AN UN-ORIGINAL 'SIN'
Robert Rodriguez doesn't just write and direct such dazzling-looking movies as "Sin City" and "Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D." He does everything but serve lunch to the crew, working as an editor, director of photography, special effects supervisor and even composer.
He told The New York Post about the upcoming "Sin City" director's cut DVD and his next project with his friend Quentin Tarantino, who served as guest director of one segment on "Sin City."
What's cool on the "Sin City'' DVD?
There's two of them. The first one [out last week] is sort of the standard bare-bones one. The real one I'm still putting together. We shot all the material from three different "Sin City" books knowing I would have to take stuff out to make it flow as a single feature. The second disc will have all three stories separated with their own title cards. Each is like a 45-, 50-minute movie, so it's got its full length put back in. It could be a total of an extra 20 to 30 minutes."
Then there'll be a 20-minute film school [featurette] about how I did the lighting and the special effects and all the green-screen stuff. There's also an 18-minute uninterrupted take when Quentin's there directing and it feels like you're sitting there on the set.
You direct, edit, write and produce your films. Why take on so many roles?
You just love your material so much you just want to be hands-on and give it all that tender loving care. [The jobs] are all different and they all pull at different parts of your creativity and it's all going towards the master project. You try to make it as personal as you can especially in this day and age where movies have just gotten so much bigger. You go in the other direction, making it as homemade as you can.
How do you direct actors in a digitally enhanced movie?
They totally trust you if you prove to them that you know what you're doing. It's also very freeing for them. You just present to them in the context that it's like theater. They're gonna be on a blank stage with a few minimal props. And the rest is imagined. That they can relate to very easily.
You make films for Miramax, but Bob and Harvey Weinstein are leaving to start a new company. Will you go with them?
Yeah, they just give us that freedom when I go to them and say, "I got a movie I want to do; it's really strange, it's all the stuff you're not supposed to do," they say good, go do it. It's just that simple.
What are you working on for your next project?
I'm doing another crazy movie with Quentin for the Weinstein company called "Grindhouse." It's a double-feature horror film. He directs one, and I direct the other, and we have fake trailers in between. It's like a late-'60s, early-'70s exploitation double feature. We're writing it right now over at Quentin's house. We watch old movies, old horror-thriller exploitation movies, and get lots of ideas. We're gonna be shooting it in the fall.
SHE WENT NUDE FOR BILL MURRAY
'Broken Flowers," Jim Jarmusch's charming comedy, features Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Julie Delpy and Tilda Swinton.
But the scene that has everybody talking stars a 20-ish (she won't give her age) New York actress named Alexis Dziena.
Murray is Don Johnston, a ladies' man who sets off on a journey to find the ex-girlfriend who sent him a disturbing letter about a 19-year-old son he knows nothing about.
One stop is the home of ex-lover Laura (Stone) and her sex-kitten daughter, Lolita (Dziena).
It's here that the young woman provides brief but explicit nudity — front and back.
The scene lasts maybe 10 seconds, but it elicits gasps from audiences, not to mention hot buzz on the Internet.
So, Cine File asked Dziena, how did Bill Murray — the man, not the character — react to seeing so much of her?
"I can't really answer," she says with a girlish giggle. "Probably he was feeling whatever he portrayed on screen."
And how did Dziena (pronounced Da-zeena) feel seeing herself naked on the big screen?
"My manager and my mom were sitting next to me, and I was biting my manager's hand and putting my foot in my mom's lap," she confesses.
"Then it was over, and I said it wasn't so bad. It's a lot scarier in concept."
Dziena spoke with Cine File from L.A., where she's shooting an ABC-TV dramatic series, "Invasion," debuting Sept. 21.
Her character: "The wild daughter of the local sheriff."
Dziena used to be an item with Michael Pitt, the hunky actor who plays the Kurt Cobain character in "Last Days."
They split up a year ago, "but we're still friends."
She has a new boyfriend, but doesn't want to talk about him.
Dziena was born and raised in Manhattan, where she lives with her real-estate-selling mother.
In her spare time, the actress writes plays, paints and plays piano and cello.
She's also learning drums. "I like it, but I don't think my neighbors do."
Oh, yes. The small tattoo we see on her butt in "Broken Flowers" was painted on just for the movie.
Yearwood Returns With New Album, Tour
Save for a handful of one-off performances and appearances, Trisha Yearwood has not been on the road in three years. That will change this fall with a 27-date tour that will open Sept. 29 in Mesa, Ariz., and run through a Nov. 19 show in Robinsonville, Miss.
Yearwood will be touring in support of her new album, "Jasper County," due Sept. 13 from MCA Nashville. The Garth Fundis-produced set is the follow-up to 2001's "Inside Out."
"I've never taken this long to make a record," Yearwood says. "I've never recorded as many songs. I'd never completely started over on an album like I did on this one. Overall, it was a two-year process to make this record."
In fact, Yearwood and Fundis scrapped an album's worth of material and decided they could do better. "Once we did that, we were able to get to the next layer of songs, to dig a little deeper," she says. "When we got into the second set of sessions, it felt instantly right. That's when I knew. You could just feel that it was special."
The album is led by the single "Georgia Rain," which is No. 18 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. The song features a harmony vocal by Yearwood's fiancée, country superstar Garth Brooks. Fans who pre-order the album through Apple's iTunes music store beginning Aug. 30 will receive a bonus acoustic version of the single.
Also contributing guest vocals to the album are Brooks & Dunn's Ronnie Dunn ("Try Me") and Beth Nielsen Chapman, who sings on the ballad she co-wrote, "Trying to Love You." Other "Jasper County" cuts include the bluesy opener "Who Invented the Wheel" and the upbeat songs "Baby Don't You Let Go," "Gimme the Good Stuff" and "Pistol."
Yearwood has a few appearances planned prior to the tour's kick off. Tomorrow (Aug. 20) she'll be in St. Paul, Minn., to perform at the Starkey Hearing Foundation's So the World May Hear Awards Gala, which Brooks will also attend. Michael Bolton, Donny Osmond and Paul Williams will also perform at the event, which aims to raise $3 million for the charity.
As previously reported, Yearwood has been tapped to sing the National Anthem Sept. 8 as part of the NFL Kickoff 2005 ABC special before the opening game of the professional football season.
Also on tap are appearances on NBC's "Today" morning show, as well as the network's "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," CBS' "The Late Show With David Letterman," ABC's "Good Morning America" and "The View" and the syndicated "Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "Martha."
Yearwood is expected to be on hand in January for Nashville's inaugural Sound and Speed Presented by SunTrust, a Motorsports and Music Celebration.
Here is the "Jasper County" track list:
"Who Invented the Wheel"
"Pistol"
"Trying to Love You"
"River of You"
"Baby Don't You Let Go"
"Standing Out in a Crowd"
"Georgia Rain"
"Sweet Love"
"Try Me"
"Gimme the Good Stuff"
"It's Alright"
Here are Yearwood's tour dates:
Sept. 29: Mesa, Ariz. (Mesa Performing Arts Center)
Sept. 30-Oct. 1: Las Vegas (Las Vegas Hilton)
Oct. 2: Pomona, Calif. (Los Angeles County Fairgrounds)
Oct. 4: Palm Desert, Calif. (McCallum Theatre for Performing Arts)
Oct. 5: Escondido, Calif. (California Center for the Arts)
Oct. 7: Santa Rosa, Calif. (Luther Burbank Center for the Arts)
Oct. 8: Reno, Nev. (Reno Hilton Theater)
Oct. 9: Jackson, Calif. (Jackson Rancheria Casino)
Oct. 15: Norfolk, Va. (Fleet Rec. Park)
Oct. 17: Atlanta (Symphony Hall)
Oct. 18: Jacksonville, Fla. (Florida Theatre)
Oct. 20: Melbourne, Fla. (King Center)
Oct. 21: West Palm Beach, Fla. (Kravis Center for the Performing Arts)
Oct. 22: Clearwater, Fla. (Ruth Eckerd Hall)
Oct. 23: Fort Myers, Fla. (Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall)
Oct. 27: Prior Lake, Minn. (Celebrity Palace)
Oct. 28: Joliet, Ill. (Rialto Square Theatre)
Nov. 2: Glenside, Pa. (Keswick Theatre)
Nov. 3: Easton, Pa. (State Theatre)
Nov. 4: Mashantucket, Conn. (Foxwoods Resort and Casino)
Nov. 5: Albany, N.Y. (Palace Theatre)
Nov. 6: Waterbury, Conn. (Palace Theatre)
Nov. 10: Baltimore (France-Merrick Performing Arts Center)
Nov. 11: Atlantic City, N.J. (Atlantic City Hilton Casino)
Nov. 18: Shreveport, La. (Sam's Town)
Nov. 19: Robinsonville, Miss. (Sam's Town)
'Virgin' Wins Box Office With $20.6M
LOS ANGELES - Steve Carell scored in his maiden voyage as a leading man, with his comedy "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" taking in $20.6 million to debut at the top of the box office.
Opening in second place was Wes Craven's airplane thriller "Red Eye," which raked in $16.5 million in its first weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The two new movies bumped the previous weekend's top flick, "Four Brothers," to third place with $13 million. "Four Brothers" lifted its 10-day total to $43.6 million.
The weekend's other wide releases tanked. Disney's "Valiant," an animated tale about the exploits of heroic homing pigeons during World War II, came in at No. 7 with $6.1 million.
The motorcycle-racing flick "Supercross: The Movie" opened well out of the top 10 with $1.3 million.
The overall box office was down slightly, with the top 12 movies grossing $98.8 million, off 3 percent from the same weekend last year. Hollywood receipts have sagged for most of the year, running about 7 percent behind 2004's revenues.
"The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which Carell co-wrote, casts him as a middle-aged electronics-store clerk whose co-workers discover he's never had sex and set out to find him an easy woman, only to see him begin dating a single mom ( Catherine Keener) with a mutual a no-sex policy.
"Forty-year-old virgins everywhere are celebrating the No. 1 opening of their hero," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
Distributor Universal hopes "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" can muster the same good word of mouth that made another R-rated sex romp, "Wedding Crashers," one of summer's biggest successes.
"Our racy little R-rated comedies are making a hit this year," said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal.
Critics warmly embraced "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," a sign the movie could get talked up enough by audiences to hold up well in subsequent weekends.
"This is a movie that's a conversation piece. People are going to be telling other people, quoting different lines and scenes," Dergarabedian said. "That's what's going to sustain it in the marketplace."
"Red Eye" stars Rachel McAdams as a woman on an overnight flight who's forced to assist in an assassination plot by her seat mate ( Cillian Murphy), a man threatening to have her father killed unless she complies.
An understated departure for horror master Craven ("A Nightmare on Elm Street," the "Scream" movies), "Red Eye" also received high marks from critics.
"What's most impressive to me was Wes' successful transition from horror films to the suspense genre," said Jim Tharp, head of distribution for DreamWorks, which released "Red Eye."
Here are the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," $20.6 million.
2. "Red Eye," $16.5 million.
3. "Four Brothers," $13 million.
4. "Wedding Crashers," $8.3 million.
5. "The Skeleton Key," $7.4 million.
6. "March of the Penguins," $6.7 million.
7. "Valiant," $6.1 million.
8. "Dukes of Hazzard," $5.7 million.
9. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," $4.5 million.
10. "Sky High," $4 million.