Newsweek Entertainment

Tiger-Stalking: In Defense of Our Tabloid Culture

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:38:40 GMT

In defense of our Brangelina-loving, Jon and Kate–hating, Tiger-taunting, tawdry tabloid culture.

The Smothering of the Smothers Brothers

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:11:14 GMT

Heaven on Film

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:09:38 GMT

Heaven, according to polls, is a place nearly everyone wants to go to, so why don't movies ever remotely capture that yearning? We all carry inchoate visions of heaven around in our heads, but we don't realize how bruising another's interpretation can be until we see it in celluloid. The most recent attempt—the heaven in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones—looks more like Barbie dropping acid and entering her playhouse. Our (deceased) teenage heroine, Susie Salmon, plays disco dress-up with her heavenly BFF. Platform shoes! Purple glitter! Meanwhile, the topography of her world is, in-explicably, constantly in flux—now it's forest, now it's ice. Spend two minutes in Jackson's interpretation of Susie's personal heaven and your teeth start to itch. I, for one, would rather be at the mall.

Zadie Smith's Double Life

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:55:04 GMT

Zadie Smith's literary criticism is so good, it makes you miss her fiction.

Jazz Is Dead (Commercially). Long Live Jazz (Creatively).

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:54:17 GMT

The music may never again be a popular force, but it is still swinging—if you know where to listen.

Tourists Journey to Their Favorite Film Locations

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:01:13 GMT

Other countries are catching on. New Zealand saw dozens of tour operators spring up once the epic trilogy hit theaters. A Lord of the Rings Tours day trip includes a helicopter jaunt of various film locations and a chance to handle weapons and costumes (lordoftheringstours.co.nz; $1,200). And Red Carpet Tours provides an epic 12-day journey through Tolkien's Middle-earth (redcarpet-tours.com; $4,500). The sleepy Swedish town of Ystad has been happily inundated with devotees of the wildly popular series of crime novels, which have been made into films. The town of 17,000 even opened a film museum that runs regular walking tours of the murder scenes investigated by one of Sweden's best-loved detectives.

Let Heath Ledger Rest in Peace

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:21:55 GMT

Movie Review: 'The Lovely Bones'

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:40:44 GMT

If anybody could bring to the screen, Peter Jackson would seem a perfect fit. The director of the worldly (teenage girls, murder) and the otherworldly certainly has a vision broad enough to encompass both heaven and earth, which is where Alice Sebold's hugely popular novel takes place. Earth—specifically, a suburban American town in 1973—is where 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered at the start of the tale. Heaven—or an in-between station—is where she resides as the story's narrator, able to see, but not be seen by, her family, friends, and killer.

A New Kind of Bollywood Film

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:07:59 GMT

Midway through Vishal Bhardwaj's 2009 movie (), the hero is captured by thugs looking to recover $2 million in stolen cocaine. As the goons torture him to find out where he's hidden the drugs, they run into a problem: he stammers so badly that they can't get a word out of him. So sing, they say. Out come his answers, to the tune of a popular song. Problem solved. Except the hero the thugs have captured isn't the thief. His twin brother, who lisps, stole the dope. And the twins haven't spoken to each other for years.

Orson Welles: Back From the Dead

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:05:17 GMT

Welles's death in 1985 didn't rescue his reputation. "For the television generation," wrote frequent lunch companion Gore Vidal in 1989, "he is remembered as an enormously fat and garrulous man with a booming voice, seen most often on talk shows and in commercials where he somberly assured us that a certain wine would not be sold 'before its time,' whatever that meant." In 1993 the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of Welles's most perceptive chroniclers and staunchest defenders, lamented that he is "mainly regarded in the U.S. today as a failed artist." Even now, YouTube serves as a repository of Welles's bad late-life behavior, like the gruesome clips that keep "Orson Welles drunk" and "Orson Welles frozen peas" among his most popular Google searches. (Look them up for yourself if you're cruel.)

Movie Review: 'Crazy Heart'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:56:04 GMT

First-time director Scott Cooper, who wrote the screenplay from a Thomas Cobb novel, gives his cast (which includes Duvall, in a small but tasty role) lots of breathing room. What he prizes in this character study is not originality, but authenticity. From the songs Blake sings (written by Stephen Bruton and T. Bone Burnett) to the light in the eyes of his aging groupies, the details feel right. gets to you like a good country song—not because it tells you something new, but because it tells it well. It's the singer, not the song.

Movie Review: Clint Eastwood's 'Invictus'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:53:45 GMT

During his incarceration, Mandela studied his Afrikaner enemies and was wise to the role sports played in the national psyche. South Africa's less-than-sterling rugby team, the Springbok, was as beloved by whites as it was despised by the black population, to whom it had become a symbol of oppression. Yet Mandela, taking a huge political risk, refuses to give in to his supporters' demand that the team be dismantled and renamed. To do so, he sees, would only stoke fear and racial paranoia in the Afrikaner population. Enlisting the team's captain (Matt Damon) to his side, Mandela challenges him to turn its losing ways around. His goal is to use rugby to bridge the racial divide in his country.

Jason Reitman: The Grown-Up's Director

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:46:01 GMT

There hasn't been a studio movie as unapologetically adult, sophisticated, and nuanced as in some time. Reitman wrote the lead with George Clooney in mind, and there are echoes of the unmarried Clooney's life here. He's playing another urbane charmer, but there's a panic, a vulnerability, under the slick surface that Clooney has rarely shown. The rootless, no-strings life Bingham has constructed is imperiled when a young efficiency expert (Anna Kendrick) hired by Bingham's boss (Jason Bateman) concludes that the company can save time, money, and manpower by firing people remotely—via teleconferencing. Threatened with permanent grounding, Bingham takes the brash woman on the road to show her why the delicate but brutal job must be done in person. There's a second challenge to his beloved autonomy: Alex (Vera Farmiga), another corporate frequent flier with whom he begins a hot affair. Alex is his perfect counterpart ("Think of me as you, with a vagina," she quips), as wary of emotional baggage as he is, content with occasional romps in airport hotels when they can coordinate their flight patterns. Farmiga is a great partner for Clooney, her wry sophistication setting off silky sexual sparks against his jaunty seductiveness. But Alex gets further under Bingham's skin than he expects. Suddenly, he experiences need, and it's profoundly uncomfortable.

Does Television's Gay Influx Promote Stereotypes?

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:12:50 GMT

Gays on TV once helped promote tolerance. Now they may be hurting it.

Joe Papp: The Man Behind Shakespeare in the Park

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:29:18 GMT

Papp made theater free, and proved it was priceless.

Bluegrass and Old-time Music Legend Ralph Stanley: The Last Hillbilly

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:17:04 GMT

The world that Stanley evokes is fast fading. It's neither an insult nor a joke to call him the Last Hillbilly. He doesn't mind the word, he says, although now he's proud to be called Dr. Stanley, in acknowledgement of the honorary degree he received from Lincoln Memorial University in 1976. In his singing, songwriting, and playing, you hear the sounds of a world gone by, and you hear it plainly in the wistful tone of this account. "We were the last generation from these mountains to live from the earth," he says. "It was a hard life and there was a lot of suffering. But the music we made couldn't have come from any other place or time. The suffering was part of what made the music strong, and I reckon that's why it's lasted … What's real doesn't die."

Wes Anderson's 'Mr. Fox' Is Fantastic

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:09:34 GMT

Which brings us to , directed by the patron saint of moody hipster comedies, Wes Anderson. You wouldn't think that Dahl and Anderson would be a happy cinematic coupling. "Dahl was so skilled at inventing plots," Anderson says. "I don't know if my movies have been distinguished by the strength of their plots. I think some of them are questionable if the plots exist at all." There's a moodiness about Anderson's animated —with Bill Murray the voice of an uptight badger, how could there not be?—but it melts into Dahl's story like butter on toast. Dahl's fable is about a mischievous fox (George Clooney in the movie) trapped in his hole by three gun-toting farmers who are fed up with his swiping their chickens and food. Anderson takes this existential setup and fills it out with an obsessively protective Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), his obsessively competitive son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), and a collection of oddballs who feel like they're plucked from an all-animal version of

Hollywood Discovers Korea's Talented Actors

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:52:13 GMT

Next up: Jeong Ji Hoon, a.k.a. Rain, a pop superstar in much of Asia but still little-known on the global stage. On Nov. 25, Joel Silver and the Wachowski brothers will release their latest big-budget martial-arts thriller, , starring Jeong as the title character, who seeks revenge on the secret society that raised and trained him and killed his best friend.

Wanda Sykes and Late Night TV's New Color Barrier

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:02:44 GMT

African-Americans have done well breaking into late night. What they've failed in is being funny.

Calista Flockhart on Ally McBeal and Harrison Ford

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:38:39 GMT

It's been 12 years since Calista Flockhart started dancing with an imaginary baby, and now, Ally McBeal is finally back—on DVD. Flockhart spoke to Ramin Setoodeh.