Jeff Newelt is editor of the Pekar Project and the forthcoming “Harvey Pekar’s CLEVELAND.” If I had my druthers I’d do a universal search/replace on the Internet, find all instances of Harvey Pekar, who died one year ago at age 70, being lazily labeled a “curmudgeon,” and switch each misnomer to “mensch.” It’s not that…
Fresh off this week’s announcement of one international project, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman is signing up A-listers for another. The director of 2009 Oscar nominee “Waltz With Bashir” is putting together the cast for his first Hollywood movie, a sci-fi thriller called “The Congress.” The film’s new cast members reportedly include Harvey Keitel and Paul…
Paul Giamatti has played a broad range of characters, from a station manager in Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” to John Adams in the award-winning HBO series of the same name. In his latest role (for which he earned a Golden Globe at last night’s award show), he plays the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Barney Panofsky in “Barney’s…
At the Golden Globe awards last night, winners included “Boardwalk Empire” for best TV drama (discussed in the Forward here and here); Al Pacino for his turn as Jack Kevorkian in HBO’s “You Don’t Know Jack” (discussed in the Forward here); Paul Giamatti as best actor in “Barney’s Version” (here and here); Natalie Portman in…
If “Barney’s Version” does one thing really well, it’s recreate the blithe comic tone of the Mordecai Richler novel on which it is based. This faithfulness has everything to do with casting. Director Richard J. Lewis and producer Robert Lantos’s big screen “Barney’s Version” — which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week and…
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