Also in Friday morning's wrap of news briefs: Variety appoints its new publisher. Shirley MacLaine eyes her next gig. And, take a look at the new Specialty newcomers for the weekend.
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Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair said that 9/11 formed part of the inspiration for her latest film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which kicked off the Venice Film Festival Wednesday evening. Just days before the attacks, Nair won the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion, for her much praised Monsoon Wedding and she left the fabled Italian city for the Toronto International Film Festival to promote the film when the attacks happened. Like other New York residents, she was stranded in the Canadian city following the tragic event, taking her a week to get back to NYC and her husband and son. When she did make it back, she felt an "otherness" in the post-9/11 period, a theme she explores in her latest feature.
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The world premiere of international political thriller The Reluctant Fundamentalist will launch the Venice Film Festival August 29th. The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name about a young Pakistani man chancing corporate success on Wall Street, but becomes embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family's homeland. The feature will screen out of competition stars Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Martin Donovan, Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Haluk Bilginer and Meesha Shafi.
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The old-fashioned cancer weeper — a genre that includes pictures like Love Story, Brian’s Song, and the gold standard of chemocathartic melodrama, Terms of Endearment — has been in short supply these days, maybe because nakedly manipulative tearjerking is a hard sell with modern audiences. Jonathan Levine tried to freshen the genre with last year’s 50/50 and pulled it off with reasonably effective results, thanks largely to the unassuming charisma of his star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt: You don’t want to see anyone get cancer, but you particularly don’t want to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt get cancer. You may not want to see Kate Hudson get cancer, either, as her character does in A Little Bit of Heaven. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like her. The tiniest bit of Hudson’s wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She’s like an adorbs Camille.
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The year is drawing to a close, which means that it is time to start thinking about all the things you did not accomplish in 2011. (That Ghostbusters 3 script? Still unread. That copycat Wedding Crashers crime you committed in college? Still unresolved in court.) But before you do that, let's take a look back at some of my favorite Movieline stories that punctuated this remarkably unproductive calendar year.
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The Ginnifer Goodwin-Kate Hudson chick lit adaptation Something Borrowed, based on Emily Giffin's bestselling beach read, didn't exactly score with critics (Read Stephanie Zacharek's takedown here) and came in at #4 over the weekend with a $13.9 box office take. But producer Molly Smith, speaking to Movieline Monday, is optimistic that a sequel will move forward -- and she's counting on fans of the novel to buoy demand.
If you'd dismissed the upcoming Ginnifer Goodwin-Kate Hudson wedding-themed chick flick Something Borrowed as just another Bride Wars-esque lady comedy, think again; Something Borrowed tackles a subject that's been on the minds of modern artists for decades -- the moral lines between friendship, love, sex, and betrayal. Or, in the immortal words of hip-hop group Naughty by Nature, circa 1991, it's about one concept in particular: O.P.P.
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