Blog Posts by The Staff at WordandFilm.com

Kristin Scott Thomas/Photo © Featureflash/ShutterstocBy Tony Phillips via Word & Film
"Yes, it's quite complicated, isn't it?" Academy Award nominee Kristin Scott Thomas asks. If art house cinemas stacked themselves into multiplexes, it would be possible to catch the British-born, French national on three screens currently, while the six films she has in various stages of production could easily fill up the multiplex across the street.

The four films a year she's been averaging over the past five years could very well fry up a Netflix queue, but the average moviegoer might be hard pressed to name any of them. In fact, the most one is liable to get, after some prodding, is a vague, "Wasn't she in that 'English Patient' movie?" But her Oscar-nominated turn as Katherine Clifton was more than fifteen years ago and a lot has changed since those days of Miramax owning Oscar night.

You might like: Gwyneth Paltrow Hungry for Foodie Flick 'Blood, Bones & Butter'

Today, she's 5,832 kilometers away from her Parisian Rive Gauche flat holding

Gwyneth Paltrow (c) ShutterstockBy Sarah Cahill via Word & Film

Gwyneth Paltrow is allegedly preparing to channel her inner Julia Child by starring in the big-screen adaptation of Gabrielle Hamilton's foodie memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter. Hamilton's bestselling 2011 book chronicles her unconventional journey through the many kitchens that eventually lead her to become the owner and and chef at New York City's wildly popular Prune restaurant. Rodrigo Teixeira of RT Features (who is currently working on the adaptation of Peter Ackroyd's The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein), has been tapped to produce. A screenwriter has yet to be identified for this project.

Paltrow has been making a concerted effort over the past few years to establish herself as a culinary influencer, evident from her 2011 cookbook, My Father's Daughter, as well as her recipe-centric website, GOOP. While it may be fun to watch her exercise her culinary muscles on the big screen, what we're really looking forward to seeing realized are the various

Dana Brunetti and Michael DeLuca/Photos © S. Bukley/Shutterstock

By Christine Spines, via Word & Film

Fifty Shades of Grey offers a foreboding glimpse at the future of literary pop culture phenomena. Over the past thirteen months, since E L James' racy romantic trilogy began titillating its way to the apex of the cultural conversation (not to mention bestseller lists), the series has already spawned a growing swarm of web videos (parodies, fan homages, celebrity dramatic readings, etc.) thick enough to rival Funny or Die's output for a year. And then there's the media drum beat, growing ever louder with each news break, speculative or real, as the books continue their conquest of each new medium.

Related: The Fifty Shades of Grey Casting Poll: Who Would You Cast as Anastasia Steele?

Now, after this week's significant development hit the airwaves announcing that producers Dana Brunetti ("The Social Network") and Michael De Luca ("Moneyball") had been chosen to shepherd Fifty Shades of Grey onto the big screen, the challenge will

Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum in 'Magic Mike'/Photo © Warner Bros By Christine Spines, via Word & Film

Though a certain baseline of hotness is a non-negotiable prerequisite for aspiring actors interested in seeing their name in bold print and on movie posters, even in hedonistic Hollywood there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. For instance, being too easy on the eyes often means not being considered for meaty roles or being relegated to eye-candy status. Ambitious stars cursed with an excess of good looks often have to work harder if they're looking to provide something more fortifying than the empty calories of cheesecake and beefcake roles. Charlize Theron packed on thirty pounds and donned a mullet to embody the "Monster" serial killer that enabled her to transcend her angelic appearance. Johnny Depp became Tim Burton's ghoulish muse. Robert Redford founded a film festival that spawned a counter-culture movement. Brad Pitt has spent the past two decades camouflaging his golden glow with errant brambles of facial hair.

Halloween parties have always been a surprisingly reliable barometer for pop cultural heat. So this year, expect to find a battalion of Lisbeth Salanders fanned out among the Steve Jobs and the Lady Gagas and the Katniss Everdeens. In fact, odds are strong that Lisbeth could give the sexy nurse a run for her money as the costume of choice for women seeking a provocatively alluring getup to wear on All Hallows' Eve.

Because most secondhand descriptions of the punk protagonist of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy make reference to her Goth chick menace and dark sexuality, odds are equally high that most Halloween Lisbeths will mangle the author's intent by sexing her up or going too S&M with the accessories. In fact, we're relatively certain that so many of these getups would have been downright offensive to Lisbeth herself, who was modeled not on "La Femme Nikita" or Daniel Ash of Bauhaus but on Pippi Longstocking, the plucky protagonist of Astrid Lindgren's series about a young girl

Until fairly recently, women in thrillers often came in three flavors: the stern, humorless suit (think: Dame Judi Dench's M in the "Bond" series or Joan Allen's CIA honcho in the "Bourne" films), the super-human super agent (Jennifer Garner in "Alias"), and the crime-solving spinster ("Prime Suspect," "Miss Marple"). Then out of the shadows sprang Vanessa Michael Munroe, a completely new brand of high-octane heroine who is as fierce as she is feral, as haunted as she is hyper-effective at tracking down her prey, as smart as she is sexual.

Munroe, the title character of The Informationist, Taylor Stevens' bestselling debut novel, inhabits a siege-like state of perpetual danger as she pinballs through the Third World in search of the daughter of a Texas oil tycoon who went missing in Equatorial Africa. Munroe has spent much of her life earning a good living as a cross between a forensic researcher, bounty hunter, and a one-woman special-forces team with a particular knack for piecing

Busy Philipps in I Don't Know How She Does It//Photo by Craig Blankenhorn ©2011 The Weinstein CompanyBy Christine Spines

It's ten o'clock AM and Busy Philipps is having a life-imitates-art moment. As Philipps describes trying to cram an entire workday into the brief window when her three-year-old daughter is at school, her real-life lament could easily double as dialogue in the script for her most recent project, "I Don't Know How She Does It," which stars Sarah Jessica Parker as a woefully overextended working mom.

Another way to look at it is that Busy is just living up to her name. Best known for her role as the terminally single woman pining after Justin Long's bartender in "He's Just Not That Into You," Philipps has made a habit of working on zeitgeist-y projects aiming to capture the most of-the-moment female archetypes: TV's "Cougar Town" and "I don't Know How She Does It."

In the latter, which is based on the bestselling novel by Allison Pearson, Philipps plays a Type-A supermom who organizes school bake sales as if she were running a Fortune 500 company and acts as a foil