Matt Damon on the training he went through to prepare for Invictus

Awards Daily points to this great article and interview about what Matt Damon went through to prepare for Invictus. As Awards Daily points out, he went from gaining weight for The Informant! to having to bulk up to play the captain of a rugby football team. And in rugby, they don't wear pads like in American football, so he had to be ready for some physical punishment on the field. Matt Damon was amazed that the story of the team captain, Pienaar, and Mendela was true.

But after looking up Pienaar online and seeing photos of him, Damon was also incredulous he'd been asked to play the part. "Clint, this guy is huge," Damon protested. "We've never met, but I'm only 5 foot 10."

Eastwood started to laugh. "Oh hell, don't worry about that," he said composedly. "You go worry about everything else!"

Damon had six months to master an elusive South African accent and pack some new muscle on a frame that – because European rugby is a sport that doesn’t use the protective gear of North American football – would be facing pulverizing punishment on the field. He would be playing a real-life character who, in the course of his career, has broken his nose 14 times and received 400 stitches to his face.

“I had to build myself up to try to pull off the illusion of being the captain of a South African rugby team,” Damon says. “Ultimately, I was trying to look at every possible pitfall: What are the things that could possibly blow this illusion?”

That’s the way Damon works: thinking hard about a role long before he hits the set. “So I kind of made my little checklist of things to do.”

The 39-year-old actor will always remember his first meeting with Pienaar. He and Freeman received an invitation to Pienaar’s house for a gourmet dinner the South African sports icon was cooking himself.

“He invited me to meet his wife and two boys, and Morgan and I went, and I remember I rang the door bell and I looked UP at him! The first thing I ever said to Francois Pienaar in my life was – ‘I look much bigger on film.’ And he laughed and laughed and gave me a big hug and took me into his house, and that was it.

 Read the whole great article here.   I think this is going to be a fantastic holiday film.

James Franco says appearing on General Hospital is Performance Art

James Franco wrote an article in Friday's Wall Street Journal explaining his fascination with performance art, and that is how he views his appearance on the soap General Hospital -- as an extended performance art piece:

I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade—ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of "General Hospital" as the bad-boy artist "Franco, just Franco." I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.

The final episode of the story arc will take place in a real gallery, and he plays the artist Franco (who poses as a street graffiti artist) furthering the reflexive nature of the whole enterprise.

The folks at "General Hospital" informed me that in three days of filming we backlogged enough material for 23 episodes. There will be one more step. After all of the Franco episodes are aired, my character's storyline will be advanced in a special episode filmed in a "legitimate" New York gallery. One more layer will be added to this already layer-heavy experiment. If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?

Read the whole thing here.

Victoria's Secret Commercial By Michael Bay

Okay. This just completely made me crack up. Helicopters. check. Knife throwing. check. Plenty 'o explosions. It's Michael Bay. Check and triple check.

Totally over the top. Totally Michael Bay. As one blog put it - The focus is on the breasts as in Transformers, but at least this time it's for a reason!

Winter Wonderland - Jason Mraz

It snowed last night here in Chicago land. It's a winter wonderland for the first time this season!

Wish I could just spend the day by the fire....

Send a Holiday Postcard from Gmail - for Free!

Send a holiday postcard, yes a real snail mail postcard, from Gmail for free!  Check it out here.

A Different kind of Schmear for the Holidays

CBS has a bold new ad campaign for the holidays, suggesting men give their wives the gift of a pap smear for Hanukkah or Christmas.

"

Want to do something special for your woman this Hanukah?" says actor Josh Pais in one. "Schedule her Pap smear. Just a schmear could save her life."

Then, as a shot of an animated menorah comes to life, he adds, "Give the gift that will light up her menorah."

"If your main objective is to offend no one, than you're on a fast track to being irrelevant," Margo, vice president of CBS, says.

Does it come with an assortment of bagels?

Read more at the NY Daily News.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Trailer

Dh Preview One - For more funny movies, click here

A short teaser trailer, and we have to wait till next fall!

SNL spoofs the Sahalis

Taylor Lautner to play Teen Superhero Max Steel?

According to the LA Times, Taylor Lautner is in talks to play teen superhero Max Steel.  Max Steel was a Mattel action figure released in 2001, and there was an animated show that ran for three seasons. It's still very popular in Latin America.

Lautner would play Josh McGrath, a 19-year-old extreme-sports athlete who is accidentally exposed to the unleashed power of nanotechological machines, which become part of him and (in the old show, at least) give him increased strength, near-invulnerability and the ability to change his appearance.

Taylor appears next in a small role in the film Valentine's Day, and next week hosts SNL.

How Twilight Should Have Ended

LOL!

Hat tip: BluEyedDaizy