What’s with all the poster action today? I can’t keep up. Anyway, in the interests of efficiency, I’ve paired up the new one-sheets for “Jennifer’s Body” and “Inglourious Basterds” (yes, another one) for your viewing pleasure. Why not? After all, they’re both advertising blood-spattered comedies from smart-aleck Oscar-winning writers, and they both seem destined to grace a lot of teenage boys’ walls, albeit for fairly different reasons.
[Source: Bloody Disgusting and Screen Rant]
You may recall, a few months ago, Kris confessing his undying love for one Ms. Hope Davis, a crush I fully understand even if I don’t entirely share in it. (My heart is still yours, Ms. Keener.) Bottom line: quirky-beautiful woman, wonderful actress, all-round fox.
So I’m curious to know how Kris feels about the news of his would-be paramour replacing Julianne Moore to play Hillary Clinton in Peter Morgan’s third Tony Blair project “The Special Relationship.”
I’m quite pleased with the development: great actress that Moore is, she doesn’t quite strike me as a strident enough screen presence for Clinton. I find it easier to imagine Davis walking the walk with tongue ever-so-slightly in cheek, and to be honest, I find her a moderately closer physical match too. (No offence meant, Kris.)
I mentioned last week that I wasn’t entirely sold on the trailer for Jim Sheridan’s remake of the Susanne Bier drama “Brothers,” which played a little too shrill and on-the-nose for my liking. I have no such issues, however, with this superb poster: elegant, unusual and one of the few one-sheets I’ve seen lately that uses composition to intelligent thematic effect. Brownie points to all involved.
[Source: Cinematical]
• How “Brüno” could forever change Hollywood’s depiction of homosexuality. [Slate]
• Or should that be “Humpday?” [Time]
• Jodie Foster goes back behind the the camera, directing and starring opposite Mel Gibson in “The Beaver.” Ahem. [Variety]
• Given the ubiquity of the Harry Potter kids, Gill Pringle considers the rise of the well-behaved movie star. [The Independent]
• Eternal maverick Isabelle Huppert on her “internal adventure” of her acting career. [indieWIRE]
• Must-read of the day: Andrew O’Hehir takes a fresh look at “The Seventh Seal.” [Salon]
• Inspired by the title of Michael Moore’s latest, Xan Brooks contemplates cinema’s least appropriate date movies. [The Guardian]
• By the way, have you been playing Nat Roger’s fantastic “First & Last” game this month? Check it out. [The Film Experience]
There are several reasons I’m bothered by this one-sheet for gay rom-com “I Love You Phillip Morris,” which has built up a fair amount of goodwill from its appearances at Sundance and Cannes this year.
Is a John Le Carré adaptation now some kind of rite of passage for lauded foreign directors crossing over to English-speaking audiences?
Okay, I’m stretching. Still, it’s interesting that a few years after Fernando Meirelles made the switch with his take on Le Carré’s “The Constant Gardener,” we now have “Let the Right One In” helmer Tomas Alfredson taking on the British author’s defining work “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”
ScreenDaily reports that UK stalwart Working Title is shepherding the first big-screen version of Le Carré’s classic espionage novel — which was very successfully adapted for TV in the 1970s, with Alec Guinness famously taking on the role of George Smiley, an elderly spy brought out of retirement to hunt an MI6 mole in the Cold War era.
No cast has yet been announced for the film, which begins shooting next year. In something of a “Frost/Nixon” reunion, the film is being produced by Working Title heads Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, while Peter Morgan (also an executive producer) is on script duty.
Deep into Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel noir “Shutter Island,” there’s a wonderfully telling exchange between the two central characters. Reflecting on the gothic heights to which their situation has spiralled, one observes, “It’s all a bit Grand Guignol, don’t you think?” His partner’s reply: “I don’t know what the fuck that means.”
Ostensibly a nod to class difference within the narrative, it’s also arguably a tongue-in-cheek dig at the novel’s self-reflexive straddling of high and low culture. “Shutter Island,” of course, is Grand Guignol of the highest order, but with an acute awareness of the term: steeped in references to throwaway pulp fiction and lurid 1950s B-movies, but written with the literary discipline and deference of a serious novelist.
Needless to say, Boston-ish setting aside (and even then, “Shutter Island” goes to significant dramatic lengths to distance itself from the city), the novel is a very different beast from the two Lehane titles successfully given the screen treatment in recent years. For all their whodunnit trappings, “Gone Baby Gone” and “Mystic River” traded largely in earnest authenticity; “Shutter Island,” by contrast, hinges on artifice.
Lehane has apparently stated his admiration for Graham Greene’s alternation between “novels” and “entertainments”: this, carefully wrought and quotation mark-enclosed as it is, is plainly his idea of a pure entertainment, a funhouse, a ride.
Well, this is impressive. Hayao Miyazaki, John Lasseter, Tim Burton and Robert Zemeckis have all lined up to help represent Walt Disney Studios at Comic-Con in San Diego later this month, in the interests of showcasing a range of new and/or revived Disney features at the geek mecca. This is the first Comic-Con for all four filmmakers, so it’s quite a coup for Disney to assemble them in one place.
Burton and Zemeckis will be joining a panel on 3D filmmaking (the first time Comic-Con has broached the subject), which will include discussion, not to mention exclusive footage, of their respective upcoming 3D features “A Christmas Carol” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
Meanwhile, Miyazaki and Lasseter are set to participate in an animation panel (which also includes such veterans of hand-drawn Disney animation as “The Little Mermaid” duo Ron Clements and John Musker), in which a range of upcoming animated titles — including “Toy Story 3,” “The Princess and the Frog” and “Ponyo” — will all be previewed.
Both sound likely to be hot tickets. Kris, of course, will be on site in San Diego and covering the whole shebang for your reading pleasure. Lucky man. (Full press release after the cut.)
• Jeffrey Wells offers his own mid-year assessment of 2009’s best and worst so far. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• How New Line mutated from house of horror to chick-flick central. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• Memo to “Baywatch: The Movie” producers: it’s about the jugs, not the jokes. [The Guardian]
• Too lowbrow for you? Here’s David Lynch on his unlikely collaboration with musos Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. [Sight & Sound]
• Apparently, Meryl Streep gained 15 pounds making “Julie & Julia.” Wow, she really does want that third Oscar. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Francis Ford Coppola talks movies, wine and why he wanted Scorsese to direct “The Godfather Part II.” Really. [Esquire]
• An “Up” doubter (commercially speaking, anyway) eats his words. [The New York Times]
• Not movie-related (yet), but a “Catcher in the Rye” sequel without J.D. Salinger’s involvement? Stop the madness. [The Wall Street Journal]
“Capitalism: A Love Story.”
That, Variety informs us, is the title of Michael Moore’s latest, which you may remember remained nameless even through its own teaser trailer. So, simply by waiting this long, he even turns the choosing of a title into a publicity opportunity. You sort of have to admire the way he plays the game, right down to his cornball blurb:
“It will be the perfect date movie … It’s got it all — lust, passion, romance and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day. It’s a forbidden love, one that dare not speak its name. Heck, let’s just say it: It’s capitalism.”
Spooky that I asked yesterday for a documentary to step forward and report for awards season duty, and a mere few hours later we get this. The film bows October 2nd, courtesy of smart indie outfit Overture Films.
Thanks to commenter AmericanRequiem for reminding me to post the new “Funny People” trailer. (Hey, I have to sleep sometime.) From where I’m standing, it’s a notable improvement on the previous trailer, not least because it’s considerably more tight-lipped about plot developments than that one was. Shame about that.
Interesting that this one seems to place more emphasis on the Seth Rogen character, who was pretty much just parsley on the side in the first one.
Expanding on the teaser that generated much excitement among genre aficionados a few months back, comes this more revealing trailer for South African Neill Blomkamp’s freshman feature “District 9,” produced in association with Peter Jackson.
Can’t say I’m as sold on the venture as others are — and the new trailer makes it look rather broader and less enigmatic than what we were originally led to expect — but I’m always up for seeing my hometown of Johannesburg show its sun-bleached colors on screen. Represent, Joeys. (Newish one-sheet after the cut.)
Wow, the Oscar off-season gets shorter by the year. Before we know it, they’ll generously let us have a single night’s sleep after the ceremony before plunging us into campaign hell.
Of course, I exaggerate — this is hardly news to set pundits’ pulses racing. Still, last year we at least got to wait until late August before the convoluted (and invariably disheartening) process of assembling the contenders for Best Foreign Language Film began with Denmark submitting first. (And promptly sinking without trace.)
This year, Sri Lanka comes first — and early — out the gate by naming its official Oscar submission as “Flowers of the Sky,” a melodrama from director Prasanna Vithanage than screened earlier this year at the Palm Springs fest. The flim’s site describes it as follows:
Faded film star Sandhya Rani (Malani Fonseka) unexpectedly sees her profile rise again when she is embroiled in controversy. As a media-crazy nation draws her into its net, she is confronted with a changed, compromised industry – more commercialized, media savvy and value-less. As she faces her new found fame, Sandhya comes to confront her darkest demons – and also herself…
You’re probably aware that the opening 8 minutes of Kathryn Bigelow’s staggering “The Hurt Locker” are available to view online. I’m not linking on point of principle — the increasingly popular tactic of marketing movies via isolated clips rather than trailers doesn’t sit well with me anyway, but in particular, an opening sequence as tense and electrifying as that of “The Hurt Locker” deserves to be experienced unspoiled on the big screen. Seek it out if you must, but I advise against it.
Meanwhile, IMP offers a pair of new international posters for the film: they’re nothing like as strong as earlier designs, but I guess floating heads still sell for some folks. Glad to see they’ve kept that terse tagline, though. Similar second design after the cut.
For documentaries, qualifying for Oscar consideration can be a rough ride. Academy rules stipulate that a film must at least enjoy a week-long theatrical run, in both New York and Los Angeles, to be eligible — which can be a tall order for tiny movies on tricky subjects.
So — acting as a kind of fairy godmother to independent documentary makers struggling for exposure — we have DocuWeeks, a three-week-long showcase sponsored by the International Documentary Association, in which a selection of features and shorts screen on both coasts. In doing so, they both qualify for the Academy awards and raise their profile to potential voters.
It’s a nifty tradition that has already seen 16 films go on to make the Oscar ballot, including 2007’s winning feature “Taxi to the Dark Side” and last year’s champ in the short race, “Smile Pinki.”
This year sees a total of 28 films — 18 features and 10 shorts — in the DocuWeeks lineup, so it seems safe to wager that we’ll be hearing more about at least some of them as the awards season progresses. I admit I don’t keep up the documentary side of things as much as I should, so I know next to nothing about most of the inclusions in the globally diverse group.
I’ve had a chaotic day today, so I regret to inform that I haven’t yet finished hammering out this week’s edition of Page to Screen. Apologies. Be sure to check in tomorrow for a discussion of Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island.” Promise.
Chad’s excellent Sunday Cents columns have previously inspired discussion amongst readers about the rights and wrongs of adjusting box-office figures for inflation. I must say it’s always made perfect sense to me, and I’m even more in favor after reading this interesting Bloomberg chart, which lists the top grossers of all time after inflational adjustment.
Under these circumstances, “Gone With the Wind” handily see off all challengers with a gross of $1.45 billion — a satisfactory outcome for me, given that it’s my personal number-one film of all time too. Meanwhile, “Titanic” — the all-time champ on the unmodified chart — drops all the way to #6 when inflation enters the equation. Result.
Below is Bloomberg’s inflation-adjusted Top 10; after the cut, the equivalent ranking irrespective of inflation.
TOP 10 ADJUSTED FOR TICKET PRICE INFLATION
1. Gone with the Wind ($1,450.7)
2. Star Wars ($1,278.9)
3. The Sound of Music ($1,022.5)
4. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial ($1,018.5)
5. The Ten Commandments ($940.6)
6. Titanic ($921.5)
7. Jaws ($919.6)
8. Doctor Zhivago ($891.3)
9. The Exorcist ($793.9)
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ($782.6)
• AMPAS elects its governors. Among those returning to the board: Tom Hanks, James L. Brooks and eternal Oscar bridesmaid Kevin O’Connell. [Variety]
• Nat Rogers reflects on his favorite thesps of the decade’s first half… and how they’ve fared since. [The Film Experience]
• Martin Scorsese looks back on Woodstock. A good read, this. [Times of London]
• Ebert has some choice words for the “Transformers” defenders. [Roger Ebert’s Journal]
• Noah Forrest boards the “Hurt Locker” train. [Movie City News]
• Ahead of “Frozen River”‘s long-delayed UK release, Melissa Leo talks about how an Oscar nod has changed her career. [Times of London]
• Celebrating the delights of the movie-mangling “Cinemash” web series. [Los Angeles Times]
• Why Nicolas Cage should still be in the conversation for Superman. Uh, right. [The Guardian]