Also in this week-capping edition of Biz Break: Frank Langella to be honored at Nantucket, Harvey Weinstein scores laurels from UCLA, Ken Loach's latest lands Stateside, another Tribeca premiere finds a distributor, and more...
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He's played cops, a count, Houdini, a time traveler, a king, and even a drag queen, but in this week's Lockout, Guy Pearce treads new ground as an all-out action hero -- not that he necessarily sees things that way. "People used to say that about L.A. Confidential," he recalled to Movieline recently in Los Angeles. "They’d go, ‘Wow, so you’re an action hero!’ I’d be like, action hero? It’s a ‘50s film noir!" Even still, after 20+ years of acting, most recently in a string of acclaimed supporting turns (see: The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker, Animal Kingdom, Mildred Pierce), it's only now that Pearce is laying claim to the title, guns blazing.
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The sci-fi action flick Lockout, directed by first-timers James Mather and Stephen St. Leger from a script they wrote with Luc Besson, features a scene in which characters somehow skydive out of orbit through the stratosphere to land, neatly and not even a little on fire, on an urban road. It isn't a sequence of events I'd ever have dreamed I needed to see on-screen, but boy, was I glad to.
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There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director -- Luc Besson -- manning the syringe. Technically, that something is the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi: Here the Burmese activist is played by Michelle Yeoh, who gets the already wearisome Shepard Fairey treatment on the film's poster, and seems to have attended the special edition stamp school of acting in preparation for the role. Almost to a scene, Yeoh is so still and serene she's practically submerged, her dialogue seeming to rise like beatific air bubbles that burst into tiny, untroubled smiles at the surface. Rather than ripple out -- and risk the suggestion of any small mercy of movement whatever -- Yeoh's performance forms a kind of undertow that pulls the surrounding story and characters into the hagiographic shallows, where they float like sea monkeys with better set dressing, blooping away about Burmese democracy.
This week's Guy Pearce-starring, Luc Besson-produced Lockout might look like a run of the mill action pic -- that vague title doesn't help things -- but, as the film's opening scenes show, it's got a blustery '80s-style hero at its core and a punny sense of humor to move things along. Get a taste for the brawny bravado and hijinks to come in the film's first five minutes, viewable after the jump.
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Friday night at the 2011 AFI Fest, the seats in the historic Grauman's Chinese Theatre weren't quite filled to capacity for the gala screening of Luc Besson's The Lady, which received mildly lukewarm reviews on the festival circuit. But, as it did at its premiere in Toronto, the biopic of Burmese democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi received a standing ovation at AFI Fest -- one clearly directed primarily at star and Oscar hopeful Michelle Yeoh.
Let's cut to the chase: Michelle Yeoh looks simply amazing in the first full trailer for Luc Besson's The Lady, the story of Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi and the two decades she spent as a political prisoner in her own country. The film played Toronto last month but doesn't yet have a U.S. release date, which is too bad because after glimpsing the uncharacteristically restrained (and gorgeously shot) work here by Besson, it's one of the more intriguing upcoming releases on my radar.
Much of director Olivier Megaton's female assassin pic Colombiana coasts on a certain popcorn movie badass factor -- lithe star Zoe Saldana as stone-cold killer hell-bent on vengeance for the murder of her family, slinking through missions in skintight catsuits (or less) and gracefully blasting away bad guys with beautifully cold precision in the grand tradition of producer Luc Besson's most famous female killers. But Saldana feels a more weighty responsibility when it comes to her action heroine debut and how its success might affect opportunities for women in film to follow.
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