This column seems to be turning into a “Hey, let’s check out IMDB to see whatever the heck happened to so-and-so director?” what with installments on Kenneth Lonergan and Kathryn Bigelow resulting from such aimless internet browsing (well, not so aimless as it turns out). Well, if ain’t broke…
MICMACS Á TIRE-LARIGOT is the film Jean-Pierre Jeunet has just started production on. Most of you will know the man as the writer-director of the delightfully enchanting and genuinely romantic AMELIE. Those of you with slightly more movie buff cred will also know him from the hilariously dark, dirty and sort of post-apocalyptic DELICATESSEN, the visually stunning and fairy tale like THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, and the somewhat failed anti-war romance, A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT.
Those of you with less movie buff cred will know him from ALIEN RESSURECTION.
Read the rest of this entry »
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. What, you need more reasons than that? Fine.
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sing! All right, all right, I’ll give you more.
Even though the long thought dead musical genre seems to be making an extremely welcome yet moderate comeback (MOULIN ROUGE, CHICAGO, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, HAIRSPRAY, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE), the genre is still somewhat on thin ice with jaded modern audiences who nearly killed it in the first place with their unwillingness to buy people can believably burst out into song. It seems musicals now either have two directions they can take to survive: go completely gung-ho with no apologies or pass all the musical numbers off as dream/fantasy sequences and with a fair amount of restraint.
500 DAYS OF SUMMER seems like it’ll fall in the latter, while taping into a good dose of (oddly enough) William Faulkner like stream of consciousness. According to an MTV interview with Mr. Gordon-Levitt himself, the film is told through the point of a view “a hopeless romantic, a love sick young man” whose non-linear memories of the 500 days involving the young woman played by Zooey Deschanel guide the course of the film, one memory bleeding into the other. Because “the movie is all from the point of view of this guy, and this guy has watched way too many movies and listened to far too many pop songs … his life becomes a pop song.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Much like my previous installment of this column, I found out about this film because I was looking up someone’s IMDB credits to see what they were up to. In this case the person I was looking for was one of the best living action directors we have: Kathryn Bigelow.
Bigelow is hardly a director one would call prolific, but she is undoubtedly one that has made an impact. That’s all the more impressive given that her reputation as one of Hollywood’s finest action directors rests almost entirely on the films NEAR DARK, BLUE STEEL, POINT BREAK, STRANGE DAYS, and K-19. Heck, I consider her one of my favorite directors based solely on NEAR DARK, one of the best vampire movies ever made. In my students days I even picked up this book (one I highly recommend) to satiate my Bigelow fixations.
Ever since STRANGE DAYS in 1995 her output has reduced dramatically giving me little to fixate on though. Aside from a very brief short film (MISSION ZERO with Uma Thurman) her last feature film was K-19 in 2002. Now supposedly sometime this year we’re getting another Bigelow film, this one called THE HURT LOCKER. Excitingly enough the story does appear to be Bigelow’s on concoction, making it her first writer/director credit since BLUE STEEL in 1990. The actual screenplay is written by Mark Boal who wrote the article IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH was based on. The film stars Ralph Fiennes in an apparent small role, with Guy Pearce, David Morse, and Jeremy Renner also starring along a slew of young up and comers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s feature film YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000) remains one of my Top 10 favorite films of all time. I’ve seen it something like over twenty times now, own the published screenplay, and have one of its posters hanging over my bed. After the film was released I couldn’t wait to see what Kenneth Lonergan would write/direct next. So I waited. Then noticed he contributed to the screenplay to Martin Scorcese’s GANGS OF NEW YORK. But still no word on another project of his own. So I waited again. And waited. And … well, you get the idea.
I’d more or less given hope, fearing that Lonergan somehow felt burned by the film industry and returned to playwriting. However, a few weeks ago I was talking to someone about YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, and decided to use that as an excuse to check up on Lonergan for the first time in a while. So I ambled on over to his IMDB spread, and what should my unworthy eyes see? A new credit. Even better, a new film called MARGARET. Even better, it’s written and directed by him! Then I checked out the cast, and was elated to see he’s still able to draw a great set of actors, including Anna Paquin (starring in the title role), Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Allison Janney and up-and-comer Olivia Thirlby. Not just that, but several YOU CAN COUNT ON ME alumni are in it as well, including Matthew Broderick, Mark Ruffalo and Kieran Culkin. As if that weren’t enough, the film was also produced by heavy hitters Syndey Pollack and Anthony Minghella (both sadly lost to us recently) and Scott Rudin.
Read the rest of this entry »
Loading ...
