Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2013 by Angie Han
Imagine the Lonely Island video “Motherlover” as a sun-drenched literary drama, and you have the basic premise of Anne Fontaine‘s new film Two Mothers. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright star as two childhood pals living side-by-side on a gorgeous Australian beach, along with their strapping sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville). Their lives are idyllic but lonely, and it’s not long before the two women begin eyeing each other’s sons with something more than motherly affection.
There’s obvious potential for serious sleaze, but the film has some classy pedigree behind it. It’s an adaptation of a novella by Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, and Fontaine approaches the material with an elegant eye. Toss in two acclaimed actresses, and, well… it still looks kind of trashy, but it could also be genuinely moving and thought-provoking. Watch the trailer after the jump.
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Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2013 by Angie Han
The Twilight Saga is officially over — at least until Summit starts working on the inevitable reboot — but author Stephenie Meyer isn’t leaving the big screen just yet. Her first non-Twilight novel, The Host, is headed for cinemas next month, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead and Andrew Niccol at the helm.
Where the last trailer leaned heavily on the romance, no doubt in an effort to hook the same fans who turned out for Twilight, the new one aims for broader appeal by playing up the sci-fi action. Watch it after the jump.
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Posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 by Angie Han
If Girls seems to chalk up Hannah’s bad ideas to her relative youth, the first trailer for Writers suggests such misguidedness may simply be an occupational hazard. In the directorial debut by Josh Boone, Greg Kinnear plays an acclaimed novelist who deals with his divorce by alternately spying on his ex-wife (Jennifer Connelly) and screwing his married neighbor (Kristen Bell).
His kids Samantha (Lily Collins) and Rusty (Nat Wolff) are both budding writers as well, though they take totally opposite approaches to life. She racks up “experiences” in the form of notches on her bedpost, while he pines after a pretty high school classmate (Liana Liberato) with a mean boyfriend. Watch the first trailer after the jump.
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Seeing Don Jon’s Addiction at Sundance was quite an experience, in part because of all the porn. The film, written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, follows a character (played by the director) who is addicted to online pornography. Despite being able to lure very attractive women home for sex, he prefers porn. In fact, the objectification aspect of watching porn is what he likes — he gets to see the exact images he wants, with no outlay of energy or emotion on his own part.
So there’s a fair amount of porn in the movie, and clips of stuff that might be a little intense for those who don’t spend much time checking out sex on the internet.
There’s no image that, in and of itself, would result in a rating harder than an R. But the intensity of the clips is often pretty high, and there are a lot of clips. (Think of them like the repeated drug-prep scenes in Requiem For a Dream.) They’re important, and deliberately confrontational. The audience needs to see how reliant the character is on them, and how cut off from reality the images are.
But what’s in the movie now is likely too much for the MPAA, and so the cut that festival audiences are seeing now won’t be the one that people see in theaters when Relativity releases it this summer. Read More »
Briefly: One of the biggest hits of Sundance last month was Richard Linklater‘s third collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, Before Midnight. The film was universally praised as a great picture, and a very satisfying continuation of the story begun in Before Sunrise (’95) and Before Sunset (’04).
Sony Pictures Classics nabbed the film at Sundance, to no one’s surprise, and now we know that some audiences won’t have long to wait. Expect to see the film in New York and LA on May 24. Read More »
The Escapist director Rupert Wyatt became a wanted name in Hollywood after Rise of the Planet of the Apes turned into a critical and commercial hit. Rather than directing the next Apes film, Wyatt walked away to find something else.
That “something else” turns out to be an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks‘ novel Birdsong, which Wyatt scripted and will direct. The novel spans 1910 to 1917, with some dalliance in the late ’70s as well, and is the story of an Englishman who indulges in an affair with a married French woman before the war, and is later seen as a dedicated officer on the front lines. Read More »
Posted on Monday, February 4th, 2013 by Angie Han
Although the setting has changed from Tuscany to Tokyo, Certified Copy director Abbas Kiarostami once again seems to be exploring themes of perception and mistaken identity in his latest film, Like Someone in Love.
Rin Takanashi plays a college student moonlighting as an escort. After spending an apparently sexless evening with an elderly new client (Tadashi Okuno), she allows him to drive her to class the next morning — where they’re spotted by her jealous boyfriend (Ryo Kase), who assumes the old man must be her grandfather. And things get odder from there. Watch the new trailer after the jump.
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Posted on Friday, February 1st, 2013 by Angie Han
It’s no coincidence that the official website for author Isaac Marion includes glowing blurbs from both Stephenie Meyer and Simon Pegg. Marion’s novel Warm Bodies, and Jonathan Levine‘s film adaptation of same, owes as much to Twilight as it does Shaun of the Dead. It attempts to infuse some self-aware humor into a tale of star-crossed inter-species romance. Ultimately, however, the combination turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.
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