I don’t talk about Harry Potter much around here, but I know the phenomenon well enough. While I have a hard time telling one title from the next, I could probably pick most of the main characters out of a police lineup and even tell you how they relate to one another.
Though I may be lukewarm on Potter, I grew up a huge fan of Letterman (I prefer the 12:30 NBC variety to the current incarnation) and I know that it takes a special guest to endure his shtick without looking like an asshole.
Hundreds of guests have tried and failed, but Harry Potter’s Emma Watson is nearly perfect. She gets off to a bit of a shaky start, but then she quickly warms up and she nails the landing. She manages to roll with the punches and give back as good as she gets while still allowing Letterman to be Letterman.
Aaron Sorkin is already threatening to turn the story of the over privileged Ivy League dorks who invented Facebook into an interesting movie (if anyone could do it, it’s Sorkin) and now Steven Zeitchik is reporting in THR that Columbia has hired Sorkin to rescue their spine-tingling baseball statistic movie Moneyball.
Now we’re forced to wonder who is going to direct.
Though we were confident in Steven Soderbergh’s ability to make Excel spreadsheets, On Base Percentage statistics and our 2nd least favorite baseball team interesting, we were perfectly content to have him off the project and on to something else.
Sadly, Sorkin pulls us back on the wagon train. We need to have a walk-and-talk with that guy…
Well no, not really, but fresh off his international success with Let the Right One In, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is lining up to make his first English language feature, an adaptation of Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy. Author John le Carré brought his famous character George Smiley out of retirement in 1974 to root out a double agent in the British intelligence service. It was the first of a trilogy of novels that also include The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
Peter Morgan (The Queen and pretty much everything else British these days) is writing the screenplay on the film set to begin shooting next year.
Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People were already memorably brought to television in mini-series format by the BBC in the late ’70s and early ’80s with the great Alec Guinness in the role of George Smiley.
Brüno. In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen made Americans uncomfortable by pretending to be an obnoxious, ill-dressed foreigner. Can he do the same thing as an obnoxious, ill-dressed homosexual? Break out your lederhosen Jungen und Mädchen. Brüno Kommt!
I Love You, Beth Cooper. What if you were the class valedictorian and you used your graduation night speech to profess your love for the school’s hottest cheerleader? What if, instead of barfing on your shoes, she then promised you the greatest night of your life? Yeah, neither of these things would ever happen in a million years. If they did, they wouldn’t need to make wish-fulfillment fantasy movies like this one. Hayden Panettiere (TV’s Heroes) stars as the hottie in this adaptation of Larry Doyle’s comic novel.
The latest trailer for Neill Blomkamp’s nifty looking sci-fi District 9 isn’t spoilery exactly, but I think it pushes giving away too much. If you’re already on board, skip the trailer. If you don’t know what District 9 is, check out the original teaser. If you still need convincing or you just can’t resist trailers, stream it after the jump or catch it in HD at Yahoo.
Unlike the first trailer trailer for Judd Apatow’s Funny People, this one does a good job of emphasizing the funny without really giving away the story.
Stream it after the jump or if TrailerAddict doesn’t suit you, catch it at Myspace.
Funny People starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana, Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill opens July 31st.
Lying liar Tragically incorrect Sharon Waxman’s assertion that Harvey Weinstein and Universal were pressuring Quentin Tarantino to trim 40 minutes from Inglourious Basterds was already dealt a blow when it was vigorously denied by Weinstein himself and now Tarantino’s flat denial to Variety’s Michael Flemming over at BFDMemo should really finally be the end of it:
“I’ve heard these rumors that the studios told me to cut out 40 minutes. These are complete lies. The movie is actually a minute longer, in running time, than it was in Cannes. It was 2:28, without end credits, and now it’s 2:29, or 2:32 with end credits.”
The bold is mine obviously since a person can’t really speak in bold.
The rest of the interview is pretty good. Tarantino discusses some of the additions and subtractions he made to the film; he fans the embers of Basterds prequel rumors; he talks about working with a big star and the speculation that big stars can no longer open movies; and he talks about the pressures of commercial success. Check it out.
Also, we’re officially off the Basterds image posting bandwagon, but since we keep getting inerrupted by this pesky “news” business you might as well have a look at this and these.
Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and “Chuckles” tease Cemetery Junction
K’s Gervais-dar went off and she spotted this teaser trailer for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s upcoming comedy over at MSN. It’s one of those deals that doesn’t actually show any of the film, but it’s funny if you like Gervais/Merchant so even trailer haters can watch it in peace.
Courtesy of Hitfix, here’s the US poster for Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces starring Penelope Cruz. It’s really just a portion of the Warholesque series that ran in Spain upon the film’s premiere, but in English of course.
Don’t forget to check out the English language trailer here.
Broken Embraces opens in NY on November 20th and LA on December 11th.
Internet guy-types are swooning for Big Fan like schoolgirls at a Twilight screening. How did LiC readers treat the premiere of the one sheet? A collective yawn.
Directed by Robert Siegel, the writer of The Wrestler (”If Moses supposes, the writer of The Wrestler…”), this story of crazed New York Giants fanatics clearly isn’t a comedy despite the presence of comedian Patton Oswalt (Ratatouille). When he saw it at Sundance, CHUD’s Devin Faraci called it “the Taxi Driver of sports comedies.”
Though the subject matter leaves us kind of queasy, that’s obviously the point and Patton Oswalt looks terrific. Stream the trailer after the jump or check it out at Yahoo.
Since we last thought about I Love You Phillip Morris, the film has picked up a release date (2/5/10) and now it has a new one sheet.
Written and directed by the screenwriters of Bad Santa, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, I Love You Phillip Morris is based on the true story of a Texan (Jim Carrey) who goes from family man, to homosexual, to criminal, to prisoner in love with his cellmate (Ewan McGregor), to 4-time prison escapee.
Reviews have been mostly pretty good for this strange sounding romantic comedy, but they had me at Bad Santa.
Beginning today over at MSN, Mean’s Cinemash is taking famous people and putting them in shortened versions of some of our favorite movies. A new short will be unveiled each week throughout the summer and will be available for download to the 5 people who use Microsoft’s Zune or they can be streamed at the MSN website.
Just in time for the 7/17 release date of the hotly anticipated (500) Days of Summer, the first short is Sid and Nancy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel directed by Marc Webb. It’s a modest pleasure that only really kicks in near the end when they start to riff on a scene in Summer where Deschanel’s character compares her relationship with Gordon-Levitt to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.
This is not a political blog, but as the subject of Errol Morris’ terrific documentary The Fog of War, Robert Strange McNamara gets in.
Agree with him or disagree with him, love him or hate him, he was a fascinating figure and a powerful influence on a huge chunk of American history. The effects of decisions he was involved in continue to linger for better or for worse.
He died yesterday in his sleep at the age of 93, which is a gentler fate than the tens of thousands he consigned to death through war, but I don’t believe he escaped this lifetime unpunished. There had to be a psychic toll and you can see him grappling with it in the Morris documentary.
That’s not to say he’s forgiven, but he and his victims are all beyond such human notions now.
“…The digital revolution in filmmaking truly is a democratizing factor in production and distribution… While that phrase has been thrown around to mean all kinds of things, what it really means to me is that technology is reducing the barriers to entry for the making of films and subsequently for the dissemination of those films to audiences. Doesn’t democracy feel great?”
– Jake Abraham, producer of Lovely By Surprise
At the risk of looking like a self-promoting tool, I want to point you to this column in FilmMaker Magazine from producer Jake Abraham about the alternative distribution of Lovely By Surprise, a film I’m a big fan of. I promise you I was already planning a post before I saw my name was mentioned near the end. It’s interesting from a filmmaker’s perspective, but it’s also interesting to me as a blogger. I’ve always envisioned LiC as a place to call attention to movies that might otherwise get buried by the hubbub, and this was a perfect opportunity to do just that.
When I was approached out of the blue a few weeks back by a representative of the film, it didn’t occur to me that I was just one tiny piece in an innovative campaign to spread the word about a love-it-or-hate-it kind of film that might have been a tough sell for traditional distribution. It turns out not only was I a small piece of the plan, so were many of my favorite bloggers including a few familiar faces like Daniel Getahun, Rick Olson and Marilyn Ferdinand. Be sure to check out their thoughts on the movie and then Google the film and see the dozens of other bloggers and film sites who’ve joined in with their own voices, not because they had anything to gain by it, but because they liked the movie.
It’s no secret we were huge fans of Brent Meeske’s documentary Branson when it premiered at LAFF a couple of weeks back. Information on the film has remained scarce, but AICN’s Mr. Beaks (AKA Jeremy Smith) conducted an interview with Meeske and Jackson Cash, one of the central figures in the film. It’s a good read and it gives you a good idea of what the movie is all about.
Also, Variety printed a positive review of the film by Andrew Barker last week:
Though the chintzy stage shows and eccentric performers it documents often seem ripped straight out of a Christopher Guest mockumentary, Brent Meeske’s wonderful chronicle of Branson, Mo., performers is something else entirely — a very funny, very sincere testament to the immense dedication, faith and personal sacrifice that goes into creating forms of art most cultural arbiters would dismiss with a smirk. In many ways a kindred spirit to Sacha Gervasi’s recent “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” “Branson” is a pitch-perfect, tremendously affecting documentary…
Danish director Ole Christian Madsen takes several steps away from his Dogme 95 roots for this, the most expensive film ever produced in Denmark.
Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) play two Danish resistance fighters in 1944 as the tide of the war against the Germans was turning. It’s similar narrative (and hopefully thematic) territory to Paul Verhoeven’s terrific Black Book and I’m really looking forward to it.
Flame & Citron has gotten great reviews in Europe and it was well received when it played Telluride and Toronto in 2008. Comparisons have been made to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows.
The film opens in NY on July 31st and LA on August 14th with a nationwide roll-out to follow. Being an IFC release, it’ll probably go to VOD around the same time if not before. I’ll be seeing it sometime between now and the NY release and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Meanwhile, check out the trailer after the jump or watch it in HD at Apple.
I’m not sure I like the increasing habit of posting scenes from movies on the Internet. It’s no way to be introduced to a movie, especially out of context. On the other hand, if you’re going to post a scene, make it the beginning of the film and don’t include any spoilers.
This 8-minute opening segment of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (via SlashFilm) fits the bill, plus it’s a good movie that needs you to go see it. It opened on June 26 in a handful of theaters in NY and LA then expanded last weekend into a handful more, but still within NY and LA. This weekend it’s expanding into an estimated 50 theaters so many of you will finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about.
As far as scenes go, this one is really just a whistle wetter. Nothing is spoiled and the scene itself isn’t even resolved. It gives you a great idea though of the type of claustrophobia and prolonged suspense you’ll be dealing with for the next 2 hours. Check out the clip after the jump.
There are too many things that Public Enemies does well for it to be considered a failure, but it gets LiC’s vote for the biggest disappointment of the first half of 2009. There are many movies that are much worse, but none of them put so much great raw material (milieu, cast, technical command) to the service of so little. It’s a blank slate that Mann aficionados will be quick to fill with significance, but I’m not buying it. Don’t even get me started on comparisons to other, better films about legendary depression-era outlaws.
Here is Charlie Rose’s July 2, 2009 conversation with director Guillermo del Toro. Though the reason for the interview was del Toro’s new vampire novel The Strain co-written with Chuck Hogan (Prince of Thieves), the two covered a number of interesting topics over 30 minutes including monsters, Catholicism, the kidnapping of his father, the perils of New Zealand meringue desserts, his desire to adapt a Carson McCullers novel, and his rescue of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film.
It’s almost hard to believe such a gentle and jolly fellow is capable of making movies that are so dark.
Watch the interview above, and/or read some juicy quotes after the jump.
Plenty of mediocre indies get picked up for distribution at film festivals every year which makes it all the more galling when good ones like Kirt Gunn’s unexpectedly terrific Lovely by Surprise slip through the cracks. The film premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2007 where it won the New American Cinema Special Jury Prize and then it made a string of festival appearances without a pick up. After that it appears to have been four-walled in select cities around the country. This Tuesday it’s finally coming to DVD where a wider audience will have a chance to see it at last. They would be wise to do so because Lovely by Surprise has a lot to recommend it.
The Girl From Monaco has all the earmarks of a certain kind of romantic comedy in the European mold: the staid world of a slightly boring but successful middle-aged man is turned upside down when he improbably earns the attention of a beautiful, free-spirited young woman with whom he falls in love. Though it opens with a sweeping, sparkling, tourist bureau ready helicopter shot of the Mediterranean set to the bouncy strains of Nat “King” Cole’s L-O-V-E, soon after the opening credits the lightly comic tone gives way to a darkness that sets into the story and a sense of doom that lingers just off the sun-kissed shore.
When the tale takes a final turn for the dramatic in the last act, it may come as a surprise for those expecting something lighter from the start, but it makes The Girl From Monaco a richer, more interesting picture than it first appears on paper. It may also explain the decidedly mixed critical response the film has received on this side of the Atlantic.
I haven’t heard Jim Sheridan’s remake of Susanne Bier’s Brødre being talked up in Oscar circles even with the expanded best picture field, but with a December release date and this irritatingly earnest trailer (with a helpful U2 soundtrack in case you’re not feeling the earnestness), it’s starting to smell a lot like Oscar bait.
This is the sort of thing that could prove to be an acting tour de force (and we like Natalie Portman, we really do) in which case it might be tolerable, but the trailer doesn’t give much hope.
Tobey Maguire’s bug-eyed crazy guy character just reminds us of the unfairly maligned The Good German, a film deemed unworthy by the unimaginative Oscar gods. Also, be skeptical of awards hungry movies that premiere their trailers on ET.
Though it will no longer be the collaboration that was originally announced back in May, Screen Daily has reported that production on Wim Wenders’ 3-D project bringing three dances by the legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch “will resume work after a period of mourning” according to the film’s producers.
They don’t definitively say that Wenders will still be involved with Pina, but we’ll assume he is until we hear otherwise. Either way, the project takes on even more interest in light of Ms. Bausch’s passing at the age of 68, five days after she was diagnosed with cancer.
One of the dances planned for the film was based on Stravinksy’s Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). Check it out after the jump.
In Contention’s Guy Lodge points us to the UK Guardian’s exclusive look at the lovely new trailer for Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces starring Penélope Cruz. UPDATE: The embedded version from DailyMotion is after the jump but it looks a bit better over at The Guardian. Check it out here.
Reviews out of Cannes were mixed, but we weren’t waiting for the critical consensus before deciding we’d be there November 20, 2009 when the film opens in New York and Los Angeles.
Sacha Baron Cohen likes to have it both ways – and no that’s not a gay Brüno joke. He makes fun of bigots by confronting them with racial or sexual stereotypes and then he presents their reactions for us to laugh at. As New York Magazine’s Adam Sternbergh notes however, the person in the seat next to you might not be in on the joke and could just be laughing at the stereotype.
Says Sternbergh:
When Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor used slurs, they were doing what comedy often does, what it exists to do: speak the unspeakable and thereby drag it into the light. But what’s unspoken in this new humor of homo-heebie-jeebies is this: We’re not all as enlightened as we’d like to think. Sometimes comedy can point that out to us, and sometimes it can simply exploit it. This current comedy two-fer-one — by which you get laughs both from the knowing ironic crowd and the insensate clods — is all too tempting, since it allows you to “bust” taboos while benefiting from your own taboo behavior.
Sternbergh is correct to a point, but I’m not so sure we can hold the artist responsible for how people respond to their work or why. It’s a gray area and I think Baron Cohen is shining a light on it. He’s not only exposing homophobia on the screen, he’s exposing it in the audience. Isn’t he? What do you think?
Brüno directed by Larry Charles minces onto big screens on July 10th.
Laetitia Casta as Brigitte Bardot and Eric Elmosnino
as Serge Gainsbourg in Vie Héroïque
Continuing on a French theme, The Playlist has a bunch of images from the upcoming Vie Héroïque (A Heroic Life) coming in 2010. We were first tipped to the Serge Gainsbourg bio starring Eric Elmosnino as Gainsbourg, Laetitia Casta as Brigitte Bardot, Lucy Gordon as Jane Birkin, Anna Mouglalis as Juliette Gréco, and Sara Forestier as France Gall when Karina Longworth caught a trailer for it prior to a screening at Cannes, but The Playlist had casting details way back in October ‘08.
The monkeys and I are big fans of ’60s French pop in general and one-time Weekend Forecast musical sponsor Serge Gainsbourg specifically so we’re extra curious about this one even though bios are usually tiresome. Serge is actually a two-time musical sponsor if you count this Gainsbourg penned number by France Gall…and we do.
On a sad side note, British actress Lucy Gordon who plays Jane Birkin killed herself back in May.
We showed you the first teasing teaser for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s upcoming Micmacs à tire-larigot and now Twitch has uncovered seven more, one for each character.
That makes huit for those of you keeping score at home.
They’re all in French of course, but they’re still pretty funny even if you only speak English.
In addition to Dany Boon, the film stars Omar Sy, Julie Ferrier, André Dussollier, Yolande Moreau, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Dominique Pinon, Michel Crémadès and Marie-Julie Baup.
Here’s how IMDb describes the plot: “A man and his friends come up with an intricate and original plan to destroy two big weapons manufacturers.”
Apple has a featurette and an HD version of the trailer we ran back in May from In the Loop, the funniest movie of the year so far. Check out the LiC review here.
Based on the BBC comedy The Thick of It, In the Loop is about a low-level British Cabinet Minister whose big mouth gets him stuck between pro-war and anti-war forces on both sides of the Atlantic in the run up to the Iraq war. It stars Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Chris Addison, Gina McKee, Mimi Kennedy, James Gandolfini, Anna Chlumsky, David Rasche and Steve Coogan.
The featurette from IFC has an interview with director/co-writer Armando Iannucci, but it also gives away a few more jokes. If you’re already on board In the Loop, you should probably skip it, but if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, have a look.
As we noted a few weeks back, Focus Features is releasing Park Chan-wook’s vampire film Thirst, the co-winner of the Prix du Jury at Cannes, on July 31st in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Focus Features website has a whole list of where the film will be playing and when.
Irvine, CA – Regal University Town Center 6 (8/14/09)
Los Angeles, CA – Laemmle Sunset 5 (7/31/09)
Pasadena, CA – Laemmle Playhouse 7 Cinemas (8/14/09)
San Diego, CA – Landmark Ken (8/21/09)
San Francisco, CA – Landmark Bridge Theater (7/31/09)
Washington, DC – Landmark E-Street Cinema (8/14/09)
Atlanta, GA – Landmark Midtown Art Cinema 8 (9/4/09)
Honolulu, HI – Kahala Mall 8 (8/14/09)
Chicago, IL – Landmark Century Centre Cinema 7 (8/14/09)
Cambridge, MA – Landmark Kendall Square Cinema 9 (8/21/09)
Baltimore, MD – Charles (9/4/09)
Royal Oak, MI – Landmark Main Art Theatre 3 (8/28/09)
Minneapolis, MN – Landmark Lagoon (9/4/09)
Saint Louis, MO – Landmark Tivoli Theatre 3 (9/4/09)
New York, NY – Landmark Sunshine Cinema (7/31/09)
Portland, OR – Regal Fox Tower Stadium 10 (8/21/09)
Philadelphia, PA – Landmark Ritz At The Bourse 5 (8/28/09)
Austin, TX – Regal Arbor Cinemas @ Great Hills (8/14/09)
Seattle, WA – Landmark Varsity 3 (8/14/09)
Watch the red band trailer and see the one sheet here. Read more about the reaction to the film when it played Cannes here.
Sunday: 7/5/09 The Watercooler
Talk about the weekend's movie watching, or anything else that's on your mind.
Thursday: 7/9/09 Weekend Forecast
A look at the upcoming weekend's theatrical releases.
Saturday: 7/4/09 Movies You May Have Missed Updated semi-regularly, these are DVD releases of interesting films that may have slipped under your radar.
Well no, not really, but fresh off his international success with Let the Right One In, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is lining up to make his first English language feature, an adaptation of Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy. Author John le Carré brought his famous character George Smiley out of retirement in 1974 to root out a double agent in the British intelligence service. It was the first of a trilogy of novels that also include The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
