Joaquin Phoenix Quits Movies to Focus on Music.

It's official.

Phoenix's publicist, Susan Patricola, has confirmed his earlier comments to TV's "Extra": The upcoming Two Lovers will be his last performance on film.

"He has said that Two Lovers is his last. But this is not strange. Joaquin has been directing music videos and been involved in music for the last number of years," she says.

Phoenix first talked about his decision to "Extra" this week while attending a fundraiser in San Francisco, abruptly ending the interview after the reporter wondered whether he was joking.

The 34-year-old star received Oscar nominations for his roles in Gladiator and Walk the Line. He learned to play guitar on the latter.

Phoenix co-stars with Gwyneth Paltrow in the romantic drama slated for release Feb. 13.

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The Wrestler [The Review]

Mickey Rourke stars as the washed-up New Jersey wrestler in this Oscar-tipped low-budget movie, due for US release on 19th December.

Rourke's performance as the washed-up eighties actor playing a washed-up eighties wrestler has gripped those cultural commentators who have already seen it. Nobody ever thought this would happen – a comeback performance from Mickey Rourke many years on from his 1980’s triumphs with Barfly, Angel Heart, 9½ Weeks and Rumblefish.

Rourke plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (and gets annoyed when people use his real name), a career wrestler who is still putting on performances way past his sell-by date and having to supplement his meagre income with work heaving crates in a warehouse. He lives in a trailer park, is estranged from his daughter and seems to have few friends, even though he’s popular with his fans and his fellow wrestlers. During one event he suffers a cardiac arrest, and briefly retires, involving a humiliating stint on a deli counter in a supermarket.

Tempted by a rematch of his most famous fight back in 1986, he unwisely agrees the fight, the massive bypass scar still healing across his chest, pumping himself full if pharmaceuticals and steroids to build up bulk.

Director Darren Aronofsky is best when he plays his New York card – fancifully in Pi, but very down-to-earth in Requiem for a Dream (2000), a film whose central performance, with Ellen Burstyn as a middle-aged woman addicted to speed-filled slimming cures, won an Oscar. Here he’s in New Jersey. This is a cold and fairly uninviting place, and the hand-held camerawork accentuates the feeling of a documentary.

The environment is wintry and decaying, but the wrestling ring, somehow, always feel warm – and its understandable why Randy feels forever drawn back to it. It’s not like it was however; he was to endure many novelty, gothic acts, which involve a great deal of superficial mutilation and bleeding. The audience, these days, doesn’t want peroxided men in spangly tights and Guns and Roses on the soundtrack. They want rivers of blood.

Randy describes himself as a ‘big broken piece of meat’ and that is the feeling that Rourke gives with every inch of his performance. Indeed, the final speech that Randy gives at the end could as well describe the troubled career of Rourke himself, who at one time retired from acting to box professionally.

There’s hardly a scene where we don’t see Randy, whether he’s trying to make friendly with his angry, estranged daughter, getting picked up by a slightly suspect female fan, or in the ring with fights. There are no Rocky style training sequences. Training sequences are, to be honest, pretty boring. Instead we get more attention payed to the unexpected femininity of these super-masculine figures – the care they take with their hair being dyed, the tanning, the obsession with the body beautiful.

This isn’t Rocky, this is rock-bottom. Both Aronofsky and Rourke have pulled of a spectacular, shining comeback here – Aronofsky from the disaster of The Fountain and Rourke from the disaster of his life. This film is highly recommended.

***** stars our of five

Gwynie Gets Goopy

Gwyneth Paltrow was out an about in London's West End last night, where she was premiering her film Two Lovers during the London Film Festival.

She's not been backward in offering her public support for Madonna, saying on GMTV this morning “She's a very dear friend. I support her in all the ways I can. I'm just here for her and on the other end of the phone. I speak to her a lot.”

You can find Gwynie's website Goop here

Guillaume Depardieu

A sad story came to an end yesterday, with the death announced of 37 year-old Guilluame Depardieu at the Raymond-Poincare hospital west of Paris. He died of pneumonia, taken ill while filming in Romania.

The son of Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume never got on with his famous father and in 2004 published an autobiography accusing the iconic French actor of neglecting his children in his pursuit of money and fame.

While he appeared with his Gerard in the 1991 movie Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World), Guillaume's first acclaimed role was in Les Apprentis (The Apprentices), for which he one a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar. But he led a troubled life, including prison terms for heroin possession.

The film they made together in 2002 A Loving Father now seems to have added resonance.

Burn After Reading [Review]

George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt star in Burn After Reading, a sour black comedy from the Coen Brothers whose Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men in 2007 was one of the highpoints of their career. Every Coen brothers film is an event, but there's nothing on show here except the chilly proficiency of these sibling creators.

Yes film school students should study its clever script and immaculate editing, should trawl over its astonishing sense of craft. But the profound sense of the rotten on show here, of rotten people doing rotten, decaying things, may not be to everyone’s taste just now.

John Malkovich plays the disgruntled former CIA operative, a mean-minded horrible drunk, who decides to take his grievances out on his former employees by penning a tell-all memoir. The memoir falls into the hands of his wife Tilda Swinton, who is secretly trying to divorce him just as she carries on an affair with George Clooney, and the memoirs in turn accidentally fall into the hands of some gym employees. There’s a bouncy, funny little performance from Pitt, who is the only ray of sunshine going in this grimy little world. In cahoots with Frances McDormand, a fellow worker obsessed with getting plastic surgery, they try to blackmail Malkovich by trying to sell his memoirs to the Russians.

This is a film about something that is never really quite there and events that never really quite happens. It’s about toxic narcissism, sexual delinquency, and middle-class hypocrisy. By the end the CIA bosses who have been monitoring just what is going on dismiss the whole sequence of events, including a murder, as a ‘clusterfuck’ but little else of very great importance – at which point the movie ends.

The Coen Brothers have created some great comedies – The Big Lebowski being the best-known – plus some brilliant thrillers with comedic elements including Fargo. But this film reminds me of their only actual misfire, The Ladykillers from back in 2004. Burn After Reading has no pretensions towards great entertainment or making great statements; its quite self-evidentially a minor work, a novella rather than a novel.

I’m going to try and forget about the nasty taste this film left in my mouth.

White Knight

There have been some generous donations to the campaign against Proposition 8 - which seeks to prohibit same-sex marriages in California.

Steven Spielberg and Brad Pitt are not averse to liberal causes, but their donations sent a something of a message as to where their feelings lay on this issue.

After organizers of the movement complained that Hollywood was doing precious little to help, TR Knight has stepped forward with a $50,000 gift towards the campaign.

The Grey's Anatomy star, you may recall, had some problems with co-star Isaiah Washington onset and some alleged homophobic comments. It was an ugly little spat, and it damaged Washington's career.

Back in June, speaking to USmagazine.com, he ruled out marriage for himself and youthful boyfriend Mark Cornelson.

What Spielberg Does Next

The Paramount Dreamworks bust-up has left Steven Spielberg with time on his hands. Here's a list of his next possible projects:

1. Tintin
A trilogy based on Herge's comic strip about a young reporter and his clever side-kick dog Snowy who always lands in exotic forms of trouble. Spielberg has held the rights to Tintin for 25 years and he may begin lensing the first installment this fall, using 3-D performance capture technology. Peter Jackson will likely direct the second film.

2. Lincoln
The director has a draft from Munich writer Tony Kushner for a project which has been ongoing since 2001. Spielberg says he'd like to start this longtime passion project in "early 2009, because it's Lincoln's 200th anniversary." The film is expected to focus on the Civil War and star Liam Neeson in the title role as Lincoln himself.

3. The 39 Clues
An adaptation of a 'next Harry Potter' book series centers on The Cahills 'the most powerful family in the world'. Spielberg has hired screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) to kick the whole thing off. Spielberg's presence as a producer as well as director bodes well for the film.

4. The Trial of the Chicago 7
Based on the story of the seven Americans charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, The Trial of the Chicago 7 would mark a very political departure for Spielberg, as well as for stars Will Smith and Sacha Baron Cohen. Baron Cohen will play Abbie Hoffman. Smith may play Black Panther Bobby Seale (watch out, Will), and Philip Seymour Hoffman has been considered as defense attorney William Kunsler.

5. Dinner For Schmucks
Sacha Baron Cohen and Spielberg have been conducting a mutual admiration society since they met at the 2007 Paramount/DreamWorks Golden Globes party. Already in development, this could be a rare Spielberg foray into straight comedy with a kind of Larry David feel about it.

6. St. Agnes' Stand
A wounded man on the run who, against his better judgment, stops to help a group of nuns under siege from Apaches. Previously connected to Martin Scorsese, this adaptation has been in development for about 6 or 7 years. Those in the know say Spielberg and company are very happy with it, even though it has been kept very quiet. "They talk about it less than Lincoln, but that doesn't mean anything," says one person familiar with the project.

7. Interstellar
Spielberg attended lectures at Caltech for this project based on physicist Kip Thorne's relativity, time travel, and wormhole work. Dark Knight scribe Jonah (brother of Christopher) Nolan is set to deliver a script in 3-5 weeks.

8. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
DreamWorks book exec Lisa Hamilton quietly acquired rights to David Kertzer's 1997 true story of a Jewish boy kidnapped by agents of the Papal inquisition. Tony Kushner is earmarked to adapt but is currently busy revising the Lincoln script.

9. The Children of the Lamp
This P.B. Kerr book adaptation about twins who live in Manhattan and battle with evil Djinn has not so far been ear-marked for Spielberg. At the same time, DreamWorks have not sent the drafts out to any directors - so it could be that Spielberg is eying it. Kerr's blog can be found here.

10. A musical?
The director told Time Magazine in 2002 he's set on doing a musical someday. The rank outsider.

When J-Lo Had Enough

Jennifer Lopez has been revealing quite a bit about herself to The Daily Beast.

Amongst other things she admits she had a nervous breakdown round about the time she was filming Enough in 2002.

Now a mother with twins, she's not averse to sending them to a Scientology School.

'I wouldn’t mind. Not at all,' she tells The Daily Beast. 'I know that the technologies that they have are very helpful…It’s all about communication. That’s the thing I really don’t like about talking about this.'

'I do know so many great people who do do it, who choose it as a lifestyle and really follow it and it is their religion…I just wish that people wouldn’t judge it without knowing what it is.'

How to Loose Friends & Alienate People [The Review]

Adapted from the tome by Toby Young, which in turn became a successful stage play, Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) plays the socially dysfunctional Brit who lands up working in a Vanity Fair type Manhattan publication. And screws it all up.

The pleasure of Young’s original book was its self-mocking tone as he lists his toe-curling misjudgements, rubbing everyone up the wrong way before finally getting himself fired.

In person Toby Young is perfectly affable and currently has a successful career as a journalist here in the UK. His desire to do everything wrong, quite deliberately, has always had the whiff of contrivance about it. I worked, many years ago, for an single afternoon at the Modern Review, his anti-establishment publication whose office-life is briefly featured in this movie. A more disagreeable bunch of narcissists would be hard to meet - but Young himself was never anything less than pleasant and scrupulously polite. At midday I walked out for lunch and never went back.

Anyhow, the film. Here all the names are changed. Graydon Carter. Vanity Fair. All changed. The Hollywood star he asked whether he was gay, in an interview, which caused a ruckus? It’s no longer Nathan Lane. Everything has been tidied up and defanged. Worse, there’s even a love-interest with Kirsten Dunst. A cherished signet ring, which in his book he drunkenly gives to a girl in a bar, becomes the main McGuffin which moves the story forward – the shining object which draws in his romance with the woman he is destined to marry. Absurdly, he briefly becomes very good indeed at his job, having sold his soul to the devil. No such thing happened with Toby Young.

The whole tone of the book is changed then, and consequently, the whole point of the experience. This is no longer an attack on superficial media culture, pretty much the same, by the way, in both Manhattan and London. And it’s certainly no The Devil Wears Prada. It doesn’t have that slickness and facility. It’s not even as funny as the TV show Ugly Betty, also set in NYC’s glossy magazine world.

Young has gone on record as saying that Simon Pegg is just too nice to play him, and certainly he does a good job of making an unsympathetic character vaguely likeable. But in the end this is another generic comedy which loses its way within minutes, unsure whether to satirise the this fanciful, snobbish, rarefied world, or celebrate it.

Kate Winslet to Play Vivienne Westwood?

Kate Winslet is being lined up to play British designer and Punk alumnus Vivienne Westwood in a yet-to-be-announced biopic. It's thought Universal will produce.

The rumor began after an overheard conversation at Westwood's Gold Label fashion show in Paris a night or so back.

The designer's managing director, Carlo D'Amario, told guests: "Kate Winslet will play Vivienne from the 70s to the present day."

Ghost Town [The Review]

There’s something ineffably, beautifully winning about the New York comedy. It's hard number to pull off these days. For obvious reasons. And here we have a new one, a new incarnation, just arrived – written and directed by David Koepp (writer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Koepp has previously directed such spooky fare as Stir of Echoes with Kevin Bacon. He is a skilful writer – one of the most successful in Hollywood – and his directorial chops aren’t so bad either. But will this old-fashioned tale convince audiences?

Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) is a dentist. He enjoys being a dentist because he hates people. When an especially talkative patient he arrives, he likes nothing better than to fill their mouth with instruments to make them shut up. When his colleague has a small party to celebrate the birth of his daughter, he’s glimpsed sneaking out without attending.

He’s mean-spirited and sardonic. He’s also something of a coward who hates physical pain, so when he goes to hospital for a routine health-check, he insists on a general anaesthetic. When he wakes up, he can see ghosts. And the ghosts all want to talk to him – a Upper East side dude in a tux who hates his widow’s new man, an old lady worried that her daughter didn’t find a letter slipped under the door, and gangland killer who wants to finish the job. There’s several dozen of them. There’s even a camp naked guy who keeps saying ‘is this a bad time?’

Pincus hates this of course. They all want favours. He doesn’t do favours. But the womanising smooth-talker in the tux (Greg Kinnear) is especially persistent; he wants Pincus to stop his wife Gwen (Tea Leoni) dating a human rights lawyer. When Pincus starts to intervene, he rather falls for Gwen as well. He succeeds in creating a problem between Gwen and her fiancé. And then regrets it.

This is familiar stuff – a curmudgeon schooled and made a better person by a series of ghostly visitations was an idea dreamt up by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol well over 150 years ago. The trouble here is Ricky Gervais and, to some extent, the basic interpretation of a well-worn premise. It’s a tough balancing act to make a disagreeable person sympathetic, and Gervais simply doesn’t have the acting skills to pull it off. In the UK, where Gervais is a star, this film will receive a much better reception. In the US audiences will be baffled by this dumpy, unappealing character with no social skills, a Manhattan dental fascist who nevertheless sports British teeth, a man whose ability to charm Tea Leoni seems beyond the realms of wildest fantasy.

But in the end the script doesn’t make us care enough about this man, and his redemption, and nothing Gervais could have done would ever fix that. This is another one for those long-haul flights; perfectly agreeable, quite funny in parts, but I wouldn’t pay money to see it. The New York comedy has yet to find a new form, or so it seems.

Shannen Sheds Skin, Skark Style

Shannen Doherty has revealed to Details magazine that she’s terrified of the sea.

Two years ago she went ‘cage diving’ off the coast of Hawaii. But when the sharks turned up, she wasn't happy.

"I couldn't breathe,” she recalls. “I started having an anxiety attack, I couldn't stay out of their reach.”

"They were slamming into the cage; they looked so frickin' mean! My leg slipped a little through the bars, and a shark swam up against me and rubbed off a layer of my skin."

I’ve Loved You So Long [The review]

Released this weekend in the UK, I’ve Loved You so long is a French-language film garnering rave reviews for British Actress Kristin Scott Thomas. Some people are even whispering the Oscar word – best supporting actress was, after all, won by French-speaking and singing Marion Cotillard last year for the superlatively French La Vie En Rose.

La Vie En Rose was funny and sad, as ripe and runny as a large slice of unpasteurized Brie. But this film is a very different affair - much cooler and much more cosmopolitan. We first meet a dowdy-looking Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) dragging on a cigarette as she waits for her sister at an airport. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) is wary and fairly soon, as she drives back to the family home in Eastern France and Juliette meets her brother-in-law for the first time, we begin to realise that Juliette has been in jail for fifteen years for a horrific crime.

I’ve Loved you So Long is directed by a literature professor who lives and teaches in Nancy where the film is set, and there’s a real sense of intelligence behind this film and the way the story is told – which is really just an accumulation of little family melodramatic moments (any family can have) but with this extraordinary back-story looming like a monstrous shadow in the corner. On a human level this film has great universality quite beyond its very middle-class setting; Juliette is the figure some families have, the scapegoat and the villain on whom everything bad is heaped.

At first Juliette seems an almost sinister figure, but after the shock of discovering her crime, we realize that this isn’t a Chabrol film and she isn’t going to murder anyone before she goes to bed one evening after making a cup of chocolat. In fact her story becomes, as bits and pieces make themselves known, almost unbearably poignant and sad. She is like a woman living a posthumous life. She gazes on the warmth of her sister’s family life as if it’s a dangerous illusion. As she looks for and finally finds a job she suffers placidly the contempt of strangers, and it becomes slowly clear just how much she has lost.

That said this is not a depressing film and it does tail off on a note of healing and quiet optimism. A hit at the recent Toronto Film Festival, this is a thoughtful, intelligent piece of French filmmaking.

Paul Newman

Paul Newman was the last of a breed, a contemporary of James Dean.

Leonardo DiCaprio has just described him as a role model for the more socially-conscious Hollywood type. Those sauces he dreamed up have so far taken well over $200m for charities including the Hole in the Wall Camps for sick kids. Favorite films? The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy - there are so many to chose from.

There's a well-written tribute to him here in the New York Times.

Here are some wonderful images of him on Youtube. And see him here in classic form in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Johnny Depp is the Mad Hatter

It seems Disney just can't get enough of Johnny Depp.

Despite the less-than-stellar last episode, Depp has agreed to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fourth "Pirates of the Caribbean".

He's also to play Tonto in a bigscreen adaptation of "The Lone Ranger," both produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

But he'll be a perfect fit for the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s version of "Alice in Wonderland." That's the one I'm looking forward to.

Read more about this story at Variety

Knightley to be tragic Zelda

Keira Knightley is in talks to play Zelda Fitzgerald in The Beautiful And The Damned.

Leonardo Di Caprio is being touted as a possible co-star in the biopic, based on the life of Great Gatsby novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife - Hollywood's golden couple in the 1920's.

Both were tragic figures. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic crazed by jealous impulses. Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic aged 30 and died in an asylum fire.

Dr Ross May return

The producers of ER are "optimistic" that George Clooney will return for its final season.

Executive producer David Zabel has already managed to coax Anthony Edwards and Noah Wyle back for one last hurrah and says "We have a really good storyline for every character from the past."

But Clooney's spokesman seems to have poured cold water on the proceedings by insisting the actor is "busy making movies".

Here's the Clooney/ER fan page

Kirsten Dunst meets a Jealous Ghost

Kirsten Dunst is starring in, and producing, a ghost story simply called Ghost. It’s based on the book by AN Wilson A Jealous Ghost

Wilson's highly literary 2005 novel describes a young American woman who travels to London to write a dissertation on Henry James' classic ghost tale, "The Turn of the Screw," and then goes to work as a nanny for two children in the British countryside. Before long she’s experiencing all-to-familiar events from the original book (read a review here).

Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego is to direct. You can read more about this project here.

Brideshead Revisited [The Review]

It’s a tale of bedeviled aristocrats, catholic guilt and large palatial residences that played very well in 1981 when it became a British TV staple and more-or-less introduced the world to Jeremy Irons. Eyebrows were raised when this remake was announced; the New York Times has already called it ‘Brideshead Regurgitated’.

Despite the success of Atonement, a more-or-less a straight crib of both the book and the original 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, is there really a need for the honied sirops, the curds and whey, the wasps in the jam jars, of such hysterical and nostalgic feasts? Well – just look at the news. Nostalgia sells when the world seems to be turning itself to the business of ruin.

Brideshead Revisited is the story of a fairly ordinary young middle-class man Charles Ryder who goes up to Oxford in the 1920’s and is immediately drawn into the social circle of a louche, gay aristocrat named Sebastian Flyte. Flyte is highly unstable and prone to alcoholism, but Ryder is seduced by him, especially, like a Jane Austen heroine, when he sees his house at Brideshead. But on a trip to Venice Ryder is drawn to Sebastian’s equally seductive sister Julia, and Sebastian embarks on a drinking frenzy which never comes to an end. The film begins and ends in WWII when Ryder has been billeted at Brideshead and moons around the empty, decaying grandeur of it all remembering the past.

Director Julian Jarrold is necessarily reaching for a high standard here. Some of the casting is better than the original. Some of it is worse. The best moments are when Ben Whishaw (as Sebastian) and Emma Thompson (as his mother Lady Marchmain) are onscreen. The worst are turns by the otherwise splendid actor Michael Gambon, doing a kind of Ricky Gervais impersonation as Lord Marchmain (a role rather better inhabited by Laurence Olivier), and by the chief casting of Matthew Goode (Matchpoint) as Charles Ryder, who gives a performance so lumpen and unappealing that the mystery of why everyone throws themselves at him becomes the elephant in the very large silk-wallpapered Drawing Room. This character always was a winnying arriviste but somehow Jeremy Irons still made him appealing.

It’s a long film at 132 minutes and the magnificence of the original TV series was that it allowed the story to breathe. Here Ben Whishaw (who camps his character up substantially compared to Anthony Andrews version) disappears far too early in the film and what we are left with is the dreary, dank melodrama of the endgame; miserable marriages, catholic deathbed scenes and so on. The lightness of the Oxford years, and the stolen summers at Brideshead, have been trimmed back. And it’s a mistake. Despite the presence of a scriptwriter as good as Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones), the roll of the story has been misjudged and weighted towards the theme of guilt.

That said, this film is perfectly good in many ways. And it’s also perfectly pointless. As predicted.

** Two Stars Out of Five

Already released in the US, Brideshead opens in UK cinemas October 3rd

Sneak Preview of new Robert Downey Jr film

In theaters from 21st November, The Soloist has Oscar-bait written all over it.

Directed by the man who brought you Atonement, Robert Downey Jr plays the LA journalist who discovers a brilliant musician (played by Jamie Foxx) living as a down and out.

You can see the trailer here.

It looks good. But is it just too self-consciously sugar-sweet and feelgood? Pundits are already wondering whether Atonement director Joe Wright, best known for costume dramas, really knows how to handle a modern scenario. Or if he's phoned in some weird kind of Anthony Minghella knock-off.