The long-awaited Snowpiercer, from South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, is finally coming out on June 27th. This movie's been delayed for months, because the director was caught up in a fierce battle with American distributor Harvey Weinstein (a confrontation you never want to enter, frankly) over releasing his cut of the movie, and not Weinstein's, who wanted at least 20 minutes chopped from the film. Bong Joon Ho won out however, so we're getting his original version when it hits theaters, and it definitely looks unique. An action-packed sci-fi based on the French graphic novel Le Transpersoneige, Bong shot 80% of the film in English and with an ensemble cast of both American and South Korean actors. His other movies are the acclaimed Memories of Murder, The Host (which I loved) and Mother, so I'm looking forward to checking this one out.
TRAILER #2: "Begin Again"
The new U.K. trailer for Begin Again, the latest music romance from the director of Once, came out today. It looks great and even though it's coming out July 4th, it's been playing at various film festivals this spring and I personally can't wait to see it at SIFF in a couple of weeks. Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo team up to record an album all around New York City, and yes that is Keira doing her own singing in the movie:
Movie of the Day: "Mildred Pierce" (1945)
One of my favorite film noirs of all time is a perfect entry for Mother's Day week, as it tells the story of the self-sacrificing Mildred, the mother who does everything in the world for her daughter, including giving up all the things she wants for herself, only to be betrayed by the increasingly evil child as she grows older. Okay, so it's not exactly a happy Mother's Day movie, but it's a hugely entertaining melodrama with some classic performances from Joan Crawford (who famously won an Oscar for this) but especially Ann Blyth as the horrible little two-faced Veda- seriously, you're going to want to see Mildred take down this demon spawn through any means necessary by the time the finale rolls around. This is one of the greats.
Original Trailer (unusually for the time, this is kind of a misleading trailer, which omits the mother-daughter story and plays up the film noir angle, but Mildred is anything but a femme fatale- that role actually belongs to Ann Blyth in the film):
TRAILER #2: "One Million Ways to Die in the West"
The second red-band trailer that's even raunchier than the first, filled with the kind of gross and off color jokes that are Seth MacFarlane's brand of humor. This actually looks pretty funny (if MacFarlane's your cup of tea that is, which he isn't for everyone), and I have a feeling it's going to be big hit when it comes out on May 30th. MacFarlane fans are pretty rabid and brought his first movie Ted to a surprise $218 million in 2012. The question is whether he himself can transfer from the behind the scenes guy to an on-camera screen presence, but I don't know, he looks pretty at ease to me in these trailers.
TRAILER: "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day"
As I watched this trailer knowing it was written by Lisa Cholodenko (who I just recommended yesterday for writing and directing The Kids Are All Right) and directed by Miguel Arteta (who made Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl), it became sort of surreal how bad this looks. Frankly, the trailer just got worse and worse as it went along, and it only seems to have a passing resemblance to the classic kids book from 1972 it's based on. And it's too bad, because obviously Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner are two of the most likable actors in Hollywood, but this just doesn't cut it. Unless somehow this is an awful trailer to what's actually a really good movie underneath, which sometimes happens, but I kind of doubt it here. It's coming out October 10th.
TRAILER: "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"
Can't wait! The war is here for Caesar and his apes, as this new trailer shows in the upcoming sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, coming out July 11th. I'll admit the whole war against the humans thing seems familiar (did that happen in a previous Apes movie?) but who cares when the apes look so cool? Jason Clarke, Keri Russell and Gary Oldman are the new human additions to the cast but let's face it, nobody goes to see the humans in these movies. It's all about Andy Serkis's Caesar.
Movie of the Day: "The Kids Are All Right" (2010)
It's time to start our Mother's Day movies, in honor of the holiday coming up on May 11th. First up today, we have two movie moms for the price of one, in this Oscar-nominated film about a family with two mothers and two teenage kids, the latter of whom go searching for the donor who helped create them. The guy they find is Mark Ruffalo, who turns out to be a cool, kind of hippie-ish laid back Californian, and whose entrance into their lives and family turns everything that Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have built upside down. This is a warmhearted family comedy with some really great acting in it, from all three of the adults especially. It was nominated for 4 Oscars, including nods for Bening and Ruffalo, and really worth seeing.
Trailer:
TRAILER: "Tammy"
Could Melissa McCarthy have another big summer hit this year? Here she is in Tammy, which was written by her and her husband Ben Falcone, who also directed. She looks funny as always, but sometimes with comedy trailers you can't really tell what the tone of the movie might be- I suspect that this one could actually be more of a dramedy than it looks. We'll just have to wait and see. Tammy comes out July 2nd.
POSTER: "Interstellar"
Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated sci-fi film Interstellar is coming out in November, and now the poster has officially been released:
We still don't really know anything about this movie yet, other than that it's got a big ensemble cast (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn Michael Caine), but we won't have long to wait before the trailer finally drops. It's supposed to be released ahead of Godzilla in the theaters, which means it'll be online sometime next week. The teaser didn't tell us much, and Nolan seems to be wanting to play up the mysterious aspects of this, as usual. It looks to want to recall 70's sci-fi epics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind to me, which Nolan has admitted was a big influence on him as a kid. Let's hope it can live up to the hype.
Julia Roberts and Sally Field Curse Off
Ok, so Jimmy Kimmel is obviously trying to compete with Jimmy Fallon's celebrity viral video craze, but I gotta admit this was funny. I love Sally Field's oh-so-casually dirty mouth:
Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "The Women" (1939)
Out on blu-ray this week is a classic from the 1930's and one of my favorites of that particular era. The Women was adapted from a play by Clare Booth Luce and featured an all star cast of Hollywood's biggest actresses at the time. The conceit is that this movie is virtually all women, showing not one single man in the entire film. Good girl Norma Shearer stars as a wealthy Manhattanite whose husband is having an affair with the evil Joan Crawford and whose friends alternately plot with her and against her in light of the scandal the affair causes. Hilarious, filled with sparkling one-liners and some all time delicious scenery-chewing from Crawford and the great Rosalind Russell. It was made into a horrible remake in 2008, but this is the one you want to see.
Original Trailer:
REVIEW: "The Invisible Woman" (2013) Felicity Jones, Ralph Fiennes. Dir. Ralph Fiennes
Charles Dickens had an affair with a younger mistress by the name of Ellen Ternan that lasted thirteen years until his death in 1870. The affair was kept mostly secret, despite the rumors that abounded during his lifetime- he denied it even though he left his wife of 22 years for the young girl, who was 18 at the time they met. Not much is known about the woman herself, hence the title of the film The Invisible Woman, which documents the affair from their first meeting, and mostly from her point of view, as it begins with Ellen (known as Nellie) during her marriage to her husband after Dickens' death, and flashes back to her young adulthood. The film seems to be an attempt to shed light on the mysterious lover of the famed English novelist and increase the value of her own life as something other than Dickens' mistress. The problem is, even after this movie I wasn't really convinced she was anything else.
Felicity Jones plays Nellie and gives a good performance in the title role, bringing some intensity to the part of the conflicted and intellectually curious young girl, trying to show us what someone like Charles Dickens would have seen in her despite their nearly thirty year age difference. She's the youngest of three sisters who live together with their mother (Kristen Scott Thomas) and all are aspiring actresses. They move in the same London society circles as Dickens, and Nellie in particular is a devoted fan of the author, pouring over all of his works and keeping them close to her at all times in a collection under her bed. She idolizes the man and when they first meet as cast members in a production of one of his plays, there is an immediate sparks between them. Dickens is played by Ralph Fiennes (who also directs this movie) as a jolly, amusing, and worldly soul drawn to the unconventional, and seems to be attracted to Nellie in spite of himself. He's not shown as a leering, predatory older man- in fact he tries to distance himself from Nellie at first, but his marriage to his wife (played by Joanna Scanlon from The Thick of It) has deteriorated so badly that there is no longer much affection between them at all, and she hardly seems to mind when he sends her in person to deliver his birthday gift of a gold bracelet to Nellie after it was mistakenly delivered to her.
Fiennes directs the film with a sure hand, taking care to make the interior rooms dark and dreary as they would have been in the 1850's, and there is some beautiful cinematography in the outside settings especially. But no matter how many shots we get of an aged Nellie (who is never for one moment convincing as a fortysomething woman- she always looks like a teenager) taking long walks on the beach as she agonizes over her troubled past, I just could not find myself interested in her internal anguish. Fiennes is far more interesting as Dickens, who of course is one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century, and I couldn't help but wish this movie had been about him instead. Nellie is shown to be a smart girl, but a terrible actress with no prospects in that regard. Her mother is a bit relieved when Dickens wants to take her on as his mistress and support her for the rest of her life, because she knows she'll be taken care of. Nellie feels slightly guilty at first, but soon comes to realizes she has no better options, and after all, he does love her and is willing to leave his wife for her. But there's not much else to the character. Despite Jones' attempt to inject some internal life behind her eyes, I couldn't ever see this woman as anything but a blank slate. There's no sense that she gave up a future of her own to be taken care of by Dickens, if anything it seems she might have gotten lucky.
On paper the story of Charles Dickens' secret 13-year affair seems like it would be a juicy, fascinating subject to tackle. But there hardly seems to be anything truly scandalous that took place over the course of these events, and with a nice but rather unremarkable girl inhabiting the other half of this pairing, there's just not a whole lot of story there to tell.
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