Results tagged “tomhanks”

Joe Dante returns to the New Bev, and this time he's brought company! Living legend Roger Corman joins Dante for a double-feature of his films St. Valentine's Day Massacre (Corman's first directed for a major studio) & Not Of This Earth (far from his first directed for a schlocky drive-in). The inferno rages all-day Saturday, with a screening of The Movie Orgy, a cut-and-paste epic of found footage & cinematic anarchy. Best of all, to quote Dante, "admission is free because even I don't know who owns the rights to all this found footage". It all climaxes with a 25th anniversary screening of Dante's classic Gremlins. You will have to pay for that, but Gizmo's so cute! Just keep your popcorn away...it's a midnight show.

Kogi-schmogi! "One of the true great things about Los Angeles is In-N-Out Burger," endorsed Tom Hanks, when asked for tips to help the Tonight Show's Conan O'Brien acclimate to his surroundings (although this isn't O'Brien's first time as an Angeleno).

       

While it didn't approach the monstrous financial heights of the poorly-conceived The Da Vinci Code, Thomas de Hanks' Angels & Demons ($48M) tricked enough Americans into theaters to hold off the sturdy Star Trek ($43M/$143.6M) to capture the weekend box-office crown. X-Men Origins: Wolverine had a reasonably good third weekend to place, uh, third ($14.8M/$151M) while Ghosts of Matthew McConaughey's Bangbus Girlfriends ($6.8M/$40M) and Obsessed with White Chicks ($4.5M/$40M) rounded out the top five.

      

Dan Brown's quickly-paced novels seem tailor-made for the big screen, but The Da Vinci Code was a lumbering dud. Here's hoping that Angels & Demons is edited at a much brisker pace (with less exposition). At least they fixed Tom Hanks' weird hairdo from Da Vinci. If you want to see something that will just fill you with joy, try The Brothers Bloom. Rian Johnson's superb debut Brick was clearly not a fluke. In fact, he may have the best cinematic style since Wes Anderson. Management continues Jennifer Aniston's slow descent into irrelevance. How did such a once-cheery actress become so damn sour? At least the great Steve Zahn is in it.

He might have played a big box book retailer in 1998's You've Got Mail, but in real life, actor Tom Hanks is pitching for the little guy, namely Pacific Palisades' Village Books. Local blog Tabloid Baby explains that Hanks is trying to help efforts to save the store by signing books there tonight.

• For those who thought oil spills only happened when big tankers in Alaska collided with icebergs, may I point you to the South Bay? Crews were busy Saturday cleaning up about 5,500 gallons of oil that spilled into the wetlands area around Machado Lake. The oil apparently overflowed from an oil-and-water separator at the Cooper & Brain Oil Co. field near PCH at the 110 Freeway. You might remember Machado Lake as the former home of Reggie, the beloved alligator who now lives at the zoo. Good thing, because I've never heard of a black alligator before.
• A mysterious crash in Sherman Oaks early Saturday left one person dead that CHP officials said might have been a burglar being chased by the people whose homes he allegedly robbed. The motorist died when he skidded into a concrete wall on the Sepulveda Boulevard offramp after being chased by the CHP. Four others were hurt.
• For the first time in its history, the SWAT training unit has accepted a woman into its program. Jennifer Grasso, 36, is one of 13 officers selected for the department's 12-week training school, which starts Monday. Congratulations, Grasso. Just remember what Tom Hanks advised another female who was competing in a man's world: there's no crying in SWAT school.
• According to Paid Content, pop culture-focused social media site Buzznet has acquired indie-music blog Stereogum for $5 million. What this means for the future of Stereogum is unclear, but its owners are reportedly staying on to run the site. Now that's what I call indie.
• A change for Disneyland's It's a Small World ride are reportedly in the works. Disney apparently plans to add its name-brand characters to the anonymous cast that currently populates the ride. It has caused a huge uproar among the original artist's family. There is something so poetic about controversy at the so called Happiest Place on Earth.
• Jazz lovers in Long Beach are praising a judge's decision to open the Backstage jazz and blues supper club. An apartment owner had sought an injunction to halt construction, saying the music would force tenants to move. Noise studies did not bore out the owner's claims as the judge kind of blue jazz owners away with his decision.
• Add cantaloupe's to the list of food items being recalled. On Friday, Dole asked consumers not to buy or eat their beige melons picked in Honduras for fear that they were contaminated with salmonella.
• Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said he will not pay his California baristas more than $100 million in tips a San Diego judge said is owed to them after several employees sued the company. Schultz said there is no money to be refunded from the tips that are usually shared with shift supervisors. Last year, Starbucks was named the 16th best company to work for. Hundreds of disgruntled employees might disagree.
  Continue reading "Extra, Extra: We're Not in Alaska Anymore"

I've managed to avoid watching NFL playoffs and college bowl games but I'm getting worn down, I'm tellin' ya. If I got the Fox Movie Channel I would watch Less Than Zero tonight at 7pm because I'm just about as strung out as Robert Downey Jr.was in that flick. I'm not begging for the writers to capitulate, I want them to win, I'm just begging the networks to send me some shite to write about. Didn't you guys put stuff out on DVDs for the holidays? I'm sure that there's plenty of folks walking around with unused balances on their gift cards that would drop some cash on some of your repackaged programming.

In a crowded weekend of new movies, it was zeroed in on $100 million ($4.1M/$98.3M).

One day the golden touch of Judd Apatow will fade and one of his films will bomb (--but I'll be piling into the theater along with everyone else this weekend to marvel at the daring of John C. Reilly.

, Hilary Angelo jumps off the screen as one of the girls who catches Charlie's roving eye.

Like tells a fascinating and (mostly) true story that's so improbable you wonder what's taken it so long to reach the big screen. If you don't already know, Charlie Wilson was a fairly nondescript Congressman from Texas (known more as a hedonist than a legislator) who almost single-handedly provided the money and weapons that the Afghan Mujahideen used to defeat the seemingly invincible Soviet Union. Wilson would ultimately (and secretly) funnel hundreds of millions dollars to the Afghan fighters and many credit his involvement as the turning point in the Soviet-Afghan War.

Who has been the most potent force in filmmaking over the last twenty years? Steven Spielberg? Tom Hanks? Tom Cruise? Joel Silver? How about John Lasseter? His Pixar films have enjoyed unparalleled critical and commercial success since the debut of Toy Story in 1995. Tonight at the Egyptian you can see the whole story of Pixar unfold when the American Cinematheque screens The Pixar Story. Featuring never-before-seen material from the Pixar library, archival animation...

This weekend marks the height of the "celebrity" dog-and-pony shows for the Democrats: Hillary Clinton brought daughter Chelsea (we wondered where she was) and her momma Dorothy Rodham on the campaign trail in Iowa. And Barack Obama brought out the big gun -- Oprah Winfrey -- to Iowa and South Carolina. But Republicans have friends in Hollywood, too. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, also has his own celebrity endorsement: Chuck Norris. Yup. Walker...

In the world we live in now, Pixar is nothing less than an institution. Every film it releases is an event and each of them receive excellent reviews and make piles of money. Of course, Pixar wasn't always so admired and ubiquitous. It was once a money-losing division of LucasFilm that was sold off to Steve Jobs for a paltry 5 million dollars. All of this is laid out in a behind-the-scenes feature on...

We know on Sunday that we can watch people bumpin' uglies on HBO as well as the randy exploits of a Hollywood posse on HBO as well as all the other junk on HBO because Sunday is an HBO kind of day. But I think that there's something else worth checking out that starts Sunday. The much anticipated and hugely overhyped new series from Ken Burns, The War, starts on Sunday night at 8:00pm...

Photo by Lush.i.ous via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr

It's been a busy summer for 'wild and crazy guy' Steve Martin. From writing a children's book with cartoonist Roz Chast, to finishing his memoir Born Standing Up, and getting ready for an August start date for filming the Pink Panther II, he found time to squeeze in a life changing event. After inviting Tom Hanks, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Carl Reiner, Ricky Jay, and about seventy other friends for a party at his Los Angeles home, the guests were surprised with a wedding. Martin married writer and former New Yorker staffer Anne Stringfield. The ceremony was officiated by former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey. SNL head honcho Lorne Michaels served as the best man. The bride wore Vera Wang while Martin donned his Inspector Clouseau mustache.

- Crew member hurt on the set of the new Julia Roberts / Tom Hanks film in Downey - ET

We've never been that interested in Da Vinci's painting La Gioconda. This lack of interest briefly grew into a loathing when this lady we work with - a dithering fat lady addicted to painkillers - started reading The Da Vinci Code and wouldn't shut up about it.

When we heard that Tom Hanks was cast as the lead Prof. Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, LAist was worried. Then when we heard that Dan Brown's page turner would be directed by Ron Howard, we were totally bummed. Not to take anything away from Hanks or Howard, but really, why do the studios need to always take the safe (read: boring) route with the blockbusters?

If you've only seen one of the nominated movies, haven't voted in any pools and are really only tuning in to the Oscars to see Jon Stewart, the, highlights of the evening are not so much the awards as any funny or memorable moments in the ceremony.

This weekend sees the opening of at least four new movies hitting theaters all across the Southland, and in surveying them LAist can't help but think how Angelenos could experience the same events in said movies around Los Angeles without ever having to pay a cent.