Archive for December, 2007
Martin Scorsese’s ‘Shutter Island’
With Michael Mann set to work with Johnny Depp in ‘Public Enemies’, Peter Jackson bringing us ‘The Lovely Bones’ and Martin Scorsese putting together ‘Shutter Island’ we know there will be at least a few high-profile films worth keeping an eye on in 2008 and Marty continues to add names to Shutter’s cast. The latest name joining the feature adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel is Michelle Williams. She joins Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley in the drama revolving around the trip made by U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) to a remote New England island in 1954 to figure out how a multiple murderess escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane.
Williams, will play the wife of Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall which will be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film follows the story of Teddy and his partner who travel to Shutter Island to investigate the escape of Rachel Solando, a murderess, from the mental institution on the Island. They then find themselves trapped on the island thanks to a pesky hurricane. Teddy, already racked with guilt about the recent death of his wife, begins to fall apart when the man who killed his wife is in the very mental institution that he’s investigating. So, if Teddy’s wife is dead it could be possible that William’s character will appear in the movie in flashback sequences.
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Johnny Depp and Michael Mann will make “Public Enemies”
Meeting hours before the Hollywood premiere of Depp’s “Sweeney Todd,” the director and actor shook hands on a deal that triggers a March 10 start for “Public Enemies” in Chicago.
The film is based on Brian Burrough’s nonfiction book “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34″ set during the great crime wave of 1933-34, when the government’s attempts to stop Depression-era criminal legends such as John Dillilnger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd transformed J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI into the country’s first federal police force. Mann wrote the script, based on Burrough’s book and Depp will play John Dillinger, considered the most notorious gangster of the era.
While Mann had been mulling several projects that included a reteam with “Collateral” star Tom Cruise on “Edwin A. Salt” at Columbia, “Public Enemies” gained momentum in the past six weeks, and became a reality when Depp became available after Warner Bros. postponed “Shantaram” due to concerns about script, costs and the prospect of shooting in India with monsoon season approaching.
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Juno: Movie Review
From a first impression, it would seem that all the ingredients are in place for “Juno” – the story of a high school junior who finds herself pregnant – to become the breakout indie hit of 2007. The new-on-the-scene screenwriter with an ear for ultra-snappy, ironic dialogue (Diablo Cody, already garnering comparisons to Tarantino), the super-hip, obligatory-since-“Garden State” indie soundtrack (courtesy of Matt Messina, The Moldy Peaches and Kimya Dawson) and a bevy of quirkily dysfunctional characters. Of course, we’ve seen those parts not amount to a satisfying whole before (oh Wes Anderson, we hardly knew ye). But in this case, it turns out those first impressions are dead-on. “Juno” is all that and more - a wonderful film with heart, humor and, yes, a great soundtrack.
Directed with a welcome ease by Jason Reitman, who with “Juno” emerges fully from dad Ivan’s shadow, the film opens with the titular 16-year-old administering several home pregnancy tests, all with the same outcome: positive. The father? None other than the king (or is it court jester) of awkward comedy Michael Cera, who plays Juno’s partner in sexual awakening Bleeker (don’t ask about the character’s names – Juno’s little sister is called Liberty Bell). Juno and Bleeker handle the news with a real, understated grace. They’re kids; they think they can handle anything. After a brief flirtation with abortion, Juno opts for the other A-word and finds what she considers to be perfect adoptive parents (played to yuppie perfection by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) in the local Pennysaver. All this before she even informs her parents. When she finally does, it’s done almost as a business meeting – Juno wouldn’t want a big show of tears. Her family isn’t unloving, nor is it smothering. It’s just … normal. Father Mac (J.K. Simmons, given a fine, meaty role), is an air conditioner repairman who loves his daughter as best he can. Step-mom and dog-lover Bren (Allison Janney, always a pleasure) steers happily clear of the evil stepmother role in none-to-subtle ways.
As Juno, Ellen Page proves that her fine work in the borderline-exploitative pedophile-torturefest “Hard Candy” was no fluke. At a mere 20, this young actress can carry a film with uncommon, unaffected sincerity, even when the script calls for her to be impossibly, unbelievably, at-times annoyingly precocious (Juno is fluent in all things pop culture - from the Stooges to Dario Argento). Ms. Cody’s zippy script has a parlance all its own (characters are prone to terms like “wizard” and “honest to blog”) which Ms. Page wears like an old shoe. The script is also uncommonly generous to its cast; there’s not a bad role (or performance) in the bunch.
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Javier Bardem - Interview
So far, this has been a decent year for Javier Bardem, who’s actually been out and about promoting a few new movies for the first time since 2004’s Oscar-winning The Sea Inside.
Bardem can be seen as the murderous Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, opening in limited cities today, but we had a chance to talk to him a few weeks back for his other new movie, Love in the Time of Cholera based on the Spanish romantic classic by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Bardem plays Florentino Ariza, a poet and telegraph clerk in 19th Century Columbia who falls for the beautiful Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but when she marries a doctor (Benjamin Bratt), Florentino promises to remain faithful and true to Fermina until she agrees to be his. Over the course of the movie, which spans over 50 years, we see Bardem as Florentino at all different ages, as he sleeps with over 600 other women before finally getting his wish.
You’ve said that you read Marquez’s book when you were 14 and that it made a big impression on you. How did those feelings carry over to yourself as an adult and getting to portray that character?
Javier Bardem: Well, the first time I read it, as you said, it was so big. It’s such a big novel. I mean, I followed the storyline, but I remember being thoroughly stuck in the reading of it. I was trying to get lost in the descriptions, for example when she goes to the market and the way that Garcia Marquez explains the flavors and the smells of the fruits and all of that. I remember reading that like six times in a row, going through the page. It just opened a whole world for you and there were many things that I missed. After that, I read it twice. When I knew the movie was going to happen, I felt like I had to talk to the director and say, “I have a big passion for this character.” Also, as an actor, it’s a challenge to try to do somebody that goes from 20 to 75, because when you do that you have to avoid acting age. You have to really try to act the character aging, which is different. That’s a challenge, especially when, for example, you’re shooting scenes in when you’re 20, when you’re 40 and when you’re 75 all in the same day, and you have to change years that fast. That’s a challenge, and I wanted to go to that challenge.
How do you feel about the movie being made in English and not in Spanish even though you have a lot of great Spanish actors in it?
Bardem: Once again, it’s the way it’s conceived and you have to get onboard or not. I would’ve preferred that it was in Spanish. There were many moments where I said, “F*ck. If this were in Spanish I could really make another thing.” There’s an understanding, a knowledge, of the language that you can play with in the novel. There are certain words that for you mean something deep because it belongs to your own memories and experiences, and you bring it with you and the character will go to another level, but when you’re working in a foreign language, you have to try and put that as a surgeon. You have to try to put those images and experiences into those words that don’t mean anything to you, which is extra work. It’s also a great experience, because you have to really focus and you have to really be able to let yourself go as an actor but without losing the conscience of the language that’s not your own. It’s a weird, kind of schizophrenic moment, but it’s good.
I thought Ron Harwood did an amazing job adapting this, so did the words in the script have the same effect on you in English than the book when you read it in Spanish?
Bardem: No, no, it’s impossible. I mean, I was always working with the book in Spanish. When I was shooting the movie I was always with the book in my bag and I was always coming back to it and reading and putting notes from it. From there, you’re in this universe of what you’re reading, the language of Garcia Marquez in Spanish, to go to set and say it in English was a weird situation. Sometimes, I’d get lost in the translation. It was obvious sometimes that I wasn’t bringing what I could.
Would you consider this a story about undying love or about persistence?
Bardem: I don’t know. I think it’s the ultimate love story of a person who really falls in love when he’s fourteen years old, and still, when he’s seventy-five, feels the same way like as if he’s seen her the day before. I mean, it’s fiction. It’s a novel. I don’t know if that exists in the real world, but we all want to think it exists, no? That’s why we’re always fighting for it.
Read the rest of this entry
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American Gangster
Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Brian Grazer, Steve Zaillian and Ridley Scott team to tell the true juggernaut success story of a cult hero from the streets of 1970s Harlem in American Gangster.
Nobody used to notice Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the quiet driver to one of the inner city’s leading black crime bosses. But when his boss suddenly dies, Frank exploits the opening in the power structure to build his own empire and create his own version of the American Dream. Through ingenuity and a strict business ethic, he comes to rule the inner-city drug trade, flooding the streets with a purer product at a better price. Lucas outplays all of the leading crime syndicates and becomes not only one of the city’s mainline corrupters, but part of its circle of legit civic superstars.
Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is an outcast cop close enough to the streets to feel a shift of control in the drug underworld. Roberts believes someone is climbing the rungs above the known Mafia families and starts to suspect that a black power player has come from nowhere to dominate the scene. Both Lucas and Roberts share a rigorous ethical code that sets them apart from their own colleagues, making them lone figures on opposite sides of the law. The destinies of these two men will become intertwined as they approach a confrontation where only one of them can come out on top.
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P.S. I Love You
Holly Kennedy (Hilary Swank) is beautiful, smart, and married to the love of her life—a passionate, funny and impetuous Irishman named Gerry (Gerard Butler). So when Gerry’s life is taken by an illness, it takes the life out of Holly. The only one who can help her is the person who is no longer there. Nobody knows Holly better than Gerry. So it’s a good thing he planned ahead. Before he died, Gerry wrote Holly a series of letters that will guide her, not onlyThe first message arrives on Holly’s 30th birthday in the form of a cake and, to her utter shock, a tape recording from Gerry, who proceeds to order her to get out and “celebrate herself.” through her grief but in rediscovering herself.
Sometimes there’s only one thing left to say.
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National Treasure 2 : Book of Secrets
Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) sets out to find the lost 18 pages from the diary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
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National Treasure 2
While Ben is presenting new information about John Wilkes Booth and the 18 pages missing from Booth’s diary, one man stands up and presents a missing page of John Wilkes Booth’s diary. Thomas Gates, Ben’s great-grandfather, is mentioned in the page.
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