Film Fatale

'Doomsday' has Apocalypse Wow
(An expanded version of my story from the NY Daily News, March 11.
by Justine Elias

(Doomsday opens March 14. Universal's official movie site is here.)

Forget all quaint notions of plaid kilts, malt whiskey, and Highland terriers: In the futuristic action movie Doomsday, Scotland, circa 2035, is a walled-off quarantine zone. A virus has wiped out 99.9 percent of the population. When a new outbreak ravages London, the government forms team of commandos to seize survivors north of the border and find cure. But the remaining Scots are hostile. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in would be insane. Who'll be tough enough to lead the mission?

For DOOMSDAY director/writer Neil Marshall, 37, the heroine is Maj. Eden Sinclair, played by Rhona Mitra. (Picture a female Snake Plissken, the badass hero of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) Sinclair's got guns, a posh accent, and a mechanical camera-eye. "Eden's a child of the apocalypse," says Marshall. "Her mother sacrifices herself to save her, and she remembers that moment. Rhona was great at showing those feelings." And like Kurt Russell's Snake, Eden's got a mean streak. Says Marshall, "Rhona's got a very cruel smile."

Continue reading "DOOMSDAY: Neil Marshall Interview" »

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For most people, a celeb story in a magazine should be exactly as diverting and time-consuming as it will take for one's toenails to dry at the manicurist.

In the Washington Post, film writer Ann Hornaday has a wide-ranging piece on why the art of the celebrity interview could use a makeover.

Oh, admit it--you still read them, no matter how bad, redundant and uninformative these celeb profiles are (that 5,000 word Esquire cover story of Angelina Jolie was a recent example of the self-serious, expanding gas to fill the space variety. Nice cover shot, though.

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Matt Damon, BOURNE to run.

In the Observer, here's a profile of director Paul Greengrass -- the man behind UNITED 93 and the two most recent BOURNE movies.

He's not nearly as shaky as his camera.

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Native New Yorker Julia Stiles gets a New York magazine profile this week -- she plays CIA op Nikki, the young woman who (surprisingly) survived the first two BOURNE thrillers and plays an even more prominent role in THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM.

Though Stiles first made her mark in offbeat film adaptations of Shakespeare (O, 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU), she hit it big with the MTV audience in SAVE THE LAST DANCE. And she's just directed her first movie, a short film called RAVING.

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Steve Zahn and Christian Bale search for a way out in Rescue Dawn.
Breakthrough roles can happen anytime - and this week, Steve Zahn, best known as a young comic actor (REALITY BITES, HAPPY, TEXAS, ), may score a breakthrough with audiences and critics for the second time in his career for his dramatic portrayal as an American flyer battling despair and the elements in Werner Herzog's RESCUE DAWN.

Here's Nathan Rabin's interview with Zahn from The Onion's AV Club. And you can read Choire Sicha's conversation with him here.

Zahn's always been an endearing actor, but this time his performance lingers in the mind long after the movie's over. According to a radio interview, he'd been obsessed with Herzog's documentary LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY to the point of ordering multiple DVDs to give to friends. When he heard that the feature version was in the works, he knew he had to be a part of it.

Fortunately for us, he is.

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Dutch people talk about everything. It's Americans who are shy, says Carice van Houten, the breakout star of Paul Verhoeven's BLACK BOOK.

And she does mean everything. When I met van Houten in Toronto last year, Black Book had just opened to enthusiastic reviews in her homeland and at the Venice Film Festival. After a couple of days of interviews, she was still laughing about reviews by critics -- "all men, English men, you'll see?" -- who excitedly remark upon the heroine's 1) nudity and 2) attention to detail in hair-dyeing. What followed was a charming and funny Q&A that unfortunately didn't make it into this Boston Globe piece.

Below, the unedited piece -

By Justine Elias, Globe Correspondent - April 8, 2007

NEW YORK -- The breakout star of "Black Book," Carice van Houten, has earned comparisons to goddesses of Hollywood's golden age: Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Greta Garbo.

Like those bewitching and sometimes-blond bombshells -- and some of director Paul Verhoeven's previous femme fatales (Renée Soutendijk of "The Fourth Man," Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct") the 30-year-old Dutch actress seems poised to spring from obscurity into full-fledged international stardom. In person, though, Van Houten is hardly the wily seductress she portrays to be in "Black Book."

Continue reading "BLACK BOOK's Breakout Star Talks About...Everything" »

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Meet the moppet Miró, the kinder Kandinski.

You will -- one of the more engaging documentaries at the 2007 Sundance Festival is MY KID COULD PAINT THAT, director Amir Bar-Lev's look at the controversy over child artist Marla Olmstead, whom some gallery owners called a prodigy, and whose abstract work some critics compared to Paul Klee and Juan Miró.

Sony Pictures Classics announced this week that it had acquired the rigths to the film for $2 million, and festival reviews - including this one from the Hollywood Reporter - are enthusiastic.

Remarkably, the director asked the Olmsteads to participate in the film, and they agreed -- even after the authenticity of their daughter's work had been challenged in a Feb. 2005 installment of 60 Minutes. Over the course of filming, writes the New York Times, ""Mr. Bar-Lev begins to have misgivings and finds his role as family familiar and advocate morphing into something darker. The movie is a transparent rendering of the journalistic process, and the picture is none too pretty."

When Bar-Lev started work, the young artist was already a sensation -- she'd had her first solo show, sold several paintings, and a Birmingham, NY area reporter had broken the story.
By October, 2004, Gaby Wood of The Observer (UK) became one of the first international print journalists to visit Marla Olmstead en-suite -- at the studio of gallery owner Anthony Brunelli.

Continue reading "Meet The Kid Who Could Paint That (When She Was 4)" »

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NPR's Terry Gross talked to Sacha Baron Cohen this week about life before and after BORAT -- the film's two Golden Globe nominations, the difficulty of making future films when he and his characters are now so popular and recognized in the U.S. Though there's little talk about the lawsuits filed by people saying they were duped or hurt by appearing in the film, Gross and Baron Cohen do talk about the way that his characters get at the thinly veiled bigotry, anti-Semitism, and homophobia of the people he meets.

There's one very interesting question from Gross about the difference between Baron Cohen, who's Jewish, playing a character (Borat) who says horrible, ridiculous anti-Semitic things, and Baron Cohen, who is straight, playing the character Bruno, the flamboyantly gay fashion reporter for Austrian TV.

"Well, I'm not gay," says Baron Cohen. "But I have had a another man's testicles lying on my chest, so make of that what you will." Referring, of course, to the the prolonged naked wrestling scene between Borat and his producer. He also points out that the fey, foreign Bruno is often treated cruelly both in and out of the fashion world. "It seems like homophobia is the last taboo."

Listen to the entire interview at NPR's website for Fresh Air, Gross's weekday interview program.

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New York Magazine's Logan Hill talks to cool customer Clive Owen about Robert Altman, being THE INSIDE MAN (again), and not being James Bond, in this week's issue.

Amid the grim pleasures of CHILDREN OF MEN, the dystopic tale of a world run out of babies, are a few breathtaking, terrifying, impossible camera moves. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki has earned three Academy Award nominations (for THE NEW WORLD, SLEEPY HOLLOW, and A LITTLE PRINCESS); he'll surely get another one for his work on his movie with Alfonso Cuaron.

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No British film would be complete these days without Bill Nighy in in the cast. After portraying the newspaper editor we all wished we worked for in STATE OF PLAY (BBCAmerica), the 56 year old character actor's career seemed to suddenly skyrocket. He was the aging rocker in LOVE, ACTUALLY, the vampire patriarch in UNDERWORLD, the shifty government attache in THE CONSTANT GARDNER, and the unloved stepdad in SHAUN OF THE DEAD.

“It’s like I won a competition this year, and this is the prize,” Mr. Nighy tells the New York Times, shortly before the opening of a new David Hare play on Broadway. “To go to work every day with three of the greatest actresses currently operating in the world is identifiable as a pretty good gig. I think these are very specific stories, women who need a significantly older man, and happily they sometimes think of me,” he said of the players who, to his consternation, have helped transform him into what he called the “thinking woman’s crumpet.”

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Jamie Dornan and his torso with Kirsten Dunst in a scene from 'Marie Antoinette'

Love it or hate it, MARIE ANTOINETTE is this year's cinematic textile and design showcase. I can't decide if Sofia Coppola's directing style -- arresting visuals and music and reactive, rather than active central characters -- makes for a strong film. After seeing Marie Antoinette, I felt as though I'd been to a decadent party where I didn't know a soul. I couldn't remember much more than the music and the fashion.

Like last year's MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, MARIE ANTOINETTE is a sumptuous looking film, one that looks and sounds like a sweetened historical dream. It's also the frontrunner for every art, costume and design award nomination.

The New York Times Thursday Styles section found something else to admire: the casting of model Jamie Dornan in the role of the French queen's "enigmatic Swedish lover," Count Axel Fersen.

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Almodovar's VOLVER's is Spain's choice for the Academy Awards, but there's another Spanish filmhat's also going over big in the home country. ALATRISTE, a swashbuckingly tale of a soldier turned mercenary, is based on a series of popular historical novels by Arturo Perez-Reverte. One other good thing about the movie: Viggo Mortensen of LORD OF THE RINGS fame plays the hero.

Until Mortensen's movie rides into US theatres, his fans will have to make due with his books. But as Janet Maslin writes in the href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/movies/01viggo.html?ref=books">New York Times, the actor's independent publishing company isn't putting out fan-oriented fare.

"I go over all the books with a fine-tooth comb before they go out,” Mortensen tells the Times. " "That includes accompanying the page proofs to Jomagar, the Spanish press outside Madrid that actually produces them."

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Getting a little tired of the buildup. Enough with the buzz screenings. Will the movie just freakin' come out already?

But Sacha Baron-Cohen--BORAT--I can't stay mad at you. Enjoy his sexytime Q&A with the Times of London.

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Do what you can this week to avoid reading reviews of THE PRESTIGE, the new film from Christopher Nolan. Despite the entreaties of Touchstone's PR reps, critics can't help spoiling some of the duelling-magician thriller's finest surprises. (The movie's trailer, by the way, contains some masterful misdirection, setting up the conflict without ruining the coolest trick.)

What no review can wreck is your impression of the lead actors' performances. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are well cast as the rival showmen. Bale has three films this fall. Werner Herzog's RESCUE DAWN debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, and HARSH TIMES, due later this month. New York magazine's Logan Hill talks to Bale about Batman, magic and Herzog -- take a look.

Update:

Scott Foundas' review from LA Weekly praises the seductive mysteries of THE PRESTIGE without wrecking any of the film's pleasures. I hope my review in the Boston Phoenix will do the same. It'll be posted on Oct. 19.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Does your carpet match your drapes?
Now you can be sure it always will.

Cue the clip from Paul Verhoeven's WWII thriller BLACK BOOK, in which the brunette heroine mixes up a peroxide rinse to go undercover--way undercover--as an Aryan princess. ("What a perfectionist," leers her Dutch resistance boyfriend, before diving in for a closer inspection.) That Verhoeven, what scamp! But darn it if he ain't a visionary, too.

From Radar Online, the resurrected magazine that ought to be on your essential reading list:

"New York socialite Nancy Jarecki (who's married to Moviefone man and CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS director Andrew Jarecki) has launced a line of pubic hair dyes called Betty." For $20, those unhappy with their hair-hue can "safely" dye their nether tresses Black, Brown, Auburn, Blonde, and Fun - which appears to be pink.

Nancy Jarecki would like "Betty" to become a cute and socially acceptable name for "mons pubis" -- because all the other words are so clinical, ugly or dirty.

Mrs. J gamely answers a key question: how permanent is the dye? A lot of people ask, "If I'm having oral sex with my girlfriend, will it come off on my face?'"

The answer, she swears, is no. The Betty dye will hold.

So go on! Have sex all the sex you want. Swim. Play tennis. Ride horses on the beach. Fool those Nazis, BLACK BOOK heroine. The Betty dye will hold fast.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

INFAMOUS-the second movie in two years about the genesis of Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD-arrives in theatres a year after the critically acclaimed CAPOTE. This film, too, boasts a career-making performance from its leading man. In place of a physically transformed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Infamous is carried by a less well known lookalike, the highly regarded stage actor Toby Jones, and his best pal Harper Lee is portrayed this time, with warmth and appealing shyness, by Sandra Bullock.

The key scene, for me, is when Jones' Capote is on the phone to his society and literary friends, revising and sweetening one of the most indelible lines in his true crime novel, Perry Smith's remark that he had admired Mr. Clutter "right up until the moment I slit his throat."

I really enjoyed speaking with Jones for the New York Daily News. The actor's well known as a playwright and monologist (he's a great admirer of the late Spalding Gray).

Continue reading "INFAMOUS 'In Cold Blood' With Hot Prison Sex" »

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There ought to be a special Emmy award for whoever casts the leading men for PBS' MASTERPIECE THEATRE and MYSTERY. They've found yet another floppy haired, skinny-sexy actor to make thegirls go crazy and turn sexually ambiguous young men into lifelong Anglophiles. He's David Tennant, a 35 year old Scots-born actor who'll be all over TV this fall. Tennant plays the lead role in CASANOVA (on PBS Masterpiece Theatre, beginning Sunday Oct. 8) and he is the new incarnation of the SciFi network's DR. WHO (Fridays at 9pm).

The Los Angeles Times has a look at Tennant in both series. Reporter Robert Lloyd describes Tennant's cut-glass facial structure as "vulpine," which is one of those writerly ways of saying that the actor both looks like a wolf and is rather foxy. Without sounding all gay about it. On DR. WHO, his sci fi pal Rose (Billie Piper) describes the hero as Rose characterizes him as "a big old punk with a bit of rockabilly tthrown in."

Perfect.

Continue reading "The Next "It' Brit TV Guy: Actor David Tennant" »

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Radar, the magazine that would not die, has fighting spirit Q&A with Marine-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey, who bitchslapped some sense (and a little psychosis) into the recruits of FULL METAL JACKET. He'll be playing yet another wacko authority figure in the sequel to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which opens this weekend.

I'm never sure if the hard-driving Ermey, who hosts a military doc show on The Discovery Channel, is putting us on, or not. But in the Radar interview, he says that director Stanley Kubrick rang him up during the making of EYES WIDE SHUT to say he'd been bossed around by stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and that the movie would turn out to be a "piece of shit

What did Kubrick mean by this? Ermey's answer dispels any notion of Kubrick as overbearing control freak. "He was kind of a shy little timid guy," says Ermey. "He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit."

Read it all--nobody gives good quote like a Marine.

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James McEvoy was the man to meet at the recent Toronto Film Festival. As the star of five upcoming films, he's the new go-to guy of British film.

Best known to American filmgoers as the faun from THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE and the hero's younger brother in WIMBLEDON, this Scots-born actor is more than a match for Forest Whitaker in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. Here's an interview with the 27 year old Glaswegian in the Sunday Telegraph that reveals where he'll turn up next.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In the Observer, Ryan Gibley writes a profile of the imposing Helen Mirren, who'll play yet another monarch -- this time, she's Queen Elizabeth II in THE QUEEN. The film's one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the Venice and New York Film Festivals.

The film will play right about the time she's up for an Emmy for playing the first Elizabeth, in the HBO miniseries ELIZABETH I.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The always suprising Terry Gilliam talks to The Guardian about his movie TIDELAND, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year. (It'll finally get a small release in the US on Oct. 6th.)

Even in notably nice Toronto, this was one of the most walked out upon screenings I've ever steeled myself to sit through. I'm a huge fan of Gilliam's movies, but this was an ordeal -- like watching the brain-eating scene in HANNIBAL over and over again: Nasty, nauseating.

It got to the point where I had to stay, in order to count the number of people who walked out. Then I realized it would be easier to count those who butched it out to the end. From a full house down to about 20. Mitch Dell's Texas Grotesque novel (a sort of 'shroomy (shroomier?), uglier WIZARD OF OZ has extensive scenes of, well, grotesquerie, but there's a big difference between description and literal depiction.

At the time, most critics thought the film was unreleasable for a number of reasons: Some were freaked out by the Gothic/Grotesque details of a little girl - the 10 year old heroine, Jeliza Rose, cooking dope for her addict dad (Jeff Bridges) so he could shoot up. That didn't bother me. And it wasn't the scene where she behaved seductively with a mentally retarded man, all but forcing him to kiss her. In a way, both scenes showed how adaptable - and then cruelly manipulative - an abused child could become in order to survive.

No, what got to me was the extended close ups of a putrefying corpse (Jeff Bridges) and the on-screen dissection of his long dead body. Like, an hour's worth of putrefaction. You could practically smell it.

But the characters in the film didn't react. Of course, they were all demented or in shock, so their emotional reactions were shut down or warped. But even mad people have visceral and sense-reactions. There's something false and gutless in all this displayed, demonstrative craziness.

Though it was upsetting to imagine a child in the thick of this weirdness, I'm convinced it was far less weird for the child actress (Jodelle Ferland, who's gone on to work on 24 and SILENT HILL) to peform the scenes than it is for an audience to watch. For a kid, this is playtime. Don't worry about her: she's turned up since TIDELAND in '24' and SILENT HILL.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Writer/director Kevin Smith did his best to promote CLERKS 2: he did hundreds of interviews, he met fans at promotional screenings, he bashed Good Morning America's Joel Siegel, who noisily walked out of a critic's screening during the bestiality scene.

And Smith fucked his wife Jennifer and told us about it on his online diary. His hot wife, as he often reminds his readers. Two journalists who spoke to him a couple of weeks ago told me that he began the conversation—or performance—by lying down on a couch, making a great show of yawning and then saying, "I'm soooo tired—I just got done fucking my wife."

Great. Thanks for sharing.

Maybe he'd like to make a movie sometime?

Ever since CLERKS (whose garage rock cool was ruined by one long, dumb dick joke), The Onion, ">Smith's filmmaking career has been more about talking the talk than anything else. His ten year old viewaskew website is more accomplished, with a clearer point of view (self promotion) than any of his films.

I'm delighted to hear that Smith might be sitting in for Roger Ebert for a few weeks. Who better than Smith, the pop culture critic who broke down the absurdities of STAR WARS and LORD OF THE RINGS, to review the dregs of summer movies?

The Onion ">sums up Smith's career.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:37 PM | Permalink

John Hodgman of The Daily Show visited Danny and Oxide Pang on the set of THE MESSENGERS, their forthcoming English-language horror movie, to write this profile for the New York Times Magazine.

Though it's not exactly news that Asian horror directors have crossed over with U.S. audiences (J-horror gave way to K-horror. The Pangs come from Hong Kong.) The New York Times piece focuses on the Pangs collaboration with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Productions. Though Raimi's biggest success was in mainstream film (SPIDER-MAN) and TV (XENA, WARRIOR PRINCESS), Ghost House has allowed him to get back to the genre that he began with. Interestingly, many of the international filmmakers he's now working with were influenced by his earliest work on the EVIL DEAD movies.

For all aspiring screenwriters, the formula for thrills is right here on the page: "Initially, Raimi and Tapert thought they would give a Ghost House movie a very specific, recognizable structure, going back to the formula they had teased out of the drive-in. “We did start with a very hard formula of five sequences of six minutes of suspense,” Raimi recalled, “no less than 18 scares. Because we knew that three or four would be cut, and three or four wouldn’t work, but we’d end up with 10 or 11 really jolting, leap-out-of-your-seat moments for the audience.”

Hodgman also illustrates something that I've often wondered about: how do directing teams divide their work? With the Pangs, there are Oxide days and Danny days -- they alternate who is in charge.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quick!

Read Sara Vilkomerson's congenial conversation with Ralph Fiennes, who's in the middle of yet another brief but brilliant run on Broadway. I don't know how long this link will stay active before the interview gets sent to the not-free archive.

The actor, who's at the Booth Theatre until Aug. 13 for his a Tony-nominated turn in Brian Friel's The Faith Healer, is not an easy person to interview, but Vilkomerson does an unusually good job drawing him out on his favorite subject: stage acting. He doesn't do lots of press for his movies, and when he does, he prefers to talk about things he's comfortable with (theatre, literature) nd not what magazine editors and gossip mongers would love to hear about (his personal life, his siblings).

Vilkomerson, who's the queen of the money quote (see the kicker to her piece on Jack Black, Vince Vaughn and women who love a guy with a gut), lets Fiennes tell some backstage anecdotes (like trying to concentrate before his entrance, every night , while he can hear the audience in the theatre next door hollering for Julia Roberts). And she also mentions the breakup of Fiennes longtime relationship with British actress Francesca Annis-- the UK tabloids went mental over it a few months back. (The actor doesn't comment on it.)

All fine and good, you'd think.

Nope. In this week's New York Observer, Robert Edwards, director of The Land of the Blind, writes a huffy letter protesting the page one piece, calling it a "cheap shot," "character assassination," and accuses the paper of exploiting Fiennes' celebrity by putting the actor's face on the front page. "Ours is a tiny little movie with almost no advertising or marketing budget; we only had two press opportunities with Ralph, and chose to give one of those slots to The Observer."

Here's some more publicity, Mr. Edwards: THE LAND OF THE BLIND (hey, where's the official website?) opened June 17 in New York, and it's been playing at Human Rights film festivals.

Continue reading "Fiennes Furious (OK, Not Him. His Director)" »

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