A community of survivors exists on the outskirts of a Louisiana levee, where a six-year-old girl with a boundless imagination and a deep connection to the world around her lives with her father. In Movieline’s exclusive clip, enter the world of Benh Zeitlin’s impressive feature debut/Sundance hit Beasts of the Southern Wild (in limited release this week), as seen through the eyes of the film’s pint-sized heroine, Hushpuppy (played with tremendous fearlessness by discovery of the year, Quvenzhané Wallis). Beasts of the Southern Wild debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Cinematography Award before nabbing four honors at Cannes , including the FIPRESCI Prize and the Caméra d’Or. Zeitlin’s magical-realist fable is a deeply emotional experience, thanks in great part to Wallis’s central turn as the fierce Hushpuppy, whose relationship with her troubled father Wink (local chef/baker Dwight Howard, in his acting debut) anchors the film. Plucked from over 4,000 prospective actresses, Wallis, who was just five years old when she auditioned, commands the screen with an impressive intensity and naturalism. “When she first walked in, she was defiant towards me,” director Zeitlin told Movieline . “Most of the times you figure you can easily puppeteer a kid, but she was not like that at all. She was refusing to do this thing that I asked her to, because she didn’t it was right. I wanted her to throw something at somebody, and she said, ‘No, that’s not right to throw something at somebody you don’t know.’ Filmed on location in Louisiana, Beasts began principal photography on April 20, 2010 — the day of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the impact of which mirrored the plight of the residents of the Bathtub within the film. The story celebrates the resilience of a community in the face of disaster, highlighting the spirit of the people who remain. Beasts of the Southern Wild is in limited release today. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Like the world of male stripping it inhabits, Steven Soderbergh ‘s Magic Mike is naughty in gaudy but sanctioned and unthreatening ways. It teases with the promise of outrageousness, but underneath the G-string it’s a practically minded coming-of-age story about a young man reaching the end of a years-long spiritual spring break. Choreographed stripteases and celebrity cast aside, the film has a lot in common with the director’s 2009 The Girlfriend Experience — both are set in corners of the sex industry, share an undercurrent of economic instability and deal with how their protagonists’ professions, the perception and the performative aspect of them, clank up against their personal lives. And both keep to a low-key, realistic tone that’s deliberately at odds with their subject matter, one that in Magic Mike makes the film feel curiously rudderless, its off-stage journey pale and enervated in contrast with the cheesy, ebullient dance numbers it makes room for. Like the call girl Christine/Chelsea, the main character in the earlier film played by Sasha Grey, Mike ( Channing Tatum ) is aware of himself as a commodity and is constantly hustling, struggling for more control over the business in which he’s being offered — “I want to own something,” he says, and there seems to be more passion in those words than in his long, flirty pursuit of his tough-minded love interest Brooke (Cody Horn). Mike doesn’t make nearly as much money as Chelsea does, but he has side benefits that wouldn’t interest her: Occasional clients who stick around to sleep with him after the show, camaraderie with his fellow dancers and the swagger that comes with publicly embracing his place as, in the words of manager/MC Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), one of the “cock-rocking Kings of Tampa.” Mike’s a great stripper, but it’s not what he wants to do with his life. He also runs small roofing, event and car-detailing businesses that amount to a series of odd jobs. He’s saving up to pursue his dream of starting his own custom furniture business, with dedication if no particular urgency — he speaks of waiting for the market to reach its sweet spot and being able to get a good bank loan rate in ways that sound abstract, though we later see he’s actually put work into his ideas and is deeply frustrated by the obstacles he’s encountered. He is, in short, looking for the next step that will likely provide a way out, though when we see him grinding on stage at Club Xquisite we can see why he’s not in a hurry: He sparks to life in front of a crowd — he belongs there, and his audience adores him, showering him with bills (alas, mostly ones). Magic Mike is set over a summer in which Mike meets aimless, muscly 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer), whom he nicknames “The Kid,” and Horn’s Brooke, the sister on whose couch Adam is crashing. The two push Mike to reconsider his life — in Adam he sees enough promise (and reminders of his younger himself) to recruit him as Xquisite’s newest performer, and in Brooke there’s the potential for something serious, though she pushes him away whenever he saunters too close. As critical as these two relationships are for the film, they’re unfortunately lackluster — Adam is a slack-jawed, half-formed stand-in for the unthinking pleasure-seeker Mike used to be, and beefcakeyness-aside, Pettyfer can’t bring out anything in the character that could show us what Mike glimpses in him. Horn, with her strong jawline and tomboyish air, is an enjoyably off-beat pick for a romantic lead, but Brooke’s forceful pragmatism gets expressed primarily through glowering. Rather than reflect a sense of mutual attraction, her interactions with Mike projects only genuine distrust of him as her kid brother’s sleazy pal, to the point where it’s a struggle to believe that her opinion could possibly be important to him. Speaking as someone who’s slowly come around to Tatum’s meatlike leading-man qualities, I’d say this represents a step forward for the actor. He may not have the most expressive of faces, but his bro-ish friendships with the other dancers (who include Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash and Adam Rodriguez, all magnificently ripply) have a comfort and ease to them. His relationship with Dallas, his former mentor, is more compellingly complicated still. McConaughey plays the character like he’s Dazed and Confused ‘s David Wooderson all grown up and wearing a leather harness (complete with drawled “all right, all right”s), but he’s calculating underneath the preening, outsized showman persona. Dallas is setting himself up to be the business owner, and while he appreciates Mike’s ambition, he’d still rather have him as an employee than a partner — their maneuverings over a planned expansion and move to Miami grow steadily edgier under the familiar banter. And when Tatum’s on stage, he seems like a different performer entirely — one who’s startlingly physical. Magic Mike slyly offers up a look at the actor nude from behind in an early scene, as he gets out of bed with his ongoing casual hookup Joanna (Olivia Munn). But its not actually (just) the chance to gawp at his impeccable musculature that makes Tatum such an impressive spectacle in the film — it’s his dancing, the way he goes from hulking screen presence to a fluidly athletic being, aware in his movements. Before he launched his acting career, Tatum did work as a stripper for a few months, an experience that informed the film (Reid Carolin wrote the screenplay), and he has danced in a non-exotic fashion on-screen in music videos and in the 2006 Step Up . The divide between Tatum as performer and Tatum as actor gives the film an interesting unsteadiness. Set in a strip mall-filled Tampa that Soderbergh, who also served as cinematographer, tints a smoggy yellow, the movie carries the underlying message that it’s time for Mike to grow up and figure out what’s next. But that doesn’t quite line up with the grinding normalcy with which the film depicts “responsible” living. How’s that really suppose to compare with being up there in the spotlight, rolling around in money, adored? Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Richard Gere gets the golden line in this trailer for Sundance 2012’s drama-thriller Arbitrage , the feature directorial debut from Nicholas Jarecki ( The Outsider ). “World events all revolve around five things, M-O-N-E-Y,” he says, perhaps taking a cue from Wall Street ‘s own philosophy courtesy of Gordon Gekko (though he preferred the more direct g-r-e-e-d). Of course Susan Sarandon, who plays his wife has a zinger herself with, “How much money do we need? Do you want to be the richest person in the cemetery?” In the film, New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Miller (Gere) is the epitome of success, but behind the facade he’s in way over his head. He’s desperate to sell his trading empire to a big bank before the truth comes out, not only to colleagues but also his admiring wife and his daughter and heir-apparent Brooke (Brit Marling). And to complicate things further, he’s carrying on an affair with a French art-dealer, Julie (Laetetia Casta). But on the eve before he’s about to sell his plague-ridden holdings, he gets into further trouble (as tipped off in the trailer below) and he must now juggle family, business and crime with the help of someone from his past, Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker). The trailer seems to be pretty thorough in telling the story, so take a look. The only thing left is the final question: will he make it out from under the brink? [ The feature will begin its roll out September 14 courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. ]
To say there’s nothing on the contemporary movie landscape like Alex Kurtzman’s People Like Us is to suggest that the picture is a groundbreaking work with special effects unlike any we’ve ever seen, that it’s fresh and original in its use of characters or situations from old movies (or even older comic books), that its 3-D wow factor rivals that of Avatar . But People Like Us is something odder: This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That’s more of a rarity on today’s landscape than it should be. Twenty or thirty years ago, you might have called a movie like People Like Us pedestrian, something not very special – it isn’t, for example, nearly as acidic or pointed as Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon . And still, People Like Us , despite the fact that it’s been given a title that dooms it to failure (more on that later), seems to be motored by a quiet urgency. The picture gives off the sense that there’s something at stake here, and there is. What big studio wants to bankroll this kind of movie anymore? Who wants to see this sort of thing? It’s all just feelings, and who needs them? We’ve got foreign movies and indie movies for that stuff. But I love the way People Like Us so defiantly carves a space for itself in a genre that no longer exists, the mainstream fractured-family drama. The picture has flaws: It could have used a great deal of pruning, especially in the last half. But Kurtzman — who co-wrote the script, with Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert — has structured the movie as a gentle mystery, and though it does have a genuine surprise ending, it still allows for the biggest mystery of all: Why do people we love sometimes behave in indefensible ways? People Like Us doesn’t pretend to have the answers; what it does suggest is that there’s honor in handling your own disappointment like a grown-up. Chris Pine plays Sam, a corporate failure who, as the movie opens, isn’t having a particularly good day. It gets worse when he arrives home and his girlfriend, Hannah (Olivia Wilde), springs some bad news: His father has died suddenly, which means he’ll have to head to Los Angeles from New York right away. Sam’s response to the news is oddly passive; in fact, he seems to want nothing to do with his father, an old-school record producer, who, until he died, was a living legend. And when Hannah finally gets Sam to Los Angeles, his mother, Lillian (Michelle Pfeiffer), greets him with a literal slap in the face. “The linens are in the closet upstairs,” she says icily. She waits a beat and then says, in the same dry, flat voice, “I’m glad you’re home.” It turns out Sam has been estranged from his father — and by association, his mother — for years. His reasons are at first vague, but they become more comprehensible as the movie goes on. Now that the guy’s dead, Sam is at least hoping for some kind of payoff: Instead, his father’s lawyer (played by the always-marvelous Baker Hall) hands him a Dopp kit containing a roll of bills — $150,000, to be exact — and a mysterious instructional note that leads him to the door of a single mom, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks), and her bright but too-precocious son, Josh (Michael Hall D’Addario). If you’ve seen the trailer for People Like Us , you already know the nature of the relationship between Sam and Frankie. That’s a shame – whatever happened to the idea of letting an audience discover a movie for itself ? – but it doesn’t necessarily mar the picture’s modest but potent pleasures. For years Kurtzman and Orci have been writing Hollywood blockbusters, big, fat moneymakers like Transformers , Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek . People Like Us is their attempt to make something quieter and more personal, and in places the experiment is wobbly: Kurtzman knows what to put in, but doesn’t always seem to know what to take out, and the score, by A. R. Rahman, is too syrupy for the subtle earth-tremor emotions Kurtzman teases from his actors. But the performers keep the picture moving, even through its sloggy patches. Sam’s dad has left him no money, but he has bequeathed him a killer record collection: Carefully categorized and shelved, this precious stash of vinyl covers the walls, floor-to-ceiling, of a magical man cave. (Anyone who has ever loved vinyl will sigh at the Ali Baba-ness of it all.) Pine, for such a young actor, has an old-soul kind of face. Sam is closed off at first, and Pine plays that repressed anger as a kind of recessiveness, a retreat into blankness. His dad’s album collection is, at first, a legacy that just pisses him off, chiefly because it’s not money. But later, as he comes to know Josh, and sees both how bright and how lost the kid is, he remembers that music can be a portal into a better world, one that’s somehow easier to cope with. He admonishes Josh against stealing from a local CD shop: “You can’t shoplift from a record store, it’s like kicking a dead man.” And he gives the kid an essential listening list that includes Gang of Four, the Clash, the Buzzcocks and Television. Pine plays Sam as a man who needs to reconnect with his old enthusiasms, his old self, and he has just the right amount of gravity to make that believable. He’s got the right degree of surliness, too: There are moments where Sam doesn’t appear to be the nicest guy, and you wonder if his complaints about his father are of the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” variety. Banks, so often a crazy-wonderful presence in the movies, is more grounded than usual here, but she shows more depth, too. And Pfeiffer, looking beautiful in a way that’s believable for her age, is terrific. Pfeiffer embraces rather than recoils from the steeliness of her character, and her fearlessness makes all the difference. Everyone in People Like Us comes through with the goods. Which brings us to our last question: What’s with the movie’s stupid title? In a recent New York Times article , Stacey Snider, one of the principals at Dreamworks, explained that the title was changed from its original Welcome to People (a reference to a ’70s kids’ pop-psychology record album featured in the film) because, Snider said, “ ‘Welcome to People’ didn’t suggest anything to anyone.” She added, “It told you nothing about the content of the movie, the size of the movie, the genre of the movie.” So thanks, geniuses, for giving the movie a new title that tells us nothing about anything and which is almost impossible to remember. Who in their right mind would run, not walk, to see a movie called People Like Us ? Not people like you and me, that’s for sure. But if there were ever a time to defy a studio’s crap marketing strategy, it’s now. People Like Us is about all the ways in which our parents fail us – and about how one of the loathsome chores of adulthood is having to get over that, and over ourselves. That’s either not a big enough subject to fill a whole movie, or too much ground to cover in one picture. Welcome to people: They’re completely horrible, except when they’re totally awesome. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Those marketing gurus at Fox are going to make sure you keep talking about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus all summer, as a new viral video has been unveiled that highlights, testimonial-style, how awesome it is to work for the good folks at Weyland Corp. The way this scientist chick talks about Weyland’s envelope-pushing embracing of new technologies makes it sound like the best corporation to work at since Pixar, only with more semi-feeling anthropomorphic robots running around the place making sh*t happen. The viral teases a recruiting event at next months’ Comic-Con in San Diego and links out to ProjectPrometheus.com , though the site has yet to be updated with information. What could it mean? (Besides DVD/Blu-ray promotion for Prometheus ?)
Madame Tassaud has outdone herself here. Not one, not two, but eight wax replicas of the great Lady Gaga and her over-the-top styles have been unveiled! Gaga’s going global with her likenesses in NY City, Las Vegas, London, Hollywood, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hong Kong and Shanghai, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. With figures so strikingly similar to the singer and her iconic outfits that they’re hard to tell apart from real Lady Gaga photos , the Madame gets props from THG. Take a look at them below and see which you like best …
