"When you commit yourself to a character," Sasha Grey recently told Movieline, "you really don't know what's going to happen until that exact moment or that exact scene." Maybe so, but in the adult-film actress's mainstream debut The Girlfriend Experience -- directed with cool, affectless precision by Steven Soderbergh -- your educated guesses probably wouldn't be that far off.
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More than any question accompanying the release of Stephan Elliott's new film Easy Virtue, all anyone wants to know is: Can Jessica Biel actually pull off Noel Coward? The answer is "maybe": Maybe if her director wasn't preoccupied with his own performance. Maybe if she didn't have to square off against co-stars as formidable as Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Maybe if it didn't feel like everyone involved was seemingly making different movies. Maybe if she was a believable blonde. Maybe a lot of things, really, though none of these are the real reason Easy Virtue flails.
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Hey, you know what won't be back? An entire franchise, after Terminator Salvation gets done with it. What was once a fun, exciting, involving series of pop adventures has been turned into a grim, desaturated slog by director McG. Coming on the heels of Star Trek's giddy escapism, it's hard to see how this risible war film will provide moviegoers -- or Warner Bros. -- with any jolts whatsoever.
At an overflowing press screening Wednesday morning, Quentin Tarantino's much-anticipated WWII epic Inglourious Basterds premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a group of less-than-enthusiastic journalists.
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Ryan Murphy, the canny and mischievous mind behind FX's Nip/Tuck, has lifted his finger to the air, taken some rudimentary atmospheric calibrations, and decided what the world needs now is Glee, sweet Glee. The hour-long musical comedy series previews tonight after American Idol, then gets stuffed inside the piano bench until its official bow on Fox's fall schedule.
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Finally, after four solid days of lackluster films ("Hey, did you see _____?" "Yeah, it was okay.") Lars von Trier — with his beautiful, violent, and cringe-inducing film Antichrist — has managed to wake up the festival in ways many people found, well, rather revolting. The press screening was by far the fest's most popular; high-level badges were relegated to the balcony and many members of the press were shut out. (Zut alors!)
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A pouring rain greeted journalists as they raced to the Palais on Friday to catch Jane Campion's Bright Star. The gloomy weather was the perfect setting for the somber portrait of the last days of poet John Keats.
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Despite some serious consideration by Movieline's blue-ribbon panel of camp aficionados, you will not find The Da Vinci Code in our deep, distinguished, and recently revived canon of Bad Movies We Love. It fell more into the less-auspicious Bad Movies We Can't Stay Awake Through, resulting in one hung jury after another. But its follow up Angels & Demons is a relative firecracker of a film, all pulp, pomp and grisly spectacle in the nerve center of the Catholic Church. For its sheer improvement over its predecessor, this one probably doesn't deserve BMWL enshrinement, either. But for its operatic treatment of Tom Hanks saving Rome, Vatican City and all of their faithful from annihilation in about six hours flat? Welcome to the club, boys!
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Just prior to the announcement of the films chosen to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, news about the inclusion, or lack thereof, of Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro changed hourly. After it was reported that his film failed to make the cut for the main competition, word came that the festival wrangler, Thierry Fremeaux, would throw Coppola a bone by giving him a special screening. He declined and, smartly, decided to screen it in the Director's Fortnight, a sidebar competition that began in the sixties — Cannes' more subtle precursor to Sundance's Slamdance. The result is a film not nearly as dismal as many head-up-their-rear film critics have christened it.
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Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi's returns to the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes this year with the splendid, though unfortunately titled No One Knows About the Persian Cats. His last showing at the festival was in 2002 with Half Moon, and judging by the positive reception, it's clear he's gaining traction among critics and festival-goers. This reception certainly wasn't hindered by the news that unfolded last week about Roxana Saberi, the Iranian journalist who was recently released from an Iranian prison. Aside from her journalistic duties, she also was a co-writer of the script.
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Even the most casual sports enthusiast knows that Spike Lee is more than just a basketball fan. Lee's combative but respectful interactions with a generation of Knicks opponents made those games mandatory viewing, and his modern basketball fable He Got Game taught us that even though it can get dirty, the spirit of the Game in the soul of its players is all that matters after the money is counted. That capital-G Game is what Lee and his willing subject Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant try to capture in Kobe Doin' Work, airing commercial-free Saturday night on ESPN. For the non-basketball fans, this might be Lee's least accessible work since Bamboozled, but for lovers of the round ball, this is as close as you will ever get to balling in Kobe's size 14's.
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Amidst hazy and humid weather, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival officially opened today with a black-tie, evening screening of the Disney/Pixar film Up, directed by Peter Docter. Both pomp and circumstance were in high demand as thousands of cheering French people welcomed a gaggle of (mainly French) celebrities who vamped on the red carpet — perhaps this festival is the only time the black-tie-wearing paparazzi ever shout "Agnès" in trying to get racy snapshots of French director Agnès Varda.
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Between his 2005 debut Brick and this week's The Brothers Bloom, filmmaker and (crack Movieline screenwriter) Rian Johnson has proven to be something of a savant with the modern crime thriller. His ear has nearly supersonic range for dialogue, and his eye effortlessly reads extra dimensions of faces and locations -- dynamics that come in quite handy with plots as complex as his. Still, however smart the source, a story is always just a story. And Bloom's most extravagant con might not be that of its swindling siblings, but rather just how touched you can be by something so weirdly inaccessible.
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Adoration is a return to vintage Atom Egoyan, an overturned jumble of curious parts that the Canadian auteur's unseen hand fits together, piece by piece, until finally pulling away to reveal an oddly affecting portrait rendered in shades of loss, guilt, isolation, and, ultimately, redemption. The plot involves an orphaned teenager named Simon (young Canadian actor Devon Bostick, a natural) who lives in a bleak city north of the border with his tow truck driver uncle -- a solemn and embittered man played with captivating skill by Scott Speedman. (Read my interview with Speedman here.)
Simon is obsessed with technology, and spends much of his time peering through the LCD monitor of a handheld videocamera, capturing the testimony of his grandfather in a hospital bed; the old man is enormously pissed off about Simon's deceased father, for some, unexplained reason, and swears up and down he's a murderer.
Carlos Cuarón's Rudo y Cursi arrives with an impressive pedigree, boasting all three celebrated amigos of the New Mexican Cinema -- big brother Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro -- as its producers. But a funny thing happens on the way to the estadio de fútbol: the sibling rivalry fable starts to feel like a Mexicanized take on Will Ferrell movie. And that's not exactly a compliment.
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