The Screengrab : perez hilton

A-List Transsexual Update

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:30:00 GMT

After the high-profile failure of last summer’s Speed Racer (following luke-warm on the heels of V For Vendetta and two disappointing Matrix sequels), some in Hollywood are wondering if the Wachowski Brothers are still 100% certified A-list players...but the more interesting question is whether the Wachowskis are still, in fact, brothers.

The cross-dressing ways of Larry Wachowski have been common tabloid knowledge since at least 2003, but according to the sometimes accurate Wikipedia, rumors that Andy Wachowski now has a sister named Lana are false.

“They just don’t do interviews, so people make things up,” Joel Silver apparently claimed in a 2007 interview denying persistent rumors of Larry’s gender-swappage. And yet, just yesterday, the famously unimpeachable Perez Hilton posted the following frumpy photo of alleged lady Lana Wachowski, speculating the erstwhile Larry had, indeed, transitioned full-time into the land of estrogen.

We here at the Screengrab, of course, like a good sex-change rumor as much as anyone. But, honestly, we’re cool with anything that makes Larry/Lana happy...especially if it means the Wachowski Siblings will someday get back to making ballsy films like Bound and the original Matrix...no matter how many actual balls they’re packin’.

Related Stories:
The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)
Speed Racer Bombs! Screengrab Two For Two!

Screengrab Scoops Perez! (or...Gael Garcia Bernal: Baby Daddy)

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It has just recently come to our attention that PerezHilton.com posted the following badly-translated public announcement from the production company of a certain dreamy, diminutive Mexican heartthrob on August 14: "This statement is to say that, after so much speculation and comments, the actors Dolores Fonzi and Gael Garcia Bernal are indeed expecting a baby at the start of next year."

Then Mr. Hilton trumpeted, "We told you, our Perezcious readers, a few weeks ago that there was a baby on the way for the two."

And by "a few weeks ago," he meant August 6...more than SIX WEEKS after your intrepid friends here at the Screengrab SCOOPED his ass with Bernal's suspiciously proud-papa-to-be behavior at the Provincetown Film Festival (way back in June!) with OUR post: Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

But does Perez Hilton credit us with the scoop? Does he have the common decency to even know we exist? No and no, and then, to add insult to injury, he even titles his Gael Garcia post "Confirmed Spermination - We Told You First!"

The nerve!

Well, that tears it. On behalf of the 567 of you out there who were already bib-shopping for Gael and Dolores' little bundle of joy long before a certain more famous and successful blogger ever caught wind of the story, I intend to write a strongly worded e-mail to this Mr. Hilton (if that's even his real name) and declare WAR (after, y'know, explaining what the hell a "Screengrab" is)!

That'll show him.

(Oh, yeah, and congratulations from all of us here in Blogtopia to Gael and the Fonz on their upcoming production!)

Speed Racer Bombs! Screengrab Two For Two!

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

So, according to Perez Hilton, the $100 million jalopy Speed Racer is the "first bomb of the 'summer' box office season," with a dismal $20 million take over the weekend...and some insiders are voicing doubts that it grossed even that much.

Woo-hoo! Sad news for the Wachowski Brothers, Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci and Chim Chim the monkey, perhaps...but it does mean we here at the Screengrab currently have a perfect batting average with regard to our predictions for the Top 5 Hits and Misses of the 2008 Summer Movie Season.

Speed Racer was #4 on our "Miss" list, and the gazillion-dollar grossing Iron Man was #4 on our "Hit" List. The only dark cloud on our prediction horizon is the recent bad buzz about our #3 "Hit" pick.

Considering the disappointments of Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade, my own expectations of Crystal Skull are already, shall we say, pretty well managed...but it remains to be seen whether or not the bad buzz translates to disappointing box office when Indiana Jones premieres on May 22.

John Waters + Johnny Knoxville + Parker Posey = Fruitcake!

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

What with the new Broadway version of his 1990 Johnny Depp vehicle, Cry-Baby, and the hit film of the hit musical of his 1988 indie hit Hairspray keeping him busy, John Waters hasn’t had a chance to actually write and direct a new movie since 2004...and considering said movie was A Dirty Shame and the one before that was Cecil B. Demented, I haven’t exactly been holding my breath.

But Perez Hilton blogged Thursday that Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey are now attached to Waters' next project, the Christmas comedy Fruitcake.

According to Perez and THR.com, the film (originally set up at Waters’ alma mater, New Line) is being produced by Killer Films, That Is That Productions and, possibly, ThinkFilm. The plot has something to do with “a boy named after his favorite dessert” who “runs away from home during the holidays after he and his parents are caught shoplifting meat, then meets up with a runaway girl raised by two gay men and searching for her birth mother.”

After more than four decades in the film business, it’s astonishing how amateurish Waters’ recent cinematic output has been, but here’s ho-ho-hoping the Christmas motif of Fruitcake will inspire him to raise the bar at least as high as Pecker (1998), arguably his last truly coherent film.

At the very least, Waters' talk-show P.R. tour should liven up the holidays considerably...so, God bless us, every one!

A Brief Guide to this Year's Academy Awards Outrages

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Academy Awards were handed out this past weekend in an annual ceremony whose main reason for being, aside from giving me the chance to look like a mouth-breathing chucklehead in my "Oscar predictions" piece, is to give the bloggers of this great nation a chance to pick out things to be scandalized over. It's important to make sure that everyone can read about the three-ring circus of horrors with extra added attractions that is the Oscars show, since it's already been well established that nobody actually watches the damn thing. But people who read the Screengrab but otherwise have lives may have missed out on a few of the finer points of this year's extravaganza. Here's a handy breakdown of all the terrible things they did this time to help you make conversation this weekend with your hairdresser or bookie.

They dissed Whoopi Goldberg: Goldberg, who stepped in to host the Oscars ceremony four times, presumably because Billy Crystal was feeling light-headed those years and was afraid that if he went on he might slip and say something funny, was not included in a montage of past emcees. It has been reported that the next day, Goldberg "choked up" and "forced back tears" on her day job, The View, because she was so hurt by the perceived slight. I would assume that this is, at the very least, a gross exaggeration, but I once saw a clip from The View where one of the regular co-hosts proudly announced that she didn't know whether or not the Earth is flat because there was no way that she could investigate the subject and still have time "to feed my child" — what's the kid weigh, six hundred pounds? — and she didn't immediately vanish through a trap door, never to be seen again, so I can only assume that anything goes on that show, so long as it's stupid. Anyway, Gil Cates, the distinguished veteran director and Oscars honcho whose own children refer to him as "Phoebe's uncle", is said to have called Goldberg and assured her that no insult was intended and urged her to dry her tears on his slightly used handkerchief.

They also dissed Brad Renfro: Renfro, who died a month ago at the age of twenty-five, was not included in the montage honoring movie people who passed on over the course of the past year. The inescapable point of comparison here was with Heath Ledger, who died a week to the day after Renfro's death. Rather than send Gil Cates over to the cemetary to cry on Renfro's grave, the Academy felt content with just sending out a spokesperson to say, "Unfortunately we cannot include everyone." With TMZ and Perez Hilton leading the charge, some entertainment news outlits and random bloggers tried to erect a conspiracy theory that Renfro had been denied a place in the memorial roster because his youthful death of a drug overdose after a prolonged slide in his career and personal life was not a "feel good" kind of death; they seemed oblivious to the fact that they seemed to be suggesting that Ledger's death had, by comparison, made everybody feel all warm and fuzzy inside. A lot of people checking in at the comments sections seemed to be awfully well-adjusted to the idea that Renfro just wasn't as big a name as some of the others who had made it in. The whole sad business served mainly to underline the fact that, by a quirk of fate, Renfro's death was overshadowed by that of Ledger, which the public and the press alike seemed to agree was more tragic, or at least more shocking and unexpected. Also omitted from the montage: Roy Scheider, whose death a couple of weeks ago came too late for him to be included.

They didn't do F. W. Murnau any favors, either: Handing out the award for Best Cinematography, Cameron Diaz reported that the first award ever given in that category had gone to F. W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece Sunrise and then mentioned that the lead characters in that movie were identified in the credits only as "The Man", "The Wife", and "The Woman from the City," and giggled, "Sounds like a fun shoot." Film savvy bloggers such as Self-Styled Siren and James Wolcott were put out by Ms. Diaz — or, to assign the blame where it really belongs, by whatever nimrod wrote that "joke" to go on the cue cards — for apparently mocking a masterpiece. I'm not even sure that anything as self-confident and opinionated as mockery was intended; maybe it was just a tone-deaf stab at double entendre, it's really hard to tell. But it's easy to share in the feeling that it's a strange way for people who are presumably gathered to honor the art of the motion picture to behave, to snicker at a classic in a way that seems to presume that nobody who's not dead or kicking back in an iron lung has seen or would want to, just to kill thirty seconds of a show that's too long anyway. The really funny thing is that, by general consensus, the highlight of the evening was provided by the kids from Once — whose characters in that movie are officially identified in the credits as "Guy" and "Girl."

And their mama dresses them funny: The main news about this year's collection of carps about ugly-looking clothes of the rich and famous may be that the daughter of a legendary American playwright and the wife of the world's greatest actor seems to have inspired more incredulous stares than the award-winning screenwriter and former stripper whose name sounds like a '70s porn star's CB handle. Writing in Slate, Dana Stevens took this gracious approach with regard to Rebecca Miller: "She's a published fiction writer who's also directed several films (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). She's just too smart and cool to be wearing that dress unironically." A few brave souls elsewhere did note that Mr. Rebecca Miller, one Daniel Day-Lewis, was wearing shoes he stole from the kid who always gets picked last for red-rover, red-rover and a tuxedo that actually looks like one of those T-shirts that's supposed to look like a tuxedo. And to judge from his hair, the couple had recently moved into Jerry Seinfeld's building after the super installed the low-pressure shower heads. Is it possible that one of them first tried on his or her outfit as a joke that the spouse didn't get, and that then the spouse went out of his or her way to pick out a ridiculous-looking outfit so at least that the other wouldn't be publicly humiliated without a little company? And you thought The Gift of the Magi was a heart-tugger!