Behold! Set pics from Woody Allen’s new horror movie, in which 20 year-old Evan Rachel Wood and 60 year-old Larry David grab a knish. Looks like Ben Kingsley was just the beginning of the threat to Hollywood’s nubile youth. More at dListed, if you can stomach it.
The news [via Vulture] that Larry David has been cast in the lead of Woody Allen’s upcoming return to New York project makes me really happy for some reason. I mean, obviously, he’s been cast in the traditional role of Woody stand-in; and, obviously, there is going to be either a romance or some kind of hokey mentor relationship between he and the sure to be precocious-yet-neurotic sexpot played by Evan Rachel Wood. But still! If Woody *has* to make films about old men and the young girls who are inexplicably drawn to them, at least he’s found a pair where the girl has experience kissing up to a much creepier older man.
For a taste of what David can do when working alongside a canonical New York auteur, check out the clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm above.
Julie Taymor’s long-awaited Beatles-fueled musical seems to have split critics neatly into two camps. There are people like Aaron Dobbs and Anne Thompson, who give Taymor’s spin art 60s pastiche an A for effort, but ultimately concede that the film could, at the very least, stand to have some rainbow-hued fat cut. Then there are the full-on haters, like the journalist I spoke to immediately after yesterday’s press screening, who used the phrase “literally retarded,” and Glenn Kenny, who compares the “mortifyingly soft-headed” experience to “watching Sesame Street.”
They’re all right, and they’re all wrong. The first hour of Across the Universewas nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be; the remaining hour+ was worse. It’s not an experience I would recommend for any obsessive Beatles fan (you’d never be able to stand the fast-food commercial instrumentation), and Taymor’s refusal to deal with the dissolution of the counterculture will infuriate hippie cynics.
But I’m absolutely positive that a shorter cut, stripped of some of the forced multiculturalism and contemporary political references, would play like gangbusters in middle schools.
MTV’s Movie Blog is trumpeting two exclusive new trailers for Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s big budget period musical starring a pre-Marilyn Manson Evan Rachel Wood and set to the songs of The Beatles. These trailers are super different from the film’s international trailer, which Sony implanted on YouTube a few weeks ago. Where as the international spot seemed to play up the film’s non-musical elements (epic scope, romantic and political subplots, Taymor’s patented baroque psychedellia), these new trailers seem squarely aimed at the High School Musical crowd.
It’s probably a smart move for Sony to hedge their bets like this: the new, music-video-on-crack trailers have a shot at reaching the kids who are currently pushing Hairspray to $100 million, while the international trailer might lure their Boomer parents. But the both sets of trailers would seem to give credence to an idea disseminated by the hatchet job Nikki Finke wrote on Taymor back in March: it now seems probable that the movie Sony is unveling at Toronto next month is very different from the movie they hired Taymor to make.
