Judging from a raucously well-received New York screening of Les Misérables on Friday afternooon, the most exciting aspect of the 2013 Oscar race will be a contest between the precision of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and the passion of Tom Hooper’s epic musical. An enthusiastic audience that included Anne Hathaway’s actress mother Kathleen Ann (she gave her daughter a big thumb’s up from the crowd), applauded and sniffled its way through the two-hour-39-minute feature and a post-screening at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.
Hooper was kidding when, during the Q&A session that also featured cast members, Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks, Eddie Redmayne and Hathaway, he told the audience that he put “a lot of gaps in the edit” to allow for applause. And yet, the picture had the audience — which seemed to be packed with Broadway aficionados — cheering at the end of each musical number, weeping during the tear-jerking final scenes and delivering a standing ovation at film’s end.
Based on their applause, Hugh Jackman, who anchors the film as the ex-con Jean Valjean, and Hathaway, who plays the doomed grisette Fantine, are shoo-ins for Best Actor and Supporting Actress nominations, despite the latter actor’s much-too-brief screen time. (Thank you, Jamie, for setting the record straight.)
One reason there aren’t a lot of musicals on the big screen these days is that they’re hard to take seriously in a world where Saturday Night Live has come to rely on half-baked musical parody as a weekly crutch — Les Miz got the treatment when Hathaway hosted two weekends ago — and Trey Parker and Matt Stone are doing both musicals and musical parody better than anyone. (
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe played a crazily estranged couple in Lars von Trier’s erotic/thriller/surreal Antichrist in 2009. And now, Dafoe is set to return to Von Trier’s latest, Nymphomaniac along with Gainsbourg, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Stellan Skarsgard and Uma Thurman. Others are joining the cast, while one big name has pulled out.
Nicole Kidman had been rumored as another possible addition to the cast, but she has more regal obligations and cannot join, according to THR. Kidman, who played the lead role in von Trier’s Dogville is currently busy playing Grace Kelly in Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco.
Dafoe, meanwhile, will play a supporting role in the two-part erotic Nymphomaniac, which will be released in both a hardcore and soft core version. Dafoe is currently in Hamburg, starring in Anton Corbijn’s drama A Most Wanted Man.
Von Trier veteran Udo Kier, who has taken part in a number of von Trier’s films including his most recent Melancholia has also joined the cast along with French actor Jean-Marc Barr (Dogville), Caroline Goodall (Schindler’s List), Kate Ashfield (Shaun of the Dead), Saskia Reeves (Butterfly Kiss) and Danish actor Omar Shargawi (R).
In the film, Gainsbourg stars as Jo, a self-described nymphomaniac who reveals her story to an older bachelor played by Stellan Skarsgard.
Rumors have flown over the summer whether named actors would take part in sexually explicit scenes, though porn-star “stand-ins” have also been rumored to be engaged on camera. Shia LaBeouf fueled the rumor when he said he was ready to “go all the way” in Nymphomaniac.
[Source: THR]
AFI Fest is fast approaching and the event unveiled Centerpiece Gala and Special Screenings details with Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (3-D) and Walter Salles‘ On the Road on tap for their West Coast debuts. Peter Ramsey’s Rise of the Guardians and Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone will also debut. Bone star Marion Cotillard will receive a tribute during the festival, taking place November 1 – 8. All galas will take place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
A number of Toronto premieres will be presented as Special Screenings at AFI Fest. Eight titles including The Central Park Five, Ginger and Rosa, Holy Motors, The Impossible, Quartet, Room 237, TIFF winner Silver Linings Playbook and West of Memphis will screen in the section.
As previously announced, the World Premiere of Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock will open AFI Fest, while Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln will close out the event. For the fourth year, AFI Fest will off free tickets for all of its screenings (though packages are available to ensure reserved seats for Galas).
AFI Fest 2012 Galas with descriptions provided by the event:
Opening Night Gala:
Hitchcock: The love story between the iconic filmmaker and his wife, Alma Reville, during the filming of PSYCHO in 1959. DIR Sacha Gervasi. SCR John J. McLaughlin. CAST Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Danny Huston, Toni Collette, Jessica Biel, Michael Stuhlbarg, James D’Arcy, Michael Wincott, Richard Portnow, Kurtwood Smith. USA. World Premiere. Thursday, November 1, 7:00 p.m., Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
Centerpiece Galas:
Life of Pi in 3D: Director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) creates a groundbreaking movie event about a young man who survives a disaster at sea and is hurtled into an epic journey of adventure and discovery. While…
Full Story »Hungry for some funny? Sounds like the new competitive carving satire Butter might be what you’re craving, at least according to its cast who hit the red carpet last night for the NY premiere!
Jennifer Garner, Olivia Wilde, Modern Family’s Ty Burrell and more were all on hand for the creamy fete hosted by The Cinema Society along with DKNY, Forevermark, and RentTheRunway.com — and they all went out of their way to assure audiences that Butter is NOT a political comedy.
So then what is it? To find out, watch my video interview below!
Plus while Butter hits theaters October 5th, you can get instant gratification right now as the movie’s currently available on iTunes and On Demand. And if it’s half as fun as the cast seems to have had making it, then you’re in for a treat…
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Joe Wright’s latest Anna Karenina had a cast, screenplay and plan of action in hand in the spring of 2011, but the acclaimed filmmaker of Atonement and Pride & Prejudice made a bold step a mere two months before beginning the shoot. Instead of another straightforward narrative telling of the story of the epic novel by Russian great Leo Tolstoy, he opted to go for a theatrical angle in depicting the saga of a late-19th century Russian high-society aristocrat who breaks entrenched taboos and embarks in a torrid love affair with affluent soldier, Count Vronsky. In Toronto where the film is having its World Premiere Friday night, cast members including star Keira Knightley and Wright likened the sudden change to “jumping off a cliff,” but they were ready for the challenge, though not all were sure if it would ultimately succeed.
“I don’t know that we did know it would work,” Keira Knightley, who plays Anna Karenina, said Friday morning. “With Anna Karenina it’s been done so many times before and there was a sense that if you’re going to tell this story again, you might as well do something that’s out there.” “Out there” includes depicting scenes of the titled heroine (or anti-heroine) on a stage as her marriage and social status disintegrates. Wright grew up working at his parents’ puppet theater and took classes at the Anna Scher Theatre School and even acted on stage, no doubt influencing his creative point of view. And, perhaps conveniently, the reversal served-up some pragmatic pluses, according to Wright.
“A lot of the budget was being spent on hotels and travel and all this stuff that the audience is never going to get to see,” he said in Toronto today at a hotel with a small group…
Full Story »Speaking of old….Dax Shepard deployed one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book on the Conan show on Monday when he diverted attention from the lame box-office performance of his movie Hit and Run by poking fun at the aging action stars who kicked his cinematic ass, the cast of The Expendables 2.
Shepard told host Conan O’Brien that the cast of the Sylvester Stallone-directed The Expendables 2 were “all show and no go” when it came to their collective well-muscled appearance. “It looks like the zombie apocalypse is saving the earth,” Shepard said in reference to the veteran ensemble.
Alas, Hit and Run might have benefited from scenes of a zombie apocalypse, or something that would have raised moviegoer interest. The picture, which also starred Bradley Cooper and Shepard’s real-life girlfriend Kristen Bell grossed just $5.9 million in its initial five-day opening. The movie ranked 10th for the weekend, well behind The Expendables 2, which saw a $13.5 million weekend and a 15-day domestic box-office take of $52.3 million.
Feeling a little insecure there, Dax?
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There’s a lot of “auto” in Dax Shepard’s debut as an auteur. Shepard (who previously co-directed the mockumentary Brother’s Justice) wrote, co-directed and stars in the action comedy Hit and Run; he even cast real-life love Kristen Bell to play the role of his cherished girlfriend, but their romance is not at the center of this movie — rather, it’s the deep love between Shepard and the many cars that populate the film that drives Hit and Run. It’s only when these machines rev their engines that the soundtrack fills with sultry ballads and the camera switches to slow mo — all the better for us to admire the sleek undercarriages and sexy lines of the movie’s many four-wheeled stars.
But this is far from a good thing. The movie’s human stars can’t compete with such auto-erotica; cartoonish characters and a thin plot are mostly vehicles to get from one stretch of highway to another, in a chase through the kind of cinematic America where fleabag motels have parking lots filled with easily-stolen luxury sports cars and roadways are always adjacent to abandoned airports that provide plenty of space for nifty driving tricks.
Shepard stars as Charlie Bronson, a likeable guy living in a non-specific American everytown. Although Charlie doesn’t have a job, he does have a devoted girlfriend, Annie (Bell), and a bumbling U.S. Marshal (Tom Arnold, looking increasingly like a nerdy version of Meat Loaf) to watch over him. Charlie, you see, is in the Witness Protection Program, a fact that is supposed to prevent him from leaving his safe provincial town. But when Annie has the opportunity to interview for a big job at a university in Los Angeles, Charlie decides to chauffer her towards her dreams and away from…
Full Story »This week Shia LaBeouf announced that his blockbuster phase is over. From here on out he’s focusing on working with indie artistes, starting with everyone’s favorite provocateur, Lars Von Trier. But will Shia go all the way for his art on Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, which will reportedly be shot in both softcore and hardcore versions and potentially require its cast to perform unsimulated sex scenes?
“There’s a disclaimer at the top of the script that basically says, we’re doing [the sex] for real,” LaBeouf told MTV during a chat promoting Lawless, as Lawless co-star Jessica Chastain looked on lamenting the future corruption of “little Shia.” “And anything that is ‘illegal’ will be shot in blurred images, but other than that, everything is happening.”
Charlotte Gainsbourg will play the lead and reunite with her Antichrist director in Nymphomaniac, in which Von Trier “wants to see the sexual arousement of a girl [on screen],” according to producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen. Stellan Skarsgard and Nicole Kidman have also signed on to join the cast.
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My dreams are dashed. After enjoying the big-screen treatment of 21 Jump Street — replete with cameos by original cast members Johnny Depp, Peter DeLuise and Holly Robinson Peete — I held out hope that Fox would make a smart alecky theatrical adaptation of Beverly Hills 90210. But the Hollywood-goes-to-high-school-series just opted for smaller rather than bigger.
Our sister website TV Line reports that cast members of the original Fox series, Jennie Garth, Jason Priestley, Luke Perry and Gabrielle Carteris are taking part in an ad campaign for the Old Navy clothing company’s fall line. The situations are familiar. Carteris moons over Priestley, as she did in the 1990s, and Garth chooses jeans over Priestley and Perry, which pretty much sums up the 2000s to the present. I’d like to suggest that Old Navy tap Garry Shandling as Larry Sanders for another campaign. I swear I’ve seen Shandling wearing mom jeans at media events, and Old Navy could strike advertising gold by putting a sell-sell-sell twist on one of Shandling/Sanders signature lines — we’re paraphrasing here — “Do these pants make my ass look fat?” Why no, Mr. Shandling, your ass looks a-mazing!
Check out the Old Navy commercials below.
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