Javier Bardem booms out, “You shall love (pause) whether you like it or not.” Bardem is seen dressed as a priest in ‘To The Wonder,’ the latest film by Terrence Malick, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival. The trailer opens with a couple walking across what looks like a bridge over the Seine in Paris who then head to what looks like the tidal island Mont Saint-Michel before heading back to more suburban locales and then pastoral expanses.
Starring Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Bardem, the film was originally set to star Christian Bale who later dropped out.
The feature by the reclusive Malick is a romantic drama centered on an American man who is torn between the woman who moved to the U.S. to be with him (Kurylenko) and the appearance of a local woman from his past (McAdams) as his marriage falls apart. The film managed to polarize audiences in Venice.
Full text of Bardem’s voiceover in the trailer below.
You shall love whether you like it or not. Emotions, they come and go like clouds. Love is not only a feeling; you shall love. To love is to run the risk of failure, the risk of betrayal. You fear your love has died; perhaps it is waiting to be transformed into something higher. Awaken the divine presence which sleeps in each man, each woman. Know each other in that love that never changes.
[Source: The trailer is exclusive to TheFilmStage.com via Huffington Post]
In the previews for This Is 40, the only shots of Megan Fox show her in a bikini or in a bra, because the producers think that if Paul Rudd sitting on the toilet isn’t going to sell that shit, then Megan Fox in a bra will. Megan Fox tells The Mirror (via DM) that you better stare long and hard at her chichis in a bikini, because that’s probably the last time you’ll ever see them on the big screen. Megan is somebody’s mom now and feels like she has a moral responsibility to not embarrass her son by putting her tits on display. Mickey Rourke’s favorite actress and my favorite philosopher said this about taking her clothes off for the cameras:
“It changes your perspective about being overly sexual in a film when you have a baby. I’m going to be more cautious about choosing films because I’m already thinking about when he’s in school and his friends are going to be showing him my photo shoots with me in a bikini and he’s going to be horrified. So that will deter me from making some of the choices I made before.”
Megan Fox washed Michael Bay’s Ferrari in a bikini for her Transformers
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Full Story »First, Abe Lincoln was a vampire hunter. Now he sounds like he might have been a very early member of the Green Lantern Corps. The 16th president’s tough formative years will be explored in The Green Blade Also Rises, which will mark the directorial debut of Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) protege A.J. Edwards who also wrote the screenplay. Malick will produce the film, which despite its sci-fi-sounding title, will depict the hardships that molded young Abe into the man who became one of America’s most influential presidents.
Lincoln has yet to be cast, but the filmmakers announced on Friday that Wes Bentley (The Hunger Games) will play the president’s first teacher, and Brit Marling (Another Earth) will play Nancy, Lincoln’s biological mother. Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds) and Jason Clarke (Public Enemies) are also on board as Lincoln’s step-mother and father. Edwards got his start as an editorial intern on Malick’s The New World and served as the editor on his most recent film To The Wonder.
The previously untitled, Ben Affleck/Rachel McAdams-starring project due later this year has also received an R rating for “some sexuality and nudity.” Ugh. This calls for a petition! Meanwhile the film still awaits an official release date; stay tuned here for details as events warrant. [CARA via Film Stage]
Here’s Christian Bale and Wes Bentley shooting scenes in Santa Monica at sunset yesterday for a new Terrence Malick movie, and since this is a Malick movie you won’t see any of these moments in moving picture form. When Terrence Malick finishes editing this movie, you’ll only see 45 minutes of an intense close-up of a foam bubble on a wave followed by another 45 minutes of sand trickling out of Christian’s hand. You won’t see Christian making the full “sittin’ on da toilet and really excited about it” pose (alternately: the “anal oral handy special” pose). You won’t see Christian and Wes having dylsexic-style butt sex. You also won’t see Christian and Wes not knowing how to quit each other.
Oh well, everyone involved is still going to win all the Oscars for this shit. That includes the seagull who felt the wrath of Christian’s airborne punches after it crashed his scene. Just add seagulls to the list of things Christian is fucking done with, professionally.
The troubles marring the relationship between fast-talking literary agent Jack McCall (Eddie Murphy) and his wife and the mother of his baby Caroline (Kerry Washington) are nothing next to the issues A Thousand Words has in marrying wacky physical comedy and a new age exploration of absentee fathers. The film, which is directed by Norbit’s Brian Robbins and written by Bruce Almighty’s Steve Koren, is being slung at audiences as a broad family laffer of the Jim Carrey school, but spends just as much time trying to be a serious tale about letting go of childhood resentments and accepting mortality. The “deep” bits aren’t, despite a climactic shot in which Murphy actually frolics with his childhood self through a Terrence Malick-style dreamy field of wheat, and the parts that aim to be funny rarely succeed at that either, telegraphing their punchlines so far in advance that they don’t really need to follow through on them.
Murphy’s journey into the lucrative and yet so often awful world of family-friendly comedies is one that’s been taken by plenty of comics, but he wears it worse than most, his edges sanded off and a too calculated look in his eyes as he prepares for the soggy reconciliations with which these stories always end. It doesn’t help that even the pratfalls in A Thousand Words look tired and recycled. McCall climbs a tree to rescue a cat only to have it attack him, making him fall. McCall bluffs his way to the front of a long line at Starbucks by pretending his wife’s in labor. (I realize this is really not the type of film at which to nitpick, but beyond the vaudeville-era mustiness of the gag, why would anyone believe that someone in a wild rush to the hospital would still stop for coffee?) McCall causes multiple car accidents trying to…
Forty-eight hours to Oscar. Gut-check time — or maybe make that “gut-instinct check” time, a moment to break away from the meticulous zeitgeist-combing science of Movieline’s Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics and make a few choices for myself. Not that they’ll be so different, but if you can’t go with a hunch where 5,765 fickle, insular industry minds are concerned, then what can you go with? We can’t all be be Otis the Oscar Cat, you know. Anyway, let’s make this quick:
BEST PICTURE
A certain voluble sliver of the Oscar punditocracy likes to whine about The Artist’s awards-season supremacy — as if it signaled some searing compromise of the Academy’s historic tradition of recognizing only the finest, most artistically challenging and rigidly contemporary work. These people sound like some bitter old man bitching about how the Super Bowl halftime show never features anyone good anymore, or some mouth-breathing fanboy complaining about the vanquished integrity of Star Wars. You guys, they were never good to begin with. In their own way — as meritocratic tastemakers — neither were the Academy Awards. This year’s foregone Artist win has less to do with regressive, reductive cultural tastes than it does with Harvey Weinstein being a good marketer, no different than 15 years ago. If these whinging bozos won’t learn, then can’t they at least shut up?
Will win: The Artist
Should win: Melancholia. Wait, what? Oh. Fuck it. That’s the best picture of 2011. Period.
BEST DIRECTOR
Have you seen Midnight in Paris recently? Man, that one does not hold up. The Descendants never did in the first place. Hugo is fine, but I think the groundswell of voters who got Terrence Malick into the competition in the first place could…
Full Story »You know that when two of the most respected pundits in all of Oscardom argue (within days of each other!) for curtailing both the epic Academy Awards season race and the ceremony in which it culminates, patience for all this crap is wearing thin. With that in mind — and also considering that the “race” for most of these categories ended weeks or months ago — who’s up for an Oscar Index lightning round? (The entire staff at Movieline’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics raises its hands.) OK, then — to the Index!
The Final 9:
1. The Artist
2. The Help
3. The Descendants
4. Hugo
5. Moneyball
6. The Tree of Life
7. Midnight in Paris
8. The Daldry
9. War Horse
Though we cannot rule out any of these underdogs’ mounting a behind-the-scenes charm blitz before Academy polls close next Tuesday, or the implications of the reminder that no movie about movies has ever won Best Picture, The Artist’s triumph at last weekend’s BAFTA Awards only tightened its seeming lock on the Best Picture Oscar. Still, let’s hear it for The Descendants, blazing the media afterburners for a desperately needed uptick. (The Help, by comparison, got a forlorn-looking electronic billboard.) Also, don’t look now, but somebody actually dared to write thoughtfully about The Daldry. Not a minute too soon! Anyway, yes, Steve Pond, we’re all with you: Let’s just end this farce already.
The Final 5:
1. Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
2. Alexander Payne, The Descendants
3. Martin Scorsese, Hugo
4. Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
5. Woody Allen,…
After spending the last year with her Oscar and her new baby, Natalie Portman is set to return to acting with a busy year with not one, but two Terrence Malick films. The Black Swan star will join Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett to film Knight of Cups this summer, with all three reuniting in the fall to film Malick’s Lawless with Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, and Haley Bennett. Plot details for both films have been kept under wraps, so tee off with your thoughts on the Portman addition and the unusual double film casting move below. [Deadline]
