There's no stopping Joel Schumacher, the 72-year-old filmmaker who returns to screens this week with the thriller Trespass. Though to invoke his name in some circles is to invite wishes he would stop; Schumacher has never been an especially popular director among the critical elite, and his latest film, a wild home-invasion potboiler co-starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman, won't necessarily change things. But you know what? That's a good thing -- at least for Schumacher.
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Julia Roberts shot newbie director Dennis Lee's ensemble family drama Fireflies in the Garden four years ago, but after an infamously disastrous Berlin Film Festival showing and distributor drama at Senator Films, the indie film languished for years on the shelf. Last night at their premiere in Los Angeles Lee told Movieline how Roberts saved the film from direct-to-video hell and Roberts explained why her upcoming project, Snow White, will be worth the price of admission.
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Craig Brewer knows that some of you are skeptical about his remake of Footloose, the 1984 Kevin Bacon teen classic about lusty high-schoolers who kick off their Sunday shoes, strain against their small town conservative parents, and "angry dance" their way to prom. But the director, who helped bring rap music to the Academy's attention in his Oscar-winning Hustle & Flow (and next chained Christina Ricci to a radiator in Black Snake Moan, another tale set in the Southern region where Brewer was raised), comes at it with a fan's devotion and with an awareness of how religion, morality and politics still overlap in the lives of teenagers today. And, as he watched Kevin Bacon do when he was a kid watching Footloose on the big screen, Brewer admits to indulging in his fair share of "angry dancing."
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It's auteur 3-D work-in-progress week in New York! Less than a day after Martin Scorsese gave a hometown crowd an early glimpse at his upcoming Hugo, James Cameron dropped by Times Square to show off 17 minutes from his ongoing 3-D conversion of Titanic.
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Opening this weekend in limited release, Fireflies in the Garden isn't exactly Hayden Panettiere's "new" film. It's more like her embattled, shelved, revisited and re-revisited film -- shot in 2007, a festival curio in early 2008 and thought lost to the indie-film ages until recently, when plans were finally made for its theatrical distribution. At least she's in pretty phenomenal company, starring alongside Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe and playing a young Emily Watson in the tale of a family grappling with generations of guilt, misunderstanding, tragedy and maybe -- just maybe -- a future.
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The world premiere of your first feature film -- in the hypercritical climes of the New York Film Festival, no less -- would be nerve-wracking for any director. But Simon Curtis isn't any director. He's a BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated television and stage veteran who's worked with a who's who of British acting royalty, a noteworthy group of whom appear in Curtis's feature debut My Week With Marilyn.
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Australian actor Joel Edgerton has been in the business for a good 15 years, during which time he's transitioned from Aussie TV to supporting turns in international films (Kinky Boots, King Arthur, and Star Wars: Episode II -- Revenge of the Sith) and wrote and co-starred in the solid Australian thriller The Square with brother Nash (who directed). But in 2011 -- on the heels of his work in the underperforming but critically-loved Warrior, on the eve of his lead turn in Universal's prequel The Thing -- he seems poised, finally, for his moment in the spotlight.
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This week brings Trespass, the latest film from Joel Schumacher. The occasion prompted the opportunity for Movieline to have a candid, wide-ranging chat with the veteran filmmaker about his career, his critics and his humble origins as a costume designer in the 1970s. And despite his glossy new thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman, one subject demanded even more attention: The Wiz, the Motown musical directed by Sidney Lumet and written, in his brief, scrappy scribe-for-hire days, by Schumacher.
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Dutch filmmaker Tom Six cut a striking figure last month at Fantastic Fest, where he appeared -- ever-smiling and clad head to toe in a pristine white suit, his outfit of choice -- to world premiere his squirm-inducing body horror sequel, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). The following day Movieline spoke with Six about the film, in which he meets the challenge of one-upping himself in the escalation of extremes in gory, grotesque detail. Upon hearing that an audience member fainted the previous night, Six professed his sympathy. He was sorry to hear it, he said with a grin. Well, maybe not completely sorry.
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You might not think that Real Steel, the sci-fi action flick about a washed-up boxer and the junkyard robot he trains toward a fictional fighting championship, would carry much boxing credibility. But that's where Sugar Ray Leonard comes in. The Hall of Famer was recruited by director Shawn Levy to choreograph the robot fights and most importantly, to advise the filmmakers on how to establish a humanistic relationship between the movie's beleaguered trainer (Hugh Jackman) and Atom, the robo-underdog he takes on, that audiences will want to root for.
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Laurence R. Harvey (not to be confused with Laurence Harvey, the late Oscar-nominated Lithuanian-British actor) made an unusual debut on the world's stage when a close-up of his face, sweaty and bug-eyed, was released as the first image from Tom Six's depraved sequel The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). Meeting the British stage veteran -- and, yes, one-time children's television performer -- on the red carpet at Fantastic Fest, Movieline was pleasantly relieved to find that Harvey is far from his disturbing alter ego, the put-upon Human Centipede-worshipping drudge Martin, who commits unspeakable acts upon fresh victims in the new film. But does his mother know what he's been up to?
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Last week, Movieline spoke with with Fast Five star Tyrese Gibson to get the male perspective on being part of such a lucrative, testosterone-driven franchise. Eager to get another take, we reached out to Jordana Brewster, who has played the sole heroine of the car heist series since day one. The Yale graduate eagerly discussed her growing role in Fast Five (which is released on DVD and Blu-ray this week), a potential sixth installment and her own meager knowledge of automobiles.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor Sam Shepard doesn't take a lot of lead film roles, but when he does, he makes them count. Take this week's Blackthorn, the sweeping epic tale of what might have happened if -- as some historians believe -- legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy wasn't gunned down by Bolivian forces in 1908, and instead went on to live a quiet, reclusive existence in that country under the pseudonym James Blackthorn.
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And you thought Jessica Chastain was having a busy year. Check out the resume of Juno Temple, the 22-year-old British actress whose early roles in such films as Notes on a Scandal and Atonement have given way to a 2011 comprising work on movies from The Dark Knight Rises to The Three Musketeers to this week's quirky indie dramedy Dirty Girl.
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Grindhouse icon Pam Grier blazed a trail through the blaxploitation era, was dubbed "the baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town" (a title that remains uncontested four decades later, one might argue), and commanded the screen with a combination of ferocity, empathy, and a look so striking Roger Ebert once described her as an "actress of beautiful face and astonishing form." Years later, in 1997, Quentin Tarantino paid homage to the work and the woman in Jackie Brown, adapted from Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, one of the filmmaker's best and most underrated films and the spark that jump-started a career revival for its stars.
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