A new trailer for The Great Gatsby has hit the web. Let’s see if it has all the ingredients of a Baz Luhrmman joint: Hot, youthful actors with well-defined jaws? Check. Eye-popping colors? Check. Settings suitable for an Architectural Digest cover story, even when they depict abject poverty? Check. Iconic period-piece story juxtaposed with hot-right-now soundtrack? Check. Multiple scenes of operatic emotional outbursts? CHECK!
Luhrmann may make cool films, but his cinematic world runs hot. So, it’s amusing — but not surprising — to see that there is quite a bit of screaming going on in this new clip, which you can watch in its entirety at the end of the post. The first example can be found at the 35-second mark when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby reacts rather emotionally to Joel Edgerton’s needling. (He plays Tom Buchanan.)
From there, it’s a glimpse of the hell of war, as seen once more through the gaping mouth of DiCaprio:
Next comes a shot of Tobey Maguire all dressed up and looking like he’s auditioning for the part of the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man.
A little later, we get Jason Clarke, who was so damn good in Zero Dark Thirty, pulling off a complex running-and-screaming combo.
And then it’s back to Maguire for what looks like a five-vein meltdown….
Put those all together and you get this:
While there’s no shortage of burly action hero types in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, it’s Jessica Chastain who’s front and center hunting down Osama bin Laden in the first trailer — and that in itself is worth noting as you mark your calendars for the December Oscar contender.
I mean, how fantastically striking is the above image of Chastain, her shadow, and the American flag? Chastain plays a CIA operative attempting to locate the al-Qaeda leader, who was killed while in hiding in Pakistan nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks.
Chastain is joined by Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, Joel Edgerton, and more in the tale of how a global network of operatives joined forces to bring bin Laden down. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s research for the film had come under scrutiny by right wing watchdogs, though that flap has died down in recent months. Expect buzz to start back up again, only of the gold statue kind.
Zero Dark Thirty hits theaters December 19.
Synopsis:
For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar(R) winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.
[via iTunes]
Also in Friday’s Biz Break: indie horror maven Ti West goes “mainstream,” Daniel Craig signs for more Bonds, and Spike Lee’s Oldboy is snapped up by FilmDistrict for U.S. release.
Jeffrey Wright Cast In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Lionsgate continues to beef up its sequel cast with stellar veteran talent. The Tony- and Golden Globe-winning actor will play Beetee, a former victor from District 3 thrown into the Quarter Quell competition with Katniss Everdeen. [Press release]
Robert Pattinson’s The Rover Makes International Sales
The pic from David Michod (Animal Kingdom) sees RPattz teaming up with Guy Pearce for a gritty dystopian Outback thriller; actor-filmmaker Joel Edgerton co-conceived the story, and filming begins this winter. Rights have been sold in “United Kingdom, Canada and Benelux to eOne, Scandinavia to Nordisk, Latin America to Sun Distribution, the Middle East to Italia Film and Eastern Europe excluding Russia to Revolutionary Releasing. Village Roadshow already picked up the film in Australia and New Zealand,” per THR.
Ti West And Eli Roth Team Up For The Sacrament
Indie horror auteur West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, V/H/S) begins filming this month on the under-wraps horror thriller, which will court buyers at the Toronto Film Festival. Roth will produce and West will direct from his own script in what Roth describes will be West’s “first mainstream movie,” via Variety.
Daniel Craig Commits To Two More Bonds
With his third turn as 007 in the can (Skyfall hits theaters in November), Daniel Craig has signed up for at least two more Bond pics in the current EON Production series. According to MI6, Sony/MGM…
“That was excruciating,” exhaled director Kieran Darcy-Smith as the lights came up on the Sundance opening night premiere of his first feature, the Australian dramatic thriller Wish You Were Here. The theater buzzed with appreciation, sure enough, and the film’s emotional blows strike as sharply thanks to strong performances by Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price. But movies like these almost always prompt that irksome question: Are we all at risk of suffering a case of the film festival goggles?
Wish You Were Here follows two Aussie couples (Edgerton and Price, Antony Starr and Teresa Palmer) who go on holiday in Southeast Asia only to see one of their party go missing, with ramifications that ripple out like shockwaves when they return home with fried nerves and secrets galore. Shot beautifully in Australia and Cambodia, it’s a slow-burn character drama that begins as a missing persons tale before switching gears to domestic drama/paranoia thriller in its rapidly escalating last act, doling out bits of information about what really happened on that last drug-fueled night.
It’s easy to see why Wish You Were Here was chosen to open the festival; just two years ago the Aussie import Animal Kingdom premiered at Sundance, leading the charge for a new wave of Australian cinema. Wish You Were Here unites Animal Kingdom actors Darcy-Smith and Edgerton, whose star has risen considerably in the past few years, under the Blue-Tongue Films banner they founded with Edgerton’s brother Nash. But while there’s a lot to like in Here, it doesn’t live up to David Michôd’s explosive 2010 feature debut.
The film flashes between moments in time: Married couple David and Alice (Edgerton and Price) and Alice’s sister Steph (Palmer) struggle to adjust to normal life but are plagued by…
Full Story »I found 2011 to be a great, overstuffed year in film, though the sweeping trend of nostalgia that peaked during this awards season left me a little cold. Hugo, War Horse, The Artist, The Adventures of Tintin, The Help, even the self-aware looking back of Midnight in Paris — when it’s been such a turbulent 12 months beyond the movies, the comfort of evoking the past, especially the cinephilic past, is understandable, particularly with attendance down once again. But the features I really loved tended to be more prickly, vital affairs, about tragedy and life messily, stubbornly going on in its aftermath — ones that reminded us that film can not only be a great escape, but can also engage and reflect the outside world.
10. Shame
Steve McQueen’s sophomore effort took flack from some who found it moralizing in its portrayal of sex addiction, but it’s not a film about a condition, it’s a film about damage. Michael Fassbender plays a man who’s left a traumatic childhood behind and has shored himself up in the city that never sleeps with an immaculate condo and a high-powered job that almost hide his underlying desperation and his inability to connect or open up to anyone on anything other than a physical level. It’s one of the loneliest portraits of urban living I’ve ever seen.
9. Warrior
The neglected blockbuster of our Occupy Wall Street era, Warrior drapes Rocky trappings over characters and settings more immediate than you’d ever expect at a multiplex. Its two brothers, in what should have been star-making turns from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, head to the cage after taking beatings elsewhere — one’s left the Marines on less than ideal terms after the death of colleague, the other’s upside down on his mortgage and…
Throw on your fur and gaze sinisterly by a swimming pool, because those collectible toys of Oscar season, the “Consider” campaigns posters, are busting out. The first one up for inspection is the campaign for Warrior, the gritty MMA drama starring Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte. Let’s take a look at the wordy one-sheet and see if it makes us feel any differently about its positioning in the Oscar index.
So, no. Bye, everyone!
All right, let’s dwell: The poster certainly does a good job of reminding us that we enjoyed Warrior overall — Nick Nolte’s performance is indeed heartfelt and fearless, and the balance of “human frailty” and “triumph” was a pungent trail mix, no doubt. But I feel the same way about Warrior that I do about another September release with a 7-letter “W” name — Weekend. Both are solid films, and if we’re being honest, Weekend is the better one. Unfortunately, both movies are proud, but ultimately unassuming showings in familiar genres. Warrior is a boxing flick with one more protagonist than we usually allow, and Weekend is a whispery romance that’s both incisive and sexually frank, though it lacks those indispensable “Oscar moments” (and an Oscar push too).
But if anyone from Warrior can exhume the movie’s energized machismo and still nab a fifth-place nomination, Nolte is the man. Comeback stories make for unassailable Oscar kudos — the Academy’s always looking for ways to be liked and inoffensive — though Christopher Plummer is dominating the old-timer niche with his shoo-in performance in Beginners. As such, I enjoyed Warrior, but I don’t see it finding a way to overtake any of the standing and upcoming powerhouses.
Consider It…: Mostly KO’d.
Full Story »The Joel Edgerton-Mary Elizabeth Winstead prequel The Thing hits theaters this Friday, so if you need a refresher on the events of the John Carpenter 1982 original — which takes place three days after the new film — what better way to relive it than through the Cliff’s Notes version, as sung in the style of Frank Sinatra from the point of view of the dog? Just go with it. Watch Jon and Al’s John Carpenter’s The Thing: The Musical, then stick around for more Buzz Break.
[Buzzfeed]
• Resident Evil 5 has found its Ada Wong. As star Milla Jovovich Tweeted, Chinese actress Li Bingbing (most recently seen kicking ass in Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame) will play the mysterious spy/assassin in the upcoming sequel. [@MillaJovovich via Coming Soon]
• Meanwhile, 16 zombie extras were injured on the Resident Evil 5 set when a platform on wheels suddenly moved, dropping them 20 feet to the ground. Must… not… make… joke… [TMZ]
• Director Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Other Guys) is taking a brief detour from making you pee your pants with laughter to produce a documentary about the drop-out epidemic in the American public school system. Which will… make you pee your pants with sadness? [Deadline]
• Hugh Jackman says Wolverine could be rated R. Or not. But maybe. Whatever. [MTV]
Full Story »
Australian actor Joel Edgerton has been in the business for a good 15 years, during which time he’s transitioned from Aussie TV to supporting turns in international films (Kinky Boots, King Arthur, and Star Wars: Episode II — Revenge of the Sith) and wrote and co-starred in the solid Australian thriller The Square with brother Nash (who directed). But in 2011 — on the heels of his work in the underperforming but critically-loved Warrior, on the eve of his lead turn in Universal’s prequel The Thing — he seems poised, finally, for his moment in the spotlight.
The thought inspires mixed feelings for Edgerton. On the one hand, a higher profile means he’s been able to land bigger roles, like Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby. On the other hand, he admits on the subject of fame vs. artistry, “You’ve got to be really careful that you’re not falling into the Hollywood trap.”
Edgerton rang Movieline to discuss his career at large and his work in Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing, in which he plays tough-but-sensitive American pilot Braxton Carter, one of a group of scientific research camp members blindsided by a shape-shifting alien creature in isolated Antarctica three days prior to the events of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi classic.
You filmed Warrior in 2009 and The Thing in 2010, but both are hitting theaters around the same time so this feels like the perfect time to talk with you. Does it feel like you’ve been waiting for this moment, this year?
I don’t know! I feel like I’ve been waiting for a moment all my life. And it’s funny; when the moment comes, it doesn’t really feel…
With less than a month until The Thing — the prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi classic — hits theaters, Universal is upping their marketing ante with a spoileriffic red band trailer that not only reveals The Thing, how it is discovered, how it attacks, who it attacks and who it kills, but it also shows off some of the climactic special effects. Subtle much? Click through to see the red band trailer at your own risk.
Taking place three days before the events in Carpenter’s original film, Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as an American paleontologist who joins a Norwegian team of scientists to examine a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship that is buried in Antarctica. When an experiment unexpectedly frees the alien, Winstead joins Joel Edgerton’s crew pilot to prevent the creature from killing them all. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing finds its way into theaters October 14.
What do you think? Is the spoilery marketing campaign killing your build-up buzz for The Thing or do spoilers for a prequel not matter when you technically already know the film’s outcome?
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