Movie fans were shocked today with the news that Oscar-winner Adrien Brodyis turning action hero to star in the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predatorreboot, Predators. At first I thought maybe he’s trying to distance himself from the Roman Polanski mess by picking a movie as far from The Pianistas possible. But then I remembered that since winning Best Actor six years ago Brody has done little to show himself worthy of the award (he’s great in The Darjeeling Limitedat least).
But will anybody believe him as a guy who can defeat a bunch of Predators? That he’s better than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who barely survived one of them? That he’s the guy to lead kick-ass costars like Danny Trejo, Oleg Taktarov, Walt Goggins and even … umm … Topher Grace (he’s at least been an action movie villain before, even if a bad one)?Well, obviously this gig is going to require that supposed Oscar-caliber talent in order to convince us.
Check out the stunned reactions from other film bloggers after the jump: …Read more
Just as Nikki Finke “TOLDJA” almost four months ago, Oscar-nominee Natalie Portman has been tapped for Marvel’s Thor, in which she’ll play love interest to the Norse god-turned-superhero. No stranger to comic book adaptations nor to reworkings of Scandinavian properties, the actress will play “Jane Foster,” a nurse who becomes Thor’s love interest when the “powerful but arrogant warrior” is banished to Earth by his fellow Asgardians. So far, Portman remains the sole household name cast in the movie, which stars Chris Hemsworth as the title hero, Tom Hiddleston as the villainous Loki and Brian Blessed as Thor’s father, Odin. Fellow Oscar-nominee Kenneth Branagh is directing.
The former child actress follows in the tradition of well-known but questionably talented starlets playing uninteresting love interests in comic book adaptations: Kim Basinger in Batman; Katie Holmes in Batman Begins; Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight; Kirsten Dunst in the Spider-Manmovies; and Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man. To me, Portman seems like a cross between the last two actresses. She’s done the “manic pixie dream girl” thing like Dunst, but she’s a little more high class, a la Paltrow. Marvel claims they’re updating the Foster character for the film, which is good considering few comic enthusiasts even know or care much about her, but it still seems likely Portman may actually have less to do in this movie than she did in The Darjeeling Limited(not including the Hotel Chevalierprologue).
Personally, I think Branagh should have hired Maia Brewtonfor the role, especially now that people are re-watching Parker Lewis Can’t Lose on DVD. Sure, she hasn’t been around in awhile, and it would be stunt casting, but I always prefer stunt casting to bad casting.
Check out some other film blog responses to the casting after the jump:
If there’s one thing I relate to on the big screen, it’s the depiction of fraternal relationships. I’m the middle of three brothers (excluding the half-brother I only knew as a toddler and the former stepbrother I only knew briefly as an adult), and at different points in my life I’ve either hated them or considered them my best friends. So, yeah, I can’t wait to see Step Brothers, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as new siblings who go from being enemies to BFFs when forced to live together.
Choosing a handful of favorite movies about brotherhood is really tough. After all, tales of brothers go all the way back to almost the beginning, with the story of Cain and Abel. And a number of favorites can’t exactly be discussed, because the revelation of brothers, especially twin brothers, is often the surprise twist in films. So, before you start naming a thousand other films about brothers that I’ve forgotten (such as The Brothers McMullen andLegends of the Fall), keep in mind that I’ve actually left out a whole pile of brother films, and this is more of a personal favorites list.
Coupe de Ville – If there’s one movie that seemed to define my brothers and I growing up, it’s this underrated road movie about three estranged siblings (played by Patrick Dempsey, Arye Gross and Daniel Stern) delivering the titular automobile to their father (Alan Arkin). As kids, my brothers and I couldn’t have been any more different, just like the guys in the movie. For at least half a decade, until he seemed to disappear after he left the sitcom Ellen, Gross was like my cinematic alter ego, just because I felt a kinship with his middle-brother character in Coupe de Ville so much. …Read more
I had nearly forgotten about The Onion Movie. The sketch-comedy-formatted film spin-off of the brilliant newspaper satire was made about four years ago and then was abandoned by original distributor Fox Searchlight. According to Wikipedia, it performed badly with test audiences, and when it was shelved and then dropped by the studio, the filmmakers — co-directors Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire and screenwriter Robert Siegel (formerly editor of The Onion) — also walked away from the project. It spent the next few years involved in attempted rescue operations by New Regency and actor-writer Scott Aukerman (Run Ronnie Run!). Now, finally this trailer has shown up on the DVD of Fox Searchlight’s The Darjeeling Limited, implying that the studio will be dumping it to DVD sometime this year.
As you can see, there was good reason for Fox to have initially distanced itself from the movie. It makes the similar-structured The Kentucky Fried Movielook like a masterpiece (I understand it’s considered a classic for some, but it’s by no means a masterpiece). And, well, it even makes the recent parody films like Epic Movieand Meet the Spartansseem like masterpieces. Considering that after 20 years in print and 12 years online, the actual newspaper is consistently intelligent, cutting-edge, relevant and, most of all, hilarious, it’s quite disappointing to see how stale are the gags in the film. While it may be funny to see the decapitation caused by a neckbelt, the concept as a whole is illogical and unimaginative. And the smoking ban joke? Maybe topical in 2004, but even then the gag would have been put to better use in a Tonight Show monologue.
At PopWatch, Gary Susman passes along the rumor that The Kinks may be reforming for a reunion tour. “Which is cool, because there’s such a groundswell of demand to see the Davies brothers joined onstage, for the first time since 1969, by drummer Mick Avory and bassist Pete Quaife,” Sussman writes. “Well, okay, not really…”
This may seem like a tangent, but bear with me: I spent some time with my 20 year-old sister and her friends over the holiday, and their iPods are full of songs by bands from waaayyyy before their time–bands like The Kinks, New Order, Joy Division–but only the tracks that have been used in semi-recent, semi-indie movies, like The Darjeeling Limited, Marie Antoinette and Control. I was in the car with two of these kids, and when “You’re Gonna Miss Me” by The 13th Floor Elevators came on someone’s iPod, I glanced down and saw that the album it came from was the High Fidelity soundtrack.
It’s so easy to criticize the Academy Awards’ ignorance of the merits of comedy (even if such criticism is unfounded), but the Golden Globes have rarely been so deserving of scrutiny in their exclusion of the funny business. After all, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association actually has a category for best comedies of the year. Sure, the genre is still considered second fiddle to drama and has to share its category with musicals (which are sometimes musical dramas), but at least we know there’s a place that honors Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, Ghostbusters, Back to the Futureand Crocodile Dundeeas one of its year’s best pictures (thank goodness for the musical-less ’80s!). The problem is, now that the musical genre is back in (near) full force, comedies are not getting as much recognition, even in their own (shared) category.
Following the Globe nominees yesterday, there was a good deal of complaining going on that Knocked Upwasn’t one of the Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy nominees. At New York magazine’s Vulture blog, they said, “what’s a Comedy award for, if not to reward the best-reviewed and most successful comedy of the year? Apparently, it’s to reward quasi-musicals like Across the Universe, quasi-comedies like Charlie Wilson’s War, or quasi-movies like Hairspray.” Dave Karger at Entertainment Weekly actually thought the “best-reviewed comedy of the year” got snubbed in the best actress and best supporting actor categories, too. And Carpetbagger David Carr points out that if the Best Motion Picture Drama category can have seven films listed, the Musical or Comedy box should get to have two more picks. But would Knocked Up have really gotten one of those two slots?
A few weeks back, listener DJP requested a show on spirituality, which coincides nicely with the Film + Faith blog-a-thon kicking off this week. As we thought about it, the spiritual is so broad and pervasive in movies it’s hard to know where to start. Somehow, Kevin and I sojourn on The Dareeling Limited, Children of Men and A Woman Under the Influence.
Karina investigates the “curse” surrounding one of the most spiritual characters in moviedom, Joan of Arc.
Oh, what a difference a weekend makes. News broke on Friday that Wes Anderson was video taping an interview with Owen Wilson for MySpace, to promote The Darjeeling Limited. It was to be Wilson’s first interview since his apparent suicide attempt this summer. The clip wasn’t scheduled to debut until midnight that night, so there was plenty of time to speculate as to what it all meant, and especially whether or not the two old friends would broach the topic of Wilson’s health and sobriety. Jumping the gun just a tad, Nikki Finke ran with the headline, “Hey, Barbara & Diane: You’re Obsolete. Owen Tells All Post-Meltdown To MySpace.” In the post, she pointed to what she described as “a really angry article about this on ABC News,” in which the network that owns Barbara Walters, who in turn owns the patent on teary celebrity confession, kvetches about changing paradigms. We’ll have to take Nikki’s word on that — the story no longer exists at the link in her story.
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.
With a total gross of $140,000, The Darjeeling Limited earned the highest per-screen average of the year this weekend, when it opened in two theaters on New York on Saturday after opening the New York Film Festival on Friday night. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution opened almost as strong: the NC-17 rated, 158 minute film grossed almost $62,000 in its single New York engagement.
Admittedly, there’s a lot riding on the success of Lions For Lambs (it’s the first production to be released by Tom Cruise’s revamped United Artists, and Cruise’s first starring role since the disappointing Mission Impossible 3), but is YouTube really the best place to sell an Oscar-bait drama about war and moral responsibility? Cruise and Co. think so: they’ve signed a deal with GooTube “in an effort to build buzz for the drama…to launch a competish for which individuals can produce a 90-second video discussing the social issue they’re most passionate about.”
Amidst recent accusations that they’re just not very good at releasing films, First Look has announced two new acquisitions: Day Zero, a draft drama starring Elijah Wood which premiered at Tribeca earlier this year; and The Amateurs, a comedy about a crew of middle-aged suburbanites who hop into the world of DIY pornography.
Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayerstook the top prize this weekend from Paul Auster’s jury at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
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.”
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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Just as Nikki Finke “TOLDJA” almost four months ago, Oscar-nominee Natalie Portman has been tapped for Marvel’s Thor, in which she’ll play love interest to the Norse god-turned-superhero. No stranger to comic book adaptations nor to reworkings of Scandinavian properties, the actress will play “Jane Foster,” a nurse who becomes Thor’s love interest when the “powerful but arrogant warrior” is banished to Earth by his fellow Asgardians. So far, Portman remains the sole household name cast in the movie, which stars Chris Hemsworth as the title hero, Tom Hiddleston as the villainous Loki and Brian Blessed as Thor’s father, Odin. Fellow Oscar-nominee Kenneth Branagh is directing.
At 
It’s so easy to criticize the Academy Awards’ ignorance of the merits of comedy (even if such criticism is unfounded), but the Golden Globes have rarely been so deserving of scrutiny in their exclusion of the funny business. After all, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association actually has a category for best comedies of the year. Sure, the genre is still considered second fiddle to drama and has to share its category with musicals (which are sometimes musical dramas), but at least we know there’s a place that honors 
With a total gross of $140,000, 
