Everyone loves Bill Murray, but only the die hard fans recognize the majority of his work. The rest, unfortunately, concentrate too much on his greatest films, such as Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translationand all of his collaborations with Wes Anderson. Yet while each of these films, and Murray’s roles and performances in them, are certainly deserving of their preferred and predominant praises, Murray is the kind of actor who is so talented and entertaining that he can be enjoyed in even the worst movies on his resume. In fact, he’s probably the only A-lister who could lend his voice to a bastardized CG version of a beloved cartoon character and get away with barely any contempt from his devotees.
This week, Bill Murray makes an appearance in the new kiddie sci-fi flick City of Emberas the selfish mayor of a doomed underground metropolis. And it’s sure to be one of his less-appreciated roles, whether because it’s in a children’s movie, because it’s a supporting part in an ensemble filled with many talented actors, or because it’s not Ghostbusters 3. But those who really love Murray will likely flock to the movie primarily to see him, just as they did and do for the rest of these movies with underrated Murray roles:
Wes Anderson has been hired out by Universal/Imagine to script a remake of Patrice Leconte’s Mon Meilleur Ami (My Best Friend), about a cabby hired out to pose as Daniel Auteuil’s pal. If Anderson also directs the film, I can see Bill Murray as either role, but let me suggest that the other be played by Richard Dreyfuss for a perfect What About Bob? reunion.
Pirates of the Caribbean collaborators Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp are apparently going the way of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, but better, for a computer-animated film titled Rango, which will feature motion-capture technology unlike anything we’ve seen before in an animated feature.
After sparking my interest again with Black Book, Paul Verhoeven is disappointingly returning to the genre of erotic thriller, according to Variety. He’s in talks to direct a movie about an intern who’s doing his boss’ wife, which is of course described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.
At the midway point of the Toronto Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter notes the fest’s lack of Oscar buzz, except for the awards talk surrounding The Wrestler, Martin Landau (Lovely, Still), Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) and even Dakota Fanning (The Secret Life of Bees).
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore,Lost in Translationand Broken Flowers, has been animated by a kind of communal, revisionist nostalgia. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola were teenagers during Murray’s first brush with fame in the early 80s, which would have made them extremely susceptible to the prototypical Murray character of the day, which hit its zenith with Ghostbusters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2006, the Wes Anderson-directed AmEx commercials that preceded each film at the Tribeca Film Festival sadly topped most of the films themselves. That’s probably more of a dig at Tribeca than legit praise for Anderson, but regardless: the reigning king of quirk has a new side gig directing adverts for AT & T. I’ve embedded one above, and you can find four more here. I don’t think Anderson’s obsession with tableau has been put to better use since Rushmore, but until I see The Darjeeling Limited next week at the New York Film Festival, I’ll withhold final judgement.
Judging by the opening shots of the newly-released trailer for The Darjeeling Limited (via Anne Thompson), Wes Anderson’s latest is about noses. There are three of them, each lovingly framed in Anderson’s signature wide-angle close-ups: Jason Schwartzman’s fake nose, Owen Wilson’s bandaged nose, Adrien Brody’s…pure, unadulterated Brod-nose. On closer examination, it seems to be a remake of Bottle Rocket, transplanted to India. Instead of two guys, there are three. Instead of a road trip, it’s a train journey. One of them falls in love with an exotic Indian woman instead of an exotic maid. You’ve seen it before, but this time, it’s painted sandy gold, the music is borrowed from Satyajit Ray, and there are camels.
Watch it here, and if you see it pop up on YouTube, let me know and I’ll embed it above.
Posting will be light today and Friday while your dutiful blogger does some traveling. Speaking of travels, news/rumors are starting to spread regarding which fall festivals are expecting appearances from which Indiewood star directors. indieWIRE says Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited has been set to open the New York Film Festival. The Coen brothers are also expected to make an appearance at Lincoln Center, with their Cannes hit No Country For Old Men. According to Anne Thompson, Joel and Ethan will first hit Toronto, where they’ll probably run into Shekhar Kapur, who will be in town unveiling his Elizabeth sequel, The Golden Age. And according to Jeff Welles, Paul Haggis will be making the Canadian sojourn, too–this time with “investigative thriller-slash-broken-heart drama” In the Valley of Elah.
That still leaves a number of indie-arm fall flicks with no set festival premiere. Namely: Love in the Time of Cholera, Margot at the Wedding, and my personal hype-magnet of the year, P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. While we’re waiting for more news, you can watch the trailer for the Coens’ film above.
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore, 
Craig McLean’s 
A number of films that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are either opening or expanding this weekend:
