If you think of Penn Badgley in terms of Dan Humphrey, the character he played for five years on the CW Network’s Gossip Girl, prepare to have your world rocked. The actor is about to make the transition from television to film look easy with a big performance in a small film: Greetings From Tim Buckley, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 3 and in other select markets later that month. Badgley plays Jeff Buckley, the remarkably talented musical artist known for his album Grace and a much-adored interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, who, like his singer/songwriter father in the movie’s title, died much too young. Directed by Daniel Algrant (People I Know), Greetings From Tim Buckley is about Jeff’s attempts to get out from under the long shadow cast by his late dad (played by Ben Rosenfield). Buckley pere died from a drug overdose at the age of 28, but, despite his short life, left behind a substantial, mostly critically acclaimed body of work, including nine studio albums. Jeff was working on his second album in Memphis, Tenn. when he drowned while swimming in the Wolf River there in 1997. He was 30.
The story is a rich one, but Badgley was at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go. Greetings From Tim Buckley did not have permission to use Jeff’s music in the film — a second planned Buckley biopic, Mystery White Boy, will have that privilege — which meant that the actor had to convey the singer’s immense talent and charisma without tapping into his songs. He more than rises to the occasion thanks to a tour-de-force a cappella performance at a record store that moviegoers surely will be talking about in the weeks to come.
I spoke to Badgley late last year after I saw Greetings…
Full Story »
Warner Bros. won its lawsuit against mock-buster Age of the Hobbits. Also in Tuesday’s news round-up, Amy Adams will be feted for The Master; Tim Buckley feature is heading to U.S. theaters; Disney will adapt Dolphin pic for a feature; and Gus Van Sant is lending his name for the U.S. release of acclaimed Laurence Anyways.
Warner Bros. Triumphs in Hobbit Mock-buster Case
A federal judge granted Warner Bros., MGM and others a restraining order against mock-buster Age of The Hobbits, saying the victory over Global Asylum’s “cynical business model.” Global had planned a to release a parallel pic, Age of the Hobbit against Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Deadline reports.
Amy Adams to Receive Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Award
The three-time Oscar-nominated actress will be presented the events’s prize January 31st. Adams is a contender for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the wife of a cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, THR reports.
Greetings From Tim Buckley Heads to U.S. Theaters
Directed by Dan Algrant, the Toronto Film Festival feature explores two generations of musicians, Tim and Jeff Buckley. Penn Badgley plays Jeff Buckley as a young musician who rehearses his public singing debut at a Brooklyn tribute to his father and struggling to come to terms with his legacy with the help of an unlikely woman at the show. While they discover each other and New York City, the film also explores Tim’s (Mr. Rosenfield) 1960s heyday, as he drives cross-country with a girlfriend and finds himself on the verge of stardom. Tribeca Film will distribute the pic with Focus World, a subsidiary of Focus Features.
Disney to Adapt Dolphin Boy Feature
The studio secured rights to…
David O. Russell (The Fighter) is gunning for awards season again with The Silver Linings Playbook, and Movieline’s got a signed poster from the Oscar hopeful to give away! So sharpen your pencils and your wits and submit your best 10-word review of any film by director Russell for a chance to win.
Silver Linings Playbook stars Bradley Cooper as Pat Solitano, a guy who’s lost everything – job, marriage, sanity – and moves back in with his parents (Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver), where he meets an intriguing woman named Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence).
The dramedy has been steadily gaining momentum since its debut at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival, and marks Russell’s second film in two years to aim for the Oscars. (Read more at the Silver Linings Playbook Facebook page, where sports nuts can submit their best-worst sports obsessions and listen to four Pandora playlists “selected” by the film’s eccentric characters.)
CONTEST RULES:
- Submit an original 10-word review of any David O. Russell-directed film in the comments below, on Twitter, or on Facebook. Entries must be exactly 10 words, no more, no less!
- Enter with your full name and an email address where you may be reached.
- One (1) winner will be selected and announced on Friday, November 2. Contest ends Friday, Nov 2 at 5pm ET/2pm PT — so get to reviewing!
Silver Linings Playbook, meanwhile, his theaters November 21.
“Gameday” app allows fans to submit their own game day superstitions since the film centers around a family who are OBSESSED with the Eagles and have their rituals and superstitions that they go through every time they play. The best submissions will be shared on the SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK website.
“Playlist” app allows you to…
Full Story »Thrown together for five months of real-life training and preparation — during which time they witnessed some harsh times, indeed, while preparing to play LAPD officers — Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña put in extraordinary dedication to bring authenticity to David Ayer’s End of Watch. In an exclusive featurette, the duo (along with Ayer and co-star Anna Kendrick) share their experiences making the gritty found footage cop drama (and love for one another): “[Peña] and I spent over half a year together, going through some of the scariest situations that I’ve been through in my life,” says Gyllenhaal. “Mike’s my other half.”
The film, from writer-director Ayer (Harsh Times, Street Kings, Training Day), debuted at the Toronto Film Festival to strong reviews. (92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — not too shabby.) Critics applaud Gyllenhaal and Peña’s close, charismatic chemistry,an element obvious even from trailers and clips. Mark your calendars.
Synopsis:
END OF WATCH is a powerful story of family, friendship, love, honor and courage starring Academy Award® nominee Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña as young Los Angeles police officers Taylor and Zavala as they patrol the city’s meanest streets of south central Los Angeles. Giving the story a gripping, first-person immediacy, the action unfolds through footage from the handheld HD cameras of the police officers, gang members, surveillance cameras, and citizens caught in the line of fire to create a riveting portrait of the city’s most dangerous corners, the cops who risk their lives there every day, and the price they and their families are forced to pay.
End of Watch is in theaters September 21.
Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter.
Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Also making the rounds: Eric Roth will receive an honorary award at the Austin Film Festival, the latest doc from the filmmakers behind Sweetgrass and Foreign Parts makes a deal, and the Sylvester Stallone-Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Tomb gets a 2013 release date.
David Gordon Green And Nicolas Cage: Two Great Tastes?
THR reports that Nic Cage will star as an ex-con and mentor to a teenage boy in a gritty Southern-set adaptation of Larry Brown’s novel Joe. The versatile David Gordon Green (All The Real Girls, George Washington, Pineapple Express, The Sitter) will direct, either reining in or letting Cage’s signature nouveau shamanic acting method run free.
Cinema Guild Acquires TIFF Doc Leviathan
The documentary by directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) will be distributed in the U.S. by Cinema Guild after screening next week at the Toronto Film Festival and subsequently at the New York Film Festival. The experimental documentary about fishing “captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.”
Eric Roth To Receive Honors At Austin Film Festival
The annual event, held October 18-25 in Austin, TX, will award the Forrest Gump and Curious Case of Benjamin Button screenwriter with the Distinguished Screenwriter Award. The Oscar-winner will also take part in “A Conversation with Eric Roth,” along with a retrospective of his work and screening of 1999’s The Insider.
Martin Scorsese, Steve James, and Steven Zaillian To Make Roger Ebert Doc
America’s most beloved critic announced via Twitter that he’ll be getting his own (much deserved) documentary, with a trio of heavy hitters behind the camera: Hoop…
Reincarnated begins, appropriately, with a big cloud of smoke. Over the course of the documentary, which premiered today in Toronto, rapper Snoop Dogg (real name: Calvin Broadus) transitions into his reggae-focused new alter ego Snoop Lion, dropping classic lines left and right. Will Snoop Lion be around for long? “I’m Snoop Motherfuckin’ Dogg till the day I die,” he told reporters, “but at the same time when I’m making my reggae music I’m in the light of the Lion.” Well then! Get to know the Lion a little better with 9 Snoop Lion quotables from Reincarnated.
1. “Reggae is a form of hip hop and hip hop is a form of reggae.”
2. Sample lyrics of Snoop Lion’s first reggae recording, “Smoke Da Weed”: “Smoke da weed/Every day/Don’t smoke da seed…”
3. Snoop, after revealing that he stole from his white school friends: “You all know you shouldn’t have let me in your motherfuckin’ houses.”
4. Snoop’s cousin Daz: “I’m smoking a blunt in the jungle!“
5. To reggae legend Bunny Wailer: “We want to bless you with some California herbs that we have.”
6. “My songs are too hard…I know Obama wants me to come to the White House, but what the fuck can I perform?“
7. “I want to be loved while I’m here. And the only way to get love is to give love.“
8. Snoop on turning 40: “I’m wiser, or a bit wiser. Like Budweiser.“
9. Not a quote, but a fun fact: Snoop’s Rastafarian name is “Berhane,” which means “light.”
Stay tuned for more on Reincarnated.
check out Movieline’s ongoing coverage of the Toronto Film Festival.
Follow Frank Digiacomo on Twitter.
Follow Movieline on Twitter.
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…
Kristen Stewart said that the sex scenes and the nudity weren’t the difficult part of playing Marylou in On The Road. Rather it was her character’s emotional openness. ”She loved so openly — and that’s hard,” Stewart said of Lu Anne Henderson. She also referred to her character, who Neal Cassady married when she was just 15, as “a bottomless pit” — presumably a reference to her emotional capacity — who would have been “ahead of her time even now.” (For more photos of Stewart, check out our Toronto Film Festival photo gallery.)
Stewart, who wore a sparkly floral dress and black high-tops, seemed her usual intense and uncomfortable self as she spoke during an extremely brief Q&A session that followed the movie. But the more she spoke about Henderson, the more animated the actress became, particularly when she said that Henderson, in spirit, “was so fucking there for me” on the set.
The second and last question asked of her came from a fan, who drew winces when, in the spirit of On the Road, she asked Stewart where she’d choose to go if she could go anywhere. After taking a half-hearted stab at answering the question, the actress finally said, “I don’t know, dude.”
Judging from the polite applause that followed the screening, the crowd liked but didn’t love On the Road, which, thanks in part to its source material, felt aimless at times. That said, the performances by Stewart, Garret Hedlund, who plays Cassady doppelganger, Dean Moriarty, and Sam Riley, who essentially plays Kerouac, are strong. Stewart doesn’t have a lot of lines, but she brings a sultry radiance to the screen that is impossible to ignore. I don’t know if this performance is going to net her an Oscar nomination, but it’s clear that…
Full Story »The Toronto International Film Festival is off and rolling. TIFF’s official opening night is Rian Johnson’s Looper with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt… and all kudos to them, but Toronto is sharing the opening spotlight with Walter Salles’ On The Road, a “surprise” event for Dredd, Rust & Bone — starring Gordon-Levitt’s The Dark Knight Rises co-star Marion Cotillard — and others.
As TIFFers arrived in town, the tradition of a slow opening night ended. It was full tilt as events, traffic, schmoozing and gossip about what movie is good, what is less so, was well underway. One prognosticator even had the Best Female Actress Oscar noms already lined up (at least in his mind) — and one is Rust and Bone’s Cotillard, pictured here with Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard Thursday evening at a dinner hosted by Moet & Chandon Champagne at Michael’s in downtown Toronto.
Of course no stranger to Oscar, the French actress won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007 for La vie en rose. She turns out another stunning performance in Rust & Bone, by French director Jacques Audiard, in which she plays a beautiful — naturally — woman who meets a club bouncer played by Bullhead actor Matthias Schoenaerts. Their chance meeting turns into a stronger bond that takes flight after an accident.
“I was very excited after reading the script,” Cotillard said about her role playing Stephanie in Cannes in May. “When a script moves me, I find that I immediately understand a character. Of course not completely, but I do understand.”
Read more from the Toronto Film Festival.
Follow Brian Brooks on Twitter.
Follow Movieline on Twitter.
If, like me, you’ve been lamenting the steady bleed of thoughtful, investigative journalism from newspapers and magazines, the Toronto International Film Festival offers hope via visual media. Scanning the list of documentaries that the festival will be screening, the subject — and the fresh, innovative ways in which the filmmakers are tackling them — calls to mind the original, smart, and, often, great journalism that came from the pages of Harold Hayes’ Esquire magazine in the 1960s and early’70s, arguably, the gold standard of 20th Century magazine writing. And here are the 10 docs that will have my undivided attention here in Toronto. Now I just have to find the time to see them.
1. Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley: Initial reports are that the wise-beyond-her-33-years actress and filmmaker has made a stunning auto-documentary by becoming, as she puts it, “a detective in my own life.” Polley — the daughter of the late actress and casting director Diane MacMillan Polley, who died when Sarah was 11, and British actor-turned-insurance-agent Michael Polley — delves into her murky family history to separate fact from fiction. I hear that the answers she unearths resonate like a punch in the gut.
2. Love, Marilyn, Liz Garbus: The enduring perception of Marilyn Monroe as a “Candle in the Wind” to use the title of Elton John’s exquisite song, gets an overhaul in Garbus’ close-up of the actress and sex symbol. The Bobby Fischer Against the World filmmaker uses an ensemble of actresses — including Marisa Tomei, Viola Davis, Ellen Burstyn, Evan Rachel Wood and contemporary trouble doll Lindsay Lohan — to give voice to Monroe’s never-before-seen personal papers, diaries and letters which reveal her to be a fiercely ambitious steel magnolia with a poet’s soul.
3. The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh: The buzz has been building on…
Full Story »
