News•August 13, 2015By Dave McNaryZach Galifianakis is in talks to voice Batman’s enemy the Joker in Warner Bros.’ Lego Batman.Galifianakis joins Will Arnett, who’s returning as the gruff voice of Batman from The Lego Movie and Michael Cera, who was recently cast as Robin.Lego Batman will open on Feb. 10, 2017 — three years after the original. Chris McKay, the animation supervisor on The Lego Movie, is directing from a script by Seth Grahame-Smith. Dan Lin, Roy Lee, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are producing.Galifianakis starred in the Hangover trilogy, The Campaign, Birdman and the upcoming Masterminds, which has been delayed due to Relativity’s bankruptcy filing. He also did voice work on Puss in Boots.Watch ‘The Lego Movie’ stars play with their toy versions:#news#movie:lego-batman#zach-galifianakisShe is a figure of instant enigma. A young white woman in Mumbai, speaking Hindi, living alone, rarely smiling, consumed by an obsession. Judging by her accent, she was raised in England.
We learn she is half-Indian. She has received a letter from the father she has never seen. "If you ever come to India," he writes, "look me up." He unhelpfully provides no contact information.In Anurag Kashyap's "That Girl in Yellow Boots," we follow Ruth (Kalki Koechlin) to India, through the labyrinth of Indian customs and visas, which apparently involves endless numbers of men shuffling obscure sheets of paper and sending her to another office. "Why are you here?" they ask. "Because I love India," she says, which doesn't allay their suspicions that she is a foreigner seeking employment. She lives in a shabby little apartment and supports herself by working in a massage parlor, where she can charge 1,000 rupees extra by providing a "handshake," if you follow me. Her free time is spent in the search for her father, who abandoned his family when she was too young to remember him. There is a snaky man named Prashant (Prashant Prakash) who considers himself her boyfriend, although she refuses him intercourse and sees him off with handshakes.
A cokehead, Prashant provides a current of humor when he lugs a giant bottle of water into her flat and handcuffs himself to the radiator to force himself to get clean and sober.Ruth is a slim, morose beauty, with long hair, full lips and a slight overbite; she's described as "Bugs Bunny crossed with Julia Roberts." We sense an inner rage. She isn't seeking her father for sentimental reasons and still grieves over the suicide of her older sister. Her skill at massage is not really tested by most clients, who are happy enough to move directly to the happy ending. We meet several of her regulars, including one man who doesn't want her to look at any part of his body. "Where should I look?" she asks. She stares at the wall while her head bobs in time with her hand, and her face betrays nothing — not amusement, annoyance or even boredom. She makes little effort to be pleasant. There is one older man, Divakar (Naseeruddin Shah), who actually does want only a massage, and she is marginally happier to see him.
Most of the time, she broods, often staring at the cityscape and smoking. The cokehead Prashant is obnoxious by constantly following her and cluelessly interrupting her life, and she tells him to get lost. As the story finds its way to a conclusion, we realize it was all about character, not plot. What happens at the end doesn't please or especially surprise us — except that it sidesteps a cliche. The film's value is in its portrait of Ruth, and her independence as a solo outsider in a vast, uncaring city. Kalki Koechlin, who co-wrote the script with her husband the director, Anurag Kashyap, creates a memorable woman who is sad and old beyond her years. This is Kashyap's seventh feature. He is said to be a leader of a growing independent film movement in India. I hope it prospers; a film like this provides a radically different view of India than you can find in the pleasures and excesses of Bollywood. Koechlin herself, who is 28 but looks younger, was born in India of French hippie parents, studied theater in London and has worked before with Kashyap.
They were correct to sense that the very presence of a young foreign loner in Mumbai was a good place to begin with a film. A tribute to the late actor and director, Bill Paxton. "Moonlight," "La La Land" Win Big at Academy Awards The winners of the 89th Academy Awards. Who do you read? Good Roger, or Bad Roger? This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr... The Consummate Everyman: Goodbye to Bill Paxton staff says goodbye to Bill Paxton.'Kinky Boots' among winners at Dora Awards The Canadian cast of Kinky Boots is shown in this undated handout image. (THE CANADIAN PRESS / HO - Mirvish Productions, Cylla von Tiedemann) TORONTO - The Toronto production of "Kinky Boots" was among the big winners at the Dora Mavor Moore Awards. The Mirvish musical, featuring a score by pop star Cyndi Lauper, nabbed three awards in the musical theatre division at a ceremony held at Harbourfront Centre's Concert Stage in Toronto on Monday night.
"Kinky Boots" won for outstanding production, outstanding male performance for Alan Mingo Jr., and choreography honours for Jerry Mitchell. The Canadian Opera Company was the frontrunner in the opera division heading into the ceremony, and emerged as the night's biggest winner with a total of eight awards. The COC scored five Doras for "Siegfried," including outstanding production and directing honours for Francois Girard, and three for "La Traviata." Young People's Theatre received five Doras, including outstanding production in the theatre for young audiences division for "Goodnight Moon." The Art of Shaving Bath & Body Works Blazing Onion (Temporarily Closed) Fast Fix Jewelry & Watch Repair Gyro Express Mediterranean Grill Metsker Maps & Travel P.F. Chang's China Bistro Sublime Gifts And Finds White House Black Market Young Art Lessons & GalleryA few months ago, the Paste Comics team received a tragic email: Tini Howard would no longer be able to write under the auspices of editorial objectivity.
Of course she couldn’t—the weekly Required Reading contributor had not only announced her new series The Skeptics with artist Devaki Neogi (currently in stores), but was also scripting The Mighty Morphin Power Ranger: Pink, Magdalena, a backup in Shade, The Changing Girl and a new Rick and Morty miniseries. And those were the only projects she could formally announce. But though she couldn’t comment on the work of publishers she also worked for, Tini also had insight into an industry whose landscape is in the midst of huge changes. She’s been vocal on this very site about the necessity for views that transcend those of the straight white dudes who tend to dominate creative teams, and she’s currently shaping that change through comics that can be bought in stores right now. So we asked Tini to both recount her trajectory and give her sage advice to future comics writers about what it both means and takes to be a professional sequential arts scribe today. Breaking in Your Writer Boots, Part I
Breaking in Your Writer Boots, Part II Breaking in Your Writer Boots, Part III Last time, I finished on the exciting teaser that 2016 was the year I became a full-time professional comic book writer. Which is true: I did, and Black Phillip willing, I still am. I wish this meant that I woke up every morning in my jammies and bounced to my office, where I ate cereal and wrote about Nightwing doing lunges. It doesn’t (yet), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome. It is still, and will likely always be, a road of exhaustion, hard work, nerves, disappointment, insecurity and cheap thrills. But I literally asked for this. And I’m not sorry. I grew up on Aesop’s Fables. My favorite, the one around which my creative husband and I have built our lives, is the fable of “The Dog and The Wolf.” The dog knows where to go to be fed every day, but he must live his life on a chain. The wolf has to hunt, every day, but he’s free to go where he pleases. Nothing against dog people.
I just don’t do well on chains, even if you promise me dinner. That said, comics life is hard. Everyone says it, and we don’t say it to scare you off. We say it because if you want to go to work every day at the same place and have health insurance and a 401K, that is not unwise. But it didn’t thrill me. Here’s what does thrill me: About a year ago, I was heading to Emerald City Comicon in Seattle, Washington. It was the farthest I’d ever been from home for a convention, and it was probably the first time I felt like a Real Pro at a convention. I was flying by myself, books in hand, meetings scheduled ahead of time. People wanted to see me for coffee, drinks, to plan out the upcoming year’s schedules. I had sweaty palms over getting to be on a panel beside Raina Freaking Telgemeier, among other things. I spent the weekend doing some of the typical networking, but in ways that were entirely foreign to me. The velvet ropes of publisher’s tables were pulled aside and I was invited back—to sign, to chat, to plan.
Editors courted me in ways that were downright thrilling; I have nothing to compare it to, other than the excitement of a good date. When you’ve been wanting an editor at a company to just pay attention to you for two, three years, having them take you out for drinks, for breakfast…it makes you giddy. I’d run up to my hotel room, drawing on my eyebrows and changing from a con-floor t-shirt into something with buttons to look nice. Brushing my teeth and refreshing my lipstick, nervously flexing my toes in the elevator. Butterflies in my stomach when I thought about making a good impression on an editor, things like I should probably not order hot wings, because they’re messy, despite the fact that I literally always want hot wings. I had a great experience there. I came home feeling not only like these people might actually like me, but like I liked them. Hitching my wagon to these fellow creatives now seemed less like a quest for approval and more like a genuine partnership.
With that pressure gone, I felt respected, trusted and, if you’ve ever had a really good partner, in any sense, you’ll know what comes next: you wanna try new things. The place where I am now is one I couldn’t have imagined, 10, five or even two years ago. As I write this, I have boxes and boxes of comics with my name in them behind me; a stack of 1099 forms from half a dozen companies in front of me. I barely had time to think I need to find more work before I had several offers pour in—enough that I had to make choices, and say “no” to things. This is weird, right? It sounds alternately like I’m warning you away and boasting about my success, but it doesn’t mean to be either. What I’m saying is this: if I did this, you can too. Maybe not about comics, but about anything. What seems impossible is totally, ridiculously possible. And these writer boots I’ve been talking about? Well, I put them on one foot at a time, just like everyone else. Wait, that’s pants, isn’t it?