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.
Previous coverage of Natalie NudegateTM
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For a recap of our NYFF coverage thus far, click here. Everything else you might have missed from the week gone by is linked below:
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.
…Read more
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A bunch of actors (including Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, Hayden Christensen, and Olivia Thirlby, aka The Other Broad From Juno) will direct segments of the omnibus feature, New York, I Love You.
“From the grave of Queer Cinema emerges the gay zombie movie, in the form of German-Canadian co-production Otto; or, Up with Dead People,” declares 
