Also rounding out Friday's round up of news briefs, Harvey Weinstein receives UCLA honors, New York's LGBT Festival sets its opener, the Austin Film Festival touts its record submission and California is chided for not doing enough to keep productions from ditching the state.
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Though he plays one of the great roués of literature – the social climbing, bloomer-dropping hero at the center of Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel – the focus on Robert Pattinson in Bel Ami is notably above the belt. This is certainly true in the literal sense, where first-time directing team Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod lavish attention on Pattinson’s extraordinary face, even get a little lost in it at times. But it also feels like the source of a larger lack – that of the libidinous physicality and charismatic breadth of a well-rounded scoundrel.
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Poor Robert Pattinson: The weight of proving himself, in a movie that doesn’t have the words “Twilight” and “Saga” in the title, is shaping up to be heavier than a vampire’s curse. In last year’s Water for Elephants, he had a charming naivete, a seemingly natural shyness that was wholly inoffensive, if not exactly memorable. And as social schemer Georges Duroy in Bel Ami, playing here at the Berlinale out of competition on the festival’s next-to-last day, he works harder to redeem himself than any actor should have to: He applies a scowl from Column A with an eyebrow furrow from Column B to express displeasure; Smirk No. 4 denotes a moment of extreme hubris. The effect is like watching an athlete trying not to break a sweat – you might want to root for him, but there’s a part of you that just wants him to let it all out already.
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From Meryl Streep to Martin Scorsese and awards season juggernaut The Artist, Hollywood's finest came out in full force Sunday in London for the 2012 BAFTA Awards. (Get the full list of BAFTA winners here.) Hit the jump to see who dazzled on the red carpet and celebrated backstage at the last big hurrah before the Oscars.
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Most audiences will have to wait until this spring to glimpse Twilight vamp Robert Pattinson as a rascally womanizer in the period drama Bel Ami, but select lucky Belgian fans got a chance to screen the film early this week. Since the trades have yet to pass judgment, let's take a look at what the netizens had to say in their Bel Ami fan reviews: "Amazing!" "Stunning!" "A little bit psycho!" And, oh my -- "sexy thrusting!" More waxing poetic over RPattz's heavenly buttcrack (and oh yeah, his performance) after the jump.
Exciting news, world. Robert Pattinson has advanced from respectfully romancing teen virgins onscreen to defiling wealthy, middle-aged wives (played by Oscar-nominated actresses, no less) in pursuit of upward mobility. Or wealth. Or maybe just acceptance as a serious actor. (Look at him in a period piece with Kristen Scott Thomas!) Either way, jump ahead to see our little Edward Cullen mature into a scheming, sexing cad in the trailer for Bel Ami.
It's not like Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star aspires to be Citizen Kane, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail or even Wedding Crashers. All it wants to be is a silly, raunchy comedy about the rise of an extremely unlikely adult-film actor. That it fails so spectacularly in this regard makes it almost something special -- not only is Bucky Larson incredibly unfunny, it's also squeamish in a manner that makes you wonder if either writers Adam Sandler (who produced the film via his Happy Madison company), Allen Covert and Nick Swardson (who plays Bucky) have somehow never actually seen porn, or if they subcontracted the script out to a group of 8-year-olds with only the vaguest idea of what it entails. The latter would explain how incidental sex is to what's theoretically a movie all about it, from an early scene in which we learn that our hero has never masturbated or even heard of the concept, to the porn career he establishes, in which he never actually comes into contact with his costars.
Though a U.S. release date has yet to be set, Twi-hards are already squeeing with anticipation for Robert Pattinson's period adaptation Bel Ami, in which the Twilight star plays a turn of the century dandy sleeping his way through the ranks of Parisian high society. Which means he gets up close and personal (and hot and heavy and between the sheets) with pretty much every woman in sight, as seen in a new batch of pics that have surfaced online.
Fairytales are meant to teach lessons -- and the older you get, the more twisted those lessons become. Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood -- featuring a virginal Amanda Seyfried in that iconic red cloak, enveloped in the crimson of sensuality and blood lust, a young woman inexplicably drawn to the big, bad wolf -- isn't the first film to take the fairytale's latent messaging to darker, and we mean really dark, places.
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