabloids crack me up. Pictures include 24-year-old actress Sienna Miller (wearing blue ballet flats from Miu Miu) returning for another lunch at French bistro Pastis in the heart of Manhattan’s meatpacking district (9 Ninth Ave. at Little W. 12th St). Just last night at the Met, Sienna co-chaired the Costume Institute Gala, a fund-raiser benefiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More pictures in the gallery!
PS :: Well, naturalism can be a dead end if you’re not careful. When it says to slit your wrists, if you don’t do it, then you’ve somehow failed. I guess what we all want to do is rise above ordinariness and bring other people along with us. MM :: That’s why heroes are very important in life. They are just as fallible as we are, but it’s good to have them as a dream to live up to. I got to meet Justin Timberlake the other day, which was exciting. PS :: Wow. Did you dance or anything like that? MM :: [laughs] I didn’t, but Justin came up to me at a party, which was the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m a skinny, left-wing, arty-farty boy from London, and the idea of a 180-pound guy from Tennessee talking to me is pretty exciting. PS :: Well, I’m not going to ask you about your love life. But what I recommend doing when this interview comes out is getting a Sharpie and going down to the newsstand and writing your telephone number in a couple of issues, just to see what happens. MM :: We’ll set up a date line: 1-800-MAX-IS-AVAILABLE.
With a copy of Plato’s Republic under his arm, some big ideas in his head, and a dad (Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella) who directed The English Patient to boot, Max Minghella, 21, is plotting to make some epic moves of his own. Max Minghella, currently attends Columbia University in NYC and is interviewed by actor Peter Sarsgaard (most recently appeared in Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, engaged to expecting Maggie Gyllenhaal) in the May 2006 issue of Interview Magazine. Watch the Art School Confidential trailer below (Limited release :: Friday, May 5) and check out the interview between John Malkovich and Max Minghella. Read the full article after the jump!
Max Minghella could be the second chapter in the next movie dynasty — that is, if he can get through midterms first.
In Terry Zwigoff’s new film, Art School Confidential, Max Minghella plays a wayward student who hatches a grand plan to make it big as an artist and win the heart of the most beautiful girl in school. Based on the popular comic strip by Daniel Clowes (who also collaborated with Zwigoff on 2001 ’s Ghost World), the film is a stylized, cheeky send-up of both the art world and celebrity culture. With a brilliant supporting cast that includes John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, and Sophia Myles, Minghella—the son of Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella— is in fine company. But it’s the 20-year-old London-bred actor’s breakout performance, all calculated ambition and white-lightning drive, that remains the film’s bona fide centerpiece. Here, Peter Sarsgaard checks in.
PETER SARSGAARD :: Where are you? MAX MINGHELLA :: I’m outside a bus stop in North London, right where I grew up. I’m on my way to meet my dad for dinner. I can see the hospital where I was born. This has been memorable already. PS :: [both laugh] So, how have you been? MM :: I’m good. I’m on leave from school at Columbia University for spring break. I should be in Cabo San Lucas, but unfortunately I’m in London. Are you in New York? PS :: I am. How’s school going? MM :: It’s been a little intense lately. Had the midterms. PS :: I was never very good at that stuff. I bet you’re fantastic at it. MM :: I’m not, but I pretend to be. Did you go to college? PS :: I did, but I didn’t graduate. I dropped out my senior year. Don’t do that. MM :: You made it through more than most. You did very well. PS :: I imagine we should talk about some ole film stuff. I thought a line in Art School Confidential was interesting; there’s this prick in the film who went to the school and had done quite well for himself, and he’s talking in front of all the students and says, "To be a great artist you simply have to be a great artist." Which is not untrue, but I was looking at him and thinking that this is a man who defines becoming a great artist as becoming one that is commercially successful. I was wondering how you might define it for yourself. MM :: Well, I’m very new to all of this, but the weird thing about acting seems to be that material success and artistic success are bizarrely linked in a way that maybe they aren’t in other mediums. There’s this sense that if you want to go off and do Jarhead with Sam Mendes, you have to go and make movies first that establish you and reach an audience. You have to do Flightplan to get to do Jarhead. PS :: If you make a piece of art and no one sees it, does it really exist? I’ve done a lot of movies where I thought I actually did make something that was meaningful to me, and no one went to see them. MM :: But then that raises the question: Does one make art for other people or for oneself? For me, all the pleasure of acting is in the process, not the product. I don’t get any pleasure out of a movie being shown to other people. PS :: We don’t have a very good time acting out scenes over here in the house, though, with no one watching them. [Minghella laughs] You know, one of my first jobs was working with John Malkovich, who, of course, is in Art School Confidential. I’d seen him onstage when I was a kid, but he really frightened me. [laughs] He was very intimidating because of his chops and his intelligence and the seriousness with which he approaches his work—not just acting, but life as well. MM :: The brilliant thing about John is that he’s totally aware of how pretentious he is. [both laugh] He’s unbelievably pretentious, yet he completely embraces it and sort of loves that about himself. PS :: I saw that Malkovich was a producer on Art School Confidential. I can’t help thinking that he saw some aspects of Hollywood in the film and was interested in it because of that. MM :: I would imagine. The parallels are not subtle. PS :: When a film is set in a world that is not exactly like the one in which we live, the question I always face with a director is, "This is clearly not like our world. Explain to me how it is different." How did [director] Terry Zwigoff get you to understand the differences between the world in the film and the one that we all know? MM :: Honestly? He didn’t. [Sarsgaard laughs] I just knew it was based on a comic strip and I knew the script, and you could walk onto the set and see that the colors were a bit more vibrant than they might be in real life. PS :: But I found the stylized aspects of the film less immediately apparent with your character. There are a lot of kooks around you in this movie. MM :: The struggle for me was to try to find a way to be interesting when you have actors around you who are not only of superior experience and technique but who also just have more fun material to work with. I mean, when I’m doing a scene with Ethan Suplee and Nick Swardson, who played my roommates, and they both have these great lines and they’re on a roll like stand-up comedians and I have to sort of be the straight man, it’s difficult to keep up. But it was an interesting challenge to maintain belief in that slightly fantastical world that is being portrayed. PS :: Well, I thought you really captured a quality that you also have as a person, when you talk about having respect and awe for art and artists and other actors. You seem to me someone who doesn’t believe that it’s all bullshit—because certain people do. MM :: But maybe I’m equally naïve. PS :: Naïve would be a lame thing to call it, because hopefully you’ll hold on to that belief. If you believe in the art form, you have the capacity to reimagine what it can be. I think that’s what each generation is supposed to do, you know? MM :: I hope so. Has that happened, though? Do you feel like, from generation to generation, there’s been a change in approach? I think method acting seems to have evolved in a weird way. I feel like the Brando of it all doesn’t exist anymore—yet with American actors there’s definitely a seriousness and a technique that they try to emulate. PS :: Well, naturalism can be a dead end if you’re not careful. When it says to slit your wrists, if you don’t do it, then you’ve somehow failed. I guess what we all want to do is rise above ordinariness and bring other people along with us. MM :: That’s why heroes are very important in life. They are just as fallible as we are, but it’s good to have them as a dream to live up to. I got to meet Justin Timberlake the other day, which was exciting. PS :: Wow. Did you dance or anything like that? MM :: [laughs] I didn’t, but Justin came up to me at a party, which was the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m a skinny, left-wing, arty-farty boy from London, and the idea of a 180-pound guy from Tennessee talking to me is pretty exciting. PS :: [laughs] Have you traveled much around the United States? MM :: I haven’t really. Actually, I might go do this movie in Texas. PS :: Is it an indie? MM :: It’s very, very indie. I like the idea of pretending to be from Texas for a couple of months. PS :: There’s a long history of people with some English in them playing Southern. MM :: The accents are not dissimilar. PS :: Just throw in a hard r. That’s my only piece of advice. So are you going to leave school for a period to do this film in Texas? MM :: Unfortunately, I might have to. I’m going to finish school, but if you’ve got to make the compromise, then you have to make the compromise. PS :: Somehow I feel lucky to have figured out that I wanted to be an actor when I was older. When I look at people whose first experiences are in big films, I think, Wow, that’s a bitch. [Minghella laughs] We live in a culture that really loves to exalt young actors and then just takes them down so hard. I don’t understand the glee of bringing them down. MM :: I grew up in England, and an innate part of our culture is that you can’t celebrate anything. We’re all so scared. We’re still pissed off about losing our colonies, so we’re worried that anything we like is going to get taken away from us. So I’ve grown up with a fear of celebration. PS :: I’ve sensed that about you. [laughs] Well, I’m not going to ask you about your love life. But what I recommend doing when this interview comes out is getting a Sharpie and going down to the newsstand and writing your telephone number in a couple of issues, just to see what happens. MM :: We’ll set up a date line: 1-800-MAX-IS-AVAILABLE.
