John Travolta, Joaquin Phoenix tackle some burning questions and so much more

First, the good news.

“Welcome Back Kotter was a classic TV series and Grease was a classic movie and I have zero interest in doing either again as a ‘whatever.’ I just think it is unnecessary.”

This, from John Travolta during a whirlwind press day in San Francisco. Travolta and his costars in Ladder 49, a film that chronicles the personal and emotional tolls it takes in being a fireman, were in town on a promotional blitz, which found each actor being ushered into different suites at the Ritz Carlton at different intervals for myriad interviews.

Get ready for a movie unlike any other

A Japanese scientist decided to conduct an experiment. He wanted to understand the molecular structure of water and what affects it. Because water is the most receptive of the four elements, he suspected it may respond to nonphysical events. So he set up a series of studies, applied mental stimuli to the water and photographed it with a dark-field microscope.

The first picture from the microscope contained water from the Fujiwara Dam. It was nothing to write home about—just your garden-variety microscopic image of water.

Re-imagined ‘Stepford Wives’ isn't the best reboot, but do you know what it really means?

In The Stepford Wives, Director Frank Oz marries camp to dark comedy and the cinematic marriage is deliciously wicked. This “re-imagined” Wives is much more playful than 1975 version, which showcased doomed housewife Kathyrn Ross trying to fit in among the suddenly robotic, truly bizarre housewives in the town of Stepford, Conn. Here, Nicole Kidman takes center stage and,

An emotional tango with the director of ‘The Dancer Upstairs’

When you talk to him, John Malkovich sounds so calm, so reserved, so blissfully anti-temperamental, you feel like nudging his shoulder and asking, “Hey, is there a there there?

But there’s plenty there.

Malkovich is probably Hollywood’s most unwilling iconoclast. His fame is, in part, the result of devoting decades to the acting “craft,” both onstage and in film. But it is in cinema, actually, where Malkovich piqued the curiosities of mainstream moviegoers. Somewhere between his debut performance in Roland Jaffe’s The Killing Fields (1984) and Being John Malkovich (1999), that quirky portal-to-the-brain hit with an addictively simplistic catchphrase—“Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”—the world embraced him for playing characters with an unsettling indifference. Nominated twice for an Oscar—Places of the Heart (1984), In the Line of Fire (1993)—and the recipient of numerous Golden Globe and acting award nods, the dent Malkovich has made in Hollywood seems divinely inspired if not richly deserved.

How the writer of Men in Black and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure penned and directed the year’s surprise Indie hit

Channeling creativity can be a tricky thing, especially for Ed Solomon, whose impressive directing debut in Levity only seems to be casting a shadow over the frothy works he penned in the past. It’s a delicious example of artistic range, but how, exactly, does a guy go from scribing something as inane as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to probing the depths of a man’s soul in a film headlined by Billy Bob Thornton?  It’s the question that has Hollywood scratching heads—and savoring every minute of it.

From the outside, Solomon always seemed embraced by an industry that collected some sweet box office cash thanks, in part, to his writing: Men in Black (1997) and Charlie’s Angels (2000) sailed through the persnickety creative digestive tracks of moviegoers; Leaving Normal (1992) and What Planet Are You From (2000) tanked. Now, the man who made Keanu Reeves whoa! America back in the ’80s with B&T, seems to be tackling more serious fair— along with the premiere of Levity, there’s the May release of The In-Laws, a comedy starring Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, which Solomon also wrote. But it’s Levity’s search-the-soul-and-purge-the-inner-demons theme that’s winning over audiences at film festivals like Sundance. In the film, Billy Bob Thornton plays a paroled murderer haunted by his past and desperately wondering how to make amends. GT caught up with Solomon via phone in a recent interview.