Buckwild star Shain Gandee, 21, has died. Gandee was found in a car with his uncle and an unidentified person (all three deceased) in West Virginia 31 hours after he was reported missing. The show, which announced its second season in February, has attracted criticism for defaming West Virginia, and last month two of its cast members were busted for drugs (Salwa Amin) and a DUI (Michael "Bluefoot" Burford). MTV issued a statement praising Gandee's "magnetic personality" and "passion for life." R.I.P.
Sometimes all people in an audience want is to be wanted, even when they're not. They get desperate to stop minding their own business and start minding a movie's instead. For instance, when a teenage girl's been snatched from a mall parking lot and thrown into a trunk, then comes this close to being rescued by a stranger, some people in the audience think that girl needs some encouragement. So they yell to her: "Scream, bitch. Scream!" Even after a cut to the inside of the truck reveals that the girl's abductor is ready to impale her cheek with a screwdriver were she to scream, some people in the audience need her to take that risk anyway.
God willing, every audience for The Call will have that person who thinks he's just on the phone with a friend or stuck in traffic or totally by himself in the theater. They don't make enough thrillers like this anymore, ones you can talk to, ones that, uncannily enough, seem to listen. The night I saw the movie, when one character drops a phone about 15 feet into a shaft, someone in the audience said, "Damn, I would have to go down there and get that." And down into the shaft the character went.
Lindsay Lohan is in talks for Elizabeth & Richard: A Love Story, a Lifetime movie about the famed relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. As Slate has pointed out in the past, Lohan and Taylor have some things in common, including "substance abuse issues, public emotional outpourings, and copious amounts of tabloid drama. The key difference, though, is that Elizabeth Taylor had a true record of achievement before she became the most notorious movie star in America." To which I say: Um, excuse me, but the last time I checked Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t in Mean Girls. Grade: B+ [Deadline]
Fans of idiocy the world over rejoiced yesterday when news broke that Bobby and Peter Farrelly were planning on revisiting their first — and some would say funniest — film, Dumb & Dumber. According to Deadline, the new project would be a sequel (presumably called Dumb & Dumbererer because obvs) and the plan is to reunite original stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.
Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace movie has been in the works for years, and now it’s got both a home and big-name lead actors. HBO has picked up Behind the Candelabra and set Michael Douglas to star as Liberace, with Matt Damon playing his live-in lover Scott Thorson; the movie will revolve around their relationship. This is great news and everything, but now we’re going to have to come up with a new title for our candelabra documentary. Grade: A [HR]
