Megan Ellison and Harvey Weinstein have reportedly developed a slightly combative relationship, with some tension arising during the production and promotion of Killing Them Softly and Lawless, and culminating in the lackluster financial performance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.
But that hasn’t stopped Harvey from putting down money for another film that was funded by Ellison’s Annapurna Productions. The Weinstein Company has picked up US distribution rights to Wong Kar Wai‘s new film The Grandmster ahead of the film’s Berlin Film Festival premiere. Weinstein has distributed several of the director’s films in the past, so the continued partnership is not a surprise. (TWC also grabbed rights for English-speaking Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.)
New reviews are coming in from Berlin for the film, too. We’ll run down the latest estimations of Wong’s retelling of the Ip Man story, and give you the latest French trailer, after the break. Read More »
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Posted on Friday, January 25th, 2013 by Angie Han
Michel Gondry‘s varied resume includes several documenatires, a superhero flick, and a scrappy urban drama, but he’s still best known for his most whimsical, even dreamlike creations. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is rightly hailed as a classic, and while Be Kind Rewind and The Science of Sleep aren’t at that level, they had a sweet, oddball charm that felt uniquely Gondrian.
His newest feature, Mood Indigo, puts him squarely back into that same quirky territory. The romance follows a blissed-out young couple (Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou) whose marriage becomes complicated by her illness. If that doesn’t sound so weird, wait til you hear the details: He’s the wealthy young inventor of an olfactory-musical device called the pianocktail, her sickness is caused by a water lily in her lung, and the only treatment is to surround her constantly with fresh flowers. Mood Indigo is actually an adaptation of Boris Vian‘s 1947 novel L’Écume des Jours, but Gondry could hardly have found a more suitable premise for his sensibility if he’d come up with it himself. Watch the first trailer after the jump.
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Posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2013 by Angie Han
A dozen years after the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Weinstein Co. is getting ready to make a sequel. Though it’s been a while since we heard about any potential follow-up to Ang Lee‘s international hit, it looks like the Weinsteins have quietly been making preparations behind the scenes. Production is on track to begin in May, with a script by John Fusco (The Forbidden Kingdom). Ronny Yu (Fearless) is in talks to direct. More details after the jump.
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Feels like we’ve waited forever for Wong Kar Wai‘s new film, but in reality it has been only (only!) about six years since his last feature, My Blueberry Nights. Hardly “forever,” but with that said, this movie was announced a decade ago, in 2002.
And so, after several delays, Wong’s new The Grandmaster, starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai as the legendary martial arts master Ip Man, is finally opening in China. With that we’ve got the first English-language review of the film. The text calls the film “an action-packed visual feast… light on narrative, but oozing Wong’s trademark elegance,” which basically confirms assumptions that fans of the director would have had going in. Read more below. Read More »
Will we ever get to see Metegol, the new film from The Secret in Their Eyes director Juan José Campanella, in US theaters? Hard to say, as the animated film is about a foosball game coming to life, and foosball and soccer just aren’t as popular in the States as they are nearly everywhere else in the world. (They’re growing here, but there’s a way to go yet.)
It would be too bad if we don’t get a chance to see the film theatrically, because it looks like a lot of fun. There have been a couple small teaser clips in the past year (since pulled), and now we’ve got a proper teaser trailer. There’s good animation here, and some character designs that look just right for the story the film wants to tell. Read More »
Nacho Vigalondo‘s first film, Timecrimes, was an exciting take on the time travel film. His next film, Extraterrestrial, put an apocalyptic spin on the romantic comedy. For his third go-around, he’s simultaneously tackling the thriller and found footage genres with Open Windows. It stars Elijah Wood as a man obsessed with an abducted actress (Sasha Grey), and how he goes about trying to find her. All the action is seen through the first-person view of his laptop. (It’s sort of the anti-Maniac, which is shot primarily from Wood’s character point of view.)
The principal photography for the film is either done or nearly so, and the writer/director gave an interview about it to a Spanish news show. During the appearance, he also showed some footage. We can’t understand much, but the brief snippets of footage and behind the scenes filming speak for themselves. Check it out below. Read More »
The film NO made waves at Cannes back in May, and the trailer has just arrived late in the year to become one of my fave trailers of the season. The film features Gael Garcia Bernal as an ad executive who comes up with a televised ad campaign to unseat Chilean leader General Augusto Pinochet in a vote that took place in 1988. Rather than crafting the typical political ads featuring images depicting an abuse of power, he chose to sell democracy as an attractive lifestyle.
The film was shot on video to emulate the look of the time, and the trailer sells a film that could sit alongside Argo as an effectively dramatized social and political snapshot. No has been a film I very much wanted to see all year, and I quite like this trailer from Sony Classics, which will release the film in the US next year. Read More »
One thing we can probably all use today is a light, colorful, perhaps even strange comedy.
I’m So Excited! is the new film from Pedro Almodovar, and it couldn’t appear to be more different from his last, The Skin I Live In. This brief teaser shows a few bored or irritated passengers on an airplane, and then focuses on three male flight attendants who break into a rendition of ‘I’m So Excited,’ by the Pointer Sisters.
No, I don’t know what that’s all about, either. But I kinda love it.
The film features Javier Camara, Cecilia Roth, Lola Duenas, Raul Arevalo, Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Hugo Silva, and “special collaborations” with Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Paz Vega. I don’t know what “special collaborations” means, either, but we’ll find out soon. Read More »
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