Julia Child’s life is partially depicted in the new foodie film Julie & Julia, and while it’s as much fun to see Meryl Streep portray the famous chef as it was to watch Dan Aykroyd and Bill Cosby do her back in the day, we can’t help but wish the real Child had lived long enough to star in the film herself. We also wish the whole movie was based on her autobiography, My Life in France, rather than share-adapted from both that book and Julie Powell’s blog-turned-memoir Julie & Julia.
There’s a reason Child was a hugely popular TV personality and there’s a reason why Powell was an Internet writer. Just as you’d rather only watch Sean Penn as Gene Shalit in a movie and not bother with Michael Pitt’s portrayal of lowly film blogger Christopher Campbell, you could probably do without the Amy Adams as Powell stuff in Julie & Julia.
Outside of playing herself as a foodie heroine in a chick flick, what other kinds of movies could Child have acted in? Given her OSS background, we would have loved to see her fill in for Judi Dench in the Bond films as M. Alas, that will never happen, but if our gastronomical dreams come true, perhaps we might see one of the following TV personalities in his or her own blockbuster film someday:
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It seems impossible these days for a film franchise to keep its cast intact for a full run. This time it’s the Twilight series that has succumbed to the switcheroo game, as Bryce Dallas Howard was announced to be taking over Rachel Lefevre’s character, “Victoria,” as of the third film, Eclipse. This sort of thing nearly happened before for the Twilight series when Taylor Lautner came close to being fired from the part of “Jacob” after the first film, because he wasn’t seen as a strong or fit enough actor for the demands of the role in New Moon.
With this news, Howard cements herself as the official go-to actress for filling in vacated roles. In the past she has been a substitute in Lars von Trier’s USA - Land of Opportunities trilogy, taking on the lead role “Grace” originated by Nicole Kidman in Dogville for the sequel Manderlay, and she more recently filled in for a non-returning Claire Danes as “Kate” in the Terminator franchise (for which she also replaced the first-choice substitute, Charlotte Gainsbourg) Also, let’s not forget that she replaced Kirsten Dunst as the lead in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, when Dunst departed to make Elizabethtown.
With the way things are going for her, I predict she’ll be taking over as “Ginny Weasley” in the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, “Black Widow” in Iron Man 3 or The Avengers, “Rachel Dawson” in the next Batman film and “Kumar” in A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas.
Let’s take a look at what the rest of the film blogs are saying about the substitution after the jump:
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A few days after unveiling Mickey Rourke as “Whiplash” from Iron Man 2, USA Today brings us the first image from Michael Moore’s new documentary, which is still without a title. In a way, it corresponds well to the earlier photo premiere, because many people think of the liberal filmmaker as the true villain of his own movies. Others believe him to be the superhero, however, which would make Goldman Sachs the nemesis in this picture, in which Moore is once again met with police opposition, likely because he’s attempting to trespass on the financial institution’s property.
Apparently the trailer for the movie hits theaters this weekend, too, so hopefully someone will find a bootleg or copy of that somewhere on the web [update: I've embedded the Jimmy Fund-parodying teaser below]. My hope is it’s appropriately attached to The Taking of Pelham 123 due to that film’s involvement of a stock market scam. For now, though, let’s see what the film blogs are saying about this promotional photo:
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If you were a movie producer looking to make a lot of money, and you had the chance to do this with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, would you put the project in the hands of the people who made the first film, which was not successful in any way, shape or form, or would you put it in the hands of the guy who wrote the first, crappy film but who later redeemed himself with an enormously popular, long-running TV series adapated from that film?
Obviously, most of us would choose the latter, but then I guess we just don’t know something Roy Lee and Doug Davison (of the Asian-horror-remake factory Vertigo Entertainment) know. The duo is teaming up with Fran Rubel Kuzui, who hasn’t directed a film since Buffy but who “served” as an exec producer on the TV show, and her husband, Kaz Kuzui (producer of the original movie), to relaunch the franchise with a new, darker, event-sized Vampire Slayer movie, which will have nothing to do with the show, and which, as of yet, has no involvement from Joss Whedon.
Due to the success of Twilight and True Blood, I can see why someone would want to kick start another vampire franchise, especially one with name recognition, but is there anyone who would look forward to anything Buffy without Whedon? And even with him, would anyone accept a new actress in the title role after Sarah Michelle Gellar made it iconically her own? Let’s check out the film blog reactions to this ridiculous announcement after the jump:
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Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?
Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.
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I haven’t seen Twilight, but from what I can tell the film only has one memorable scene. That’s the way the Twilight parodists make it seem, anyway. Everything from the puppet parody to this new Christmas version (see below) recreates this scene, in which Bella acknowledges that Edward is a vampire and then the couple flies through the woods. It’s getting to the point where the parodies are losing their edge if only because of the familiarity. The one thing that could possibly be more tired is if someone parodied the bullet-time scene from The Matrix within a parody of Twilight.
But it’s mid-December, and tis the season for humorous movie-related Christmas videos on YouTube (like “Rambo Bells”). Twilight fans already got their Christmas wish with the announcement that Twilight: New Moon will be out before Thanksgiving next year, but this is a little stocking stuffer (for that Edward-face stocking pictured, available from Amazon). And if those little goths like the idea of Santa being a vampire (how is this not the concept of another Christmas horror flick?), they can buy an unrelated Santa Vampire t-shirt here. Oh nevermind, they’re not going to have enough cash for unrelated items when there’s so much real Twilight Christmas crap to buy.
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The vampires of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels are described as impossibly beautiful. But it’s one vampire, “Edward Cullen,” who is written as having such appealing details that it would seem impossible for a girl not to fall in love with him. In actuality, that’s what has happened to most females, young and old, who have read the books. And while his cinematic portrayer, Robert Pattinson, doesn’t quite resemble a marble statue of Adonis, the actor is still getting his fair share of seven-year-old suitors asking to be bitten.
Cullen is hardly the first vampire to so strongly attract the hearts (and necks) of mortals. But what is it about the bloodsucking undead that turns us on so much? Is it truly their stone-white skin and chiseled features? Or perhaps it’s their ability to go all night long? Let us take a look at the many vampire love interests that literature and cinema have given us over the years in an attempt to find out their sexy secret.
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The big love for Let the Right One In and high expectations over the impending release of Twilight has sparked some chatter about vampires as a symbolic narrative construct — or, as Jeff Wells puts it in a post condescendingly titled “Girls Vampire Club,” “the romantic whatchamacallit vampire metaphor.” At this point, it’s not even much of a metaphor: in the fifteen years between the birth of the Buffy franchise and the release of the two teen vampire films named above, the plight of the brooding but well-meaning undead has become so synonymous with teenage alienation that fiction about the convergance of the two “outsider” groups has just about run out of points to make. It’s become refreshing to see vampires function as unambiguous villians, an evil to be dealt with sans angst.
And so you’ve got to give it up for Barackula, just a little bit, just for refusing to engage in the “vampires are romantic subjects too!” cliche. This short, online-only musical (which we first learned of months ago, before it went online, but only got around to watching after last week’s election) re-imagines a young Obama’s circa-1990 induction as president of the Harvard Law Review as song-and-dance-off between our hero and a clan of literally bloodsucking would-be lawyers. Its not exactly a game-changer as far as musicals go, but it’s exceptionally narratively tight and polished for what amounts to a dramatic user-generated campaign ad, and its anticipation of what would become the major themes of the campaign all the way up to Election Day is truly remarkable.
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A version of this review previously appeared during Fantastic Fest. There is a new addendum at the bottom of the post. Let the Right One In opens in select cities today, as the first release in Magnet’s Six Shooter Series.
After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So — sorry — but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, nor do I see it breaking significant new ground. In transmuting universal real-world fears of the other and of mortality into the tropes of the supernatural, it’s simply doing what good horror movies have always done, and always should do. That said, it’s hard not to find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lily. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown away — it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen recently which uses basic genre elements to delve deeper into everyday human horrors — but if there seems to be more of an appetite for this kind of horror than the Saw V kind of horror, that has to be a good thing.
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After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So––sorry––but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. That said, I find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lilly. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown-away by it––it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen this week which uses basic genre tropes to delve deeper into everyday human horrors––but if this a new trend, I’ll have more, please.
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