R&B newcomer Kent Jones sat down with us to discuss black music and his artistry. “Black culture in particular is special because it’s ours,” said Jones. He defines his sound as an appreciation of his South Florida roots with influence from Jazz artists. “A lot of my musical influences are like the Count Basie Orchestra […]
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Kent Jones Talks About How He Got Started [VIDEO]
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Music
Tagged count, entertainment news, kent jones, music-news, musical, orchestra, relatives, sat-down, sources-report
Billionaire Robert Miller ( Richard Gere ) is a cheat. He cheats on his wife ( Susan Sarandon ) with his mistress, and on his mistress (Laetitia Casta) with his job. And for his job as CEO of one of those mysteriously mighty hedge funds that control the world in Arbitrage , he’ll cheat everybody : the IRS, his daughter and business partner ( Brit Marling ), the buddy who loaned him $412 million, and the fellow mogul Miller wants to acquire his company so he can, of course, spend time with his family, even though the idea confuses them. “I’m just trying to imagine what we would do?” laughs Marling. Clearly, Robert Miller swims with those economic sharks who nearly ruined the world in 2008, and writer/director Nicholas Jarecki (brother of Andrew and Eugene) is going to make him pay. But not for his actual crimes — no one’s going to jail for those — which means Jarecki has to invent a new sin. And so, late one night when the roads are empty, Miller whisks his mistress toward his lake house. He falls asleep at the wheel, skids into the divider, and comes-to next to her fresh corpse — a bloody metaphor for the lives he’s impersonally ruined, and a vicious end for Casta, a Normandy-born beauty so physically perfect there’s literally a bust of her in every French town hall. The quiet of the crash’s aftermath is chilling; the only sound is Miller screaming. But then he thinks of the millions he could lose if the cops, investors, and his wife look harder at his life and makes the cold decision to abandon her body and rescue his reputation. Hey, what’s a little furtive involuntary manslaughter to the baron of Manhattan? With the overconfidence of someone who’s Tivo-ed every episode of CSI , Miller calmly calls collect to Harlem and asks his ex-chauffeur’s son, a young ex-con named Jimmy (Nate Parker), to meet him at a gas station and shuttle him back to the city, no questions asked. Meanwhile, Detective Bryer (Tim Roth) arrives at the flaming wreck and resolves to find out who was really behind the wheel. This sounds like the set-up of a cat-and-mouse thriller. But Jarecki quickly establishes that Miller is screwed — the detective has him fingered by breakfast, and by lunch he’s got Jimmy in custody and threatened with a 10-year sentence for obstruction of justice if he won’t give testimony proving Miller’s guilt. As Miller’s lawyer warns, “The real world is different than television.” So, too, is this movie. Compared to an episode of your average television procedural, Arbitrage has double the runtime and half the suspense because Jarecki could care less about tension and theatrics. He doesn’t even care about Casta’s death — she doesn’t merit a single emo flashback. Jarecki is only interested in one deeply cynical question: What justice is fair to a billionaire? Money — not sex or death — is what fuels Arbitrage . It’s Miller’s excuse for refusing to confess (what’s 10 years to one innocent man if it protects thousands of employees?), and it’s what Miller offers Jimmy for his silence. Apparently, the going rate for a decade of jail time is $2 million, an insulting number considering it’s also what Miller drops to squire Sarandon’s status-conscious wife to a single Friday night benefit gala. And the detective’s resentment for Miller’s practically meaningless money is why the pinched and bitter Roth is so dogged about putting him in prison, vowing, “He doesn’t get to walk just because he’s on CNBC .” The performances are golden with Marling, Roth and Sarandon adding heft to their slender characters. It’s smart casting to have Vanity Fair impresario Graydon Carter pop up as the tycoon Miller so desperately needs to impress. And as the under-attack Jimmy, Parker works hard to make audiences want to remember his name. But this is a showcase for Gere, who has spent his career playing men who can afford a good scotch. (With that head of expensive silver hair, he could never play a fry cook.) At 63, his features have turned to steel: his eyes are small and watchful, and with his good looks he seems aggressively aware that he only has a few more years to grope Laetitia Casta before he has to holster his penis like Harrison Ford. Here, he’s at once charismatic and clueless, even getting a laugh when he asks Jimmy, “What’s an Applebee’s?” Gere does his best to give Arbitrage an agitated energy, but Jarecki’s fatalism works against the film. We can’t root for Miller; instead, we watch with dispassionate interest how the fallout of his misdeeds affects his friends, business partners and family. The smart surprise is that frankly, some of them don’t give a damn. Miller’s millions haven’t just corrupted him — they’ve corrupted everyone who wants a piece of him. And when Jimmy, the poorest and the purest in this ice cold drama, growls, “You think money’s going to fix this?” we’re forced to agree with Miller’s genuinely confused response: “What else is there?” Amy Nicholson is a critic, playwright and editor. Her interests include hot dogs, standard poodles, Bruce Willis, and comedies about the utter futility of existence. Follow her on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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REVIEW: Money, And Richard Gere, Fuel Fatalistic Financial Thriller Arbitrage
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged Actors, bennyhollywood, celeb news, city, daughter, detective, Family, film, history, kent jones, lake, movie, richard-gere, robert-miller, starlet
Jessica Chastain ‘s had an incredibly good run of prestige films in the brief span of time that she’s been in Hollywood: Take Shelter , Coriolanus , Tree of Life , The Help , and this summer’s Lawless have made quite the highlight reel. So it was inevitable that the starlet would pop up in a horror film sooner or later. Might as well be a spooky one like the Guillermo Del Toro -executive produced Mama , right? Well — spooky, silly, horror movies tend to be both of those things these days and Mama , from first time feature director Andres Muschietti (adapting his own short film), doesn’t look to be terribly groundbreaking. Lucas ( Game of Thrones ‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) take in Lucas’s two young nieces, who are discovered living near-feral existences on their own in a desolate cabin in the woods for five years following their parents’ death. Adjusting to life with the adopted tykes isn’t so easy, though – Annabel begins to suspect that something sinister (“Mama!”) has followed them. And it probably doesn’t like seeing a new mommy tucking the kids in at night. Moody atmospherics, supernatural suspense, spider-crawling ghouls, Chastain with a black dye job and heavily-lined eyes at her very Gothiest… nothing seems all that original here. Despite Del Toro’s involvement and Chastain’s abilities, this is hitting theaters during the dumping grounds of January, so temper your expectations. Verdict: Looks like that Julia Roberts movie Stepmom , with ghosts. Meh. Mama is in theaters January 18. [Via Apple ]
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged documentaries, history, Hollywood, House, kent jones, might-as-well, New Movie, sooner-or-later, starlet, story, storytelling, years-following
Just a couple of days into the Toronto International Film Festival this year, a curious commonality was noticeable in a number of the documentaries that I screened – re-enactments. While I only managed to see just under half of the nearly 50 documentary features in the TIFF line-up , it was surprising to see the storytelling approach — where significant past events are recreated via actors and, sometimes, animation — relatively widely employed. While some notable non-fiction films have made effective use of the practice — such as The Imposter or The Thin Blue Line — re-enactments more often feel in line with television productions of the Unsolved Mysteries variety. They remain a controversial element of documentary making, potentially challenging a film’s authenticity by introducing an outside, fictional element. It’s significant that the practice of re-enactment is the singular focus of one of the festival’s most-discussed docs, The Act of Killing , making this challenging film an appropriate place to begin. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, together with Christine Cynn and other anonymous co-directors, turn Indonesian gangsters into would-be Hollywood stars. The former death-squad leaders, responsible for the massacre of more than a million undesirables in 1965-1966, gleefully go along with Oppenheimer’s unusual plan, re-enacting the techniques they used to torture and murder suspected Communists, from off-the-cuff demonstrations of the cleanest way to strangle a victim to more elaborate set pieces involving interrogations and the destruction of a village. Verisimilitude is not the intent here. Although these over-the-top re-enactments push the limits of documentary ethics, they also shed light on the outsized personalities of the main subjects and reveal their histories and character. This conflation of a horrific reality with stylized fantasy also challenges the viewer and the perpetrators and becomes an unexpected form of therapy for the latter group. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God More literal examples of re-enactments are present in Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God , the prolific Oscar-winner’s exploration of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Focused around a Milwaukee priest who abused countless boys at the deaf school he ran, the film features the American Sign Language testimony of a number of men, spoken aloud by the likes of Ethan Hawke and John Slattery, but not distractingly so. Despite the forcefulness of the now-grown victims’ anger, expressed via their demonstrative signing and reinforced by the actors’ delivery (itself a form of re-enactment), Gibney decides to go one step further, recreating key sequences from their stories: silent scenes in which the priest prowls through the dorms ready to pounce on a sleeping young boy, or abuses the sanctity of the confessional booth. These sequences lack in subtlety and while they don’t undermine the strength of the film as a whole, they seem entirely superfluous. [ Editor’s Note: Gibney talks about his reasons for using these re-enactment sequences in an upcoming Movieline interview. ] Even more conventional is the use of re-enactments in Janet Tobias’ N o Place On Earth , the story of Ukrainian Jews who spent nearly a year and half living, literally, in caves to avoid capture during World War II. The majority of the film consists of actors portraying the circumstances of their flight from persecution and the conditions of their underground existence. Still-living survivors offer commentary in intermittent talking-head sequences, but the intended weight of the film is in the re-enactments which at times break from simply illustrating the story to feature actual scripted sequences. In the process, No Place on Earth ventures a step too far into docudrama. Given that the film is a production of the History Channel, it will likely connect with TV viewers, but, personally, scenes with the survivors re-visiting their cave sanctuary late in the film carried far more emotional resonance than the recreations.
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Reacting to Re-Enactment: Which Toronto Documentaries Use The Controversial Technique Well − Which Don’t
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged director-joshua, documentaries, film, history, House, kent jones, language, psych, richard pena, story, storytelling, toronto
Ending nearly a year of speculation, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced two replacements for long-serving Program Director Richard Peña, who is set to step down at the end of 2012 after serving 25 years in the post. Kent Jones will be the new Director of Programming for the annual New York Film Festival , while Robert Koehler will serve as Director of Programming, Year Round. The Film Society of Lincoln Center said that appointing two directors to the programming team will allow the organization, which not only produces the annual NYFF but a host of other programs throughout the year, to “better serve the needs of an organization that has recently expanded its operations with the opening of the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film.” Jones began in programming with Bruce Goldstein at Film Forum, and served as the American representative for the International Film Festival Rotterdam from 1996 to 1998. He was an assumed heir to Peña, serving as Associate Director of Programming at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, and from 2002 to 2009, including the New York Film Festival selection committee from 1998 to 2009 after departing under the organization’s previous Executive Director, Mara Manus. He has also served on juries at film festivals around the world, including Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Venice and Cannes. In 2009, he was named Executive Director of The World Cinema Foundation. Koehler is a film critic and festival programmer and has served as an instructor and programmer for UCLA Extension’s Sneak Preview program from 2003 to 2007. In 2003, he developed the innovative film program, “The Films That Got Away,” an ongoing series presenting significant recent work that has previously not screened in Los Angeles. Institutions with which the series has collaborated include UCLA Film Archive, the American Cinematheque and the Los Angeles Film Festival. In 2009, he was appointed director of programming at AFI Fest Los Angeles, where he helped create a new and focused competition section titled “New Lights,” as part of AFI Fest’s programming concept as a festival-of-festivals. “Richard Peña has played a fundamental role in defining our organization and its commitment to discovering and supporting the best and most important cinema in the world,” FSLC Executive Director Rose Kuo said. “Kent Jones and Bob Koehler, whose thinking and writing about cinema I deeply respect, are the perfect team to build upon Richard’s vision and carry it forward.” “The New York Film Festival has always been a beacon to me – when I was young and pouring over the yearly schedule in the Sunday Times, when I moved to New York in my 20s and started to actually attend the festival, and later when I served on the selection committee” said Kent Jones in a statement. “It means a lot to me to be entrusted with its stewardship after Richard Peña, to whom I owe a lot – I’m far from alone on that count. I’m excited to be working with Rose Kuo, with Bob Koehler, with Scott Foundas, with Gavin Smith, with Marian Masone, and with the whole team at the Film Society, many of whom are old friends and work colleagues. We’ll be working together to keep our part of cinema culture alive and thriving.” Added Robert Koehler, “I’m delighted and honored to join the country’s finest cinema presentation organization. Especially at a time when it is embarking on a new, exciting and innovative chapter in its history.” Richard Peña will continue his involvement with the Film Society of Lincoln Center after departing his duties as Programming Director at the end of the year, helping to design and organize a new educational initiative. The 50th edition of the New York Film Festival will take place September 28 – October 14.
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Film Society Of Lincoln Center Fills Richard Peña Post With 2 Appointments
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged annual, bruce willis, bruce-goldstein, Comics, country, director, executive, festival, Hollywood, international, kent jones, ncis, psych, richard pena, Year
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