When he wasn’t rooting out Communists, cracking down on the mob and spying on civil rights leaders, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover toiled as a one-man culture warrior battling Hollywood decadence. He prevented Charlie Chaplin from reentering the U.S. because of his leftist political views, and he condemned Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life for its “rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.” So what did he have to say about Alfred Hitchcock, who gave American moviegoers new and strange things to fear? Not a bad word.
The only questions anyone’s asking about Hitchcock these days are just how much and what kind of a creeper was he? The famed director’s wandering eye, his sexual obsessions, and less-than-decorous urges roil at the center of Hitchcock, the just-released biopic starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, as well as last month’s The Girl, the HBO film with Toby Jones and Naomi Watts.
As The Birds actress Tippi Hedren claimed earlier this fall, the Master of Suspense could be masterfully cruel and unforgiving. But as far as his popular image as an artiste-provocateur goes, there’s probably more than a little self-mythologizing — or branding, if you’d prefer — in that ironic Englishman persona, the casually sadistic remarks about actors, the pretensions to finding truth in nightmares.
It’s that last detail that fuels Hitchcock, a tempting portrait of “Hitch” as a crowd-pleasing, truth-telling anti-hero — not unlike Howard Stern and Larry Flynt in their respective biopics — who shows moviegoers the dark things they didn’t know they wanted to see. But was his threat to the American psyche all smoke and mirrors? That’s certainly what Hitchcock’s FBI file, obtained via MuckRock.com, suggests.
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Nic Cage re-teams with Con Air director Simon West (Expendables 2) in Stolen, which is the most-est ’90s-est classic Nic Cage genre vehicle we’ve seen in a long time. (Yes, but is it very nouveau shamanic?) The overly complicated plot involving a burned ex-partner and millions in stolen booty! The estranged daughter with an Anne Parillaud haircut! AND OH DEAR LORD IS THAT REALLY JOSH LUCAS OUT-NIC CAGING NIC CAGE? Sigh. It is. Your Friday Fun Time has arrived.
Oh yeah, Malin Akerman is in this (and threatens to turn in the best acting in the cast).
Two lingering thoughts:
A. Is it just me, or does this voice-over narrator pronounce Nicolas Cage like a total weirdo (“Nicolas Ca-aaage”) at the 1:30 mark?
B. JOSH LUCAS WTF!? I can’t even. If anyone needs me this weekend I’ll be watching Sweet Home Alabama on repeat wondering how things could go so wrong over the course of 10 years.
Verdict: Folks, we’ve got to buy tickets and make this a hit so that poor Josh Lucas never has to go oily-skinned and straggly-haired again. EVER. Mmkay?
Director Simon West and Nicolas Cage re-team for the first time since CON AIR for STOLEN, a fast paced action thriller set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. WILL MONTGOMERY (Nicolas Cage) is a master thief who after being double-crossed in a heist gone awry is sent to prison for 8 years. Upon his release he’s ready to leave his criminal past behind and try to rebuild a relationship with his estranged daughter ALLISON. The FBI and his old cohorts believe that he hid the loot from the last heist 8 years ago, $10 Million in Bonds. To get his hands on it, his old
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Full Story »Christian Slater and Donald Sutherland star in the spy action pic Assassin’s Bullet (formerly titled Sofia), about an ex-FBI agent (Slater) assigned to investigate the vigilante killings of terrorists in Eastern Europe. Action fans will know director Isaac Florentine’s work from Undisputed II and III; take a look at the trailer debut, along with new images from the film and set, after the jump.
Florentine’s earned kudos in the genre world for his action films, but Assassin’s Bullet introduces a new element: Namely, Bulgaria-born Elika Portnoy, who co-stars as an elusive and deadly agent and earns a story credit on the film.
Synopsis:
When an unknown vigilante begins killing high-priority terrorists from America’s Most Wanted list in Europe, a former FBI field agent (Christian Slater) is brought in by the US Ambassador (Donald Sutherland) to discover the identity of the assassin.
Click here for Movieline’s exclusive gallery of images from Assassin’s Bullet.
Assassin’s Bullet opens August 3.
“In the movie Wall Street I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.” And with that, Michael Douglas stumps for the FBI in a new public service announcement warning investors against financial misdeeds. If Gordon Gekko himself says greed is no longer good, it must be true. Fraudsters, beware!
“Matthew, could you please let us know how you went about meeting your wife?”
“Sure,” said Matthew Broderick. “Right after I’m assassinated.”
Such was the mood late this afternoon at Guild Hall, where, at arguably the Hamptons Film Festival’s most anticipated event, Broderick sat for a conversation with his old friend and peer Alec Baldwin. Or mostly conversation, anyway, until the wild interruption from the balcony that nearly derailed a perfectly delightful chat about humble beginnings, John Hughes. Marlon Brando, Producers-mania, botched films and so much more.
I’ll have full details about all of that tomorrow, but it’s worth noting the really good times the veteran actors and their guests enjoyed late in the Q&A portion of the show. That’s when a woman identifying herself as Deborah Connelly shouted down at the stage from upstairs, praising both as kind, good-hearted men before getting to her real point.
“I’m a very good, honest, Irish Catholic woman who stands before you now, who is truly telling you the truth,” she said. “The Patriot Act is being abused my vicious cousin who works for the Terrorist Task Force at the FBI, and in an old romance with an obsessed fireman.”
The audience’s WTF’s rumbling shifted to the event’s more customary laughter as Baldwin began singing the chorus of “Brotherhood of Man,” the showstopper from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — the exact inverse of which Ms. Connelly was accomplishing there at Guild Hall.
“I nearly lost my life over this,” she continued. “And when…
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Oh, great. Just when we thought Armie Hammer’s kiss with Leonardo DiCaprio in Clint Eastwood’s upcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic was going to be explosive, Eastwood himself is confirming that he’s leaving the first FBI director’s sexual orientation “open to interpretation.” I know a certain TV personality who might have damning evidence to the contrary.
Eastwood says that the rumored affair/relationship between Hoover and his Associate FBI director Clyde Tolson isn’t exactly a sure bet: “Some people might say [they] were just inseparable pals. Or maybe it’s a love story without being gay, I don’t know. But it’s very interesting, the way [Dustin] Lance [Black] laid out the script. It was nicely written. It didn’t go to the obvious.”
First of all, Tim Gunn told us that during his childhood, he’s pretty sure he talked to J. Edgar Hoover while he was dressed up as Vivian Vance. That doesn’t make J. Edgar Hoover gay, but that does mean he, y’know, dresses up as Vivian Vance. Makes you think J. Edgar Hoover had firm answers about his own sexual orientation, and none of the ambiguity that Eastwood describes. Plus, J. Edgar Hoover was a real person, not a literary character. Can we stop pretending there’s anything to “interpret” about whether he preferred to sleep with men?
Mind you, there’ve been plenty of biopics featuring main characters whose sexual preferences remain nebulous: For instance, in 1977’s Julia, Jane Fonda, as playwright Lillian Hellman, attacks a restaurant patron who questions her relationship with the titular activist. The difference between the ambiguity in that movie and in the ambiguity in J. Edgar is how that gray area relates to the public perception of the…
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The insanely busy Bryan Cranston, whose upcoming slate includes Contagion, Drive, Total Recall, John Carter, Rock of Ages, Red Tails, World War Z, and Argo, has revealed plans to direct his own adaptation of David Wiltse’s novel, Home Again. The crime thriller/mystery drama follows an ex-FBI agent who returns to his family in small town Nebraska only to become caught up in a murder investigation.
Speaking with reporters from the set of Total Recall, Cranston described his Home Again adaptation (which will reportedly be re-titled for the screen):
“It’s basically a very strong father-son story, and a murder-mystery. An FBI agent who suddenly quits the department and takes his son and his wife and moves back to his hometown of Cascade, Nebraska, to rekindle family values and pay attention now. He’s been working for the FBI for years, so he’s been home sporadically. And his son is now sixteen, very sensitive, and looks upon his father like sort of a stranger… And then there’s a murder that happens in the little town that they move to, which kills [the father’s] whole stance on, ‘Things are better in these small towns!’ And then things unravel, and basically, the father and son come together at the end and save each other emotionally and literally.”
Cranston, who previously wrote, directed, and starred in the feature Last Chance in 1999, is developing the project with his Breaking Bad producer Mark Johnson and says filming could begin as early as next year.
⢠Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston Will Write and Direct a Mystery Drama [Hollywood.com]
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Also in this Thursday edition of The Broadsheet: The FBI finally catches the inspiration for The Departed… a tragedy strikes How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying… Viggo Mortensen lends his face to January… and more ahead.
· Sometimes the good movies win. When the box office figures from Wednesday night are released later today, Midnight in Paris will likely have eclipsed Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Match Point to become the highest grossing Woody Allen film since Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986. (If not Wednesday, then sometime on Thursday.) At the rate Paris is trending, analysts think it could even top Sisters’ $40.1 million to become Allen’s biggest hit ever — especially after what is anticipated to be a lucrative Fourth of July holiday weekend. Still haven’t seen Midnight in Paris? Perhaps some of these 10-word reviews can convince you. [THR]
· Crazy real life news to report: the FBI arrested James “Whitey” Bulger in Santa Monica, Calif. on Wednesday night, just days after launching a new campaign that focused on his companion, Catherine Greig. Bulger — who was a top-10 most wanted criminal and had been on the run for 15 years — was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, so you can only imagine how many screenwriters are currently working on treatments about his life on the lam. [LAT]
· The Wednesday…
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