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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
Public Enemies Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs The Hurt Locker Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen The Proposal Year One Whatever Works Dead Snow The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 Away We Go The Hangover Land of the Lost Up Drag Me to Hell Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian Recently Added Spotlights Paul Rudd Jason Segel Nicolas Cage Rose Byrne Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore Jared Padalecki Amanda Righetti Clive Owen Naomi Watts Joaquin Phoenix Steve Martin Renee Zellweger Liam Neeson Maggie Grace Dustin Hoffman |
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 Eva Mendes
Interview By: Michael Dance Eva Mendes has shot to stardom fairly rapidly, even by today's Hollywood standards. After a few minor parts in movies like Urban Legends: Final Cut and Training Day, she scored the lead female role in 2 Fast 2 Furious. Her performance landed her roles like the cops in Out of TIme and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and then suddenly in 2005 she was playing opposite Will Smith in Hitch -- after having appeared as one of the girls in his "Miami" music video back in the late '90s. After later forays into both the independent (Live!) and the mega-mainstream (Ghost Rider), she's now appearing in director James Gray's 1980s cops & criminals drama We Own the Night. "I love The Yards," Mendes says of Gray's earlier movie, which like this one starred Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. "I really wanted to work with him, although I said no to him for a year. I loved his script, but it was too much of a girlfriend role. I was like, 'you know, I gotta tell you, I love this, but it's a little bit too victimy for me, I'm just kind of prancing around wearing cute clothes.' And he was so adamant, he said, 'I promise, I will make this better, and once you and Joaquin come in you can work on the characters,' and I said thanks but no thanks, you know?" Luckily, Gray wasn't about to quit. "He came back to me a year later, and this dude, there's gotta be something special about him if he's pursuing me a year later. So I said yes, not reluctantly, but not totally convinced I was making the right choice. And now I've gotta tell you, hands down it's my favorite experience. My deepest experience in my acting career." Mendes plays Amada, the girlfriend of Phoenix's club-host character Bobby. With Mendes's natural good looks and her energetic, Cuban-American persona, one might think she'd be a natural for the part, but "I'm not a club girl," she says. "I don't like clubs. [For research,] James took me to this club, it was straight back from the 1980s, with these musical numbers that I can't even describe. It was a hoot. I was around in the eighties but I was still young, thank God I wasn't doing the club scene at that age." Diving into the world was an experience, especially through the lense of her character, who she calls "completely oblivious" to the less-than-legal operations that happen in the film's club. "She wouldn't think these people would actually kill people, no. And she's still kind of a Mama's girl, she was in this cloud, especially at the beginning. I didn't want to arm her with all this knowledge because the less she knew the better." Mendes is happy to have the knowledge her character doesn't have. "There was an innocence to ... |
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