Awards Daily

(from slashfilm, thanks to Ryan Griffin)

As if the heat from two high-profile roles this year wasn’t enough (Fair Game, Mother and Child), Naomi Watts generates a good head of steam in this month’s ‘Sex Issue’ of BlackBook. (grabs via JustJared)

Click to supersize, and see more after the cut.

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Roles like this are treasure greater than gold for for indie royalty Catherine Keener. Currently enjoying a comfortable niche in limited release, Please Give screens at the San Francisco Film Festival this week, and earns “Outstanding” status from the opinion compilers at MovieReviewIntelligence.com.

Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal

This gorgeous film, always tender and sometimes dark, is a deeply resonant comic drama that’s concerned with nothing less than life, death, love, sex, guilt and the urban logic of mortality… it’s a fully dramatized and richly detailed account of fatefully intertwined lives… In a film that constitutes a showcase for the actor’s‚Äîand director’s‚Äîcraft, [Catherine Keener's] Kate is a memorable character played by a particularly wonderful actress whose recent performances seem to have been stripped of all artifice. Ms. Keener has the gift of quietude. She can broadcast fondness in absolute silence, radiate love and turn rueful or reflective in the blink of an eye.

Manola Dargis, The New York Times:

Few American filmmakers create female characters as realistically funny, attractively imperfect and flat-out annoying as does Ms. Holofcener, whose features include “Friends With Money” and “Lovely & Amazing.” You may not love them, but you recognize their charms and frailties, their fears and hopes. They may remind you of your friends, your sisters or even yourself, which makes them attractive and sometimes off-putting, an unusual, complicated mix. We don’t necessarily or only go to the movies to see mirror versions of ourselves: we also want (or think we do) better, kinder, nobler, prettier and thinner images, idealized types and aspirational figures we can take pleasure in or laugh at in all their plastic unreality. The female characters in Ms. Holofcener’s films don’t live in those movies: they watch them.

Poster and a few more review highlights after the cut.

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Kristen Stewart has confirmed that she will play Marylou, a character in the Walter Sallas version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. ¬†From USA Today:

As she told USA TODAY’s Susan Wloszczyna today while in Chicago for an Oprah taping, “I am very much attached to a movie that has been trying to get made forever. Not that this is going to help it, but maybe I can just brag a little bit. I am super excited about it, too. I am about to play Marylou in¬†On the Road. So that’s a big deal.”

Filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola and Gus Van Sant have struggled for years to bring Jack Kerouac’s classic 1957 tale of disaffected members of the Beat Generation to the big screen.¬†Tron: Legacy‘s Garrett Hedland will play the confused drifter Dean Moriarity with Stewart as his young wife and British actor Sam Riley (Control) as his traveling pal, Sal. Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) will direct. Filming is expected to start this summer.

So who is Marylou?  Described this way:

Marylou: First wife of Dean. Marylou is left by Dean for Camille, but when Dean leaves San Francisco he goes back to Denver and retrieves Marylou and brings her to Sal’s brother’s place in Virginia. For a while, it seems that Dean and Marylou are interested in Sal being Marylou’s ‘man’ once the group reaches San Francisco, but once there, it becomes apparent that Marylou is only really interested in Dean. After a while she becomes a sort of prostitute but ends up marrying a used-car salesman.

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Two days ago I jumped into the whisper chain about the new J.J. Abrams trailer set to debut with Iron Man 2. Several sources agreed with NY Magazine’s Vulture speculation that it involved a prequel to Cloverfield. Yesterday J.J. Abrams spoke to Vulture directly and told them they had it all wrong. Today there’s a detailed shot-by-shot description of the trailer circulating, but let’s first quote Abrams on the subject of keeping secrets — and the quandary of how to spring surprises while hinting there are surprises to be sprung:

“I don‚Äôt know if it would matter with you guys,” he said, laughing. “I don‚Äôt think it matters.” Is there a better way to keep secret monster movies under wraps? “I’m working on it,” he told us.

Setting the movie in 1970′s suburbia pays homage to Spielberg’s Amblin-era blockbusters like Close Encounters, ET, Gremlins, and Poltergeist — isn’t knowing that enough to get us amped? This morning you can find the teaser being picked apart like the carcass of an alien from a crash site, but won’t that kind of analytical overkill ruin it for you? On the other hand, if you weren’t planning on seeing Iron Man 2 tomorrow, don’t want to wait for a bootleg of the teaser on youtube, but still want to be in the know — then you can read about Super 8 right here as well as anyplace else. SPOILER, via slashfilm, after the cut.

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(via Living in Cinema)

Russell Crowe was in fine form last night. Apologies for the jagged edges of this edit, but you get a bonus Top 10 List just before Crowe comes out. Part 2 after the cut.

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It’s been two decades since Pedro Almodovar and Antonio Banderas made Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. They now reunite for a revenge thriller, La Piel que habito (The Skin I Live In), scheduled to shoot later this year. From Variety via the Guardian:

Variety reports that the movie is loosely based on Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Mygale and will star Banderas as a plastic surgeon on the trail of the man who raped his daughter. “It’s the harshest film I’ve ever written,” Almodovar told El Pais this week. “And Banderas’s character is brutal.”

“[The Skin I Live In]” will be a terror film without screams or scares,” the director explained to El Pais. “It’s difficult to define and although it comes close to the terror genre, something that appeals to me [and] that I’ve never done, I won’t respect any of its rules.”