Natalie Portman promoting Goya's Ghost and talking intelligently as usual

Exploring the girl/woman/woman/girl complex this former sultry child star still struggles with.

Beautiful Girls is an extraordinarily tender film about inappropriate and safely unstated love. It's so sad that a movie like that can screw you up, I say. "Absolutely ..." she says. Silence. "Well at least you were older by then - almost legal," I say, trying to fill in the void. "I was 13 in that film, pretty far from legal! But it definitely made me shy away from that kind of role. And there's a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one." Blimey, you really have thought this through haven't you. "I guess ... so I definitely shied away from it."

As she became older, did it annoy her that she had been cast in such roles? "I don't know about annoy, but it was definitely interesting to think about - why men write the female characters they do. Just like the way they write the male character. How much is wish-fulfilment fantasy, and why. Yep, interesting." - Guardian UK

Very cool that she knows what she's talking about, makes sense since she lived the lie of that fantasy.

Simon Pegg of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead talks Star Wars

"I stopped collecting Star Wars toys until the amazing Master Replicas lightsabers appeared," Pegg adds. "I bought one at a collector's convention and couldn't quite believe how cool it was. I kept thinking if these had been around in the '70s, it would have been almost too exciting to bear -- the sound, the sequential ignition, the authentic detail. When I was seven, I had a plastic tube taped to a torch [flashlight] and I was happy. I'm 37 now and I have six Master Replicas lightsabers. My wife has caught me swinging them without a hint of irony, at least twice." - Read More of this excellent interview

Oliver Stone Anti-War Commercial Coming Soon

The Oscar-winning director and Vietnam veteran will direct a 30-second spot that will air in about three weeks on national TV. It will feature a U.S. veteran of the Iraq war or the family of a veteran discussing the war's impact.

"They're giving it from their personal experience, either being on the ground or being at home waiting for their mother, father, husband to come home," MoveOn.org spokesman Alex Howe said Friday.

Stone, 60, is donating his services, Howe said. - Yahoo

Since he's the best living war filmmaker this should be quite QUITE cool! Heaven and Earth is my favorite "war is not as beautiful as life" movies. The tag line? Lasting victories are won in the heart

Second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Film

Alcon and Warner Bros. have hired director Sanaa Hamri to helm a sequel to 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, reports Variety. The original core ensemble -- America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel and Blake Lively -- are all in talks to reprise.

The plan is to begin production June 3, starting in Greece, then moving to New York and Connecticut. The challenge on the sequel has been squaring the availability of the actresses because of TV series commitments, but the hope is that all the actresses return.

Written by "Pants" co-writer Elizabeth Chandler, the sequel uses as its foundation "Forever in Blue," the fourth installment of the "Pants" novel series by Ann Brashares. Bits of the second and third books will also be used. - Coming Soon

Elizabeth Sequel Trailer!

Early teaser trailer for the upcoming movie The Golden Age, with Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush, among others. It's the second movie in what the director plans to be a trilogy. The first installment was 1998's Elizabeth. - http://cateblanchett.net/

Grindhouse suffers?

How can it be? Let's hope for future box office results as word of mouth spreads...suppose I should go see it then huh? ;-)

Heading into the weekend, the media focused its attention on Dimension Films' "Grindhouse," in which Rodriguez and Tarantino join forces to replicate a low-rent double-feature from the '70s. But the homage-within-an-homage -- Rodriguez contributed the zombie flick "Planet Terror" while Tarantino whipped up a tale of liberated chicks who cross paths with a murderous stunt driver in "Death Proof" -- failed to deliver on expectations for the Weinstein Co., opening at No. 4.

While its audience, heavily weighted in favor of over-25 males, awarded the exercise a favorable B-plus rating in exit polling, the movie's total box office amounted to a disappointing $11.60 million. - Source

OMG! Bratz Movie!

What's the plot on that?

Giovanni Ribisi = Einstein

Giovanni Ribisi = Einstein

A non stop rain of ideas, millions of pieces
organized into a tangibly stronger online brand

"I don't know if I should say, but I will, finally, talk about it," Ribisi said. "Einstein. I'm going to be doing Albert Einstein, with Liliana Cavani, who did the Charlotte Rampling film from the 70s, called The Night Porter. It's great and the script is really great, and I'm really excited about it." Ribisi said the film will begin shooting "in July, I think, and there's another movie called The Stanford Prison Experiment after that." The Einstein biopic will be shot in Italy and in Barcelona and "at Princeton, of course," Ribisi said.

"It's a movie that focuses on his relationship with his first wife, Mileva Maric, and I guess it's from the inception of that relationship to the end of his life," Ribisi said, adding that the role of Mileva had not been cast yet. "It's still sort of at the incipient stage," he noted. When a reporter asked, jokingly, if Ribisi's Einstein would be played as "twisted," Ribisi joked back "Yeah, he's gonna be a weirdo, dude. Einstein The Weirdo. I suggested that, and they were like, 'no, just Einstein.'" - Source

The Night Porter is one of the sickest sweetest films ever made, anybody who thinks they love film should check it out. It's just beyond...