Standing well over 6′ tall, with an athletic frame and impeccably coiffed hair, Richard Armitage the silhouette screams matinee idol, which makes it all the more impressive that Richard Armitage the person screams “Dwarf!”
But, then, this isn’t your older brother’s axe wielding, pipe smoking, occasionally tossed comic relief.
As Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of a band of not so merry dwarves looking to reclaim their ancestral homeland from the ravages of the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Armitage takes his first bold, steely-eyed, heroic steps into the world of Middle Earth, embodying with method exactness the badass anti-hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original.
Before that, though… a little bit of fun. Armitage recently sat down with Movieline in New York City where he revealed the physicality of being a dwarf, his facility for speaking in tongues, his hard fought battle scars, and the number one reason you should always answer an interrupting telephone.
Movieline: Here’s what we can do. We can do the entire interview in Khuzdul [the fictional language created by J.R.R. Tolkien for the dwarves of Middle Earth].
Khuzdul!
Do you speak dwarvish?
I speak some dwarvish.
Do you speak it fluently?
There isn’t really that much [in The Hobbit].
Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu!
No. You can’t fool me. That’s from Lord of the Rings.*
Do you know dwarf sign language?
[Huge laughter from Armitage as he crosses one forearm perpendicularly over the other, giving an especially vigorous non-dwarf signal.]
Yes, any dwarf could understand that. But, no, this is a real thing. Tolkien made dwarf sign language because, you know, it’s too loud to talk in the mines.
Actually, we did work with Terry Notary and we did work on a kind of sign language.…
Full Story »Movieline caught up with the charismatic William Friedkin last weekend at the Seattle Film Festival, where the Exorcist/French Connection director received a Lifetime Achievement award and screened his brutal Southern-fried potboiler Killer Joe. Before he held court keeping a packed audience rapt with tales from his nearly five-decade career in film (highlights below), Friedkin stopped to discuss two of the topics he’s wrestling with these days: His legal battle to win back the rights to his 1977 pic Sorcerer, and the absurdity of the MPAA, which anointed Killer Joe with an NC-17 rating.
Friedkin is active on Twitter, which has allowed film fans unprecedented access to the Oscar-winner and given him the chance to discuss his battle for the rights to Sorcerer, his Roy Scheider-starring remake of The Wages of Fear. “I’m suing Universal and Paramount to get control of Sorcerer,” he explained to Movieline. “It evidently means a lot to people, and I want people to be able to see it.”
As with many older films, rights to Sorcerer lie out of the filmmaker’s hands – and studios, according to Friedkin, are allowing precious 35mm prints to deteriorate right under their own noses. “What’s happened to the legacy of almost all the studios is that the people who run them now don’t care,” he said. “They don’t give a damn. I know the guy from Lincoln Center, he tried to get a print of Blade Runner and Warner Bros. told him they didn’t know who owned it.”
Even in the care of studios, library titles threaten to become damaged beyond repair. Friedkin doesn’t want what happened to another ‘70s classic to happen to his film. “Paramount put out a beautiful Blu-ray of The Godfather almost two years ago,” he said.…
Full Story »We were just talking about Scenes From a Marriage, too: The Swedish actor-writer-director Erland Josephson has died following a protracted battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He was 88. Josephson came to prominence as a friend, theater colleague and eventual ensemble player for the great Ingmar Bergman, finally breaking into the leading-man ranks in the filmmaker’s seminal relationship epic Scenes before eventually diversifying with roles in films by Peter Greenaway (Prospero’s Books), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Light of Being) and, most indelibly, Andrei Tarkovsky, who cast Josephson in his 1986 masterpiece The Sacrifice. Very sad. R.I.P. [NYT]
Full Story »By many accounts — okay, mostly just the filmmakers’ — this week’s commando pic Act of Valor marks a new kind of filmmaking on account of it’s a Navy SEALS actioner starring real active duty soldiers that takes the viewer along on a near-firsthand experience of what it’s like to fight terrorists and baddies. From the looks of the film’s new redband featurette this means audiences will get to see what it looks and sounds like to drop dome shots left and right in the heat of battle, because nothing says “valor” better than shooting strangers in the head with automatic weapons.
I’m sure there’s a fair amount of weightiness and responsibility within Act of Valor, since the filmmakers do seem to have a genuine respect for the members of the armed forces who risk their lives to serve and protect. But a clip like this — which debuted on gamer-leaning IGN, where it could easily get lost within a gaggle of first person shooter promos — doesn’t do much besides glorifying the awesomeness of battle, as seen partially through helmet-mounted cameras.
I count no fewer than eleven, maybe 12 exploding head shots in the span of this two-minute video, but what makes this even freakier is the fact that the majority of the cast is culled from active duty Navy SEALS who may have had similar skirmishes in the field. Watching people who have been trained to kill pretend to kill people who may resemble people they’ve actually killed in real life is a tricky thing to digest. It’s one thing to witness the brutality and heroism of actual military life via the movies (see: Restrepo); it’s another to embrace the glossy, redband-worthy violence as pure entertainment.
But maybe you disagree? Check…
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Bill Condon rang Movieline today for a special early chat about The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One, and while the full interview will post this weekend, we’ve got a snippet to whet your appetite. Between talk of vampire weddings and critical expectations and such, Condon shared a particularly fond memory of the time when, during filming of an epic battle scene from the simultaneously-filmed Breaking Dawn Part Two, the guy from The Fall led his entire cast in an impromptu flash mob dance-off to the sounds of the Eurythmics. Hear the tale after the jump!
Word on the street was that filming on The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn was interrupted by a pre-meditated prank, pulled on Condon, by nearly his entire cast — a choreographed dance-off that took the director by surprise in the middle of a key battle scene.
“It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen,” Condon told Movieline. He explained how it all happened.
“In that second movie, as you know from the book, a half-hour of it takes place in this one location, this one field,” Condon said. “We shot there for, when you include the second unit, a couple of months — but the first unit was there for many weeks.”
“When we came to the last, widest shot, with 80 vampires on one side and 27 vampires on the other, I’m sitting up the ladder and suddenly you hear this music — ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).’ And the Cullen side starts this incredible, West Side Story-kind of rumble. The other vampires then start to dance back. It was unbelievably big.”
Who was responsible for the vampire dance-off? “I know Myanna Buring was behind it,…
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With Brad Pitt’s box office triumph in Moneyball comes the resurgence of a particular Pitt coif: the longish bob. It’s not my favorite Pitt ‘do, but it reignites his age-old battle with doppelganger Robert Redford to steal all of the film legend’s hairstyles and make them better, I say we formalize this battle, Tyler Durden! Join us as we pit the Spy Game duo’s most comparable hairstyles against each other — and settle this winsome war once and for all.
(Clarification: I picked photos that represent the best of each style. Yes, Brad has had messier “messy” ‘dos, but I picked the most photogenic version.)
Blond power cleft
Oh, Brad. Bobby mastered this before you born. Redford’s The Way We Were/All the President’s Men clefts should be stored in the Smithsonian, while Brad’s half-assed, scorch-yellow cleft should be stuffed in a Nick Carter superfan vault. Woodward and Bernstein won’t be busting that wide open any time soon. Winner: Redford
Womanly Tresses
Such a difficult category. Here you have Rob Redz in Three Days of the Condor sporting Martina Navratilova’s entire face, and Pitt waiting to audition for Jane Fonda’s role in a gender-neutral remake of Klute. For commitment to ladylike angst,…
Full Story »The Dark Knight Rises isn’t the only 2012 summer blockbuster filming on the streets of an American city: Marvel Studios has staked out Cleveland, Ohio to shoot a climatic battle in The Avengers starting next week. Which would be great, if Cleveland wasn’t supposed to stand-in for Times Square. Yes, that Times Square.
Production crews are currently busy making Cleveland’s East 9th street (between Euclid and Prospect avenues) look like the famous Manhattan thoroughfare of tourist gridlock, and judging from some Google Street View shots of both areas, it’ll be easier said than done.
[Click for bigger]
Good luck, VFX team! Filming on the Joss Whedon-directed film begins Aug. 15, and the production will continue throughout Cleveland until Labor Day weekend. “We have to keep people back a bit for safety reasons — there will be explosions — but they will be able to see the actors and their favorite Avengers on the street during the filming,” said Patty Whitcher, an executive producer on The Avengers. Be careful what you wish for, Patty. Just ask Christopher Nolan.
· ‘Avengers’ workers start transforming East Ninth into scene for epic battle [Cleveland.com via Coming Soon]
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Getting a movie’s setup right is one thing. But following through on an intriguing premise is the hard part, and that’s where Matthew Chapman’s The Ledge, a thriller that wrangles with intricate ideas about faith and religious extremism, goes splat.
Charlie Hunnam is Gavin, an apparently freewheeling guy who works as a hotel manager in Baton Rouge. Gavin is intrigued when a shy but curiously self-possessed young woman named Shana (Liv Tyler) comes to him for a job. Shana also happens to live a few doors down from the apartment Gavin shares with his roommate (Chris Gorham), and she’s married to uptight religious freak Joe (Patrick Wilson), who proudly dispenses anti-gay rhetoric and other un-Jesuslike jibber-jabber.
Gavin doesn’t care much for Joe, but Shana’s sweetness and forthright demeanor attract him immediately. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: When we first meet Gavin, he’s creeping out toward the ledge of a very tall building, fully intending to leap. Hollis (Terrence Howard), a cop trained in dissuading potential jumpers, has been called out to the scene. Unfortunately, Hollis has problems of his own. And in the first of the movie’s many outrageous implausibilities, he gets a call on his phone from his wife and — get this — excuses himself from talking Gavin off that ledge while he decides whether or not to answer.
Hollis is lucky Gavin doesn’t do a pavement-dive then and there — but if he did, you wouldn’t have a movie. And Chapman wouldn’t have the chance to expound on religious fanaticism and other assorted quests…
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Things have been a wee bit quiet where Jonathan English’s 13th century siege pic Ironclad is concerned, but with the indie action pic’s July release right around the corner Movieline’s got just the uber-gory clip reel to set your pulse racing. (And, perhaps, your stomach turning.) Watch out, Paul Giamatti! The Knights Templar are coming for you.
Giamatti plays King John in the true story of a band of Knights Templar, led by James Purefoy, who resisted the king’s siege of Rochester Castle in a historic 13th-century battle. Billed as “A Medieval Magnificent Seven,” Ironclad co-stars Kate Mara, Brian Cox, Derek Jacobi, and Jason Flemyng.
The film is rated R “for strong graphic brutal battle sequences, and brief nudity.”
Be warned: Nonstop sword-slashing, neck-slicing, blood-spraying violence ahead.
Ironclad hits U.S. theaters on July 26.
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