Archive for July, 2008
Angelina allegedly rumored to be thinking about how cool it might be to play the next hypothetical Catwoman, maybe
Ang-felina? Here’s an odd story circling the globe. Former TV Catwoman, Julie Newmar, “has given her blessing” for Angelina Jolie to take on the role in an upcoming movie nobody has heard about, based on the fact that “industry friends tell me she has already made enquiries about the role.” Cool how Hollywood works, isn’t it? Close to a hundred Google “news” sources are running with this as if it’s as factual as somebody beating up their mom. Cool how journalism works, isn’t it?
The 33-year-old actress – who gave birth to twins Knox and Vivienne earlier this month – is said to be in final negotiations with studio bosses to play the feline villain who first appeared in the Batman comics.
It is not clear whether she would play the role in the current Batman film series, starring Christian Bale as the caped crusader, or in a spin-off film as Halle Berry did in 2004’s Catwoman.
or… as long as we’re being unclear, we should probably consider the possibility this is just Angelina’s dream Halloween costume. Stay tuned.
Tony Jaa’s spiritual devotion
Looking at movies from inside the blinkered bubble of the Hollywood hype machine, or broadening our scope to the wider realm of international prestige films, it’s easy to forget that many of the most exciting aspects of movie-making have much humbler beginnings. Classic wuxia and crime thrillers of the 1980’s were the foundation of a Golden Age for Hong Kong filmmakers like John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai who’ve been tremendously influential in world cinema. It’s taken a couple of decades for the stylistic sophistication of those influences to filter through and become seamlessly integrated into the American movie vernacular, but these are the roots of The Departed and the terrific Hong Kong sequence in The Dark Knight.
The X-Files: I Want To Believe
THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE (2008) – ***1/2 out of 5
Guest review by RRA
The idea of a new X-FILES adventure in 2008 was very provocative to me early on in how it could possibly deal with our national psyche in Bush America. If the television series was about the Baby Boomers’ unresolved issues over the JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc., then imagine the goldmine to work with in 9/11, Iraq, Tora Bora, Haliburton, Blackwater, the still-unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks, you name it. But in place of a topical popcorn thriller, we get something completely different, a movie that becomes less about any alluring background threat and more about asking the viewer fundamentally uneasy questions with no real answers, which neither mainstream or niche audiences wanted to see this past weekend.
So other words, instead of a CLOVERFIELD we got a summertime BAD LIEUTENANT.
Like so many X-FILES episodes, we open to a lone car driving along a highway in the dead of night, with that useless little white bureaucratical text in the corner telling us where we are, when something mysterious, something strange, and something bad happens to the driver. I was brought back to the 1990s growing up, when I would stay over at my grandmother’s house and watch THE X-FILES on Friday nights. Weekly we would have FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) tackle “x-files” involving everything from aliens to werewolves to demons, or my personal favorite, that abnormal retarded family who bred itself for centuries. Such good fun, such good gross memories.
Certainly the first half of I WANT TO BELIEVE sets itself up to go “back to basics” of the source material this side of WRATH OF KHAN. Scully and Mulder are brought back from the cold by the FBI to help solve the case of a kidnapped agent. Duchovny and Anderson are convincing here as older middle-age people burned out from fighting the system for years and years, burdened with disillusionment, and now trudging through the darkness once again. We have an engaging, if initially seeming opaque, outlandish supernatural mystery, and if part of the fun with the television series was the plotting our trepidation and excitement around exotic and taboo scenes, then the audience at my screening held their breath as the duo visited the apartment complex housing convicted sex offenders.
Venice ‘08 Intl. Film Festival Line-up
Screen Daily has the line-up for the 65th Venice Film Festival.
Burn After Reading gets its World Premiere.
Competition
The Wrestler, dir. Darren Aronofsky (US)
The Burning Plain, dir. Guillermo Arriaga (US)
Il papa di Giovanna, dir. Pupi Avati (Italy)
BirdWatchers, dir. Marco Bechis (Italy)
L’Autre, dirs. Patrick Mario Bernard & Pierre Trividic (France)
The Hurt Locker, dir. Kathryn Bigelow (US)
Il seme della discordia, dir. Pappi Corsicato (Italy)
Rachel Getting Married, dir. Jonathan Demme (US)
Teza, dir. Haile Gerima (Ethiopia/Germany/France)
Paper Soldier (Bumaznyj Soldat), dir. Aleksey German Jr (Russia)
Sut, dir. Semih Kaplanoglu (Turkey/France/Germany)
Achilles And The Tortoise (Akires to kame), dir. Takeshi Kitano (Japan)
Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea (Gake no ue no Ponyo), dir. Hayao Miyazaki (Japan)
Vegas: Based On A True Story, dir. Amir Naderi (US)
The Sky Crawlers, dir. Oshii Mamoru (Japan)
Un giorno perfetto, dir. Ferzan Ozpetek (Italy)
Jerichow, dir. Christian Petzold (Germany)
Inju, la Bete dans l’Ombre, dir. Barbet Schroeder (France)
Nuit de chien, dir. Werner Schroeter (France/Germany/Portugal)
Inland (Gabbla), dir. Tariq Teguia (Algeria/France)
Plastic City (Dangkou), dir. Yu Lik-wai (Brasil/China/Hong Kong/Japan)
Titles in bold look especially intriguing to me. Sound off about which ones interest you most. List of films screening out of competition after the cut.
“W” dumb as a rock; Stone not a lot smarter
Salon’s Thomas Schaller neatly sums up one of the worst things about Oliver Stone’s “W” — it’s boneheaded opportunistic release date:
…October 17? There are few things conservatives love more than feigning outrage while throwing, um, stones at people like Oliver Stone and Hollywood more generally. And if Stone’s own directorial past is any prologue, there almost certainly will be a scene or two in the new film which can be challenged as to whether it conforms exactly with historical accounts, providing fodder for talk radio’s wailing and arm-flailing.
Three weeks before the election, it could prove unhelpful to Obama and Democrats. I would be more excited to see the film on November 17, with the election in the rear view mirror and the era of Bush retrospection unofficially and unapologetically underway.
In the final days before the election we should be focused on the future, not poking ditto-heads to make them spew up the news cycle. Just what we need. More clowns at the October Surprise Party.
Depp is Burton’s 3-D Mad Hatter (?)
Digital Spy has the morning tea party news:
Tim Burton has reportedly signed Johnny Depp for his forthcoming Alice In Wonderland adaptation. The film, which will be presented in Disney Digital 3-D, will feature Depp as The Mad Hatter, according to The Sun. A source commented: “Tim has had designs on Alice In Wonderland since before he was famous.
Can the news of Helena Bonham Carter as The Queen of Hearts be far behind? Through the looking glass in 3-D sounds like an 8-dollar 90-minute acid-trip. In a good way. Does this void Nolan’s Mad Hatter?
“Do I look like a man with a plan?”
It’s fitting that “Nobody knows anything” got dropped as a banner slogan around here, because this year everybody knows at least one thing: Heath Ledger will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Done deal. Fait accompli.
In a season when we’ll be stressing over all kinds of votes, one race is a virtual certainty. The same as last year when we began chanting that Cate Blanchett was guaranteed to be nominated (twice). The same way we knew that Javier Bardem would be nominated, and the strength of that role gave us solid confidence to say he’d ride the crest of that early acclaim all the way to Kodak stage. We only needed to see that performance once to know it would be next to impossible to top. It hardly mattered what movies or roles were yet to come, because there was simply no doubt. We said it last summer and stuck to our guns (and our only regret was not betting tons of money on it).
It’s time to stop waffling and step up with the same confidence this year. It’s pretty amazing to me that there are holdouts who still have reservations and misgivings about Heath Ledger even being nominated. I’m ready to take a stand and say he’s not only sure to be Oscar-nominated — he’ll win it.
Peter Finch, Spencer Tracy, and James Dean. You’ll be hearing those names propped up a lot over the next few months, as proof of many a theory. But while many experienced handicappers are busy pulling up parallel posthumous Oscar circumstances from 30 or even 50 years ago, at Awards Daily we’ll try hard to base our forecasts on data that’s not 5 decades old. Sure, it’s cute to trot out trivia about how passing away sure didn’t do much to enhance James Dean’s chances of winning, but I think we can do better than that type of old-timey Farmer’s Almanac frost-watching, don’t you? Let’s look at the facts and see how close we can come to nailing this category down, after the cut.
“W” trailer
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEyJ2kdaaTQ[/youtube]
“W” – Catch the crazy antics of Junior, Laura, Babs and Poppy! When it comes to family squabbling, this black sheep son is anything but sheepish! Sundays on the Lifetime Network. (8 PM, 7 PM Central)
[youtube keeps shredding the trailer, but then it re-generates like a lizard's tail. You can find it in HD on Moviefone too.]
The Brothers Bloom trailer
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTOMGgY7M_8[/youtube]
Writer/Director Rian Johnson, whose 2005 debut Brick was a genre-twisting hard-boiled Teens Gone Noir thriller that won several Indie screenplay awards, follows up with a globe-trotting adventure caper — Cons Gone Rom-Com. The cast couldn’t be much cooler, and while the budget looks considerably bigger than Brick’s $475,000, the feeling we get from the trailer edges along the kooky cusp where mainstream meets offbeat. (yes, that’s Oscar-nominated Rinko Kikuchi, the precocious deaf-mute school-girl who made a flash splash in Babel.)
Bush & Batman — look! both begin with ‘B’!
Holy clone, the resemblance is so uncanny I can barely tell them apart.
BATMAN: Tormented over the tragic mistakes he’s made.
BUSH: Makes jokes about the tragic mistakes he’s made.
BATMAN: Has Lucius Fox and Alfred to ensure he stays on the right track.
BUSH: Has Karl Rove and Cheney to steer the country down the wrong track.
BATMAN: Acting on false intelligence, destroys the lives of his loved ones.
BUSH: Acting on false intelligence, destroys the lives of other people’s loved ones.
BATMAN: When Gotham is attacked, steels himself with the courage to take charge.
BUSH: When Manhattan is attacked, pisses himself and reads My Pet Goat.
BATMAN: Tracks down and kills captures the Joker.
BUSH: Drops the ball and loses bin Laden.
(read more after the cut, or add your own)
Speaking of Superheroes
“People of Berlin and people of the world, the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope with an eye towards future, with resolve in our heart. Let us remember this history, and answer our destiny and remake the world once again.” — Barack Obama
Not related to movies or entertainment? Depends on what moves you or entertains you. Obama’s speech in Berlin was the lead story on Access Hollywood, and he’s being greeted like a superstar all across Europe and the Middle East. But how does Obama’s speech affect the Oscars? Click to the quote after the cut to find another reason why Ben Stein will never win one.
Red Sonja & Double ‘R’ Rodriguez
With the Catwoman topic generating 188 comments yesterday, all the terrific actresses mentioned had me hankering for more superheroine opportunities. Along comes ComicCon and delivers the red-hot news that Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan are on track for the 2009 release of Red Sonja (She Devil with a Sword). Rodriguez promises a dark tone with piles of bodies, and when asked about the rating reminded everybody that his initials are double “R”. Cinematical took notes on the press conference, and the voluptuously barbaric poster completes this week’s bloody red lipstick trifecta.
Bale incident comes into sharper focus
The last thing we want is to fan the flames on this, but since yesterday’s story broke with so few hard facts, it’s useful to see the story refined and clarified with any new info at all. Most importantly, the language of the complaint and possible eventual charges hinged on the word “assault,” which seems on the surface to be brutal — especially to Americans accustomed to doing our assaulting in more aggressive terms. This piece from The Daily Mail peers a little too deeply into touchy “personal life” territory, but it does seem to confirm a significant factor that came to light yesterday: the “assault” appears to have been done verbally, and the “lashing out” we kept hearing whipped up on cable news was apparently more of a tongue-lashing.
The source said: ‘Christian was stressed, but he didn’t lay a finger on anyone. Instead, he flew off the handle and cussed his mother. He just got very loud because his mother was saying some very outrageous things about him, and his wife.’
While the headline hyenas here had a field day, we’ve tried to defuse the inflammatory language, counteract the tabloid vultures, and tamp down the rush to judgment. Trying to put a lid on the worst assertions, we keep in mind that the timing couldn’t have been worse — Bale’s “moment of glory,” in Sasha’s words, ruined by circumstances already pressurized and made worse by the media feeding frenzy.
Hello Kitty
Too soon to start campaigning for Catwoman? Is there another more iconic villain who could match the impact of the Joker? More importantly, who’s the female equivalent of Heath Ledger?
And who could pull off this Kittensuit? Meow.
