Hot Set Pair

Dayum, Walk of Shame – I cannot wait for you to come out.

If box office success were assured on the strength of a casual on-set pic, then I must say Elizabeth Banks and James Marsden have a big hit in their hands.

The pair looked gorge while shooting the comedy in L.A. last week. Banks is already quite the sunny B, but that yellow is taking her to a whole ’nother level.

Oof!

Photo: People.com.

Directing Paltrow

Before you get excited, I don’t Gwyneth but Jake.

Indeed, Jake Paltrow is stepping behind the camera once again, to direct Michael Shannon (from the upcoming Man of Steel), Nicholas Hoult, and Elle Fanning in his self-written Young Ones. 

The project is a futuristic thriller where water is the most scarce, most valuable resource in a very dangerous world.

How very Waterworld-sounding.

J. Palt’s last movie was 2007’s The Last Night, which starred his sister G.P., Penélope Cruz, and Martin Freeman.

Photo: CineMagia.ro.

Four Guy

Alex Pettyfer has a Beyoncé complex: Kid’s all about the four.

Exhibit A: He starred in I Am Number Four.

Exhibit B: He might be playing a character named Four in the forthcoming Divergent.

I wonder if he is into fourways....

Anyway, Shailene Woodley is starring in the adaptation of the popular future dystopia-set novel about a girl dead-set on breaking from the authoritarian ways of a government that divides people based on human traits – as is, officially, Oscar winner Kate Winslet, btw. The British bad boy would play her male lead.

This could finally break him as the new Robert Pattinson.

Photo: Cosmopolitan.sg.

Making Letting Go Funny

Life post-30 Rock is looking good for Tina Fey.

The multi-hyphenate is already hard at work on the Muppets sequel...she has Admission with Paul Rudd coming up in the spring, and now, she could be teaming up with – Acca-cool Alert! – Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore.

The project that would bring them together? A comedy titled The Nest.

Both Fey and Moore are circling the project, about a couple of sisters who find out their parents are selling their childhood home and the one last crazy weekend they decide to have together reminiscing and finally growing up in the house.

Sounds cute and funny and, yeah, cool. Call Amy Poehler, dye her hair brown a little (for a change), check the gate.

Photo: E! Online.

She Needs a Miracle

You give Lauren Graham a holiday, and she will celebrate.

The star of TV’s Parenthood is getting paired up for the big screen with her NBC chum Joel McHale (TV’s Community) in A Friggin’ Chrismas Miracle.

Graham will play one half of a married couple forced into spending Jesus’ b-day with their loony extended family. Things take a turn for the wackier when, on Christmas Eve, he realizes he’s left all of his son’s presents back at home. A race to retrieve ’em – with his pops, to be played by Robin Williams – ensues.

As, hopefully, will hilarity.

Photo: MoviePhotoGallery.com.

Big Shoe Gal

Kristen Stewart and my girl Elizabeth Banks are teaming up to inspire and shrink Jim Sturgess, respectively.

The actress will co-star in The Big Shoe for Secretary director Steven Shainberg.

Sturgess will play an artiste of a shoe designer who strikes out on his own after his mother (Susan Sarandon) suggests he get into the lucrative knock-off business. Stewart and Banks comes into the picture when mama hires them to do her bidding.

Familiar manipulation – fun.

Photo: WSJ.com.

Mama Snow

The powers that be over at Once Upon a Time have done such a good job with the casting of the Snow ladies.

Which I like – I hate it when TV families look nothing alike.

I mean, Bailee Madison totally gives major young Ginnifer Goodwin, and now they’ve cast Rena Sofer (TV’s Melrose Place) as young Snow White’s previously unseen mama.

Good goin’, I say.

Anyway, the actress will make her debut as Queen Eva on a March episode via flashbacks that will reveal a surprising connection to one of the characters that we already know.

And the plot keeps on thickenin’.

Photo: OnceUponATimeFans.co.uk.

Here Come...the Craigs, Broadway

I will go to New York for this – you can bet on it.

Yeah, yeah, I know I often say I think there’s a quick Big Apple run in my horizon every time someone I like goes to Broadway (sometimes I have – just ask Lauren Graham...or not), but this time I mean it som’in’ fiercely serious: Daniel Craig is looking to light up the Great White Way again.

Only this time he isn’t planning on doing it with Hugh Jackman, with whom he starred in A Steady Rain back in 2009, but with his real-life wife, Rachel Weisz, who would be making her New York stage debut.

Urgh, fine...I won’t get jealous.

The couple is circling the staging of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, which would see them playing a married couple crumbling in reverse chronology due to her affair with one of his friends.

Sounds like a challenging thing to pull off at the theater, so I guess it’s a good thing that 10-time Tony nominee Mike Nicholls is in talks to direct the play.

A West End production of Betrayal with Kristin Scott Thomas and Douglas Henshall is being mounted in May, while the Great White Way staging is set for the fall.

Photo: Zimbio.com.

Keep Working Together

Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth must like working together.

The Oscar winners’ first collaboration, The Railway Man, is due out later this year – just in time for next awards season, I bet – and the pair is already looking at reuniting.

Firth and Kidman are going to star as husband and wife in Before I Go to Sleep, a film based on British author S.J. Watson’s book of the same name, about a woman with amnesia who wakes up every day not knowing who she is and must put it all together from a journal she keeps. Too bad not everything with her hubby is what it seems after a while.

Mmm...sounds very prestige 50 First Dates gone dark.

Photo: FreeScotland.net.

Just Because, Pt. 89

Oh I’m sorry, Steven Pasquale.

Sorry your NBC Jekyll & Hyde-inspired show Do Not Harm got the ax after only two poorly watched showings.

’Cause you hot. You som’in’ to be seen.

Calling Central Casting!

Photo: Examiner.com.

A New New Annie Found?

No Willow Smith, no problem: The Annie show will go on.

Now that the “Whip My Hair” singer has, well...whipped her back out of the project, a starring role in the musical remake has opened up, and the powers that be are looking at Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild breakout Quvenzhané Wallis to fill it.

The young actress is reportedly in consideration to the lead the project for director Will Gluck (Easy A). Which – somebody has to say it – truly will be her acting test in the eyes of a mass audience.

I mean, Wallis is incredible in the little-seen indie, alright, but that film has this naturalistic thing going. She was 6, if memory serves, when she shot it, and I imagine her director, Oscar nominee Benh Zeitlin, had his work cut out for him or not, depending on how you look at it, to get his actress to deliver such a powerful performance. I often hear actors say kids at that age are so pure and raw, such blunt instruments, they can’t help but shine.

So I wonder now if Wallis, slightly older at 9 and very much a winning personality (just Google her interviews), would thrive in a more structured Hollywood-system set (although I see she has a part in Steve McQueen’s next awards bait, Twelve Years a Slave, opposite Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt...)...with a quote-unquote proper script...in a musical part, no less.

Just food for thought. I’d hate to see that girl thrown to the wolves.

Photo: Standardar.co.uk.

Introducing Miss Universe 2013

Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen are stunning – and the mofos make cute babies together.

And the supermodel’s a proud show-off: Girlfriend posted a pic of her family’s latest addition, daughter Vivian Lake, on Facebook earlier today.

OMGwyneth, and that baby is a pretty little chubster. And she’s big! She’s easily going to be quite the bombshell like her mama when she grows up.

Touchdown! Well done, you two.

Photo: UsMagazine.com.

Moms of the House

A new modern family is coming to TV next season, America – so you better wrap your pretty, sometimes-silly little head around the idea.

ABC Family has picked the Jennifer Lopez-produced The Fosters, about two moms (Meet the Parents’ Teri Polo and In Treatment’s Sherri Saum) juggling work and a large, multi-ethnic brood of biological and adopted kids.

Welcome to the 21st century, people!

Btw, Peter Paige from Showtimes Queer as Folk is one of the shows co-creators.

Coolio!

Photo: AfterEllen.com.

Annie Interrupted

Willow Smith is not gonna whip her hair back and forth as Annie anymore: The young’un has pulled out of the project ’cause she just wants to enjoy herself for now, thankyouverymuch.

And you know what, her dad, Will, is A-OK with that.

Ish.

“Willow was supposed to be doing Annie,” he said. “We got Jay-Z [and Beyoncé] to do the movie. But Willow had such a difficulty time on tour and she [that instead she just wanted to be 12].”

Papa Smith tried to convince her to carry on and follow through with her commitment – but then he figured his daughter was right to want to enjoy being a tweenager.

“I’m really learning through Willow the necessity that we have to snap ourselves back and refocus on the emotional needs of the people that we love,” Mr. Blockbuster said. “Someone’s emotional needs can be very, very different from your dreams and what you think they should be doing and where they are supposed to be.”

Well, duh, man.

Photo: BET.com.

Facing the Beast

Anna Karenina star Aaron Taylor-Johnson ain’t afraid of no Godzilla.

Indeed, the Kick-Ass ass-kicker is circling the reboot of the Japanese fire-breathing reptile property that Frank Darabont is working on (the filmmaker’s polishing up the working script).

Taylor-Johnson isn’t yet on board, but his name has been attached to the project for the better part of the year. And it looks like the movie will happen: Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen also have their eyes on parts in the potential May 2014 blockbuster.

Cameras are expected to roll some time next month.

Photo: TheBerry.com.

Carla Gugino Hearts Miami

When Carla Gugino was just getting started making movies, she had the opportunity to come to Miami and make one I adore: 1995’s Miami Rhapsody. Today, the actress is back in the Magic City to talk about the movie during a reunion retrospective hosted by the Miami International Film Festival.

And I am missing it.

:(

Ah, but I did not miss Gugino: We spoke on the phone earlier this week – :)! – about the comedy, which was the first effort as a director of one Mr. David Frankel, who went on to helm such crowd-pleasers as The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me.

The seminal project, decidedly indie with a budget of $6 million, wasn’t a big hit, but it has endured the test of time, IMHO, because of its charming insights into relationships, both familial and romantic, and because it featured a then-young cast of big-screen up-and-comers, like Gugino and Sarah Jessica Parker and Antonio Banderas and Jeremy Piven (and even Naomi Campbell), that worked together like gangbusters and captured a truly sizzling picture of Miami. If you miss the pre-behemoth days of the city, the movie is full of now-vintage shots of South Beach excitement and Coconut Grove fun.

To me, Miami Rhapsody paved the way for Sex and the City to happen. And just look at what that cast went on to do (did you catch Gugino going tête-à-tête with Sigourney Weaver on last summer’s Political Animals?).

Anyway, Miami Rhapsody centered on Parker’s Gwyn Marcus, a twentysomething Miamian rethinking everything she believes about functional relationships after she learns that her idolized parents don’t have the marriage she thought they that...and after she sees her sister (Gugino) rushing into a marriage that should have been better thought...and after she finds out that her brother (Kevin Pollak) is a scoundrel. Fearing that she, too, is genetically predisposed for romantic failure, Gwyn must reconsider everything in her life, including her engagement to her boyfriend (Ally McBeal’s Gil Bellows), in order to find a new balance in her life.

For Florida girl Gugino (she’s from Sarasota), the movie has a place all its own in her heart, too.

“Miami Rhapsody was definitely very significant, very fun,” she said. “It was such a special time period. David [Frankel] made it great for us on set. I remember Jeremy and I arrived together and the first thing David told us to do was go to the beach and get a tan. There was such a celebratory mood in the air. Shooting on South Beach was so much fun.”

Gugino also remembers the movie fondly because she got to play dress-up and play things real.

“I got to be married in the movie, which I don’t think has happened again in my career. But what I think made the movie so winning in my mind and that of people who come to me saying they love it, like you, is how it found humor in everyday things, like the mini-bar scene I had in the movie.”

Gugino, SJP, and Piven will attend a special screening of Miami Rhapsody at the Tower Theater tonight, the after-party of which will be held at the Coral Gables Country Club.

It is probably all sold-out by now, but click here and try your luck. You know you want to: This kind of event is the epitome of Miami, just as the movie says: Hot and stormy, and occasionally a little dangerous. Yeah, awful, but then – what’s with all the traffic at the open bar.

;)

Photo: Zimbio.com.

The Scent of Adam Is Here

Mr. SoFine Adam Levine promised us a fragrance last year, and Mr. SoFine he has delivered it.

And it “smells like s---.”

Nah, that’s just what the jokester of an entertainer told reporters at the launch of his first signature scent in L.A. this week.

In fact, Levine is quite chuffed with the end product.

“It smells really good,” he said. “I fully endorse it and I’m really happy because it has my name on it.”

Yeah, I’d like to have your...name on me, dude.

Photo: SocialiteLife.com.

RyGos’ Star

Ryan Gosling has been wanting to direct for a while, and now he is going to.

The sexy actor – who should do us all a favor an appear in something every month, abs out an all – was looking to make his directorial debut with The Idolmaker, the story of rock promoter and producer Bob Marcucci.

But that fell through.

Instead, Ry is set to helm How to Catch a Monster, and he has tapped Doctor Who himself, Matt Smith, to star in the macabre fantasy about a single mother (Christina Hendricks) who watches as her teenaged son discovers a secret road to an underwater town.

Gosling's real-life gf and Place Beyond the Pines co-star Eva Mendes also will appear in the film, which commences principal photography in the spring.

Photo: SFX.co.uk.

Unholy Morena

Next time you see Morena Baccarin on the big screen, the Serenity and Homeland star will be playing doctor.

The Brazilian-born raven-haired beauty has signed on to co-headline The Unholy opposite Joseph Fiennes.

The movie sounds decidedly B, but, hey, something is better than anything.

I mean, plot-wise, the project sounds ripe for the picking with the silly: It follows a group of cutting-edge scientists who think they can link evil to a specific human gene.

Right....

Still, though, since there is actual research being done on the matter I will say break a leg, girl. Go work on your screaming...’cause, let’s face it, this sounds like it’s going to require it

Photo: GotCeleb.com.

The Bomer Was Designed to Make Men Cringe

Matt Bomer’s so handsome.

I mean, the man can wear a suit like nobody’s beeswax. He makes daddyhood look incredible. And he is nice to look at.

Plus, he has pretty hair.

I would hate strongly dislike him (hate ain’t Kabbalah), but I couldn’t if I tried.

Shoot, gosh darn – God really wanted to stick it to the rest of us when he made this guy, huh.

Thanks, Da Man, for giving me us something to look at this week.

Photo: SocialiteLife.com.

Undies-clad Becks in the 90210 Alert!

Remember that David Beckham-for-H&M Guy Ritchie-directed commercial I brought up last month, the one that sparked the question of whether the footballer stuffed the junk in his trunk?

Well, it’s mother---in’ here. And it’s more of a short, actually, one that finds Becks running around Beverly Hills in his unmentionables (to the right, to the right!).

It’s a good thing.

Enjoy!



Quick Q: Does this qualify for an Oscar in 2014? ’Cause it ought to be considered on mass appeal alone.

Just sayin’....

Marc Jacobs Likes (Diet) Coke

Marc Jacobs knows a thing or two about designing for cans, so Coca-Cola got with it and tapped him as the new creative director for Diet Coke.

Why not, right?

Check out as the ham of a designer gets cozy with some of the good stuff in a photo booth in anticipation of the release of the three cans, three bottles, and three ad campaigns he designed for release in 11 European markets to mark the three decades of the soda’s presence in the Old Continent next month.

Stéphane Sednaoui shot the campaigns, which are said to be “whimsical, feminine,” and thoroughly Jacobsian.

Photo: WWD.com.

Taking NCIS on the Road

Aidan Shaw Alert! John Corbett’s coming back to TV.

Well, OK – so the actor is not reprising his Sex and the City character for The Aidan Shaw Show (smart after that thankless situation from the second movie) but he is working on a spin-off of NCIS: Los Angeles.

Corbett will play a forcibly retired NCIS special agent who becomes the leader of a small mobile team of Red Team agents who live and work together crisscrossing the country solving crimes.

The show’s backdoor pilot will air as an episode of NCIS: L.A. later this season.

Photo: LATimes.com.

Sharp Brit

Eddie Redmayne could not give better red carpet.

The beyond-hot It Guy was the picture of style at last night’s Evening Standard British Film Awards in London.

Like, yo, Vanity Fair – here’s the poster boy for your next International Best Dressed List.

Photo: People.com.