After a weekend of speculation, guesses and second-guesses about which top-secret "work in progress by a master filmmaker" would in fact screen tonight as a last-minute addition to the New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese confirmed today's reports by taking the stage at Avery Fisher Hall in Manhattan and introducing his family-friendly 3-D opus Hugo to a loving hometown crowd.
Our sister blog Deadline is reporting that the surprise sneak screening tonight at the New York Film Festival -- showcasing a "work in progress from a master filmmaker" -- will be Martin Scorsese's Hugo. If true, it would be Scorsese's second film to screen at this year's NYFF (after George Harrison: Living in the Material World) and a considerable risk for Paramount, which would be exhibiting the uncompleted 3-D film in one of the tougher filmgoing environments known to man. Movieline will be there in any case; check back with us later on for a report. [via @NikkiFinke]
It almost wouldn't be the New York Film Festival these days without Michelle Williams, whose My Week With Marilyn marks the actress's fourth effort in five years to grace Manhattan's venerated fall-movie showcase. It's inarguably her highest-profile work to splash down here -- a world premiere debuting in the festival's prestigious Centerpiece slot, glowing with awards-season ambition and hinging almost entirely on Williams's risky interpretation of Marilyn Monroe. But come on: We're talking about Michelle Williams here. Of course she pulled it off.
How does Keira Knightley devour so much scenery in A Dangerous Method yet stay so thin? That was the big question Tuesday at Lincoln Center, where her director David Cronenberg and co-star Michael Fassbender dropped by to meet the press ahead of tonight's New York Film Festival premiere of Method.
I'm not a huge supporter of remaking great foreign films; the trend runs from enticing (Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) to unnecessary (Let Me In). But because it's inevitable that Hollywood will keep borrowing ideas from the outside world -- and since the aptly named Fantastic Fest played host to so many of them over the past week -- here are five international offerings I could see studios attempting to re-envision. Let's just hope they don't muck it up.
There was an inkling around town that Fantastic Fest's secret screening Wednesday would turn out to be Paranormal Activity 3, what with the viral VHS tapes surfacing in Austin this week and the seemingly perfect timing for the horror sequel, which hits theaters nationwide on Oct. 21. By the time the surprise world premiere was confirmed to a packed audience at midnight on Wednesday, it was a surprise many folks saw coming. So how did Paranormal Activity 3 measure up to its predecessors -- and what does it mean that it doesn't match up at all with its recent trailer?
Within the insular Traveller community in Ireland and parts of the United Kingdom, among clans that are closely related by marriage and birth, conflicts are solved through ritualized bare-knuckle fights buoyed by blood pride and machismo. Think Brad Pitt in Snatch and you get the lighter side of the boxing tradition, but in real life, as documentarian Ian Palmer discovered as he filmed one clan's champions over the course of 12 years, there's a dark and tragic nature to the custom that drives the culture.
A quick update from Austin, where the Fantastic Debates took place at midnight pitting filmmakers, actors, and astrophysicists against each other in spoken debates before pounding it out in the boxing ring: If you were betting on Elijah Wood to reign victorious over Lord of the Rings buddy Dominic Monaghan (or in Hobbit terms, Frodo vs. Merry, who were debating the awesomeness of another fantasy nerd obsession, World of Warcraft), you'd have lost.
Because there's a chance fellow Hobbit Elijah Wood is going to cream him in the boxing ring tonight, let's take a moment to give props to Fantastic Fest guest Dominic Monaghan, who threw down some Vanilla Ice in yesterday's karaoke rap contest. With his A's cap pulled down low (Moneyball shout out!), Monaghan showed the room that this was clearly not his first time spitting lyrics like, "If there was a problem/Yo I'll solve it/Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it." At least it wasn't "You All Everybody!"
Four years after bringing his feature debut Timecrimes to Fantastic Fest (where it won the Best Picture award), Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo returned to Austin, a place so warm and familiar he liked it to returning to the womb. "It's like going back into my mother's vagina," exclaimed Vigalondo, addressing the friendly crowd at the debut of his sophomore film, Extraterrestrial. "So I get inside my mother's vagina, and for some reason you are all there inside!"
A cool bit of graffiti art popped up overnight at Fantastic Fest for Adam Wingard's buzz film You're Next, which screens later tonight. Passes to the hotly anticipated horror pic, which was picked up by Lionsgate after a Toronto Film Festival bidding war, sold out quickly online and with fest faves A.J. Bowen and director Ti West (who both star in the film) in town it's one of the hot tickets for tonight. Is Banksy in our midst as well, spraying movie promos all over Austin? Or Mr. Brainwash? (Or both, if they're the same person??)
Somewhere toward the end of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), Tom Six's follow-up to the notorious 2010 dare of a horror film The Human Centipede (First Sequence) -- after the sequel's new villain had performed makeshift "surgery" on his twelve victims but before the film's gruesome, stomach-churning denouement -- the woman sitting next to me fell ill and fainted. She came to minutes later, she told me as we waited for medics, only to be greeted by a wall of disorienting, horrifying sounds, a cacophony of screams and even worse noises, accompanied by some of the vilest images ever captured on film. Needless to say, it was agony to live through. But, she said with a brave smile, it reminded her that she was human after all.
The synopsis of Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher's feature directing debut Violet and Daisy sounds straightforward enough: "A brutal fable about a pair of teenage assassins, played by Saoirse Ronan and Alexis Bledel, who believe they've landed a straightforward assignment but soon find themselves thrown off their game when their latest target isn't who they expected." Evidently, however, that's not quite what its audience -- or even its stars themselves, for that matter -- seemed to take away from its Toronto Film Festival premiere.
Tea Party presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has an unlikely suitor in studio chief and liberal patron Harvey Weinstein, who issued a statement Tuesday night inviting the Minnesota congresswoman to her native Iowa for the U.S. premiere of his satire Butter.
Michael Winterbottom makes so many movies that some of them creep into festivals very quietly and, just as quietly, creep out, never to be seen again. That wasn't the case with The Trip, which played here last year, a woolly exploration of middle-aged angst that featured Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (as themselves) bickering and trading Sean Connery impersonations as they made their way through the English countryside. But two years before that, in 2008, Winterbottom brought a picture called Genova to the festival, a mildly engaging drama in which Colin Firth plays a father who moves his family to Italy after the death of their mother. The picture never got a U.S. release, fading like the worn face of a stone saint on a medieval church.
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