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Joseph Gordon-Levitt Denies ANT-MAN Rumors, Paul Rudd Now Uncontested

by Posted in Casting News Tagged , , , , , ,

Despite many internet rumors that the contenders for the titular role in Edgar Wright’s Marvel picture Ant-Man were Paul Rudd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, JGL has decried the news as “internet rumors” and although not directly denying the possibility, interviews at NY Comic-Con and for his recent movie Don Jon have him effectively denying his involvement in any way. This goes against Variety’s reporting that both actors had met with Marvel execs about the role, and although his de facto withdrawal seems to indicate that Rudd will take the role, the casting hasn’t yet occurred and some sources say other actors are in consideration for the role.

One of the least popularly followed Marvel superheroes, Ant-Man follows biochemist Dr. Hank Pym as he discovers a size-altering formula and the subsequent troubles and action when testing the formula on himself goes awry. Wright, who previously directed the Shaun of the Dead trilogy of films along with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is working with former collaborator Joe Cornish to adapt the comics originally penned by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Larry Lieber into a Marvel origin story in typical super-hero movie fashion.

Given Wright’s predilection for comedy in filmmaking, it will be interesting to see if this super hero film incorporates that sensibility without loosing the comic book tradition and aesthetic that most super hero films depend on. Kevin Feige of Iron Man, X-Men, and The Avengers, will also produce, which bodes well for the film’s look and feel.

Although many online pundits and comic book aficionados openly preferred Rudd from the start for the role, others put enough weight behind JGL for this dropout to be somewhat of a disappointment. The release date is set to be July 31st, 2015, so very few details are available on what to expect from the film and its casting in general. It lands among a list of dozens of superhero films and TV projects planned for the next couple years for Marvel and DC both, meaning that comic book fans will get to see most if not all their favorite comic book heroes turned into movies before Marvel and DC have to start either making more original comics or start making remakes.

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Charlie Hunnam Leaves FIFTY SHADES OF GREY Movie, Shortlist Speculation Ensues

by Posted in Casting News

Charlie Hunnam, known by many as Jax Teller on FX’s Sons of Anarchy, has dropped out of film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey. Hunnam, who was slated to play the titular BDSM-enthusiast and CEO Christian Grey, has dropped out officially because of his “immersive TV schedule which is not allowing him time to adequately prepare for the role” according to a statement issued by Universal. Several celebrity gossip blogs are reporting that his dropping out had deeper causes, including the unconfirmed notion one anonymous source gave that “he was feeling like it would be his version of Showgirls and he didn’t want to be remembered for that” as reported by hollywoodlife.com. Dakota Johnson (21 Jump Street, The Social Network) will still star as the film’s heroine, Anastasia Steele.

His personal reluctance, if the rumors are to be believed, is understandable given the high public profile that E.L James’s Fifty Shades trilogy has enjoyed since the first book’s release in 2011 and since the movie adaptation was announced in March of 2012. The trilogy chronicles the every-woman college student Anastasia Steele’s kinky relationship with wealthy Christian Grey as it deepens and convolutes over the three-book cycle.

The trilogy is often labeled as “mommy porn” for its graphic and nearly constant BDSM scenes, a legacy that has prompted much speculation on how the movie adaptation will depict the two protagonists’ relationship and the near-constant stream of smut that engulfs it. Following Hunnam’s departure, fan activism focused on what actor will replace Hunnam in that role has given way to a potential shortlist from Universal for the character.

The list, released by The Hollywood Reporter, includes Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood), Jamie Dornan (Marie Antionette, The Fall), Theo James (Golden Boy), and Christian Cooke (Magic City) as potential replacements for Hunnan. Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy, On the Road), who had apparently received an informal offer during the initial round of casting is unavailable to play the role due to his participation in Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s film about Olympic runner Louis Zamperini’s imprisonment by Japanese forces during World War II. A fan petition seeking to instate Matt Bomer (White Collar) as Grey and Alexis Bledel as Steele has reached 88,650 signatures on change.org, but it is unconfirmed whether Bomer at least is officially in the running.

Not many comments have been made about how great all of this casting intrigue will be for promoting the Fifty Shades movie, and given that most reports take as given that the next two “Fifty Shades“ books will also have movie adaptations, whoever takes the role will no doubt return for the other two and will have the trilogy as one of the hallmarks of his career. The film is still set to be released on August 1st of 2014, which means that new developments on the casting will be coming quickly if the studio wants to keep the film on track for production.

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Out in Theaters: ALL IS LOST

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , ,

“All is Lost”
Directed by J.C. Chandor
Starring Robert Redford
Action, Drama
108 Mins
PG-13

2013 is the year of the survivor-thriller reigning supreme. In Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón explored themes of isolation amidst the inhospitable vacuum of space, using dazzling special effects to elevate a simple story to a visual masterpiece. Paul Greengrass dove into the true account of Richard Phillips and his struggle to maintain his humanity in a Somali pirate hostage situation in Captain Phillips, an excellent biopic fueled by a knockout performance from Tom Hanks. In All is Lost, J.C. Chandor pits man against entropy, testing the endurance of the human spirit against an onslaught of ill-tempered serendipity at sea. It must be time for a genre victory lap, because once more, survivor-thrillers have just crowned themselves king.

There is something about these types of films that make us want to rise from our seats and cheer. They drive us to invest, they urge us to care. They recognize the most enticing aspect of our own humanity, our un-surrendering urge to live. Unlike the cataclysmic weather catastrophe of The Perfect Storm, the humanist reckless abandon of this year’s Danish film Kon Tiki, or the global satellite calamity of Gravity, All is Lost follows a relatively meager story, one of bad odds and “Ah shit!” coincidences, but however paltry it might seem from afar, it ends up having more meat on its bones than either of the two former stories combined.

As the unnamed, gruff hero of this expedition, Robert Redford hardly utters a single line of dialogue and yet carries the film squarely on his shoulders. Even without a true spoken line, there is never a time when Redford’s weathered chops don’t convince us of the track-halting gravity of his worsening circumstance. Even while he remains collected and fine-tuned, it is clear that his situation is rather grim. But Redford’s “Our Man” goes about course correcting with the smooth confidence of a career father, trying to carry us into smooth seas, both physically and metaphorically. With his panic pushed deep down, Redford is a machine of physical efficiency, an Einstein of deep-breathed problem solving.

To be the only man credited on a cast list (there’s not even a glimpse of another face, not a whisper of another voice) is a pretty unique accomplishment, but to do so and be a serious Oscar contender is another thing entirely. Redford lays down a silent tour-de-force, reckoning those who may have called him on “phoning it in” in this later stage of his career. If there’s one thing Redford is not, it’s a hack, and even when his directorial projects land with a bit of a thud, it’s not for lack of trying.

In All is Lost, his measured passion and experienced bravado guide us through a range of emotions, however restrained and simmering they may be. But this is the most challenging, and often least appreciated, act of them all. Conveying buried emotions, those under a veneer of levelheaded collection, takes conditioned skill and requires a deeper commitment to self-exploration than those spilling over the surface in winded theatrical monologues or emotion-stricken outbursts.

The decision to put so much stock in Redford’s ability to single-handedly emote his way through a film takes a boatload of guts, to Chandor’s credit. But Chandor’s deep-seated confidence in Redford is doubled in his cool, collected approach. Evident from the blueprint of a dialogue-bereft script, Chandor obviously is a man of vision, swinging for the fences. Instead of deploying red herrings, arm wrestling the audience into a false sense of tension, everything from the very get-go is very real and very dangerous. 

 

From the opening shot that confusingly pans across a shipping container adrift at sea (I initially thought the shot was of a red dock attached to land), the sensation of something amiss comes barreling from the screen. It’s no surprise that the lost shipping container – human clumsiness and carelessness personified – is the culprit of the “Who punctured my boat?” mystery. Even worse, the salt water gushing through the boat’s gaping hole has destroyed all electrical navigation and communication equipment. From minute one, the stakes are sky high. The hole is in the boat, the boat is in the water, the water is in the boat and as it turns out, the ocean is large…very large. There’s no phoning in support, no cries for help, just a need to grab your bootstraps, yank them up as high as possible and try to start calculating your way out of the ghastly inevitability of drowning. Here, throwing in the towel means certain death.

What transcribes over the following 106 minutes is the story of a man fighting tooth-and-nail for survival against all odds, even when all is lost. Just as he patches up one problem, another surfaces, and another, and another. From sharks to lack of supplies to a crumbling mast, his very humanity dangles at the end of a rope but it’s not something he will abandon without the fight of his life.

Captured with crisp imagery from cinematographers Frank G. DeMarco and Peter Zuccarini, it’s almost hard to believe that the film was shot almost entirely on a water stage (the same one used in 1997 for Titanic actually). Though backed by a small army of digital effects workmen, the water-logged stunts have a sense of immediacy and deep-splintered truth to them largely lacking from CGI-driven films. Although Gravity elevates visual panache to a new level, it fails to hone in as acutely on the emotional isolation of its central character, giving Redford and crew a matured edge over Sandra Bullock and Co. emotionally.

The creaks and moans of the tried ship mimic the heaves and hoes of a exasperated Redford, visual cues as foreboding and understated as the hardly visible score from Alex Ebert. Each adds their own signature to the layer cake of suspense, rather than seeking glory for their own right. it’s this sum-of-all-parts attitude that really makes the film sing. Chandor’s vision is so exact and his execution so precise, that All is Lost adds up to one doozie of an experience. Finger-nibblingly exciting when it needs to be, nimbly quiet when called for, but always full of hope and tenacity, All is Lost is a whopper.

A

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Madcap Trailer for THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL From Wes Anderson

by Posted in Trailers Tagged , ,

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The trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel explores the madcap joy of Wes Anderson‘s film and is sure to delight his legions of fans. The story is centered on Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes), a upclass hotel manager and his protege Zero Moustafa, the new lobby boy. When a guest is murdered, the police suspect Gustave and he and Zero hit the ground running.

Set to hit theaters on March 7th, 2014, the film sees the return of Anderson’s typical troope: Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. If you missed the first poster, have a look at it here. Otherwise, take a look at the trailer and see where you think this will fall on the Anderson spectrum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fg5iWmQjwk

The Grand Budapest Hotel is directed by Wes Anderson and stars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Saoirse Ronan, Mathieu Amalric, Lea Seydoux, F. Murray Abraham, Tom Wilkinson, and Tony Revolori. It will hit theaters March 7, 2014.

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Out in Theaters: THE FIFTH ESTATE

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , ,

“The Fifth Estate”
Directed by Bill Condon
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Jamie Blackley, Anthony Mackie, Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci
Biography, Drama
128 Mins
R


The best part about The Fifth Estate was the cheeseburger I ate before the movie. The bun was nicely toasted, hugging two juicy patties each pressed with a layer of cheese, topped with caramelized onions and the gentle spice of jalapeños. It was superb. The movie though was the antithesis of that burger. It was crap. Utter, unadulterated, “pee-a-little-in-your-pants because you’re laughing so hard in its face” crap.

The dead horse-beating script is the easiest clunker to point fingers at for its “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” tactile approach, but that quick analysis fails to recognize the full scope of how truly horrendous every element of this movie is. The consistently confused directing, entirely bumbling, borderline hack acting, and total lack of vision – all backed by one of the worst scores I’ve heard in ages – each land with a thud on the lowest tier of story-telling prowess.  The Fifth Estate‘s saving grace is that it has a good shot at winning the excuse, “It’s so bad, it’s good” from more forgiving moviegoers.

Whether the intent of the movie is to herald the importance of Julian Assange and his brainchild Wikilieaks or condemn him is unclear throughout. Even by the film’s conclusion, it’s hard to decipher if those in charge support Julian’s cause or just can’t stand him – an amazing feat for a movie that stretches well over two-hours. The intention may have been to land in some kind of moral gray zone but somewhere along the line moral complication got mixed up with poor storytelling, and the result is The Fifth Estate.

Wikileak’s contributions to revolutionizing how information is shared was groundbreaking – the way in which that story here is told is anything but. For a film that celebrates innovation, it’s amazing how stale its telling is. Montages set to thumping electronic beats detail Julian typing on a computer, driving in a car, walking down the street, typing even more on his laptop, and opening doors as if it were breathless entertainment. At times, it seems as if Bill Condon bumped his head and woke up thinking he was making a Bourne-style thriller.

Condon also hasn’t quite shaken out of his vampire gloves coming out of the ring of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two as the Assange onscreen is a lot like Bella. Brooding and touchy, he’s a one-note nincompoop with the depth of skinny jean’s pockets…girl’s skinny jean’s pockets. Having a conversation with Assange results in hearing about one of his many accomplishments or an oddly timed confession about the challenges peppering his life.

As if the character written on the page doesn’t already show it in bright stripes, Assange feels that its necessary to inform co-conspirator Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl) that he’s on the autism spectrum. It’s painful for all the wrong reasons. However little humanity the script affords these characters, the performance is still horrid to watch unfold.

As my friend pointed out, Benedict Cumberbatch does a great SNL impression of Julian Assange, and he really does. But don’t expect to see more than a lazy, played for laughs impression of Assange, as Benedict puts in one of the worst performances of the entire year. His dopey take on Assange is a far cry from a definitive look at a complex character (even if it does wind up being the only one). This is a man you never once feel sympathy for. He’s strange, jealous, and abusive to all those around him. The icing on the cake comes in a completely unnecessary scene in which he dances by himself in a strobe-lit club like a lanky gibbon jumped up on Adderall. Both Josh Singer’s script and Cumberbatch settle with saying, “Look at how weird he is!”

Shame on Cumberbatch for breaking the golden rule of acting. As an actor, you are not to judge your character. You seek understanding. You find what makes the audience connect to your character, not disengage from them. You’re like a lawyer preparing a case for trial. We, the audience, are the judge and the jury, not you. Otherwise, we wind up watching a paper-thin characterization, produced by someone who can’t stand the person they’re embodying. Cumberbatch’s take as Assange seeps this kind of cheap impersonation.

Like a student rushing to finish a research project, recklessly jamming every last bit of information they can on the page, hoping it will make them look more informed than they are, the choice of what to include in the film is simply dumbfounding. Important character information is blasted into the audience without context, relationships start and end hollow, and the actual accomplishments of Wikileaks become buried under a mile of silt. Instead of allowing the story beats room to breath, they fly out in our face, spring-loaded and irrelevant.

With all these scattered bits flying in from nowhere, this is filmmaking as drag-and-drop. Case and point: a romantic angle is shoehorned in. There’s no basis for it, it’s just there, because other movies do it. When the shirts pop off in the obligatory sex scene, you’ll bat your eyes, watching the congress of two stick figures with the sex appeal of listening to your parents talk dirty to each other.

Even from a technical perspective, the film is awful. The score by Carter Burwell works with the surgical precision of a sledgehammer, informing you, “This part’s exciting! This bit’s sad! Drama! Oh, it’s exciting again!” The set design is similarly off-putting as the locations these guys hang out at look inspired by the stark neon sets of Batman and Robin.

Since the 80s, filmmakers have felt that it is their duty to turn “hacking” into an exciting thing. It’s common knowledge that watching someone fire away at their keyboard doesn’t make for the best viewing experience, so they tend towards using visual metaphors to represent the pallid electrical repetition. The Fifth Estate‘s visual metaphor takes us to a giant warehouse, filled with rows upon rows of desktop computers, a metaphysical flair the producers must have thought very cool. However imaginative the sequence may have seemed at one point, the final execution is inexcusably lame, providing for some of the heartiest laughs of this straight-faced film.

With Cumberbatch and The Fifth Estates‘ once promising Oscar odds now shot to pieces, a flicker of hope remains for meat-headed political junkies, pseudo-intellectuals, and those who relish movies that are “so bad, they’re good”. Don’t get me wrong, I actually had a good time watching this, but it was all for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, The Fifth Estate is, without a doubt, one of the worst movies of 2013.

F

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MoviePass Makes Attending the Theater Cheaper

by Posted in Film Editorials

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You may have heard of a similar service before, one that offers unlimited movies at a theater for a monthly fee, but MoviePass is taking the idea national-wide. The idea is that with constantly rising ticket prices, people are attending the movies less than ever just as media subscription services like Netflix are at an all-time high of popularity. What MoviePass aims to do is take advantage of the subscription phenomenon while also making movie attendance in masse more affordable.

Right now, movie tickets weigh in around $12, with matinees slashing a few bucks and 3D or IMAX screenings jacking up the rate, sometimes significantly. Instead of paying for each and every theater venture, MoviePass lets you pay for a service that would allow unlimited monthly screenings. While the service is definitely a great investment for those of you who are already attending a handful of movies a month, it may not be worth it for people who only make a few trips to the theater.

But just do the math. If you’re seeing four movies a month at $12 a pop, you’re averaging just shy of $50 a month. A monthly subscription to MoviePass is just $35. If you’re like me and see upwards of 25 movies a month, the savings provided by this type of service can be monumental. Although I get the critics special privilege of not paying for my movies, you better believe me: if I weren’t, I would sign up for this in a heart beat.

Like Netflix gives people the impetus to seek out things that they otherwise would probably never be exposed to, MoviePass gives you a reason to go to the theater because the more you go, the cheaper it is! The only hitch is that you need to sign up for a whole year.

MoviePass is available at 95% of theaters nation-wide, with 14 theaters participating in the Seattle area, seven in San Francisco, and a whopping 52 in New York City.

Take into account that MoviePass only provides for movies that are shown in 2D though so anyone whose got a major need to strap on those goofy glasses need look elsewhere. The icing on the cake is that there aren’t any strings attached like blackout date or movie exceptions.

I sound like a salesman but I really just pumped about the product. Let me know if you end up giving it a try!

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Out in Theaters: CARRIE

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

“Carrie”
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Alex Russell, Zoë Belkin, Ansel Elgort, Judy Greer
Drama, Horror
99 Mins
R

We all know the delightful bedtime story of Carrie and the Pig’s Blood Prom: strange, loner girl experiences first bloodbath period (literally and figuratively) at school and becomes the target of tampon-slinging ridicule from her merciless peers. Charitable popularite Sue repents and urges hot-stuff boyfriend, Tommy, to bring Carrie to the prom, where she receives an unexpected swine viscus shower and promptly employs telekinesis to exact a wrecking ball of bloody revenge. It’s squarely within the horror genre, but it’s never really been a scary movie. The subject is far more unsettling and grotesque, a step back from jumpy frights and into demented psychology. Kimberly Peirce attempts to navigate the open can of worms within that tender, twisted psyche but stops short, pursuing the studio-brandished sheen of an American Hollywood horror remake.

As the film opens, Peirce provides a new introduction to Carrie. We meet her as a slimy head emerging from her mother’s womb, met with all the warmth and motherly love of a trembling butcher knife clutched by Julianne Moore‘s Margaret – a woman convinced her child is the product of sin and, accordingly, born of the devil. This new scene solidifies the weapon-wielding, love-hate relationship between mother and daughter that will go on to become a through line of Peirce’s retelling of the story while also playing at our natural guardian sensibilities that no baby should be inches from a razor sharp blade. It invites the right type of winches and cringes from an uneasy audience desiring something fresh.
 

Securing Moore as Margaret is a move of inspired casting. Moore’s usual warmth is gone, replaced with jitterish paranoia and a penchant for closet-rearing corporal punishment. The real irony though is that in spite of all of her bible-thumping madness, she is pretty much right on the money all along. Carrie’s abilities may not necessarily be born of the devil but a very easy utilitarian argument could be made that if Margaret pulled the trigger on her infanticide instinct, she would have saved the town a lot of grief and a lot of lives. But tricky debates of this nature are tabled and left wholly unexamined.

Skirting around these deeper philosophical questions that would have made for a much more interesting movie (more of a reinvention than an outright remake) Peirce’s Carrie settles with being largely a paint-by-numbers remake, doused in a blanket of digital makeup from all the wonders of current CGI technology.

Hunched like a troll, the teenage version of Carrie is awkward like a platypus. Corner-standing and slinking seem to be her main primary hobbies around the high school she attends, so it’s no wonder she doesn’t have a Facebook full of friends. In fact, she doesn’t really seem to have a Facebook at all (gasp). 

Following her unsettling shower scene though, Carrie seems to somehow become more confident than she was before, as if her virginal menstration opened up a new chapter in the book de Carrie’s mind. But that probably has less to do with that nasty pool of time-of-the-month blood and more to do with the telekinetic powers that seem to accompany her corporeal transformation into an adult. I don’t know if Carrie’s physical coming into womanhood is supposed to be linked to the emergence of her powers but they definitely both seem to start their flow around the same moment.

At any rate, Carrie goes about wielding her new found powers with the sneakiness of a jitterbug-thumbed high-schooler texting a storm in the midst of Spanish class. That is – how the hell is no one noticing?! She screams and tampons flutter away from her, she’s visibly upset and water coolers crumble like piñatas. While this version really ratchets up the degree of foreboding in the escalation of Carrie’s powers, it fails to take into account the reactions of those around her. It’s as if they’re all used to telekinesis, like it ain’t no thang.

Conceivably, their ignorance could be a side effect of the fact that everyone at this untitled Maine school is pretty much the worst person in the world. Even the English teacher mocks Carrie between takes eye-banging his female students. While I’m sure that opening the floor to debate about the relative ease or difficulty of people’s high school experiences is another can of worms entirely, I’m a homegrown Mainer and I don’t think you could pinpoint any school, Maine or otherwise, where every single person would burst out laughing at you in the midst of the most unfortunate moment of your life. Surely, they’re the next level of “tough crowd”. I’m fully aware that this is a work of fiction and as such everything is amped up a notch for effect but this “everyone is the worst” reality really stood out to me in this version as disingenuous and irritating. 

As Hollywood’s go-to girl for teenage risqué, Chloë Grace Moretz works well as Carrie and is far easier to empathize with than the otherworldly pale Sissy Spacek from Brian De Palma‘s version. She’s more of an ordinary girl under extraordinary circumstances than a full-blown weirdo –  someone who could have been perfectly normal if she wasn’t subject to the manipulation of her Looney-Toon mama.

It’s clear to me that the main issue with this film and with the story, is that it only works if everyone, save for Carrie, is the worst. Otherwise, we’re rooting for a serial killer. Dexter may have proved that that formula can work, but only if it’s done right. I understand that we’re supposed to sympathize with poor Carrie and the ghastly deeds brought down on her but the world in her reality is just so plastic, so invented, and so aggravating. Couple that with the fact that you’re probably going into Carrie already knowing the conclusion and it’s hard to imagine that what Peirce has cooked up will satisfy those who are looking for more than mere updated special effects.

C-

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New JACK RYAN Trailer Looks Pretty Generic

by Posted in Trailers Tagged , ,

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Paramount seems to be on a bit of a marketing blitz for Jack Ryan, the CIA operative, spy thriller starring Chris Pine, as the second trailer just dumped online not even two weeks after the premiere of the first. Maybe the debut trailer wasn’t tracking well with audiences or was failing to amp up anticipation levels but this second one is hardly making up any ground, as quick response has been largely negative.

While it’s hard to judge the quality of an actioner like Jack Ryan well before its release, the culmination of this second trailer has seemed to arrived with a bit of a thud. Obviously, I’ll be amongst those seeing it but I wonder how much of an audience it’ll snag with its Christmas time release. Traditionally, action movies over the Christmas break have seen good return on their investment, but there is no guarantee in a release period overcrowded with competition.

Take a look at this second trailer and see if you would priotize this over Christmas Day competitors American Hustle, 47 Ronin, Anchorman 2, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Directed by Kenneth Branagh (who also plays the villain in the film), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit will also feature Keira Knightley, Kevin Costner, Nonso Anozie, and David Paymer. For now, the film is slated for a Christmas release but, considering the many turning tides of films lately, it’s been rumored to be moving back into January territory. The fact that we’ve yet to see a trailer lends credence to that rumor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IX3Imm4osM

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is directed by Kenneth Branagh and stars Chris Pine, Keira Knightley, Kevin Costner, Nonso Anozie, and David Paymer. It’s currently set up for a Christmas, 2013 release.

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Talking with Kimberly Peirce of CARRIE

by Posted in Interviews

The name Kimberly Peirce is most closely identified with Boys Don’t Cry, her award-winning independent debut that saw an Oscar win for star Hillary Swank. Just as much as Boys Don’t Cry is a real life horror story, the Stephen King classic Carrie is grounded in issues of schoolyard bullying and overbearing parents. I sat down with Kim to discuss her take on the Carrie story, how she physically and emotionally transformed Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore, the use of visual effects in storytelling, and her favorite Stephen King movie adaptation.

 


What was it like for you to work on a Stephen King story?



Kimberly Peirce: It’s an honor. I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I was in a book club so I read the book as a kid. I was a literature student at the University of Chicago so  I read it when I was in college and then, of course, I re-read it when they came to me to do the movie and I was just blown away by how amazing of a story teller he is. It’s a classic tale that is incredibly timely to his era but it’s also incredibly timeless and is more relevant today than it was then. The things that blew me away about it when I went back to it was that I always love a good central protagonist. It’s what I love about movies. I love Carrie White. I love that she’s this misfit and this outcast who wants love and affection, which is what we all want. She’s up against huge obstacles. Certainly the girls at school don’t want her to have it and when she’s at home, her mother is also constantly feuding with her because her mother thinks that she’s the seed of sin. She represents the mother’s sin of having sex and enjoying it and so they’re locked in a love affair in a feud right in the very beginning, in the new scene that I added. That escalates all the way through and then I amplified the climax so that that’s even stronger.

The other thing we give you that’s extraordinary is that, at the end of the day, it’s a superhero origin story. Carrie discovers she has super powers and those super powers make life, which is largely intolerable and painful, acceptable. Talent makes life bearable and that’s what these superpowers do. I love that she explores it and doesn’t have control of it. She doesn’t understand the magnitude of it. When she goes to prom, we don’t know if it’s gonna come out. I absolutely love that it’s a Cinderella story.  What does she want? Love and acceptance. When the handsome boy invites her out, one, Sue should not have asked Tommy to ask Carrie out. Sue should have said, “I’m sorry.” Sue is doing what rich people do. She’s relying on charity. Charity doesn’t always solve problems. Tommy comes Carrie’s way and Carrie can’t say no. The most handsome boy in the school, why is he there? There’s something up. But the desire to have the Cinderella night and to wear the beautiful dress and go to the ball and dance with the handsome boy and have the night that we all dream about having, she just can’t say no. We can’t say no. We fall in love with being the Cinderella.

I’ve debated about this with people, and you can agree or disagree with me, but we want to take her to the height of the Cinderella night but then we crave seeing it turn on its head. I think we want to see it all go badly. When it goes badly, we stare, because we’re glad it’s not happening to us. We’re glad the blood is not on us. Then I think what’s amazing is that we desperately want her to get revenge on the people who did this to her. We all want to get even with the bad guy. That’s amazing to me. To me, the equation was: we had to fall madly in love with Carrie White and only by being madly in love with Carrie and wanting to see her succeed would we ever support the revenge tale. If we do, then it’s a blast because everyone loves a revenge tale.

One of the things that really distinguishes this version from earlier version of the story is the visual effects that you’re using. How did having access to advanced visual effects alter your approach to telling the story?

KP: I think what it did was empower me. When I read the book, I see in my mind’s eye this largely entertaining, using superhero powers and the world being affected by Carrie and her powers. She can move books but then she loses control. In particular, at the prom, when she wants to get revenge on somebody, she can move them out of the way, she can throw them into a door. The scene with Chris going through the windshield took a lot of time to think through because I had this vision where it was “let the punishment fit the crime.” The beautiful girl Chris is a total narcissist so what’s her punishment? We’re gonna eff up that face. Well how do you eff up that face? She had to go through the window. What’s fun about my job is how do you put someone’s face through a window? You can’t put an actor’s face through a window. You can put an actor’s face through sugar glass or you can put an animation through fake glass or an actor can fly forward on a green screen, so that’s a series of a ton of composites, which was really a blast for me. It’s a real actor, it’s an animated version of the actor, it’s real glass, it’s fake glass, it’s drawn glass. That’s really state of the art because there are all these layers and you’re using animation to visualize it and then you’re affecting the speed of it. There’s a lot of work on how fast she hits and how slow she comes out the other end. It’s all expensive so the more precise you are, the better. I direct the CG the same way that I direct the actors, which is what is the story, what’s the need, what’s the action? It was fantastic. It was really fun also having the car crash into an invisible wall. You can’t have a car hurling towards a human being, certainly not a minor. There are no invisible walls that I know of.

In this film, the revenge sequence is much more drawn out and taken beat by beat than, say, Brian De Palma’s version and that is largely due to the available effects. It’s hard to not enjoy getting more visual about that whole revenge portion.

KP: Good, that was my whole goal. I wanted you to have the most satisfaction and the most enjoyable. The whole movie, I was building up to how do I make this really fun. What I love is the Chris and Billy relationship. Chris has Billy wrapped around her finger and she’s calling her dad, and he’s like, “What the hell are you doing?” and she’s like, “Well what the hell are we gonna do?” and he says, “We’re gonna leave town.” The question is: is she willing to leave town with him. When they get trapped, I just love when she says, “It’s Carrie” and they’re hurling towards her and she says, “Run her down” and he looks at her in disbelief and is thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not gonna kill someone for you.” “Run her down. Run her down. Run her down.” That’s their whole relationship. Again, you’re supposed to get reignited by them being jerks and therefore Carrie really having a right to punch it to them. If you notice, Carrie doesn’t though. She lets Chris destroy herself. For the revenge tale, it was vital that that worked.

How many times did you guys have to film the pig’s blood scene?



KP: Twice. I was actually told that I could only do it once because the clean up on it was huge.

Getting it off her skin must have been brutal.



KP: Well one, it’s a whole rig. Two, it’s gonna splatter all over the stage, because it’s a wide shot. Three, if it hits her and it’s on her, she’s a minor so I could only do it once in a day because I would lose three hours for her clean up. I was told, “If you can do it in one that’s great.” So I said, “How many cameras can I get?” and they gave me three. I got three and put them at all the best angles. I would have gotten more but I didn’t. The first time, I was a nervous wreck because I didn’t think it was gonna work. We did all this R and D and sometimes it hit, sometimes it missed, but it hit perfectly and then of course, the DP said, “I gotta do it one more time” so we did it one more time. That was it though, we couldn’t afford more because of the clean up time. You don’t think about it but with a minor, they can legally only go so many hours so that is that.

For me, one of the scariest parts about the movie is Carrie’s mother’s devout Christianity where she believes that everything she does, including attempted infanticide, is for God and blessed by Him. I’m wondering how you think devout religion can such a scary thing these days?

KP: I want to make it really clear that Margaret (Carrie’s mom) has her own religion. She was in a recognizable religion at some point but she had sex with her husband, she got pregnant, she defined it as a sin because she enjoyed it and then skewed off into her own religion. That religion is something that she defines and she has her own iconography. As Carrie says, she changes things in the Bible to mean what she wants and as Julianne will tell you, she’s delusional. In her mind, her utmost responsibility is to protect her daughter. She believes that she protects her daughter by using corporal punishment and by repressing her. At the end of the day, her daughter is her evil and she exposes her sin by infanticide.

You did a great job at disguising Portia Doubleday in this film, she has such a different look and character type usually. Same goes with Julianne Moore who is equally playing against the loving, if spunky, persona she usually inhabits. It’s interesting to see these performers playing against type here.

KP: What I told Chloe when I hired her, “You are an incredibly talented, precocious star. You have a family around you who always loved you. You could not be further from Carrie White.” She has to be a misfit, has to be fragile, has to be scared, has to be timid and broken down. For me the fun is moving Chloe from her to her, very much like I did with Hilary Swank to Brandon Teena and even Channing Tatum to the solider, which is now a role that he plays a lot. That transformation ins everything for me. Not for the sake of transforming but generally, you start with a person who is her and a character who’s here, and at the end of the day, the character is generally the original person plus a big change. Chloe had to be fragile and timid and scared and have a lot of hostility at home, which she doesn’t have in real life, but when she gets to prom, then you see glimpses of the Chloe Moretz that you know. The same with Julianne. I knew that Margaret White is going to be fiercely devoted to religion, I know that’s she’s going to use corporal punishment., I know that’s she’s a scared woman, so then I hired Julianne Moore who is warm and charismatic and brilliant and beautiful and loves her children because when she makes that transformation, then there’s subtext. There’s all that stuff underneath. Yes, they’re transformed but I want them to leak through. I want you to say, “That’s the Portia that I love and know,” not, “I don’t even see Portia in there.”

With Julianne, beneath the intense religion fundamentalist woman who’s willing to use corporal punishment, you have that warmth there to draw from. One of my favorite lines in the movie is one that Julianne and I picked out of the book. She says, “I’ll be the preacher, you be the congregation” and Chloe just surrenders down to it because Carrie surrenders. Carrie just really wants her mother’s love, and thinks she’s gonna get it, and does, because the mother is tortured.

Were Chloe and Julianne always your first choice for these roles?

KP: Yes. For Chloe, we looked at a easily a few hundred girls throughout the states and throughout the world, because now you can get test tapes from all over. Myself and the brilliant Avy Kaufman were casting it and she was my first choice once I’d seen everyone who was out there. Really, I’m very much a structuralist so I knew that you needed to fall in love with Carrie White and want to adopt her. The movie didn’t work unless you loved her. Chloe has the ability to make you love her. I wanted to adopt her. You needed that. It’s an amazing thing that she has that ability onscreen to make you feel that way because if you look at her roles onscreen, Let Me In; she’s odd and dark and strange; in Huge, she’s beguiling, and then Kick Ass. It’s really a testament to her that once we defined what make the character tick, that she was able to bring that to life.

Other than the prom scene and the crash scene, do you have a favorite scene that you worked on?

KP: I would say I love the sequence where Carrie comes home. She’s got blood all over her and crying, “Momma, momma, momma.” I wrote that in because I wanted her to regress to being a little girl again. I also love the bath scene. She’s looking at her hands and saying she’s sorry, she’s crumbling back to being a vulnerable girl. I almost cried when she was doing that. It’s beautiful. She’s just a child. I love when she gets up, she really thinks there’s a chance. “Momma and I are clean. I can forget about the prom. I didn’t want to pray at the beginning but, you know what, screw you and your religion, I’ll pray. I’ll pray all you want.” That scene was like going to prom, you’re like, “You must be kidding? You’re gonna go to prom with the most handsome boy? That girl’s got it out for you,” it’s the same thing here. This woman, since you’ve been born, has been feuding with you and loving you. Relationships don’t change but she still surrenders because she so desperately wants love and acceptance. To me, I always love to stay on point and it’s a continuation of what we set in motion from the beginning. I love their fight. I amplified that and I love how we see the cuts on the legs and on the arms. I wanted that to be as violent as I could make it.

It comes out of this tender moment that they’re sharing which makes you realize that even though Carrie has powers, she is still very much the child to her mother.

KP: Yes and her powers protect her. When the mother does that to her, the powers shoot out and subconsciously  protect her.

Stephen King is an undisputed master of horror and has really touched on every area of fear. What is it that scares you the most?

KP: Certainly the dark in the specter of something coming out of nowhere and attacking me. It’s absolutely terrifying. If I’m watching a scary movie at my house and the drapes are not drawn so you can see out of the window out into the night, I don’t like that. The unknown. It’s interesting as a filmmaker because it’s showing restraint. I love horror films and I love when they can scare me or when I don’t get scared. I love when I’m with friends and I’m being tough because I didn’t get scared but I’m betraying myself. I’m a filmmaker so it’s easy to not get scared so then I’m like, “Get scared.” I love when your friends are watching or you’re on a date and they’re clutching you and you’re feeling brave. Scary movies are great because there’s something so human about it. We’ve been scaring ourselves and have been afraid of the dark forever, telling ghost stories and whatnot. It’s fun to be part of that and having audiences wanting to go to your movie and get scared.

In the final scene, much like in the original, there is this foreshadowing element where the crack runs up the gravestone that leaves it somewhat open-ended. Is doing some sort of follow up something that you may be interested in pursuing?

KP: I certainly couldn’t tell you the answer to that question outright but I can say that if this movie is successful, we love Carrie White and we love who she is and what she wants and her powers. Her powers have a yearning to want to stay in the world either with her or somebody else. It was honoring our love of Carrie and the mysterious and the magical and the unknown.

What advise would you give aspiring filmmakers just getting into the field or pursuing that career?

KP: Make sure you really love the job. I find a lot of people will say that they want to be a director but I think a lot of people think that it’s glamorous, and there are moments when it touches a kind of glamour, but the bottom line is: you have to love character and story and work. When my family comes and visits set, they go, “Oh my God.” It is 100 hours a week but what it is is an obsessive attention to the love of character and the love of creating them. Every detail is under your purview so I just feel like I love it. All hours of the day I’m thinking about it. But not everyone would love it. If you do, take the time to take the right classes and study with the right people. I was lucky enough to go to Columbia University and study filmmaking and writing and directing and I studied acting for years, I also went to Sundance and studied there. If you have talent, it’s not enough. You have to work really hard and study a lot and also really have to love story and character. If you do, you can create great things. It’s a great, great business but it’s a lot of work, but it’s good work. You’re always telling your story and then protecting it. Just dive in and tell your own stories. If you’ve got some crazy family, then tell that story. If you’ve got a great story about race, religion, gender identity, whatever your way of moving through the world is, you’re probably gonna have a life experience that other people don’t have and that could be interesting.

Carrie aside, what’s your favorite Stephen King movie adaptation?



KP: It’s obvious.

It is. 



KP: I’m just gonna say it. The Shining.



Yeah, obviously.



KP: It’s a perfect movie.

It’s one of my favorites.

KP: But it’s also what I love about this which is an amazing main character. Even when Jack Torrence is doing bad, I love him. I love the house. I love the family drama of it. I love the red. I love the introduction of Steadicam. I used that Steadicam quite a lot in this movie pulling Carrie through the house. Also just his love of character and story. I would aspire to be as good as Stanley Kubrick. And his thoughtfulness and his sense of humor and his oddness. He’s fantastic.

Agreed. It had to be The Shining.

KP: I do love Misery too. It’s amazing that that worked and I love what Kathy [Bates] did. I do think what Brian [De Palma] did with Carrie was phenomenal too. It’s really amazing if you think about the fact that he was the first one to do it and his understanding of camera angles and casting just made for great stuff.

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Out in Theaters: KILL YOUR DARLINGS

by Posted in Out in Theaters

“Kill Your Darlings”
Directed by John Krokidas
Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C. Hall, Elizabeth Olsen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Huston, Ben Foster, David Cross
Biography, Drama, Romance
104 Mins
R

Kill Your Darlings provides an origin story for some of the most prolific authors writing this side of the American Renaissance with a bit of a hot-blooded, cold-fingered approach. A burning sense of urgency ignites the passion of the characters onscreen – coiled up and bouncing off the walls, lunatics as they are – but that same urgency is largely absent from the film itself.

Like a budding author who hasn’t quite found his style, John Krokidas‘ film gets too caught up with being a part of the excitement to really invite others to join the fun. There’s palpable joy bubbling from the screenwriters’ research and the performer’s larger-than-life embodiments, but like newcomers to a party in full swing, we’re observers, hopelessly trapped outside the true jubilance and forced to watch through a pane of glass.

Best known for his beatnik masterpiece “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg was once a college freshman just like you, Kill Your Darlings supposes. Friendless, desperate to separate from his parents, and pining for his knack, his niche, his next big role, Ginsberg is in many ways the wide-eyed youth of our generation – filled with hope and promise, propped by all-angles encouragement, and saddled with lofty expectations. Horn-rimmed glasses and a head of greasy, wavy hair may not be a far cry from his garb of Potterdom but Daniel Radcliffe certainly experiments with a new breed of performer’s personality as Ginsberg, a refreshing break from the tired cliché of the white-bread young hero.

As a man struggling with his creative genius as well as his wavering sexuality, Ginsberg is a kettle boiling over with deep-seated self-frustration. He knows there is something worthy buried within him but struggles to access it. When he meets fellow student Lucien Carr, his world is opened to an intellectual renaissance, sexual reinvention, and, naturally, drug experimentation. After all, isn’t that what college is all about?

The Ginsberg that meets Carr is dressed in a secondhand suit literally sagging off his shoulders (a visual clue representing the idea that Ginsberg has yet to grow into himself) and is immediately transfixed by Carr, just as we are transfixed by Dane DeHaan. DeHaan as Carr is simply on fire. A conflagration of ideas breaching societal norms, Carr is a student of drunken revolution, lighting up the lives of those around him and activating something buried inside them. As it goes, Carr and Ginsberg are a match made in heaven. Manic reveler, DeHaan brings a magic quality to Carr like he brought brokenness to Jason in The Place Beyond the Pines and emptiness to Andrew in Chronicle. DeHaan is quickly becoming the most talented young actor in Hollywood and his fiery performance here just helps to solidify that fact.   

But for all the excitement born of Radcliffe and DeHaan’s circling one another intellectually, sexually, emotionally, and otherwise, the beats surrounding these beatniks are often in a downward spiral. We see the invisible magnetism of Carr but the many relationships he involves himself in are shallow and unearned. Save for a recurring relationship with kind of sketch-ball David Karramer (Michael C. Hall), the foundations upon which his web of friendships stands are shaky, if not totally crumbling. The balance between telling a succinct story and anthologizing the true characters within it have gotten the better of screenwriters Austin Bunn and Krokidas, as they carve too many side paths that fail to pay off down the line.

Beginning with a murder, of all things, sets our expectations up for a different kind of story, a more suspenseful piece than the period drama which unfolds, and for all accounts, this conceptual slight of hand is symbolic of the film’s casual failure. Like Ginsberg’s fluttering sexuality, Kill Your Darlings just doesn’t quite know what it is. Surely, the murder involved in the narrative is a critical piece towards understanding the ebb and flow of this character’s relationships, but it is more of a caveat than a central focus. Considering that the murder at the film’s introduction is more a postscript to the tale about the Beatnik generation’s roots, this tactic of putting it front and center seems like a diversion aimed to capture an audience that will clearly feel deceived by curtain time.

Better thought of as a mildly failed experiment than an abject defeat or a soaring victory, Kill Your Darlings scores big with great performances from its leads but directionless oversight from first-time filmmaker John Krokidas. Ambitious to a fault, he needs to narrow the focus and give more weight to a strong-footed narrative rather than ambling up each and every the peripheral sub-story that may present itself. With more confidence and tighter vision, Kill Your Darlings may have been excellent. As it is, it’s still pretty good.

C+

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