Oscar frontrunners Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock will be among the many presenters at this Sunday’s 82nd Academy Awards.


Both are nominated for leading Oscars for their performances in ‘Crazy Heart’ and ‘The Blind Side,’ respectively, and are expected to win following an impressive run in the precursors.

HBO plans to make a television movie about the 2008 financial meltdown, based on the book “Too Big to Fail” by a New York Times journalist, the cable network said on Thursday.

Andrew Sorkin’s book chronicles the credit crisis by focusing on such figures as Richard Fuld, former chief executive of the now-bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers, John Mack, former CEO of Morgan Stanley, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry Paulson.


HBO, owned by Time Warner, had no details on when the TV movie is expected to air, or which actors would play the principal parts.

The movie version of the financial crisis is expected to bear similarities to HBO’s 2008 TV movie “Recount,” which also dramatized recent events — in that case the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election and recount of votes in Florida.

The financial crisis continues to resonate in U.S. politics with many Americans irate at the billions of dollars in government bailouts for companies that were deemed “too big to fail,” including insurance giant American International Group Inc and automaker General Motors.

Movie critic Pete Hammond said that with Oliver Stone’s sequel to his searing 1987 movie “Wall Street” due out this year, a big audience could await HBO’s project.

“Normally I would say this kind of subject matter would be a big yawn, but there’s going to be a lot of interest out there about what really went on” during the credit crisis, said Hammond, who writes for the Los Angeles Times website.

HBO said Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail” will be adapted for TV by Peter Gould, who has written episodes of the methamphetamine drama series “Breaking Bad” for cable network AMC.

HBO had hoped to rely on a book about the financial crisis by New York Times journalist Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair writer Bethany McClean, but that book has not yet been published.

Once it comes out, the material from that book is expected to be melded into the HBO movie.

The full title of Sorkin’s book is “Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves.” Penguin Group’s division Viking Adult published the book

By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Brooklyn’s Finest is more like Hollywood’s Most Heavy Handed.

Melodramatic and laden with cop-thriller clichés, the story, set in one of New York’s toughest precincts, is contrived and inauthentic - and also grisly.


The performances are not the problem; the overall story is. Director Antoine Fuqua knows how to make gritty and engrossing cop thrillers, as evidenced by 2001’s ultra-tense Training Day. But this NYPD saga is less compelling than the average television police procedural.

TRAILER: Pay a visit to ‘Brooklyn’

The premise sounds workable: Three police officers - each on a different career path, but alike in their states of despair - wind up at the same crime scene. Will they be redeemed or released from pain?

There’s Tango (Don Cheadle), whose undercover work in a violent drug ring is supposed to lead to a more secure desk job. He’s doing good work, but is inexplicably mistreated by superiors. A particularly despicable police official (a way-over-the-top Ellen Barkin) taunts Tango, snarling racist slurs at him. As his boss (Will Patton) makes promises and reneges on them, Tango finds himself bonding with the ring’s leader, Caz (Wesley Snipes), a drug dealer with a heart of gold.

And speaking of gilded hearts, Richard Gere plays Eddie, a burned-out cop paying nightly calls to a kindly hooker (Shannon Kane). She treats him more like a valued employee than a john. Not only does she listen and cluck about his laments (those dissertations being his version of foreplay), but she also buys him a parting gift: a gold watch inscribed with a line from a tune sung by Boy George. No, it doesn’t make any more sense when you’re watching it.

At the other end of the entanglement spectrum is narcotics officer Sal (Ethan Hawke), a devoted Catholic and father of seven children who goes to confession regularly, though he’s struggling to stay on the right side of the law. His asthmatic wife (Lili Taylor) is pregnant with twins and growing sicker daily because of the mold in their tiny house.

All three officers endure a chaotic week on the force, grapple with their conscience and question their values.

It’s good to see Snipes back on the big screen, and the scenes he shares with Cheadle are a highlight. But there’s so much unremitting pain, such a constant string of calamities in the lives of all the players, that the dreariness overshadows the story.

There’s a good movie to be made about the wrenching pressures endured and daily risks faced by law enforcement types. But the popular formula needs an inventive angle.

Brooklyn’s Finest, like its title, is overly familiar.

The Cheshire Cat boasts of his evaporating skills in Tim Burton’s 3-D “Alice in Wonderland,” which has its own way of evaporating before your polarized eyes. Every scene brings something new and remarkable—if not quite wonderful—to look at, yet every scene sweeps away specific recollections of the previous one. Looked at through one lens, that’s a tribute to the immediacy of the images, as well as the wizardly integration of live and computer-generated action. Looked at through another, though, it’s a signal that Mr. Burton and his colleagues, like so many filmmakers before them, were flummoxed by the Lewis Carroll conundrum—not the one about why a raven is like a writing desk, but why that peerless author’s enchanting prose should be so resistant to dramatization.

To be fair about Disney’s latest attempt to chronicle Alice’s trips down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass—the studio’s 1951 animated version still has its passionate partisans and detractors—drama isn’t what the target audience will be coming for. Both Mr. Burton and Disney are global brands—better-known brands than Lewis Carroll these days—and the merchandise they’ve manufactured fulfills two sets of expectations. It’s more gothic than Victorian and slightly tinctured with danger, but fully equipped with the sort of exuberant action that sits well in movie theaters, and better still in the great theme-park hereafter.

The heroine is played with sweet verve by the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska. This Alice, at the ripe young age of 19, is returning to the magical world of her childhood, so she knows it’s all a dream. Still, Linda Woolverton’s screenplay makes it clear that she’s much less sophisticated than she thinks. Dream or not, Alice is caught up in a power struggle that is raging between the forces of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and the poor girl’s most reliable guide is the Mad Hatter, who is played by Johnny Depp.

As you might expect—as his fans surely expect—Mr. Depp’s mincing, flouncing Mad Hatter bears more than a passing resemblance to Jack Sparrow, though Hatter’s faint lisp and gap-toothed grin also suggest Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice in “The Entertainer,” or a young Boris Karloff doing Humphrey Bogart. He’s very funny in mildly funny surroundings that are peopled—creatured—by such bizarre creations as the doughnut-necked, beetle-browed and shaved-headed Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (I did like the Blue Caterpillar, intimately voiced by Alan Rickman.) But there’s nothing mild about Ms. Bonham Carter’s Red Queen. She’s quick and fierce, with Cupid’s-bow lips, a Bette Davis forehead and a huge cranium atop a tiny body. She gets a big laugh every time she howls “Off with her head!” and she stops the show every time she’s on screen.

full story

Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and a set of gothic thrills proved to be a huge draw at the box office this weekend, as “Shutter Island,” Paramount’s psychological thriller based on Dennis Lehane’s bestselling novel, earned $40.2 million domestically, acc
ording to the studio.

The number is the best-ever opening for director Scorsese and star DiCaprio, the latter of whom had reached the $30-million mark only once (with “Catch Me If You Can,” more than seven years ago). Many box-office experts had predicted an opening in the low-mid $30s, with any gross over $35 million considered a notable success.

But perhaps an even more decisive factor than its two high-profile collaborators was the calendar. Paramount moved the film out of a crowded October to this slot in February, where it was the only new wide release this weekend.

The film also rode a wave of promotion in high-profile television events.

“As we got into the movie and saw how commercial it was, we thought we could go for a broader audience than the October release, when it would have been positioned as an adult drama and academy movie,” said Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Moore.

“In this release window, you have giant promotional opportunities like the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics.”

While it raised some eyebrows at the time, the gambit worked.

While “Shutter Island” didn’t come close to the $56.4 million that “Valentine’s Day” earned over three days last weekend, it did rival the $41 million of “Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail” (2009) for the second-biggest February opening in three years — and as an R-rated film, no less. (Paramount also earned $9.1 million internationally from an assortment of territories, including Spain, Russia and the Netherlands.)

Though a big success in its opening weekend, “Shutter Island” was not inexpensive to produce.

The movie cost nearly $100 million to make, according to a person close to the production, although a Paramount spokesperson said that tax incentives from Massachusetts, where the film was shot, brought the final expenditure down to about $75 million.

The 1954-set story of a New England detective (DiCaprio) investigating a mysterious disappearance at an island-bound insane asylum also attracted a female audience that doesn’t typically come out to genre films. Indeed, moviegoers were split almost evenly between men and women, as DiCaprio’s presence helped boost the “Shutter Island” numbers among women.

The Scorsese pedigree was also likely part of the reason older viewers came out to the thriller in droves, as the numbers were also evenly split between filmgoers above and below age 25.

steven.zeitchik @latimes.com