Norman Babock is a special kid. In addition to his ability to speak to the dead, the shock-headed star of Paranorman is the creation of more than 300 people at Oregon-based stop-animation studios Laika , which was founded and is headed by Travis Knight, the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight. The making-of clip below, which plays at the end of screenings of the film, gives a glimpse of the work that goes into making a single character in the movie. There have been quite a few developments in stop-motion animation since the days of The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) pioneer Willis O’Brien, and this Instagram link gives further insight into the creative process and explains how Laika uses something calleda rapid prototyping color 3-D printer — where do I get one of those — that enables the animators to achieve some remarkable effects such as, and I quote, “the translucency of human skin.” As the Devo song goes: “It’s a beautiful world we live in.” Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Still enthrallingly spooky after all these years, the soundtrack to David Lynch ‘s groundbreaking — and mind-blowing — 1977 film Eraserhead got a lovingly produced limited-edition vinyl release on Tuesday that, I hope, refocuses attention on the life and tragic death of one of its key contributors, Peter Ivers. Sacred Bones records released a sweet deluxe edition of the soundtrack that initially was limited to just 1,500 copies, but after that first edition sold out, the Brooklyn, NY-based indie label has agreed to press a second edition of just 1000 copies, which it’s selling for $25.00. The package includes the soundtrack in vinyl and digital form — a convention-shattering soundscape of industrial bleeps, buzzes and hums that Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet spent years perfecting. Also included: a 16-page booklet featuring beautifully reproduced production stills that show Lynch dressed like a 20th-Century iteration of Johnny Appleseed. For me, the cornerstone of the release is Ivers’ work, not only the movie’s eerily old-timey theme song, “In Heaven,” which was sung by the Lady in the Radiator in Lynch’s film, but a previously unreleased Ivers composition, “Pete’s Boogie,” that was discovered during the transferring of the original soundtrack audio tapes. The Illinois-born, Brookline, Mass.-raised Harvard graduate was a musician whose close friends included National Lampoon founder Douglas Kenney and Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi. In the 1970s, Ivers recorded for Epic and Warner Bros Records, and beginning in 1981, he amassed a fervent cult following as the free-associative poetry-spouting host of New Wave Theatre on the USA cable network’s Night Flight program block. A kind of underground SNL , the show featured comedy and alternative bands such as the Dead Kennedys and the Angry Samoans that were really not ready for prime time. Like his friends Kenney and Belushi, who died, respectively, in 1980 and ’82, Ivers would not make it to mid-decade. In March 1983, he was found bludgeoned to death in his Los Angeles apartment. According to Wikipedia, new information in a book about Ivers’ life prompted the L.A, Police Department to reopen the investigation into his death. I contacted the LAPD to see what the status of that investigation is, and am waiting on a reply. Stay tuned. In the meantime, here’s an example of Ivers’ inspired New Wave Theatre work — further proof,if you ask me, that his life is worth reexamining. Watch It On YouTube . Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
HBO’s upcoming original movie The Girl , previewed last week for the Television Critics Association, tells the story of Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and Tippi Hedren ( Sienna Miller ) making the films The Birds and Marnie . If you thought this would be a fun story about stepping in bird doodie and making it big in Hollywood , you’re in for a big shock, as Hedren spoke at length about the alleged sexual harassment and abuse she suffered at the hands of the “unusual, genius, and evil” director. As seen in the trailer for the film, The Girl alleges that not only was Hitchcock a difficult director for whom to work, he was an abusive personality. One scene from The Girl depicts Hitchcock sexually assaulting Hedren in the back of a car. Hedren has given many interviews on her Hitchcock films over the past 50 years; The Girl will expose Hedren’s little-known story to HBO audiences this fall. “People have said, ‘Was he in love with you?’” Hedren said. “No, he wasn’t. When you love someone, you treat them well. I think we’re dealing with a mind here that is incomprehensible, and I certainly am not capable of discerning what was going through his mind or why. I certainly gave no indication that I would ever be interested in any kind of a relationship with him.” Jones, who wore a prosthetic chin and age makeup to look more like Hitchcock, agreed that the Hitchcock he portrayed was a monster. “Yes, he had a huge disproportionate amount of power over the people who worked for him and with him,” Jones said. “Yes, he was a monster but he was very human in his foibles. There’s a certain pathos to him that is very human. His weaknesses were very human.” He perhaps offered more of an objective analysis of Hitchcock than Hedren was willing to speculate. “You’re not writing a biography of Hitchcock’s whole personality, but I think that it’s my job as an actor to sympathize with the character and to try and find that,” Jones continued. “I think he’s in control of everything at that point in his life – moviemaking, every aspect of moviemaking. He’s at the height of his fame after Psycho and then there’s something he can’t control, which is this woman who’s exercising some control over him. I’m not sure that he has the internal resources to cope with that and I think that’s something everyone can relate to, the idea of an emotion that begins to have control over you. Because control over such an important issue, you only need to look at his clothes, his uniform, the way he ordered his life, the way it became very systematic the way he operated, to know that control is crucial to him.” The film seems to play like an abusive marriage. It begins with Hitchcock discovering Hedren, depicted as almost a seduction of an innocent. Once filming begins he puts threatening pressure on her. For a scene in which birds attack Hedren, Hitchcock could have shot minimal takes. As The Girl shows, the scene went on for days, the underlying assumption being that he could make it stop if Hedren would acquiesce to his advances. Of course, these are all the negative elements of Hitchcock and Hedren’s relationship concentrated into a single film, and in this case a two minute trailer at that. “There were times when it was absolutely delightful and wonderful, the times that we spent while he was my drama coach,” Hedren explained. “I hadn’t had any acting experience except in commercials. You get a good technical background for that sort of thing. But to break down a script, to delve into how you become another character, the relationship of different characters in the film was something that I didn’t know how to do, and of course, it was perfect to have someone as brilliant a genius as Alfred Hitchcock being my drama coach.” “Hitchcock had a charm about him,” she continued. “He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense. I learned so much from that man about motion pictures; how you make a motion picture, so there are things that weren’t able to be in the film to say, ‘Why would she stick around for all of this?’ It wasn’t a constant barrage of harassment to me. So that is the fault of any film. It can’t possibly have everything in it. But if it had been constantly the way we have had to do it in this film, I would have been long gone.” Miller joined the TCA presentation by phone from London, and shared her experience recreating Hedren’s harrowing scenes in The Birds . “It was difficult during certain scenes, but not merely as difficult as it was for Tippi,” Miller said. “The bird attack scenes took five long days for her and it was about five hours for me. So while I definitely suffered a little bit, it was nowhere near the real thing.” By the time they went on to make Marnie , Hedren was fulfilling a contract and trying to survive. Marnie was never one of Hitchcock’s most popular or acclaimed films, but having shed light on his obsession with the star, The Girl reveals a lot more. Hedren is cast as the title character, a compulsive thief whose new husband forced her to marry him and tries to cure her. “After having seen this film, it’s pretty fascinating to look at that because it’s pathologically interesting,” Jones said. “I find it to be one of the most interesting among the movies but I don’t think it’s one of the great movies.” Perhaps the film is Hitchcock’s fantasy for how he would possess Hedren herself. Looking back, Hedren sees something pathetic in his abuse. “I think he was an extremely sad character,” Hedren said. “As I said in the beginning, we are dealing with a brain here that is unusual, genius, and evil, deviant almost to the point of dangerous because of the effect that he can have on people that are totally unsuspecting.” Hedren’s might not be the only story of Hitchcock’s abuse. She knew of other leading ladies who didn’t get along with him, but back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, actors didn’t talk publicly about their issues with directors. “As far as I know, Vera Miles had a terrible time with Hitchcock, and she wanted to get out of the contract,” Hedren said. “He didn’t let her. She did Psycho , and I believe, if you look at Psycho , there isn’t one close up of Vera, not one. After that, she would never even speak about him to anyone. So I think it is common knowledge that Hitchcock had fantasies or whatever you want to call them about his leading ladies. Peggy Robertson, his assistant for so many years, and I remained friends until she died. She at one point said to me that he would have these kind of feelings for his leading ladies, and she said, ‘But he never got over you.’ I don’t know if that’s a compliment or whatever it’s supposed to be, I don’t know, but I really don’t care either.” Today it seems shocking that any director could get away with sexual harassment, and have an untarnished reputation for some 50 years after the incident. The studio system of that era was much more secretive. “I had not talked about this issue with Alfred Hitchcock to anyone because all those years ago, it was still the studio kind of situation,” Hedren said. “Studios were the power and I was at the end of that, and there was absolutely nothing I could do legally whatsoever. There were no laws about this kind of a situation. If this had happened today, I would be a very rich woman.” Even though there are sexual harassment laws and a wide open public forum for any actor to share her stories in the media, Hedren hopes sharing her story now will protect the next generation of young actors. “I hope that young women who do see this film know that they do not have to acquiesce to anything that they do not feel is morally right or that they are dissatisfied with or simply wanting to get out of that situation,” Hedren said. “You can have a strength, and you deserve it. I can look at myself in the mirror, and I can be proud. I feel strong. He ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life.” The Girl airs in October on HBO. Follow Fred Topel on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The new trailer of Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels ‘ The Paperboy hit Wednesday. Shots of the film, which premiered in Cannes this past May give a great tease including Zac Efron dancing with sex kitten Nicole Kidman in his tighty-whities and it shows John Cusack as the frightful villain (stalking in a Florida swamp no less). “He’s good looking, the camera can’t help but love him… And I’m a gay man – you know!” said Daniels in Cannes when asked about Efron being “eroticized” in the film at a press conference . “I don’t think I was supposed to feel comfortable,” said Efron, laughing after Daniels’s quip. “This character is learning the ways of the world and it is uncomfortable. It was a great character to play.” Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, The Paperboy is set in late ’60s Florida. Efron plays Jack, a young guy who’s aimless and living with his dad and soon-to-be step mother. His older brother (Matthew McConaughey) is a journalist who comes to town to investigate a death-row inmate (John Cusack) he believes is wrongly convicted of murder. Meanwhile, Cusack is corresponding with a platinum blonde (Nicole Kidman) with a fabulous wardrobe, fake eye-lashes and pillowy lips. She’s also the object of Jack’s raging hormones — and things get complicated. The film divided audiences in Cannes where it had its avid fans and vocal detractors. Daniels, who is currently filming The Butler and a pic on Martin Luther King’s assassination afterward. This will likely be his most racy feature though for the foreseeable future. Millennium Entertainment opens The Paperboy October 5th in the U.S.
Ridley and Tony Scott know a thing or two about indelible movie scenes. So it’s not surprising that the filmmakers behind, respectively the chest burster scene in Alien and the “Bela Lugosi Is Dead”-accompanied blood-drinking scene at the opening of The Hunger would rely on an iconic single image to connect their A&E Network reboot of “Coma” to Michael Crichton’s original 1978 movie adaptation of Robin Cook’s novel about organ harvesting. With a nod to the late Joe Strummer, I like to refer to the image as Coma Girl, and if you troll the Internet or pay attention to mass transit bus advertisements, you’ve probably seen her: an apparently naked woman dangling in the supine position from a series of wires beneath the web address: “Comaconspiracy.com”. A photographic version of that graphic — which smartly manages to be both creepy and titillating in an S&M kinda way (back then, The Story of O was almost as popular as Fifty Shades of Grey is today) — was used in a movie poster for the ’78 film, and Guy Slattery, Executive Vice President of Marketing for A&E tells me that Coma Girl was intentionally used to connect the new production, which is a two-part miniseries, to the Crichton movie. “The original was so impactful and such an iconic image,” Slattery says. “The question was how could we update it and make it more of the moment.” To those ends, Slattery says his department went the graffiti route for the viral teaser campaign that involved “legal tagging” in New York and Los Angeles, and online clips in which, for instance, “hacktvists” post the graphic of Coma Girl on the Times Square Jumbotron to draw attention to mysterious goings on at the foreboding looking Jefferson Institute. Slattery explains that a subsequent campaign will feature actual “visualizations” of the hanging coma victims. “There are some very cool technological innovations that are used” in the A&E series, such as a silvery skin like “suit and feeding tubes” that are used to keep the coma victims alive. “I think fans are going to be blown away,” says Slattery of the series which will air over two nights, Sept. 3 and 4, and stars Lauren Ambrose, Steven Pasquale, Geena Davis, James Woods, Ellen Burstyn and Richard Dreyfuss. The marketing executive says the Scott brothers’ Coma will be a “modern telling” of Cook’s story. “It’s about corporations overstepping the bounds and putting profits before morality.” Cook’s story was ahead of it’s time in the late ’70s, and now more relevant than ever thanks to advances in medicine since then. Slattery also hinted that the A&E production may also reference another memorable scene in Crichton’s movie–in which an ill-fated janitor is murdered by electrocution and freaky blue sparks shoot from one of his eyeballs. “Without revealing too much, there is a creepy scene involving an eye socket,” he says. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro has been in the craft of filmmaking since he was 16, filling roles as diverse as P.A., assistant director and makeup effects. He made his first film Cronos at 28 and received his Academy Award-nomination in 2007 for Pan’s Labyrinth , making him one of the most prominent filmmakers to emerge from his native Mexico. In a candid interview, he explains how he learned filmmaking in author Mike Goodridge’s new book, FilmCraft: Directing . Goodridge, who until recently served as editor of Screen International and is now CEO of the international sales and financing company Protagonist Pictures wrote the book which features in-depth interviews with 16 of the world’s celebrated and respected film directors including Del Toro, Clint Eastwood ( Million Dollar Baby ) Paul Greengrass ( The Bourne Supremacy ), Peter Weir ( The Truman Show ), Terry Gilliam ( Brazil ) and Park Chan-wook ( Oldboy ). These and other filmmakers share their insights and experiences on development, storytelling/writing, working with actors and cinematographers, as well as other areas necessary to completing a successful film. In this excerpt from the book, which will be available via Amazon beginning June 15th, Guillermo del Toro gives his take on the mistakes and triumphs of his first movie as well as the first movie of other filmmaking greats, a life lesson courtesy of John Lennon, Tom Cruise’s take on filmmaking, what made him cry during his first movie, making ‘everything’ theatrical and why having “enough money” will get you, err… screwed. Director Guillermo Del Toro excerpt from FilmCraft: Directing : I came from the provinces, from Guadalajara, which is the second largest city in Mexico and nobody makes movies there. When I was a teenager, I started building relationships in Mexico City and I started as a blue-collar member of the crew. I was either a boom guy or a PA or an assistant director. I was makeup effects. I did my floor time in both TV and movies. My first professional work on a movie was at the age of 16 and I made Cronos when I was 28, so I had twelve solid years of doing just about everything in between. If somebody needed something, I would do it. I even did illegal stunt driving. But what happened is that I learned a little bit of everything and, once you put your time into exploring everything, you get to know what every piece of grip equipment is called and how many you need, and how to do post — I edited my own movies and did the post sound effects on all of them. So to some extent, directing came naturally to me from my first movie. My first movie Cronos is not in any way a perfect movie, but it’s a movie full of conviction. When you make your first movie, whatever mistakes you make are very glaring, but if you have conviction, and I would even say cinematic faith, this also shines through. I recently watched Cronos again and I thought, “I like this kid,” he has possibilities. After your first movie, with a little bit of craft, diligence, and more importantly, experience, you learn to make virtues out of some of your defects. What I mean is that any first movie has good moments, even if it is not entirely perfect. It can be a filmmaker as famous as you like, such as Stanley Kubrick, whose first film F ear and Desire (1953) is about 70 minutes long and stars Paul Mazursky. It is very stilted, very awkwardly paced, full of stuff that doesn’t work, the actors speak in a patois, and it has a very non-naturalistic rhythm. But what is incredibly fascinating is that the very stilted quality, that artificial rhythm, eventually became his trademark in later films. He bypasses it in more naturalistic films like The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), but comes back to that type of hyperrealism or strange filtered reality in his later movies, and he is in complete control of it there. Kubrick used the tools he acquired in making other films to transform what you thought was a defect in Fear and Desire into a virtue. In my case, when I make movies in Spanish, starting with Cronos , I purposefully avoid characterizing certain things in the conventional Hollywood sense, and that comes out as a blatant defect. Specifically, I had shot a much longer film, including a whole section between the husband and wife where she noticed that he is getting younger and they start falling in love again. At night, he would come and sleep underneath her bed. But I couldn’t make it work. The way I staged it was simply too stilted and strange, and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it as part of the movie. Even to this day, I think there is a mix of different tones in that movie. I change from the dramatic to the comedic too often. I try to do it generically, mixing horror with melodrama, and there are moments in Cronos that are really jarring for me. I sometimes allowed Ron Perlman to be too broad and it simply didn’t work. I think I did it better in my later movies. I don’t know whether that mix of genres is my trademark. One of the things that was very influential for me when I was kid was the book by Tolkien in which he discussed fairy stories in literature. I remember him saying in that book that you should make the story recognizable enough to be rooted in reality, but outlandish enough to be a flight of fancy. So I try to mix an almost prosaic approach, or at least a rigid historical context, with fantastic elements. I treat the fantasy characters very naturalistically or else I root the story in a precise context like The Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth , or in Cronos , post-NAFTA Mexico. As Tolkien says, when you give the audience a taste of what they can recognize, they immediately accept the rest of the concoction; it’s almost like wrapping a pill in bacon for a dog to swallow it. You need, for example, the bacon of domesticity in Cronos . I wanted to shoot that family as a very middle-class family in Mexico. I wanted a kitchen that looked like a kitchen you’d recognize, a really ordinary bedroom and very mild, neat clothing design. Out of that middle-class reality, I wanted a single anomaly — the mechanical clockwork scarab device. If the audience believes that this abnormality is as real as it can be, they will respond to the story. Many directors think that the more you keep the creature in the shadows and don’t show it, the better it is, but I don’t believe that. I don’t have monsters in my movies, I have characters, so I shoot the monsters as characters. For example, in Hellboy , I shot Abe Sapien, the fish-man, like any other actor. I didn’t fuss about it, I shot the monster with the same conviction that I would shoot Cary Grant or Brad Pitt; in other words, if I shot it in a different way than I would the regular actors, I would be making a mistake. What I do in every movie very consciously is to ensure that this anomaly is shot two notches above actual reality, so it’s weird enough to accommodate the monster, but not too stylistic that it’s unrecognizable. For example, everything you see in Pan’s Labyrinth — the house, the furniture — is fabricated to be slightly more theatrical than it needed to be. The uniforms for the captain and his guards are exactly what were worn at the time, but we tweaked the cut and the collar to make them more theatrical. Everything around the creatures, therefore, exists like a terrarium for them to live in so that when it comes to shoot them, I can shoot them in a normal way. I was very nervous on Cronos , but the adrenaline carried me through. Directing is almost like keeping four balls in the air on a monocycle with a train approaching behind you. There were days, for example, like the scene with the husband sleeping under the bed, where I knew I’d fucked up. The makeup was wrong and we didn’t have time to go back and change it, we didn’t even have time to test it. The light was wrong. Everything was wrong, and I arrived home to my wife that night and cried. I said that I had destroyed the scene I had dreamt of for years. I didn’t have the luxury of reshoots. Of course, you can only break down in front of your wife, or your partner, or your parents. In front of the staff on the film, you need to keep total control. You don’t want anyone thinking the general is afraid—you have to be leading the charge. There are two very lonely positions on a movie set: the actor and the director. The cinematographer has a close liaison with the director, the gaffer, the grip, etc. The director is alone on one end of the lens and the actor is alone on the other. That’s why the great, most satisfying partnerships on set are when a director and actor come to love and support each other. Being from Mexico is an enormous part of who I am as a filmmaker. The panache, the sense of melodrama, and the madness I have in my movies that allows me to mix historical events with fictional creatures, all comes from an almost surreal Mexican sensibility. I’m really prone to melodrama. This comes from watching Mexican melodrama obsessively, to the point where I was watching The Devil’s Backbone with a Spanish architect and the architect said to me that it was more Mexico than Spain; the characters were acting like Latin characters. If my father hadn’t been kidnapped in 1998 then frankly I would be making Mexican movies interspersed with the European and American. Since 1998, I cannot go back to Mexico because I would be too visible a target, especially when there is a printed schedule of where I am going to be every day for the entire run of a shoot. I think of the audience every second during writing; I think of them as me. I question how I would understand something, or what would make me feel a certain way. When I’m shooting a scene that moves the characters, I weep, I feel the emotion on set, so when I am writing it, if it doesn’t work, I don’t print it out until I have that feeling. Creating tension is a different skill to creating fear. For fear, you try to create atmosphere. You ensure the scene is alive visually before anything is added, then you craft the silence very carefully because silence often equals fear. Rarely can you elicit fear with music unless the music is used very discreetly, underlining the scene in a way that is almost invisible. When the Pale Man appears in Pan’s Labyrinth there is music, but Javier [Navarrete, the film’s composer] is almost just underlining his movements. It becomes like a sound effect. Silence is one of the things that you learn to craft the most because there is never real silence in a movie; you always have distant wind, cars, dogs barking, or crickets in the distance. I think really well-crafted silence creates tension, and by the same token an empty frame, an empty corridor for example — if it’s empty in the right, creepy way — is a tool. You know if a scene’s not working on set, and as you get older and craftier, you can learn to re-direct it in post. You can patch it up in your coverage and recover it—you can even end up with a great scene because beauty rarely comes out of perfection. For something to work, I think it has to come out of emotional turmoil. You can’t encapsulate the perfect melody; a huge component of it is instinctive. Then, of course, there are the actors. Many times you storyboard and rehearse with the actor, and then you come to the scene and it’s not working. But then you try something different and something suddenly happens that makes it work. It’s very raw. It’s funny, we enthrone this idea of the perfect filmmaker, this myth of the all controlling, all-seeing, all-encompassing person, but even for Kubrick or von Stroheim there is a part of the process that is entirely instinctive. I once asked Tom Cruise about it and he confirmed that Kubrick often found things in a panic on Eyes Wide Shut (1999). I love imperfection. I have been friends with James Cameron since 1992 and because he is so incredibly precise, people sometimes don’t think he is human, but the beauty of being a close friend is that I’ve seen him burn the midnight oil and toil and sweat. These imperfections in the façade are what make the work more admirable. Art depends on that human touch that doesn’t make perfection; in fact the filmmakers and films I am most attracted to require a level of human imperfection. On the big effects films, you try to prepare thoroughly but there are always surprises. John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you are making other plans” and I think film is what happens when you are making other plans. You come onto the set and either the actor or the material doesn’t come out as you expect and the film comes out better for it. If you have either experience or inspiration, one of the two will get you through. One you accumulate through the years, the other you cherish. As a young filmmaker you’re full of inspiration and if you are unlucky you are only trading it in for experience. You need to remain on dangerous ground to continue to be inspired. I am always tackling things I shouldn’t tackle and meddling with stuff I shouldn’t meddle with. You never have enough money. If you ever feel one day you have enough money, that’s the day you’re fucked. FilmCraft: Directing is available via Amazon beginning June 15th. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Sometimes TMI is just TMI, says writer and critic Dave White, reviewing Scotty Bowers’ Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars : “Stalker-y internet gossip site TMZ is its own TV show now and they’ve got a bus that runs all day long so tourists from Indiana can see where Chris Brown beat up Rihanna….It’s a time in Hollywood history when Mel Gibson takes up with his mistress, puts a baby in her, screams weird racist things on the phone , they laugh about it on The View and then Jodie Foster turns around and puts him in her next movie…And even if [Katharine] Hepburn was a lesbian with a bad complexion and [Spencer] Tracy a conflicted bisexual alcoholic, what purpose does it serve if I also know that Scotty Bowers provided her with as many as 150 paid female ‘companions’ over her lifetime?” [ Los Angeles Review of Books ]
Negative speculation and prognostication has been brewing for months for Disney’s sci-fi actioner John Carter thanks to dismal tracking and rumors of bloated budgets, but Disney’s finally released their review embargo for the March 9 would-be blockbuster. So what’s the early buzz from the first critiques of Andrew Stanton ‘s take on the Edgar Rice Burroughs saga, about a Civil War veteran named John Carter ( Taylor Kitsch ) who lands in the middle of a civil war on Mars? Given the naysaying hype, the first batch of reviews are surprisingly… positive. Well, mixed positive, for the most part — critics agree on many of the film’s strengths, from the well-crafted CG world of Barsoom (that’s Mars, to us humans) to the spirited action sequences Pixar veteran Stanton has pulled off. (Look for Movieline’s John Carter review to post next week.) ” Some of the stuff that Stanton pulls off in John Carter is mind-blowing ,” enthuses Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci . ” There are a few sequences that feel simply classic, like we’ll be referring to them for years to come. There’s one scene, where John Carter stands alone (well, with Woola) against a rampaging army of nine foot tall, four armed Tharks, that is an all-timer. ” Speaking of those Tharks — the four-armed green Martian warriors that first enslave John Carter and force him to fight for them — Stanton’s CG background directing Finding Nemo and Wall-E seems to have helped him create believable, dimensional characters with a combination of CG animation and performance capture. HitFix’s Drew McWeeney was particularly impressed by the CG-heavy characters. ” The Tharks, led here by Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), are compelling creations ,” he writes . ” By a few scenes into their time onscreen, I stopped thinking about the technical trick involved in bringing them to life and simply accepted them as real .” Meanwhile, actress Lynn Collins drew high marks for her portrayal of Martian princess Dejah Thoris, a science-minded warrior princess who serves as Carter’s romantic foil while holding her own with her smarts and her sword. ” Lynn Collins’s feisty Dejah Thoris is the best kick-ass sci-fi princess since Leia, and she looks stunning too with her Martian tattoos ,” says SFX Magazine . In addition to potentially launching young teenage boys into puberty with her sensual, revealing costumes (the skimpiness of which Dejah at least acknowledges with a wink), she’s one of the better-written and unusually strong female characters to come along in genre filmmaking in a while. Or, as Faraci declares : ” Dejah Thoris is the best female character in science fiction/fantasy cinema since Ripley. ” But the critics also agree where John Carter ‘s flaws are concerned — for instance, the sprawling, often-unwieldy scope of its story and the clumsy way in which Stanton and Co. filter it down to a dense (maybe too-dense) feature-length runtime. Part of the problem lies in compacting Burroughs’ Princess of Mars novel down to one feature-length script while juggling the many moving parts — John Carter’s Civil War past, the mechanics of his Mars-aided powers, the political machinations between the two warring city-states of Zodanga and Helium, the omnipotent Tharks who walk among them pulling the strings, the warrior culture of the Tharks, and an Earth-bound framing device involving Carter’s nephew, Edgar Rice Burroughs, phew! — while additionally attempting to set the stage for sequels to come. ” Amidst the CGI environments and constant plot machinations, the story veers between interesting, boring and borderline incomprehensible ,” said Fan the Fire Magazine . ” There are moments when the film soars, only to stall and sputter on a well-meaning but extraneous –- or overlong -– character moment ,” complains SFX Magazine , adding that ” lengthy exposition scenes and Martian politics are hampered by cod pomposity and the dreaded ‘silly-made-up-sci-fi-words’ disease. ” Ultimately, if audiences react as CinemaBlend’s Sean O’Connell did, Disney’s biggest problem on March 9 will reflect its early tracking woes from weeks ago: Viewer indifference. ” The bulk of Carter [is] a tough slog, despite some decent performances and the admirable introduction of a tough-as-nails action heroine in Collins ,” O’Connell writes. ” Arid, barren Barsoom is a dull environment for a sci-fi blockbuster, and the consequences of the conflicts happening on screen are small. John Carter just never pulled me in .” Read more on John Carter here.
Will Ferrell movies can usually be summed up as “Will Ferrell as a…” and you get it. Will Ferrell as a reporter? That’s funny. Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver? Also funny. But Will Ferrell as a Spanish soap opera action hero? Casa de mi Padre is a Spanish language film starring Ferrell as a rancher’s son who goes to war with drug dealers to protect his brother’s girl (Genesis Rodriguez). Where, exactly, did he come up with this idea? At the film’s press junket today, Ferrell said he’d had this idea for five to seven years. The inspiration struck him, as such ideas do, during a 2:00 a.m. channel surfing session. “I’m probably like so many people, turning on the television going through the channels at two in the morning and landing on a telenovela going, ‘What is this? Why are they so over the top? This is amazing,’” Ferrell said. “That’s my exposure to them. I’d always had this idea of that’s such a heightened, funny world that it would be really funny to see myself in that world. I thought God, you’ve never seen an American comic in a foreign language film and have them commit to it in a way that’s believable. I thought that’s something if you could pull it off, that would be an original movie.” The TV dramas that pop up on Univision or Telemundo in the states take the drama pretty seriously. You can tell Ferrell thinks it’s funny by all the intentional mistakes (continuity errors, visible boom mics, stuffed animatronic animals and mannequin stand-ins) intentionally placed in Casa de mi Padre , which is written by Andrew Steele and directed by Matt Piedmont, both alumni of Saturday Night Live and Funny or Die . “It technically really isn’t an homage to telenovelas,” Ferrell said. “Telenovela is kind of the broad description for it but it’s an homage to that, it’s an homage to the Mexican spaghetti western. It’s an homage to bad moviemaking, continuity mistakes. It’s an homage to overacting. It’s an homage to stuffed wild animals. Once we started writing the script and talking about how we were going to shoot the movie, we saw this was a real opportunity to play around with a bunch of different elements.” The script by Steele was written in English, then the dialogue translated into Spanish. Ferrell only speaks en espanol ; only an American character delivers a few lines of English. Of course, now Ferrell only remembers the naughty words. “ Chingado is a good one,” he said. “I love that word. Chinga this, chinga that. That’s a good word, but that’s commonly used. Chinga is the F word.” Ferrell got over the language barrier on his first day of filming. “For some reason the schedule worked out to where I literally had like a two page monologue in Spanish on the first day. Once I got the first couple takes under my belt, and I could see people watching behind the monitors going, ‘His Spanish is okay. It’s not that bad.’ Then I thought oh, okay. I’m going to make my way through this. Had I kept up with the Spanish, I’d be really good right now. But I didn’t. I could make my way at a resort. At the Four Seasons in Mexico I’d probably be okay.” Fulfilling his dream of starring in a Spanish language melodrama, Ferrell was proud to use his box office clout to get an outrageous film made. “This ranks up there as one of the things I’ve gotten to do which you can only be so lucky to be in a position to take risks like this.” Casa de mi Padre opens March 16. Watch the trailer here . Follow Fred Topel on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Drive sound editor Lon Bender, up for the Oscar against The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , Hugo , Transformers: Dark of the Moon , and War Horse , on director Nicolas Refn ‘s unusual sound requests: “In the sound world, there often is a propensity to want, at least for things like car chases, guns or weapons, to use sounds of the real weapons or the real cars. But when I went to Nic to talk about car engines and the specificity of the kind of cars they were, he said, ‘I don’t even have a driver’s license and I’ve never driven a car. I don’t care what they sound like! They just have to sound exciting.’” [ NYT ]
