Seth Abramovitch

The Movieline Interview

Bong Joon-ho: The Movieline Interview

Written by Seth Abramovitch | 09 Mar 2010, 8:00 AM | 1 comment

bongjoonho1.jpgThe titular mother of Mother — the new film from South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2006 creature thriller The Host — is a ginseng seller and under-the-table acupuncturist, whose only child is a man in his early 20s, gifted with great looks but cursed with an under-developed mind. Her doting over the boy, who tends to get into trouble hanging out with his no-good friend, verges on the obsessional — they share a home, every meal, and a bed at night. Then comes her worst nightmare: before her eyes, her son is snatched away by cops, as he was the last person seen with a local promiscuous teen found dead that morning. Thus commences to churn a hurricane of a performance from Korean national treasure Kim Hye-ja, perfectly cast as a frantic parent running on nothing but adrenaline and desperation in a race to find the real murderer. It’s a crackerjack of a thriller. Movieline sat down recently with Joon-ho for a lively discussion about moms and monsters; it turns out the two are not always mutually exclusive.

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The 2-Minute Verdict

Tron: Legacy Trailer: The Mainframe's On Fire!

Written by Seth Abramovitch | 08 Mar 2010, 8:00 PM | 6 comments

trontrailer.jpgFor the first, mostly irrelevant analog minute of the new Tron: Legacy trailer, a familiar-looking man with a voice for luxury car commercials delivers big news to a younger man in his 20s: he was paged the night before by the boy’s long-missing father. This is shocking for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that someone in 2010 can still get paged. A motorcycle voyage to Flynn’s Arcade, a mysterious portal to the unknown … do you see where all this is leading? Precisely! Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges is still being held against his will by an evil, blacklight-abusing microprocessing regime, and only his son can get save him, after 93 minutes of Light Cycle races, Ultimate Identity Disk tournaments, and Michael Sheen showing off his wicked Air Guitar Hero moves in an outfit even gayer than the one he wore in New Moon!

Verdict: My memory stick just involuntarily uploaded.

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Live Awards Coverage

Movieline at the 2010 Oscars

Written by Seth Abramovitch | 07 Mar 2010, 4:00 PM | 2 comments

The ballots have been tabulated, the rule-breakers have been barred, and Mo’nique has finally decided between three equally gorgeous gowns. That’s right, everyone — Oscar Night 2010 is here! Join the whole gang from Movieline as we parse, sass, celebrate and bemoan the choices made by the Academy electorate on this momentous day for movie history. And what the hey — we’ll throw in our expert armchair fashion critiques for free. It’s all right this way…

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Written by Seth Abramovitch | 07 Mar 2010, 3:40 PM | Comment

Weekend Receipts: Cheshire Smiles: cheshire.jpgOscar Day brings an abbreviated Weekend Receipts: Disney execs were doing a feverish funderwhack today, as the final tallies for Tim Burton’s 3D take on Alice in Wonderland were in the vicinity of $116.3 million — a frabjous haul for the record books! In a distant second place was Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest, taking in $13.5 million, followed by Shutter Island, down 41.3% in its third session with $13.3 million. Kevin Smith’s Cop Out fell 49.8% in week two, earning just over $9 million, while James Cameron’s Avatar hung in at 5th place with $7.7 million. We’d look up the last time a Best Picture winner was in the box office Top 5 going into the Oscars, but we have a pitcher of potent blue cocktails to mix. Have a great awards, everyone! [BoxOfficeMojo]

The Last Word

Keeping It Real

Written by Seth Abramovitch | 05 Mar 2010, 5:30 PM | 1 comment

· Here’s a gallery of “honest” Best Picture movie posters. [College Humor]

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Written by Seth Abramovitch | 05 Mar 2010, 5:15 PM | Comment

Oh Yes It's Oscar Night: oscarzombie.jpgHey there, all you Avatards, Blind Siders, District 9iacs, An Educationados, Hurt Lockeroonies, [DEEP INHALE] Fan Basterds, Preciousites, Serious Man-hards, Upsters and Up in the Air-icans! [PANT, PANT.] What are you doin’ Oscars, Oscars eve? If you live in the greater New York area, we strongly suggest you swing over to our Oscars Viewing Party at 92YTribeca, where Stu VanAirsdale will be slinging hors d’oeuvres like a champ while your hosts/expert commentators Michelle Collins, Sara Benincasa and Sara Schaefer will preside over the insanity. If you’re trapped elsewhere in the lower 48, or anywhere else on the planet with an internet connection, you can still feel like you’re hanging out with your friends at Movieline, as we’ll be having another tweetstravaganza like the one we held for the Golden Globes. Feel free to comment, too! It’s going to be totally drunk! Uh, I mean fun! It’s going to be fun.

Party Down

You saw it in this morning’s trades: Adam Scott, so poignant and funny on Starz’s Party Down as a struggling commercial actor who returns to the depressing milieu of cater-waitering to pay the bills, has joined the cast of NBC’s Parks and Recreation. If ever a show didn’t need more cast members, Park’s bloated ensemble, which also now includes Rob Lowe, would be the one. Scott’s loose contract with Starz requires that he only appear on three episodes on Season 3 — a similar arrangement that led to the show losing Jane Lynch to Fox’s smash-hit Glee this season. (Lynch does return for the Party Down season finale — an episode revolving around her wedding.) When Movieline spoke to Scott in December, he seemed to be down with Down, calling it “my favorite job, I just love it,” and telling us “he could keep doing it forever.” So what happened? Probably a mixture of money and visibility — though it would be presumptuous to assume Scott, who has a producer credit on the series, is gone for good.

Meanwhile, his costar Ken Marino, who plays the dimwitted cater supervisor Ron Donald, was forthright when we asked him yesterday how he felt about losing Lynch to a network series:

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Watch This

chatroustewart.jpgIf you’ve not yet experienced the internet phenomenon that is Chatroullette.com, a sort of Metropolitan Museum of Self-Diddling and Guys Looking for Breasts you can access for free online, you might want to join Jon Stewart on his guided tour. Along his encounters, Jon runs into countless other journalists covering the same beat (Brian Williams’ was investigating the site as part of NBC Nightly News’s ongoing series, Felched By America), Daily Show correspondent and noted Nintendo-addict Jason Jones, and other surprises we won’t give away here. Strangely absent from the proceedings? Sen. Roy Ashburn. Enjoy!

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Written by Seth Abramovitch | 05 Mar 2010, 9:00 AM | Comment

The Fast and the Facebook: vinfacebook.jpgOnce too big for the same autoporn franchise that made him a star, Vin Diesel eventually learned to re-embrace his inner whale-tailed Mitsubishi Eclipse, and found career viability with last year’s hit, Fast and Furious. He’s now taken to his Facebook fan page (ahem — 7,645,390 and counting) to give an update on the status on the fifth film in the series: “Had a meeting with Justin Lin today regarding the Fast saga… some daring but fascinating thoughts in terms of action set pieces… and relationships, old and new. The team is on their way to Brazil this evening, to scout, and to see what selection of cars there are.” Carna-Vin! [Vin Diesel via /Film]

Jay Leno

Picture 8.pngMovieline caught up with Megan Mullally today on the set of Children’s Hospital, the gleefully subversive web series from Rob Corddry that graduates to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim this summer. We asked the Will & Grace star and two-time Emmy winner, who seems to have no qualms with moving freely between network, cable and online, if there’s perhaps a looser attitude now among TV actors when it comes to choosing projects. We also asked her how she felt about Conan O’Brien’s recent treatment by her sometime-employer, NBC. In a word? Pissed.

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