The Pirates of the Caribbean star is plotting a new course.

Posted May 1, 2007

There is a layer of smog hanging like a translucent violet ribbon just above the horizon. Orlando Bloom and I are sitting on a balcony, looking south over West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the city brown and gray and smudged by dirty light. The traffic on Sunset Boulevard is noxious and slow. Suspended over the road, on a walkway between the metal girders of a 10-story-tall construction crane, is a man eating a sandwich. He is a silhouette: We see the human shape, the lifting and lowering of the arm and the head bobbing as he chews. Bloom leans against […]

The Last Mimzy

Posted March 31, 2007

I don’t have that much to say about The Last Mimzy. It had some interesting and fun ideas that wove Tibetan mythology with Alice and Wonderland. It was an interesting story with some very pretty elements, but it wasn’t necessarily well executed. There were moments here and there that worked, a few laughs, and the premise and a

Christian Rocks

Posted March 24, 2007

Even in a career in which you’ve demonstrated an amazing ability to pull off accents, the one you do for Dieter in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn is kind of a tour de force: the speech of a man born in Germany who came of age in America, as delivered by an actor born in Wales.The Germans I was working with told me that people from the Black Forest have a slightly strange accent, even for Germans, and beyond that Dieter had a very exaggerated way of speaking. In Werner’s 1997 documentary about him, you see clips from when he’s younger; […]

Little Miss Sunshine

Posted March 5, 2007

I saw Little Miss Sunshine this weekend with my sister and brother-in-law. It was everything I expected it to be, cute and fun and heart warming. What I didn’t expect is that I’d like Steve Carell so much.

I have an odd sense of humor

Happy Feet

Posted February 8, 2007

I finally saw Happy Feet. Normally I don’t watch animated movies in theaters, simply because I don’t enjoy them enough to make it worth the effort. But Elijah Wood was in this one and I have inherited a fondness for him from my sister and an old roommate who both adore him.

The Departed

Posted January 25, 2007

I finally saw The Departed last night because there was absolutely nothing on tv, so what else was I going to do with my evening? man! Gritty crime dramas are usually not my thing, but I’ve wanted to see this because I was really curious about the movie that Leonardo DiCaprio was finally able to man up in.

Dakota Fanning| Cinderella in Sneakers

Posted January 19, 2007

Dakota Fanning picked the place. A little Mexican restaurant called Casa Vega, on Ventura Boulevard, in the San Fernando Valley. “It’s the greatest restaurant ever. I usually get a chicken enchilada and a beef taco, or two beef tacos, but I get beef and cheese. I’m very simple. I don’t get the sour cream like most people. My dad had a burrito last time. A lot of people, like my uncle, get an appetizer that’s pretty big, I guess Mexican pizza.”

Best tv of 2006

Posted January 9, 2007

Ok, here’s my top tv shows 2006. I based this not just on whether or not I like the show in general, but specifically on how good it was in 2006. Here we go, the shows you’re probably not watching… 10. Lost.Sadly, this is on the list because I was having a hard time coming up with 10 good shows. Season 1 (we all know) was brilliant. Season 3 I’m watching by default. They’re not covering all of the characters as much or as well and I don’t care that much about the characters that are getting all the attention, […]

Angelina Jolie| The Bold and the Beautiful

Posted January 1, 2007

“The middle of nowhere” is about halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas at a dusty old airstrip in the desert called the Barstow-Daggett Airport. Angelina Jolie loves this place. Something about its broken-down beauty and military history speaks to her dual craving for authenticity and manliness. She calls it, simply, “Daggett.” As in “Brad and I like to fly in to meet our motorcycles at Daggett. One time we took a three-hour bike ride in the desert to a place where we spent the night alone. And then we rode the bikes back to Daggett and flew back to L.A. […]

The Good Shepherd

Posted December 27, 2006

I liked the way the story unfolded. At first I was fairly confused but I trusted that it would eventually make sense. And most of it did. But I still have questions. There were nuances and characters from the first parts that I’m not exactly sure who was who and what was really going on, underneath the plot points.

girls speak geek

celebrity interview archive. media commentary. tv and film reviews.