Craig McLean’s 3668 word profile of Natalie Portman in the Guardian is chock full of anecdotes about what a Great Person the actress is: she was nominated for an Oscar! She went to Harvard, and also reads books! She’s a vegetarian, and she’d stop eating eggs in a minute if it wasn’t so hard! But then there are the immediate fanboy takeaways…
First and foremost, Portman talks at length about her decision to disrobe for Hotel Chevalier, her feelings about the finished film, and the aftermath of being naked in a video distributed on the internet. “It’s not that I regret the actual thing. But it really depresses me that…it can be used afterwards for different purposes. My picture ended up on porn sites.” Which is pretty much what I said two months ago.
Portman also says she was hurt by negative reviews of her performance in the Star Wars prequels, which “made my confidence in myself go down, [with] people thinking I sucked after that!” Interestingly, she goes on to say that playing a stripper for Mike Nichols made it all better. More here.
Several movies that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are opening in theaters today:
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, has been widely hailed as a “return to form” for director Sidney Lumet. That’s probably not inaccurate, but the last thing Devil feels like is the work of an old man recycling old tricks. Ballsy and occasionally incredulous in its illustration of extreme, self-manufactured desperation, Devil’s not exactly a masterpiece, but if can roll with its plot contortions, it’s a deeply satisfying bit of pulp melodrama. And it’s got the opening sex scene to end all opening sex scenes. Read my NYFF review here, and listen to Lumet talk about his late-career embrace of digital video here.
The Darjeeling Limited expands yet again this weekend, but the real news is the theatrical unveiling of Hotel Chevalier. See a review of the feature here, and coverage of Wes Anderson’s short here, here and here.
Saw IV’s opening box office has been positioned as a test of the lasting allure of the torture porn genre. But it’s also a test of the power of sex to sell blood.
A couple of blogs and pseudo news sources have picked up a story from WENN (the World Entertainment News Network, kind of a Reuters for gossip, except, as far as I can tell, WENN does very little original reporting and mostly culls news items from magazine interviews) claiming that Natalie Portman “regres” her “nude scene” (it seems imprecise to call a single pose, shot in slow motion, a “scene”) in Hotel Chevalier.
I say we can safely take this with a grain a salt. The WENN story doesn’t site a source, and just three days ago, Portman was quoted in a Hollywood Reporter story as saying the nudity “felt right.” But more importantly: Natalie’s not stupid–she went to Harvard. She’s gotta know that if she’s really serious about launching an online startup which may or may not involve lifecasting, then she couldn’t have engineered a better early promotion than getting naked on the internet.
Fox Searchlight has (wisely, I think) decided to tack Hotel Chevalier onto prints of The Darjeeling Limited when the feature expands into wide release this weekend. According to this story in the NY Times, Searchlight is hoping that the short, which “in contrast to the feature, received nearly universal praise when it was shown alongside the longer film at some festivals,” and which has been downloaded legally on iTunes over 500,000 times, will lure audiences who would otherwise wait on Darjeeling for the DVD.
Surely, there will be some rib-cage fetishists who maintain that a big screen is mandatory in order to appreciate that single profile shot of Natalie Portman’s naked body in full, so it’s a gamble that might pay off. But it seems to me that the real crux of the story is the last sentence, in which Lia Miller reports that the studio “also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.” This would be significant, because as far as I know, it would make Chevalier the first short film to garner Oscar attention after officially premiering on the Internet.
But doesn’t AMPAS have rules about that? I know documentaries can’t qualify for Oscars if they’ve been distributed online before meeting their theatrical requirements. I consulted AMPAS’ Live Action Short rules, and found that a Chevalier campaign would be shady proposition at best. More after the jump.
A number of films that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are either opening or expanding this weekend:
Across the Universe: Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical has grossed almost $9 million over the last month in limited release, mainly drawing (as I predicted) repeat crowds of young women. The weekend, it expands to just under 1,000 screens. I’m not personally much of a fan, but I figure every generation of teenage stoners-cum-theater brats need a Hair, and I can’t begrudge them that. Read my Toronto coverage here.
Control: I was a big fan of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic at Toronto. In hindsight, I do wonder if the film will fall flatter for those who don’t go in with an emotional attachment to Joy Division’s music. But it’s still a fascinating character study, and of course, the cinematography is tremendously satisfying. Read my Toronto review here.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age: Destined to become some kind of camp classic, this sequel to 1998’s Elizabeth is artless at concealing its Freudian metaphors in a way that only truly miscalculated films can be. At Toronto, I wrote: “The Golden Age plays out in a very binary, comic-book reminiscent universe, in which Spain isn’t merely a sovereign nation pursing interests in conflict to that of Britain–the country as a whole is a supernatural embodiment of evil…The Queen is able to bounce from emotional devastation to patriotic warmongering with a flick of a switch; for the rest of us, the transition may not be as easy.”
The Darjeeling Limited: Another shot of crack for fans of Wes Anderson’s visual style, but with a stronger emphasis on character than some of his recent outings. If the idea of a film revolving around a set of limited-edition Marc Jacobs luggage sounds really annoying, this may not be the film for you. But watch the short-film prequel, Hotel Chevalier, on iTunes, read my coverage from NYFF, and if your Anderson allergy hasn’t yet flared up, go see the movie.
Sofia Coppola tries to sell her canned champagne via YouTube.
The Showtime series that brought you voting zombies is moving to NBC.
The stoner comedy of the year is going straight to DVD. How is that a bad thing for stoners?
The extremely slim Natalie Portman unrobed for Wes Anderson’s short film, causing the entire internet to transform into twelve-year old rib cage fetishists.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated There Will Be Bloodpremiered this week in Austin to rave reviews.
On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin take a look at movie greed, by way of Wall Street and The Price of Sugar.
The computer containing the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s next project has been stolen.
Rueing the day you sunk your chunk of change into the ApplePaperweight? Jaman is here to help.
To skip straight to images and audio from the NYFF press conference for The Darjeeling Limited, click the “Read More” link at the bottom of the page.
The plot of Wes Anderson’s fifth feature concerns the misadventures of Jack, Francis and Peter, three 30-something brothers who gather on a train in India. It’s been twelve months since they last met, at their father’s funeral. They’ve been brought together by Francis (Owen Wilson), who, in the intervening year, almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident; he arrives on the train with his head bandaged like he’s had a lobotomy. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is fresh off a self-destructive tryst in a Paris hotel room with an ex-girlfriend; he’s grown a George Harrison mustache but walks around barefoot, like Paul McCartney on the cover of Abbey Road. Peter is about to be a dad for the first time; he insists on wearing his late father’s prescription sunglasses, even though they give him tension headaches.
All three are heavily medicated, trading black market Indian opiates at the dinner table before soup is served. Francis first tells Peter and Jack that they’re in India to reestablish their brotherly bonds by visiting a number of “spiritual places,” an itinerary which has Jack planning to jet off to Italy at the first snag. Francis then reveals that they’re actually on their way to find their mother, who is living in a convent in the Himalayas and who, for reasons unknown, failed to show up at their father’s funeral.
I adore Hotel Chevalier, Wes Anderson’s companion short to The Darjeeling Limited (I like it better than the feature, if you want to know the truth, but more on that later). I’m extremely annoyed that the above, truncated version of Chevalier is making the blog rounds, a) because it reduces the film to being about Natalie Portman’s naked body, and b) because the best part of the short, in which Jason Schwartzman finds out that his ex-girlfriend is coming to visit him and scrambles to get into character, is left on the cutting room floor. I understand that even in the full version, the nudity is going to overwhelm a lot of viewers, but the idea that any work of art involving a famous, naked actress is destined to be butchered and circulated on the internet as porn really pisses me off.
But what can I do? I’m just one, lonely bloggy voice, in a swamp of traffic nazis and low-level perverts for whom real porn apparently doesn’t do the trick anymore. So watch the above clip for the T&A, if that’s what you’re after (although it’s mostly just A). If you want the full experience, you can watch Hotel Chevalier in its entirety on iTunes, for free.
With so many60s icons in need of documentaries, when will Martin Scorsese ever get around to making that sequel to The Departed? He’s now said to be working on a film about the life of Beatle George Harrison.
Surely you’ve heard about , the ten-minute prequel to Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, which is now available on iTunes? Natalie Portman stars in the short, and appears briefly in the feature; according to Variety, Portman “insisted that Fox not use her image in the advertising for the feature film, but said that she was pleased with the short and happy to promote it.” Is that a value judgement on the feature?
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Craig McLean’s 
Several movies that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are opening in theaters today:
A number of films that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are either opening or expanding this weekend:
For a recap of our NYFF coverage thus far, 
