Posts Tagged ‘John Cusack’

Actor John Cusack has teamed up with Pentagon Paper whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, writers Glenn Greenwald and Xeni Jardin, documentarian Laura Poitras and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow to launch a new First Amendment and investigative journalism advocacy foundation called Freedom of the Press. He’s currently fielding an AMA on Reddit about the endeavor… and his new film Rampart.

Plenty of info on Freedom of the Press (whose website appears to be slow/down under the traffic burden) but Cusack also had some interesting things to say about his friendship with the late Hunter S. Thompson:

I spent many many late nights on phone with Hunter through Clinton and Bush years…

Here were his thoughts on the Iraq war Bush & company started:

“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world — a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you. “Well, shit on that dumbness, George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today — and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. “Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid rich kids like George Bush? “They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.”

HST didn’t mince words.

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Get ready to read and hear a lot this fall about David Oyelowo (pronounced “oh-yellow-oh”), the 36-year-old British actor who gained some prominence last year via The Help and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. He’s got four films coming out in the next three months: Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy (October 5); 2012 Sundance award-winning drama Middle of Nowhere (October 12); Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (November 16); and the Tom Cruise action drama Jack Reacher (December 21).

Oyelowo is very good in The Paperboy, playing one half of a crack Miami newspaper reporting team (together with Matthew McConaughey) that comes to Lately, Florida in 1969 to investigate the possibly wrongful Death Row conviction of a local man (John Cusack) for the murder of a town sheriff. The actor has a big fan in Daniels, who planned earlier to make a civil rights era movie with Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. and has the performer in his next film, The Butler. From The Paperboy press notes:

Daniels rewrote the character specifically for Oyelowo, transforming the part of Yardley Acheman from a white reporter into a cultured and sophisticated black man, whose English accent helps him navigate the still largely segregated American South of the 1960s. “As a black man himself, Lee was very interested in how a black reporter in Florida in 1969 would have been greeted and how he would react in that situation,” says Oyelowo.

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It doesn’t really matter if any of the worst-case scenarios articulated in endless TV, radio, Internet, and newspaper coverage of “Carmageddon” actually pan out or fizzle this weekend. From bloggers fearing the worst ahead of the annual Oscar telecast to handsomely named weathermen blasting out “Storm Watch” warnings worthy of a Roland Emmerich movie cameo, LA media loves a good doomsday story.

Especially if a report can be put together without actually talking to the experts, digging up historical precedents, and couching Carmageddon in some scientific modeling. Sounding the Rapture-like alarm is, quite simply, Paddy Chayefsky-grade gold.

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A German firm that wanted to create the cash flow that American companies thought they could eke out of Deutsche-speaking territories has gone belly up with some serious debtors looking for blood, including actor John Cusack
and director Jan De BontInternationalmedia declared bankruptcy in Germany on Tuesday, leaving a handful of angry debtors. The company, looking to save face, blamed its problems on the financial woes of financier David Bergstein.

Variety says: Internationalmedia was hit hard last year by the cancellation of Jan De Bont’s “Stopping Power,” an action pic that was set to star John Cusack and shoot in Berlin but was abruptly shut down after financing fell through.

The production was taken over by L.A.-based R Media, another company linked to Bergstein.

In July, Cusack sued Internationalmedia for $5.6 million for unpaid wages; the company dismissed the claim, saying R Media was now liable for the entire production

Unfortunately, the entire episode was all too reminiscent of an earlier German meltdown in the hundreds of millions surrounding a company called Intermedia in the earliest parts of this century.

Credit Where Credit Is Due: The LAT reports that John McCain repudiated John Hagee‘s endorsement after the pastor’s outrageous comments about Adolph Hitler “turned up recently on the Internet.” But the paper of record did not give credit to the Huffington Post. Don’t worry. They’re taking care of that just fine themselves.

Why Tina Daunt Is Better Than Us: Tina Daunt was able to write this about John Cusack: “The 42-year-old actor-writer-director said recently in an interview at his Venice production office… ‘They are hollowing out the very core function of what it means to be a government.’” Us? We would have written: “John Cusack is saying a bunch of stuff … while we’re sitting in his office! We should be listening, but we’re trying to decide: Should we ‘accidentally’ leave behind our black lace panties with our phone number embroidered on them in his car or on his desk?”

Apparently The LAT Missed Us: Why else would they greet us back to this blessed City of Angels with not one, but two excuses to run John Cusack‘s picture? (And one of them being a Carina Chocano review to boot!) Thank you, Russ Stanton!

Arianna Huffington, who’s now taken very seriously according to John Cusack, has hired announced Katie Lee Joel as the HuffPost’s cooking columnist. Fortune magazine’s Richard Siklos thinks the Katiebot’s winsome, but Top Chef viewers know better.

Co-founder Kenny Lerer, a former America Online executive, was similarly dazzled by Arianna’s phone technique:

Lerer visited Huffington at her Los Angeles home and was struck by her magnetic pull and how feverishly she worked the phones to reach out to people for causes she was championing or articles she was writing.

He was probably so dazzled because he’d never seen anyone actually working before. The Huffington Post attracts semi-bold name bloggers because posting’s made so easy for them, and most of them are rich enough not to want money, or think complaining about the lack of pay will make them look grubby. Willow Bay hardly needs the cash.

But who reads HuffPo for Lauren Rich Fine or indeed, any of the lonely Living Now bloggers?

The HuffPo should have site meters on every blog–most of those semi-celebrities are kidding themselves if they think they’re getting bigger numbers than Rachel Sklar.

FBLA so seldomly encounters Pynchon enthusiasts among our readers. But Matt Haley, one of the creative talents behind Who Wants to be a Superhero as well as a superhero artisthero, defied our admittedly low expectations when he answered our mythic questions.

1. What newspapers do you read? They still make those?

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? Oh, the Onion, absolutely.

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites bookmark? The family-friendly ones are usually art sites, painters’ and illustrators’ blogs, people who are way more talented than I could ever hope to be. I bookmarked mine, too, just in case I get lost. The others, well…artists see naked people everyday, we’re like doctors. Right?

4. Where do you get your car washed?No car, I usually take the MTA. Don’t look at me that way.

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? Wayne. He is the best dentist in the world. Dentists say they’re ‘painless’, this guy really is. First time I had oral surgery, I’m in the chair, and I’m envisioning that scene from Marathon Man where Dustin Hoffman is being tortured. He tells me to close my eyes (never a good sign), and I notice my jaw is starting to go numb, but I hadn’t felt that dry pinch of the Xylocaine needle. I pry open one eyelid and drunkenly ask if he’s using some kind of spray or brush to apply the painkiller, and he calmly replies, “No, I have a rather large needle in your jaw, I’m just really careful.” I’m putting his kids through college, now.

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FBLA knows that even if our readers can’t go to Sundance, you still need to be able spout all the gossip/conventional wisdom/buzz about the offerings. So, we’ve rounded up the best–feel free to pass off any cogent remarks as your own.

Sundance 2007
David Poland says it’s the worst ever. Logan Hill makes a case for kinkiest.

Grace is Gone seems to be the biggest hit thus far, which isn’t saying much. The Weinsteins have picked up this homespun drama, starring John Cusack as a family man whose wife gets killed in action in Iraq.

The Hollywood Reporter thinks Savages from Tamara Jenkins is the festival hit. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman turn in strong performances as siblings taking care of their aging father.

Hounddog, aka the Dakota Fanning rape project, got a lot of pre-festival press. Audience reactions remain to be seen.

Richard Corliss, writing in Time, confirms what the rest of us think: Sundance movies are their own genre.

The program is heavy with earnest studies of emotional accommodation.

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