Elizabeth will be on “The Tonight Show” to promote Meet Dave on Friday, July 11th! The show airs on the NBC network at 11:30pm - make sure to double check your local TV listings for exact air times in your area.

Tonight Show with Jay Leno - Friday July 11, 2008 - airs on NBC

If you can contribute a video from the show, please consider donating it to the website.

It feels like moviedom’s version of an Ultimate Fighting grudge match–Bush vs. Stone.

The two men were born into wealth and were briefly classmates at Yale, but since then, the twain has hardly met. One ducked out of military service, boozed and brawled until he found God, ran a baseball team and turned to politics, ending up as governor of Texas and a two-term president, though the last years, thanks to a disastrous war in Iraq, have been pretty much of a fiasco, with his party losing Congress and his popularity ratings at historic lows. The other earned medals in Vietnam before emerging as a bigger-than-life Hollywood filmmaker, tackling the Big Issues of the day (”Platoon,” “Wall Street” and “JFK”) before seeing his own career take a downhill slide of its own, the bumps in the road smoothed over with booze and psychedelics.

Now another chapter is being written. Down in Louisiana, Oliver Stone has been shooting “W,” his very personal take on the psychological evolution of George W. Bush, the movie everyone in Hollywood is dying to see but no one was willing to fund. It stars Josh Brolin as Dubya, with Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

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Our film reporter John Horn has just returned from steamy Shreveport, where he watched Stone filming a father-son scene between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. set during Dubya’s tenure as owner of the Texas Rangers, with a local football stadium standing in for the Rangers’ home field. John’s story will run this Sunday, but here’s a sneak peek at some of his interview with Stone.

Horn writes: “Racing to film, edit and release the film before the November election, Stone was not always getting even five hours of sleep a night. Even though it was nearly midnight and the crew was just finishing its lunch break, the 61-year-old director grew increasingly animated talking about ‘W.’

” ‘I love Michael Moore, but I didn’t want to make that kind of movie,’ Stone said of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ It ["W"] is not an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It’s a Shakespearean story … I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.’ ”

Later on, Horn gets Stone to offer his own armchair psychoanalysis of the president:

“Stone, who was briefly a Yale classmate of Bush, is clearly no fan of the president’s politics, but says he’s amazed by his resilience and ambition. ‘He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people,’ the director said. What further fascinates Stone is Bush’s religious and personal conversion: a hard-drinking C student who was able to become not only Texas governor but also the leader of the free world.

” ‘We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it’s never meant to demean him,’ Stone said. ‘We are playing with our own opinions and our own preconceptions of him. This is his diary–his attempt to explain himself in his own words.’ ”

From the LA Times

Definitely, Maybe has just been released on DVD here in the USA. Make sure you pick up a copy of the film, it’s a really enjoyable movie, I liked it a lot. You can get the film in both Widescreen and Fullscreen formats and features a commentary with Adam Brooks and Ryan Reynolds, deleted scenes, and two making-of featurettes.

Kevin Smith’s latest, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, is apparently having trouble securing an R rating from the MPAA, sending star Seth Rogen on the obligatory rant about how the MPAA cracks down on sex while giving virtually all violence a pass. You can check out his full comments at MTV if you like, and no prizes for guessing which torture-happy recent horror franchise he cites as an example of what the MPAA should be targeting instead of pestering his movie. The tongue-halfway-in-cheek kicker from Rogen: “The MPAA? It’s my mission to sue the MPAA and take them down. I don’t know how to go about doing that. But to me, it seems like it’s something that has to be taken care of.”

I’m in the camp that thinks the problem lies less in the MPAA’s attitudes toward “objectionable” content and more in the stigma placed on the NC-17. For a movie whose marketing campaign has consisted of cheerfully courting controversy — check out the hilarious teaser if you don’t believe me — it’s a bit disappointing that Zack and Miri doesn’t run with the harsher rating. The asinine restrictions on advertising that accompany the NC-17 stamp would be a bummer, but the blogs and magazines would go nuts, and I think the movie would do pretty well.

Do watch that teaser (which had MPAA issues of its own) if you haven’t already. Among other things, it will make you fall in love with Elizabeth Banks. Uh, if you haven’t already.

From Cinematical

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LAKESHORE DEFINITELY RELEASES SOUNDTRACK FOR DEFINITELY, MAYBE

Soundtrack Features Original Music By Clint Mansell

(June 10, 2008- Los Angeles, CA) -Lakeshore Records will release the original soundtrack for Definitely, Maybe on June 24th. Clint Mansell composed the music for the film, which opened on February 14, 2008. The film has since earned over $50 million at the box office worldwide.

Clint Mansell began scoring for film following the break-up of his band Pop Will Eat Itself. His first score was for writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s film Pi. He has since composed for Aronofsky’s films Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, the latter of which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. Mansell’s credits also include Sahara, Abandon, and Smokin’ Aces.

Ryan Reynolds stars as Will Hayes, a 30-something Manhattan dad in the middle of a divorce, when his 10-year old daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin), starts to question him about his life before marriage. Maya wants to know absolutely everything about how her parents met and fell in love.

Will’s story begins in 1992, as a young, starry-eyed aspiring politician who moves to New York from Wisconsin in order to work on the presidential campaign. For Maya, Will relives his past as an idealistic young man learning the ins and outs of big city politics, and recounts the history of his romantic relationships with three very different women. Will hopelessly attempts a “PG” version of his story for his daughter and changes the names so Maya has to guess who is the woman her father finally married. Is her mother Will’s college sweetheart, the dependable girl next-door Emily? Is
she his longtime best friend and confidante, the apolitical April? Or is she the free-spirited but ambitious journalist Summer?

As Maya begins to put together the pieces of her dad’s mystery love story, she begins to understand that love is not so simple or easy. And as Will tells her his tale, Maya helps him to understand that it’s definitely never too late to go back . and maybe even possible to find a happy ending.

Definitely, Maybe will be available on DVD June 24, 2008. Definitely, Maybe original soundtrack on Lakeshore Records will also be available in stores on June 24, 2008.