Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has a distinctively aggressive relationship with his audience that ranges from the provocation of Caché and The Piano Teacher to the outright antagonism of Funny Games and Benny’s Video. Amour, his latest work and the winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, might be considered Haneke’s version of a love story, and its grimness is of a much quieter but no less impactful sort. It is, more than any of Haneke’s previous work, infused with compassion, but of a sort that cuts like a knife. For all that it is, as promised, about love, it’s also a subtly punishing affair that grinds you into the ground as you watch an elderly couple deal with one member’s slow deterioration of health and sanity.
Amour starts with firemen breaking into a beautiful Parisian apartment. The bedroom door has been taped up, and inside is the corpse of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), lying on the bed, scattered with flowers — and it’s here that Haneke inserts the title card, to ensure you know that this will not be a syrupy tale. We cut back to when Anne was alive and living with her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), both in their eighties. They attend a concert being given by one of Anne’s former students — a trip that, with the accompanying streetcar ride home, marks the film’s only venture out of the apartment, a location that becomes confining until it shifts into a sort of hiding place to dwell on the misery that life must end, and sometimes does so in messy, undignified failings of the flesh.
Riva and Trintignant are the latest in a long line of Annes and Georges that Haneke’s presented over the years (the names have recurred in his films from 1989’s…
Full Story »Once, Nicole Kidman barely had to raise an eyebrow to get awards attention. Now, she barely can raise an eyebrow and her best work in years is being completely ignored in the Oscar conversation. The Paperboy stars Kidman as Charlotte Bless, a damaged attention-seeker who becomes sexually obsessed with a convicted murderer (John Cusack), while cock-teasing the only man—or really, teenager—who truly loves her (Zac Efron). It’s Kidman’s bravest, boldest, and most committed performance ever, and no one cares for the short-sighted reason that the movie is terrible.
How unfair. The Nicole Kidman of To Die For used to have a bright future before that bright future came true and blinded everyone to her comedic gifts. Once Kidman scored her first Oscar nomination for 2002’s Moulin Rouge, she became the prey of the Hollywood awards hunt, in which the chase for For-Your-Consideration goes like this: take one prestigious actress (see Kidman, Berry, Jolie, Swank), make her play someone vulnerable (see Cold Mountain, Things We Lost in the Fire, The Changeling, Conviction), then cross your fingers. This is why we’ve had a full decade of Kidman drifting about in period costumes or, god forbid, stretching herself to play a movie star in Nine. And people, this is why the Oscar season is boring. This formula guarantees a chase to the middlebrow, and it’s why every Best Picture Oscar winner since Silence of the Lambs is something your grandma would see at an arthouse matinee.
There’s only one thing we can do to save the Academy Awards: nominate Nicole Kidman for The Paperboy.
Just because The Paperboy is bad doesn’t void the bravery it took to make it. Kidman’s Charlotte is a balls-out wonder. She’s pure sex and need, at once over-confident and…
Full Story »Kathryn Bigelow’s angular thriller Zero Dark Thirty begins and ends with events that have been seared into public memory — the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, two incidents that bookended a decade in which America’s sense of security and place in the world were radically shaken.
The film presents the story of what happened in that dark space between. Using a combination of whatever details screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal could turn up in his research and cautious fiction, Zero Dark Thirty details how the U.S. was finally able to track down and kill the elusive head of the organization responsible for the worst terrorist attack on our soil.
But at almost two and a half hours long — an epic running time that never seems excessive but makes you feel the stretch of the years being chronicled — the film also teases your attention away from those known events, and brings it to the gritty, exhausting and sometimes ugly work being done on the ground and the type of people who engage in it.
It’s a curious thing that two of the awards season’s most significant films are stealthy procedurals: Lincoln, which beneath the surface gloss of a prestige biopic is a vivid showcase of the messy, difficult means by which the amendment to outlaw slavery was passed, and Zero Dark Thirty, which is an examination of how contemporary warfare has so much more to do with information than with sending troops out into battle. Both reveal the strenuous, time-consuming and ethically complicated efforts behind their well-known achievements.
While Steven Spielberg’s film uses these exertions to bring animation, prickliness and warmth to characters that could have been wax-museum distant, Bigelow’s…
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When filmmaker Cynthia Mort announced that she was writing and directing a Nina Simone biopic, Nina Simone’s own daughter, Simone, pretty much blew a fart at it, because the family was never asked to participate. The Nina Simone Estate didn’t put their stamp of approval on Cynthia Mort’s movie. Simone and The Nina Simone Estate made it clear that they would rather see a Nina Simone biopic made with LEGOS than see Cynthia Morton’s Nina Simone biopic. Then when it was announced that Zoe Saldana was playing Nina Simone, Simone really rolled her eyes into a double side-eye. Simone told Ebony Magazine that when she thinks of actresses who should play her mom, she doesn’t think of Zoe Saldana.
I love Zoe Saldana’s work. I’ve seen some of her movies more than once and really enjoy what she brings to the screen. As an actress I respect her process, but I also know that there are many actresses out there, known or not, who would be great as my mother. The one actress that I’ve had in my heart for a very long time, whose work I’m familiar with already, is Kimberly Elise. Many people have spoken to me about Viola. I love her look. I love her energy. Both of the actresses that I’ve mentioned are women of color, are women with beautiful, luscious lips and wide noses, and
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They were two of the biggest movies in terms of box office this summer – and likely for all of 2012, yet the battle between The Dark Knight Rises and Marvel’s The Avengers opened a new front in the artistic sphere. TDKR made just over $1.07 billion worldwide (with a $250 million production budget), while Marvel’s The Avengers roared on with a $1.511 billion worldwide gross (and a production budget reportedly at $220 million). One cinematographer offered up his own impressions about the rival’s merits, calling it “appalling.”
Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception as well as three nominations for Batman Begins, The Presige and The Dark Knight. He is even embarking on his own foray into the director chair on an upcoming project next year said that his past work as a news reporter and in documentary helped him to “reduce the amount of artifice” in his work.
Though he has won recognition for his work with TDKR director Christopher Nolan on the Batman franchise, he admitted to not being much of a “super hero fan” and said his reaction was surprise when Nolan first approached him about doing Batman Begins. “I was like, really? A guy in a rubber suit?” Pfister is quoted as saying in the Herald-Tribune speaking to a film class in Sarasota, FL.
He also gave his opinions on Marvel’s The Avengers, when asked what was most important in shooting a film.
“What’s really important is storytelling. None of it matters if it doesn’t support the story,” said Pfister. “I thought The Avengers was an appalling film. They’d shoot from some odd angle and I’d think, why is the camera there? Oh, I see, because they spent half a million on the set and…
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Also in Tuesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams and more begin work on a new project. The Abu Dhabi Film Festival unveils its lineup. And Beasts of the Southern Wild director begins work on a new “Louisiana-fable” project.
Helen Mirren to be Honored by European Film Academy
Mirren will receive the honorary European Achievement in World Cinema 2012 prize at the 25th European Film Awards ceremony on December 1st, this year taking place in Malta. Mirren received an Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in 2006’s The Queen.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Robin Wright Begin Work on A Most Wanted Man
Principal photography began Monday in Hamburg in a film adaptation of John le Carré’s worldwide best-selling 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man, being directed by Anton Corbijn (Control). In the film, a half-Chechen, half-Russian, tortured half-to-death immigrant turns up in Hamburg’s Islamic community, laying claim to his father’s ill gotten fortune, both German and US security agencies take a close interest: as the clock ticks down and the stakes rise, the race is on to establish this most wanted man’s true identity – oppressed victim or destruction-bent extremist?
Around the ‘net…
Tom Rothman to Produce Steven Spielberg’s Robopocalypse
The exiting Fox chief will produce Spielberg’s next film, which will star Chris Hemsworth. Anne Hathaway is the filmmaker’s choice to play the female lead. The story, which explores the fate of the human race following a robot uprising is scheduled to be released day and date in April, 2014, Deadline reports.
Abu Dhabi Film Festival Unveils Lineup
David Ayer’s End of Watch, Robert Zemeckis’ Flight and Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep are among the titles that are…
Prince William and Duchess Kate continued the Southeast Asia vacation they’re trying to pass off as work today by visiting the Soloman Islands. I know they’re calling it a Diamond Jubilee Tour, but if it looks like a duck wearing vacation clothes, eating delicious locals foods and posing for a lot of pictures, it’s called a duck on a damn vacation! The last time I had a beautiful necklace of flowers around my neck, I was in Hawaii ON VACATION. But you know, they’ve both earned it, because being a professional royal hand shaker is hard work. (“But Michael, all they’ve been doing in Asia is shaking hands.” – you “Good point. I sit corrected.” – me)
And you know, it was really nice of the local women to make Kate feel at home by taking their tops off.
Before Twilight and even before Kristen Stewart was first approached to be in On The Road by Brazilian-born director Walter Salles, the young actress read the Jack Kerouac novel for school. She told Movieline that she picked up the book because it was an assignment given, but her experience with the now American classic evolved. “I found the book fun,” she said. But after reading and studying it more, it became much more compelling and taught her personal life lessons about growing up, making choices and dealing with inhibitions. She also emphasized that while she played the comparatively wild Marylou, she does not judge her uninhibited character.
[PHOTOS: Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, and Kirsten Dunst Go 'On The Road' in Toronto]
“I learned through the book that you really have a choice about who you surround yourself with. [As a young adult] you realize you can choose who you’re surrounding yourself with,” Stewart told ML in Toronto where On The Road debuted over the weekend. “Up until that point you’re really circumstantially with your family or whatever but at some point you can ‘choose’ your family.
“I have a great family by the way, but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen. And when I read the book, I thought, ‘Gosh I need to find people like that.’ I’m definitely not the Marylou type. But as I continued reading it as I got older, the weight of it started to mean something more.”
In the film version of the book, Stewart plays Marylou who was first married to, then divorced from, and ultimately a lifelong companion/lover/fellow free spirit to Dean Moriarty. The story centers on Dean (based in real life on Neal Cassady) who…
Full Story »The two most chilling films I’ve seen so far in Toronto are both documentaries: Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers and Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.” I’ll be writing more about Gibney’s film in the coming days, but I got a chance to briefly interview Moreh at a dinner Sony Pictures Classics threw at Creme Brasserie in the Yorkville District of Toronto, and I want to share his comments.
The Gatekeepers is remarkable because Moreh managed to get six former leaders of Israel’s security agency Shin Bet to go on camera for the first time and talk about the sometimes very dark things they’ve done to protect their homeland from terrorism since the Six-Day War of 1967. The men talk about torture, about cultivating informants and about collateral damage: the calculations that go into deciding whether to take out a terrorist at the risk of also killing innocents. They also talk, in very level-headed terms, of the spineless nature of the political leaders to whom they report.
What really resonated with me is that Moreh never loses sight of the fact that, despite the life-and-death decisions these men made over the course of their careers, they are just men. (Indeed, one of the men looked unsettlingly like my father.) And in addition to pulling the curtain back on what goes into the bloody sausage-making process of Mid-East politics, these former Shin Bet leaders talk quite eloquently about the toll their work took on their psyches and their souls.
What I didn’t expect is for the men that Moreh interviewed to agree so readily that peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is possible, even if they didn’t all agree on how it should be…
Full Story »Introducing Movieline’s ARRIVALS series, spotlighting breakthrough performers enjoying a bit of a “moment.” Today meet British actress Carmen Ejogo, whose scene-stealing performance in Sparkle kicks off a big year in film and TV.
As much as Sparkle is about well, Sparkle (Jordin Sparks), the shy young singer who learns to come into her own in this weekend’s R&B remake (not to mention Whitney Houston in what might have been her comeback), it’s Carmen Ejogo’s scene-stealing Sister — sultry, ambitious, and tragically doomed — who brings the film’s cautionary lessons crashing home. Ejogo’s offscreen story is even more intriguing: the MENSA member and one-time backing singer for Tricky (she does her own vocals in the film) got her start in the 1986 David Bowie musical Absolute Beginners and tried the leading lady route in her first crossover roles (Metro, What’s the Worst That Could Happen), before earning notice in Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, HBO’s Boycott, Lackawanna Blues, and last year’s Away We Go.
With Alex Cross and ABC’s Zero Hour on the horizon (“It’s kind of like Da Vinci Code meets Mulder and Scully in The X-Files,” she laughs), Ejogo, who lives in Brooklyn with husband Jeffrey Wright and their children, is poised for a breakthrough year stateside. She rang Movieline en route to the airport, still buzzing about the film’s crowd-pleasing premiere.
How did the Sparkle premiere go?
Carmen Ejogo: It was fantastic. I’m still sort of trying to absorb the comments that came afterwards about my performance. I’ve been a mom at home mostly for the past ten years, trying to raise a family, and so to come back with a role like this and then to have an evening like last night, where the movie was received really well and my…
