It’s funny how out of control a rumor can spin on the web. The Angelina Jolie as Catwoman “news” has to be at the top of the list of most reported unconfirmed rumors ever. And it’s sad that it’s not actually true, because after seeing Jolie in the dominatrix outfit she wears at the beginning of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I’d be perfectly fine seeing her wear another tight black costume for a possible third Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie.
But who instead could play the part, if Jolie is indeed not interested, or not even offered the role (or, obviously, if Catwoman is not in the movie, as screenwriter David Goyer has apparently hinted)? One theory says that Maggie Gyllenhaal will return in the follow-up to The Dark Knight, this time donning a catsuit (Graeme at io9 strongly disputes the idea). Another terrible suggestion is to cast the too-cute Zooey Deschanel as the villainess. A far more interesting recommendation, from Catherine Bray, is Tilda Swinton. But I think the character needs to be a little sexier. Plus, I want to dismiss Bray’s idea on the principle that it’s included in the DenOfGeek list, which consists mostly of the usual hot young actress ideas that probably get thrown around for every casting decision like this.
I’m actually shocked that Eva Green wasn’t anyone’s pick, as she’s one of those hot young actresses, and she’s done the “good and bad at the same time” thing in Casino Royale. She was even part of my list until a better candidate edged her out, mostly on the idea that we don’t need to see her replay Vesper Lynd in a Catwoman costume. So, who did make the cut? Check out my 10 favorites, in descending order, after the jump:
Surfer Girl devotes twoposts to the meme that there may be an “interactive There Will Be Blood milkshake drinking” game in the works. I think the Juno game meme was the final straw––I think I have finally, fully slipped into a state in which the ironic walls have closed in so tight that I can no longer even tell when I’m being fucked with. Via Scanners.
Maybe I’m Not There would have worked better if more of Todd Haynes’ collaborators actually cared about Bob Dylan. Says Stephen Malkmus, who recorded several Dylan songs that appear in the movie, “I was more into Creedence Clearwater Revival…Dylan was a punk-rock guy and his records are undeniably genius. But you don’t know what’s going to speak to you, and his music didn’t for me.”
Chris Thilk approves of the poster for Fool’s Gold. I think. “[T]his poster is good at selling the movie based on the personalities (and breasts) of the two actors involved. Get them smiling at each other, turn them a shade of yellow that’s only slightly removed from the residents of Springfield, hint at a tropical location by putting water in the background and you’re finished.”
Brit Withey of Denver Film Festival fame has surprising news from the Berlinale: “…you can no longer smoke anywhere. I’m fine with this in the United States and I knew it was coming in France…but Berlin? Christ…”
Todd Haynes new Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There comes out in a few weeks. In case you haven’t heard the schtick, Dylan’s multiple personas are played by different actors, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett, among others.
I was a nominal Dylan fan in college, but the film made me fall in love with the man again. My renewed affections for Dylan were called into serious question however, when I stumbled upon the above video on the YouTube homepage. I know Dylan has been many things over the years, but corporate shill for GM? Come on!
As I thought about it more, I started to realize that maybe I missed the point of Haynes’ film…
At the Filmmaker Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Pitchfork’s effusive (for them) review of the soundtrack for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. In every way, it seems to be the audio mirror of the film: it’s a two-disc set of Bob Dylan covers by (by my count) 30 artists, each with a different style of interpretation. And like the film, the soundtrack is a massive undertaking that’s by turns interesting, boring, a failure and a success. You can listen to three tracks, by Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power and Calexico, here.
I agree with Stephen M. Deusner of Pitchfork that Stephen Malkmus’ songs are pretty good, and certainly better than most of what he’s done in the eight years or so since the dissolution of Pavement. But I’ve been having kind of a reniassance of late with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I still can’t reccommend Karen O’s god-awful verson of “Highway 61 Revisited”, which you can sample here. I understand that the idea was to commission a number of artists to record covers specifically for the movie, but man … they would have been much better off recycling PJ Harvey’s version, from her 1993 record, Rid of Me, and calling it a day. See her performing it live above. And if you must, use the comments to vilify me for accusing Todd Haynes of being a 60s narcissist, while I’m clearly just as bad when it comes to the 90s.
In the latest “What’s wrong with The Weinstein Company?” piece from the New York Times (Michael Cieply penned the previous installment of the saga, six months back), David Carr begins with the thesis, “For the second year in a row, Harvey and Bob have had some significant misses at the box office and probably won’t be major players at the Oscars.” He then offers a pack of typically hyperbolic denials from Harvey Weinstein. Among them is Harvey contention that his studio does, in fact, have a hand to play at the Oscars–behind Denzel Washington’s latest directorial effort, The Great Debaters, and the John Cusack war widower drama Grace is Gone.
But nowhere in the story does Weinstein mention I’m Not There, the film featuring the performance which prompted Weinstein to bellow just two months ago, “If Cate Blanchett doesn’t get nominated, I’ll shoot myself.”
Sure, it’s possible that Weinstein *did* flog Todd Haynes divisive Dylan film in his interview with the Times‘ David Carr, and the quote just didn’t make it into the final draft. It’s also possible that Carr, satisfied with the mogul’s name-checking of two barely-buzzing star vehicles, neglected to push the issue. But it could also be a sign that, despite his earlier bravado, Harvey’s been burned too much, too often of late to really stand behind a semi-difficult sell.
At Tuesday’s press conference following the press and industry screening of I’m Not There, writer/director Todd Haynes talked about referencing Godard and Fellini (but not, he insists, Don’t Look Back), the ability of film to collapse time, and why he chose to cast a woman and a black child to represent two of the six disparate facets of Bob Dylan’s life. We have audio from the press conference after the jump; to skip to a specific section of the 28-minute clip, see these handy show notes:
00:01: Getting Bob Dylan’s music and life rights
04:03: Why six Dylans?
04:49: Working in different film stocks/formats
05:41: Dylan didn’t have approval of details
06:29: The collapse of time, in the film and in Dylan’s work
09:21: On breaking free of the constraints of the biopic
11:23: Casting
12:51: Don’t say Don’t Look Back
16:05: References to other films
21:41: Fitting the strands of the story together
23:48: Why have Dylan played by a woman?
25:45: Portraying Dylan’s cultural influences, and Dylan-as-wannabe
Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a postmortem–but of what, exactly? It opens with the examination of a corpse, played by Cate Blanchett; the press notes tell us we’re supposed to connect this image to Bob Dylan’s 1968 motorcycle accident, in which he almost died but didn’t, and after which he was allegedly never the same. So on some level, it’s a love letter to a dead man whose body is still with us-–although, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of the film yesterday, Haynes kept referring to Dylan in the past tense, as though his own private Dylan was long gone and never to return–but it’s also a catalogue of various shards of the dead culture of the 1960s. It’s as vital as it sounds: like so many of Haynes’ films, it’s based on a provocative concept that plays in practice like a museum piece.
It’s a collage of personality impressions and visual styles. Grainy, fluttering black and white gives way to a bottle green landscape, spotted with the second best psychedelic lens flares of the NYFF thus far. The film’s hallucinatory logic seems at first to defy any kind of stricture, until the references start to stack up: visual quotations from Dylan album covers, The Beatles doing silent comedy, La Strada; actual, scripted quotations from at least two Godard films. Each of the six protagonists is a walking (though hardly living or breathing) quotation, a riff on a Dylan phase or personality thread. A young ruffian who uses poetry to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man. A prepubescent compulsive liar. A misunderstood prophet who finds his true calling by turning to God. An aging cowboy in hiding, laying low in a town obsessed with Halloween. A bad actor who becomes a big star and neglects the woman he loves. A put-opon speed freak who uses pop music to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man.
The New York Film Festival opens to the public tonight with two screenings of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. Since today also marks the midpoint of the press screening schedule, here’s a recap of the films we’ve covered so far, with info on when they’re screening for the public at NYFF and when/where you’ll be able to catch them if you’re not in New York.
*The Darjeeling Limited
Screens 9/28 at 7:45 and 9pm; opens in New York tomorrow and expands next week.
“It’s this kind of style-as-substance that has earned [Wes] Anderson a lot of flack over the years, but I’ve come to the point where I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to fault the guy for pursuing his balls-out personal vision. And though the quirk factor of that vision can be grating, Darjeeling’s DNA is more in line with the sentimental glamour of Margot Tenenbaum’s furs, and less with the antiseptic affectation of Steve Zissou’s nautical suit. Watching the feature, for me, often felt like being welcomed back into the embrace of an old friend.”
*The Romance of Astreé and Céladon
Screens 9/29 at 10am and 9/30 at 9:15pm; no U.S. distribution
“For a film in which a hot-to-trot nymph princess imprisons a cross-dressing himbo, it offers a surprisingly touching celebration of the spiritual over the physical, and as a tale of a crisis of romantic faith, it could play comfortably alongside any of the 1930s marriage comedies.”
*4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Screens 9/29 at 12:30 PM and 10/1 at 9:15 PM; opens in select theaters and on VOD later this year.
“It all adds up to a portrait of a political situation that transforms even the most mundane personal activities into a negotiation process, ranging from frustrating to humiliating, to downright horrifying.”
*The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Screens 10/29 at 6pm and 10/30 at 10am; opens in limited release on 12/19
“Julian Schnabel’s third feature is an almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery.”
16 films are set to world premiere at the Rome Film Festival, including Francis Ford Coppola’s aforementionedYouth Without Youth, and Noise, a comedy starring Tim Robbins. Also noteworthy: the Tom Cruise/Robert Redford vehicle Lions for Lambs will play Rome first, thus scooping AFI.
Speaking of Coppola, the filmmaker’s office in Buenos Aires was burglarized this week. The perps allegedly “subdued a collaborator of the filmmaker and stole a camera and computers,” one of which contained the script for Coppola’s next planned project, which was set to be shot Buenos Aires with Matt Dillon in the lead.
The Mill Valley Film Festival will host the U.S. premieres of Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream and Things We Lost in the Fire, as well as a number of special events, including a performance of Shostakovich’s original score by the Marin Symphony alongside a screening of Battleship Potemkin; and a concert of Bob Dylan covers following a screening of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. The musicians for the latter event have not yet been announced, but I’d put money on an appearance from Pavement vet Stephen Malkmus, who ghost-sang for Cate Blanchett in the movie.
Today’s the hump day between the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. We’ll be rolling out some final coverage of the former as the day progresses, before moving on to a burst of coverage of the latter tomorrow. First, here’s a look at some of the trade news from the past few days that we missed over the long weekend in Colorado:
Variety’s Pamela McClintock says a super summer for the studios is bad news for smaller/artsier films. “[W]ith the debut of one successful studio pic after the next this summer, indie distribs and studio specialty arms had trouble drawing attention to their pics and keeping even the most successful ones in theaters. How much this pattern will affect future release strategies remains to be seen.” But she has a prescription: “the box office success of horror titles this summer reinforces the notion that studio specialty arms and indie production companies need to balance out their slates with more commercial genre titles.”
In Telluride, people seemed to either love or hate Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, but Todd McCarthy offers the only lukewarm review I’ve seen. McCarthy says Cate Blanchett’s performance is “electrifying,” but the later section starring Richard Gere “is poorly conceived on every level, as it dramatizes and contributes nothing.” The critic’s assessment of the film’s cross-over appeal is pretty dismal: “In the end, it’s a specialists’ event.”
Sacha Baron Cohen has finally confirmed a rumor that’s been going around for a year: he’s following up Borat with Bruno, based on the fashion correspondent character from The Ali G Show.
The SXSW Film Festival is still 6+ months off, but Matt Dentler and his team have already announced conversations with two special guests: documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, and composer/source cue generator/tea impresario Moby.
Spike Lee will judge entries in the upcoming Babelgum Online Film Festival. The fest will award about $130,000 in prizes to six short filmmakers.
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