225BatonRouge.com - Blogs

Pop quiz, hotshots, what’s the easiest way to secure a lifetime of movie roles? If you’re Spiderman Tobey Maguire, the answer is simple. You propose to Jennifer Meyer, the daughter of Universal Studios head honcho, Ron Meyer. Yep, that should work. On the other hand, if a messy divorce ensues, he’ll never work in this town again. Ah, who I am kidding. No one ever gets divorced in Hollywood.

By the way, if you want spoilers on Spiderman 3, just ask Mayor Kip Holden who recently got a tour of the secretive set. Holden also goes on about attracting more productions to Baton Rouge here, even going so far as to propose the city establish a Baton Rouge Film Commission to work in conjunction with the Louisiana Film Commission. At first I was excited about this idea, but I bet a lot of people were excited about the idea of a Metro Council, too, and look how that’s turned out.

In celebrities helping ordinary people news, Brad Pitt and Global Green USA want to rebuild New Orleans with your help. Environmentally friendly designs only, please, so scratch that plan for a monorail that runs on diesel fuel and bald eagle scalps.

Our friends at NPR have a nice write-up on New Orleans entertainer Tyler Perry. If you don’t know Perry’s work, he is a 36-year-old one-man writing/acting wrecking ball who scored big hits with Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion. The latter actually earned the most box office bucks for a 2006 opening weekend until the release of Ice Age 2.

My DVD picks this week are two accomplished movies about love triangles: Woody Allen’s noir thriller Match Point and Steve Martin’s wistful slip-of-a-film Shop Girl.

Also notable this week is the first American DVD release of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, which showcases one of Jack Nicholson’s best and most minimal performances as reporter who switches passports and identities with a dead man, a fellow guest in a North African Hotel. Nicholson was so proud of the film that restoring and re-releasing The Passenger on DVD has his personal mission for the last several years. This new version includes six minutes of footage that was cut from the original European version in 1975.