S torytelling has long since been a rich tradition in the Black community. From the folktales shared by ancestors that have been passed down for generations to the new generation of musicians, poets, and writers, who are capturing their experiences through their artistry; oral traditions within Black culture have been instrumental in the preservation of our narratives. Entrepreneur Mike Coles is on a mission to elevate the storytelling experience, build community and preserve legacies through his app Choose Your Reader . For Coles—a lawyer, screenwriter, and author who was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio—books were often used as an escape. He grew up in a town that was segregated and as a result was bussed to a school on the other side of town during his grade school years. He says that experience forced him to level up and sparked a passion for education. It was during this time in his life where Coles fell in love with reading and storytelling. Amongst some of the earliest books he read—which were given to him by his mother who earned a master’s degree in child psychology—were the Big Red series penned by author Jim Kjelgaard and the books The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London . During his teenage years, he started reading comic books and collected hundreds of them. Fast forward decades later and the passion for stories is something that has been passed down to his son. One evening, while getting his son ready for bed the 3-year-old child asked that Coles tell him a story. While Coles was headed to the bookshelf to grab a book, his son told him that he wanted him to make the story up off the top of his head. His son shared three things that he wanted to be included in the story—a baseball, softball, and golf ball. Coles’ improvisational skills led to the creation of a compelling story; so compelling that his son wanted the same story repeated the following three nights. Then his son began to ask that he add other elements to the story including illustrations. While struggling to find content to bring the story to life, Coles discovered there was a need for apps that featured stories which merged engaging narratives with good illustrations. He then developed the concept for Choose Your Reader in 2016 and decided to move forward with bringing the app to fruition. Choose Your Reader gives individuals the ability to create and voice record stories to share with the children in their lives. Coles started out with the stories that he created for his son and now there are a total of 20 stories on the app; half a dozen of which are in different languages. The app features stories in English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi. Choose Your Reader was created to build a stronger sense of community. “People are becoming less connected and informed,” he told NewsOne. “Thinking about the legacy that individuals can leave behind, we can continue to build upon an oral tradition that is strong within the Black community. We have the ability to leverage the platform to create content and archive it for generations to come.” Source: Mike Coles For Coles, Choose Your Reader is also about bringing diverse narratives to the forefront. He plans on launching a section of the app that will highlight writers of color. Through the app, he’s also helping writers lower the cost of distributing and promoting their content. He says a lot of content creators of color are locked out of the publishing industry due to a flawed economic structure and he wants to change that narrative. Coles is also adamant about increasing the representation of Black protagonists in children’s stories. “Our stories have diversity and importance and are not monolithic. We tell the illustrators that diversity is important. We want to incorporate people of color into nursery rhymes and other stories that have been around for a long time. Nobody said what Little Jack Horner looked like, why can’t he be Black?” As for what’s on the horizon for Choose Your Reader, Coles says he wants to work with schools in underserved communities so they can aid teachers in cutting the costs for schoolbooks and sharing compelling content with students to spark their interest in different fields. The app will also have the capability to track the progression of a reader. He’s aiming to have 100 books available on the app by the end of the year. The app is free through December. SEE ALSO: Pharrell Williams Launches Music Education Program In Partnership With Verizon Family Of Authors To Launch Animated Travel Adventure Series [ione_media_gallery src=”https://newsone.com” id=”3881733″ overlay=”true”]
Marcus Ingram/Getty Images Big Boi Is Helping Hospice Patients See Black Panther Big Boi says that he hopes to “bring a little light” to a group of Atlanta hospice patients by taking them to see Black Panther on Friday. The Atlanta legend has rented a theater at Stonecrest 16 in Lithonia and will transport about 30 patients at Loving Arms Hospice to watch the film. He said about his good deed, “I’ve had my father and both my grandmothers go through hospice and I’d want to take them to places they couldn’t go. This might be the last movie they get to see. It’s like a little field trip.” Of course, medical staff will accompany the group, who are set to travel to the theater in one of Big Boi’s Celebrity Trailers, his company that supplies luxury trailers to movie sets–he wants the Loving Arms patients to experience the ride in one of the “super plush” vehicles. Like most of us, Big Boi has already seen Black Panther, but he’s looking forward to watching it again. He expressed his love of the movie saying, “The movie is incredible. Just the different layers – the storytelling, the writing, and of course the action. I love seeing the High Museum in there. ATL is thriving, man.” Other celebrities who have bought out theaters in their community for Black Panther viewings include Kendrick Lamar’s label TDE, Desus & Mero, Serena Williams , Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade, and more. Continue reading →
“Hamilton” Casting Called Discriminatory To Whites By now, surely you’ve heard about the Broadway breakout hit Hamilton , which tells the story of founding father Alexander Hamilton through hip-hop influenced music numbers and features a predominantly Black and Latino cast…although you likely haven’t seen it yourself since tickets are sold out until 2017. The hit play recently came under fire while looking for extra cast members to fill its highly coveted roles. An NY civil rights activist says that the producers’ search specifically looking for people of color violates fair casting rules. Via Playbill : Hamilton, which has been praised for its bold casting policy of using ethnically diverse actors to play the mainly white Founding Fathers—a move that has captivated audiences and emboldened minority actors—may have stepped over the line in a recent casting notice, according to a civil rights attorney. According to a CBS News report, the attorney, Randolph McLaughlin of the Newman Ferrara Law Firm slammed a recent casting notice specifying that the show was seeking “non-white” performers. He said the notice may violate the New York City Human Rights Law that forbids discrimination in hiring based on race. No specific legal complaint has been filed against the show with the New York Commission on Human rights so far. But McLaughlin told CBS, “What if they put an ad out that said, ‘Whites only need apply? Why, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians would be outraged.” The production is fairly confident that they had followed all the applicable rules while looking to keep the diverse cast that has helped make the show a standout on the Broadway scene, so they ended up issuing a “sorry, not sorry” statement addressing the casting call in question: “The producers of Hamilton regret the confusion that’s arisen from the recent posting of an open call casting notice for the show. It is essential to the storytelling of Hamilton that the principal roles –which were written for non-white characters (excepting King George) – be performed by non-white actors. This adheres to the accepted practice that certain characteristics in certain roles constitute a “bona fide occupational qualification” that is legal. This also follows in the tradition of many shows that call for race, ethnicity or age specific casting, whether it’s The Color Purple or Porgy & Bess, or Matilda. The casting will be amended to also include language we neglected to add, that is, we welcome people of all ethnicities to audition for Hamilton.” “Hamilton depicts the birth of our nation in a singular way,” said producer Jeffrey Seller, in a further statement. “We will continue to cast the show with the same multicultural diversity that we have employed thus far.” So…the popular play that makes SURE that Black and Brown people get prominent parts is the one that gets called out for discrimination??? SMH. At least they don’t plan on backing down. So if you’re in the NYC area and looking for that big break…by all means take your (Black or Brown) self down to the theater and try out! Playbill.com
Now that Les Misérables is expected to surpass its opening-day box-office expectations by $5 million-10 million, director Tom Hooper could pretend that adapting the beloved musical for the big screen was a walk in the park, but he’d be lying. On Thursday, Hooper spoke to Movieline from his Sydney, Australia hotel room and likened the challenge of directing the film to the massive tanker he was watching navigate Sydney Harbor. “It was an extraordinary dance between musical structure and filmic structure,” Hooper explained in a revealing interview about the making of Les Miz . The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who’s expected to snare his second Best Director nomination on Jan. 10, talked at length about his reasons for making the movie and the challenges of pacing and editing a film that is essentially sung through from beginning to end. He also addressed criticism that he relied too heavily on close-ups in the film, divulged Eddie Redmayne’s technique for attaining such exquisite sadness in his performance of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” and answered the burning question of the day: whether Anne Hathaway or Hugh Jackman is a bigger musical geek. Movieline: When I saw Les Misérables in New York, I was surprised by the audience’s passionate reaction to the movie. After certain scenes and songs, they were applauding and cheering as if they were actually seeing a live performance. Tom Hooper: It’s quite extraordinary. I’ve never sat in any cinema or any premiere, or any screening of one of my films and seen a response like this. It’s like you’re at some kind of happening, some kind of out-of-body experience rather than a movie. I was at the Tokyo premiere with the Crown Prince of Japan on Monday. It was quite a formal screening and the audience went kind of crazy. The Japanese broke into a standing ovation at the end, and I was told that for people to stand in the presence of the Crown Prince without him having gotten to his feet first was a total break of protocol. Since you had the foresight to make this movie, what do you think is causing audiences to react so effusively? Actually, I want to ask you: What about the movie connected with you? I’m very interested. Oddly enough, I’m not a big fan of movie musicals, but I liked that Les Misérables wasn’t afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, especially in a year when Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, which I also admire, are these relatively cool procedurals. I also thought that your decision to have the actors sing on camera paid off. There are some honest, raw performances in Les Miz and, as a result, the movie ends up being quite a cathartic experience. Yes, I think that’s the word. I always get asked, “Why did you do this film?” The very first time I saw the musical, the ending was what made me want to do the movie. There’s that moment where the hero of the story, Jean Valjean ( Jackman ), has just passed away and you hear the distant sound of “Do you hear the people singing?” — like an angelic chorus. I had a bodily physical reaction and was crying. I remember thinking what, why am I reacting this way? I was crying about my dad. My dad is alive and well and — but I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that this moment is going to come with my father. A few years ago, he went through cancer. He recovered, but when he was facing it, he told me, “Tom, I want to master the art of dying well.” And I said, “Dad, what on earth do you mean by that?” He said, “When I pass away, I want to do it in a way that’s as compassionate to my family as possible and that limits the pain they suffer. These words came to me when I was thinking about the end of this film. I thought, what’s extraordinary about Les Misérables is that it looks death square in the eye and says that if you navigate that moment with love, it’s possible to achieve a kind of peace. Valjean finds peace through his love of Cosette. He has loved this girl furiously since he met her and been a parent to her. Not only that, he’s rescued the man who’s going to marry her. He’s passed the duty of loving her on to someone else so he can leave this world knowing that she’s cared for and protected. And in the moment of his death, he’s able to tell his story. He’s able to say that this is the story of a man who turned from hating to love through Cosette. It’s like the line from “Finale”: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” It basically says that the only way to navigate our mortality, which we all face, is through love. And I think there’s something incredibly true about that message. But I think the thing that makes Les Misérables special is that it offers so many different ways in emotionally for people. It holds up a mirror to either your own suffering or the suffering of someone close to you, and it manages to process that suffering, leaving you feeling better about it by the end of the film. I’ll agree with you there. Over the past year and a half, I’ve lost a couple of friends and some people who played crucial roles in my life. So, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” was pretty devastating to me, but I didn’t come out of the theater feeling depressed. I felt like I’d let something go. So much of filmmaking today is avoidance basically. It’s distraction, avoidance, irresponsible fantasy. Les Misérables is somehow not that. It manages to go to the tough places. It’s escapism with a moral compass, and I’m not quite sure people are aware how difficult it was to actually get the film to do what it does. There are some scenes in Les Misérables that aren’t in the stage musical. Can you tell me about what went into your decision to make these changes? There are actually a lot of changes to the screenplay that have gone largely unnoticed. I was working with Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Herbert Kretzmer, who were the original creative team on the musical and when the changes are done in a voice that’s so identical to the way it was originally written, they’re hard to detect unless you know Les Misérables really well. Basically, we disassembled and reassembled the musical in order to improve the storytelling. One small example takes place in the factory when the fight breaks out with Fantine (Hathaway). In the musical, there is no reason why Valjean is distracted from dealing with the disruption. He simply says to the foreman, “You sort it out.” The first time I saw the musical, I had the idea: what if the thing that distracted Valjean from focusing on Fantine was the arrival of Javert as the town’s new police inspector? In that moment, he sees this specter from his past and the world falls away. He sees nothing else but that. That led to the scene in the movie where Valjean sees Javert in the factor window. By adding this moment, it better establishes the guilt that Valjean has over the death of Fantine. You upped the emotional impact of Valjean’s relationship to Fantine. Yes, and it sets up this theme about how the ghosts of the past keep coming back to haunt you. You can never be free of them. And it sets up the whole dilemma where Valjean says, “Shall I finally free myself from this past by just admitting who I really am and facing the music?” But that modification required a new piece of music to be composed that went in the middle of the factory scene that, famously, never had had anything in the middle of it. So then, we had the challenge of creating a new melody that marked the drama of that encounter between Valjean and Javert and, yet, didn’t completely fuck up the unity of the factory music. How do you accomplish that? You’ve got to pre-decide on the length of the melody that you need to express this thought, and melodic construction is not that flexible. So Claude-Michel says we can use this bit of melody and Alain works its out and gives you, say, 16 lines. But then you realize that 16 lines is too long and that we’re being repetitive. So, you go back to Claude-Michel and say, “Can you make the melody a bit shorter?” He says it either has to be 16 lines or, say, four lines to work melodically in that context. I don’t have the freedom to make it, say, 10 lines. So, we would say okay, Claude-Michel would play the piano onto his iPhone and email the recording to us so that we had a guide. And then Alain and Herbie would say what we needed to say in four lines. It was unlike anything I’ve ever done or will do because there’s this constant dance between how quickly melody exhausts itself and the amount of words you need to make the point. And I imagine that’s just the beginning of the process. That’s before you get to the edit process. Again, I’ve never done anything like it. The film is now under two-and-a-half hours, but in September it was running around two hours and 42 minutes. So, you spend a few days in the cutting room and let’s say you take five minutes out of the running time. You can’t just press play and watch your film because it doesn’t play. And the reason it doesn’t play is, wherever you changed the length, the music and the orchestration don’t work anymore. So, in order to see how you feel about the edits you’ve made, the composers have got to recompose all the bits where the lengths changed, and then the orchestrators have got to orchestrate it. We had programmers who basically programmed the music using sample sounds so that we didn’t have to spend money on orchestras. They rebuilt the programmed orchestra and then the music editors fit it to the picture. And then maybe about a week later, I could watch it and see the impact of my changes. It was an extraordinary dance between musical structure and filmic structure. Imagine what it does to pacing. With The King’s Speech , I could vary the pace of almost any scene by taking a second out here or a few frames there. In a musical, once the songs start, you can’t change the pace at all. So it was fascinating to learn how to control pace when you don’t have control of the timeline. You learn that there are points where you can actually take a little chunk out of the music, but in order to do that, I literally had to get to the point where I could read music again and read the score in order to work out what secret cuts I could take. So, you’re leaving me with the impression that making Les Misérables was like solving a Rubik’s Cube because the music and the story were so interwoven that you couldn’t just change one aspect of the movie without affecting a large swath of it. Exactly. You’re navigating whole blocks in the movie where the pace is what the music is. And, therefore, you have to use shot selection and editing to create any variations in that pace. The work involved in getting the movie to run under two-and-a-half hours was incredibly complicated. Not only does the stage musical run longer, we added material. So this movie was like an oil tanker. You’ve come in for some criticism in terms of the number of close-ups you use in the movie. What’s your response to that? I find that discussion interesting. I always give myself options. I didn’t assume that the tight close-up was the best way to do a song. So in “I Dreamed A Dream”, there was a close-up of Anne that we used but there were two other cameras shooting from other perspectives. The tight close-ups won out in the cutting room because, over and over again, the emotional intimacy was far more intense than when you go loose. In fact, in the case of “I Dreamed A Dream,” for a long time we were using a mid-shot of her at the beginning of the scene followed by a very slow track and maybe in the last quarter of the scene it was a medium close-up. And then Eddie Redmayne , who’s been a friend of mine since I worked with him on Elizabeth I , said to me: “Why aren’t you using that close-up that you’re using in that teaser trailer?” He was talking about the way you see all the muscles in Anne’s neck work as she sings and the raw power of that, and I thought, God, that’s interesting . So, it was actually Eddie’s suggestion to re-examine that scene, and the moment we put that close-up in, the film played in a completely different way. The level of emotion went up about a hundred percent. So the process of moving toward these close-ups was a process of discovery. Given the challenges that you faced, is there a scene that you’re particularly proud of? If I’m honest, it’s the final scene in the movie, because, on paper, the idea of the barricade covered in the ghosts of the fallen could be really corny and awful beyond relief. Instead, it creates this incredible emotion in people who see it. It’s something that I’m definitely proud of because, like The King’s Speech , I always knew that it was all about the end. And with Les Miz , I always knew it was about the way we go from the grief of Valjean’s death to the hope of the fallen. But it could have felt ridiculous, and the fact that we avoid the many pitfalls that existed in that scene is definitely one thing I’m at peace about. I’m also incredibly proud of what Eddie does with “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.’ Anne is evidently miraculous during “I Dreamed A Dream,” but I do think that there’s a balance in the movie that’s corrected by how brilliant Eddie is at that point. It’s a powerful performance. Do you know how he connected to his grief in that scene? It’s palpable. He wouldn’t tell me. It’s funny with actors sometimes. One feels that it’s wrong to pry. But he did have a rather unusual idea: Because the song deals with the devastation of the loss of his friends, he suggested that he sing it three times in a row without the camera cutting. That way, the devastation he’d reached at the end of the first singing would become the beginning of the second and so on. He kept pushing himself further and further into the pit of despair. Okay, so you’ve done the Oscar jockeying, and you won. As we get into the thick of awards season, are you approaching your second time any differently? As I sit here right now with the film – it’s opening in Japan today, it’s previewing in Korea and Australia, it’s opening in America on Christmas day — I’m incredibly occupied. It’s about getting through the next few days. But ask me again when I get through this bit. Given what you went through for Les Miz , would you do another movie musical and if so, what would it be? God, I would be open to it. It’s just that this is a very special case. This is arguably the world’s most popular musical and that musical version had never been made into a film until now. There aren’t that many really great musicals that haven’t been made into films. Have you decided what’s next for you? I literally have no idea. I did such crazy hours on this film for the last year and a half. I literally worked every hour I could stay awake and, therefore, I haven’t been able to read any material or any scripts. So, it’s a completely open thing at the moment. Okay, last question: who’s the bigger musical geek, Anne Hathaway or Hugh Jackman? Well, without a doubt, Anne is the bigger Les Misérables geek. It wasn’t just that her mother was in the American tour of Les Miz , she was the understudy for Fantine. So these high points of drama marked Anne’s early life. I remember her saying that, for instance, there would be a phone call telling her that her mother was going to go on as Fantine in Washington and could Anne get there from New York in time to see her mother play the role? So there was this idea that Fantine wasn’t her Mom’s right. It was this scarce gift that occasionally she was given to play, and, for Anne the role defined a certain electricity and audacity. Hugh is different because he’s actually starred in musicals on Broadway and on London’s West End. He’s a bona-fide musical star in his own right, where a lot of Anne’s singing has been in the privacy of her own home or at the Oscars, but not something like [ Les Misérables ]. It’s not something I can say, but Hugh feels that in a way he’s been a force in revolutionizing the way you do a movie musical. And that’s something I know he finds very exciting because I think he’s a real student of the genre and has seen it from so many different sides. [ Deadline ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter. Read More on Les Miz: Early Reaction: Oscar Race Heats Up As NYC Screening Of ‘ Les … INTERVIEW: Samantha Barks On ‘ Les Miserables ,’ Eponine….
Hitman Joe ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ) is confronted with his future self — in the form of a time-traveling Bruce Willis — in Rian Johnson’s Looper , the writer-director’s third feature and one of the freshest original science fiction tales in years. Before debuting the September 28 release at Fantastic Fest over the weekend, Johnson spoke with Movieline about the pre- Brick short script that gestated into Looper , the film’s dark streak and the 1970 soul ballad that serves as “the heart of the movie.” Take me back to the beginning – the idea for Looper began as a short story in your notebook around the time of Brick , right? Before I made Brick . It was a script for a short film, and it was a few years before we made Brick , during a time when we were spending all of our time looking for money to make Brick – Steve [Yedlin], my cinematographer, and I. We realized we were just driving ourselves crazy and to alleviate the pressure we decided to start making some shorts, and we made a few but this was one that I wrote but we never ended up shooting. What was the original seed of the idea that started it? It’s funny, at some point after the release I’m going to put the three-page script up on the internet but it started with the same voice over that the feature starts with. It explains the guy and his job, and when his older self shows up, it was a foot chase between the two of them across the city, then it ended when they caught up with each other. It has a similar ending to the feature which is why I don’t want to put it out too soon. I had been reading a ton of Philip K. Dick and was in a period when I had just discovered his books, so I think my brain was full of sci-fi ideas. Were you feeling super existential? I must have been going through one of those existential phases we all go through, continuously. The honest answer is it was ten years ago and I don’t exactly remember. Ten years ago I was 28. The quarter-life years or so. It’s true, my God. Now I’m going through an existential crisis, thanks a bunch! I’m sorry! One thing I like about the concept is that it’s so much about identity, our past selves, our future selves, how we see ourselves and the potential to change the future. And our relationship with this kind of character, our future self, our notion of what we’re going to turn into and our ideas of how our lives are going to go. That’s usually personified in your relationship with a mentor or parent, someone who’s indicative of a path you could take in life and whether you want to or not, that’s kind of the interesting question. I found the film to be quite romantic. Nice! And that was not something I was really expecting. That song you use, Chuck and Mac’s “Powerful Love,” is so beautiful and perfect. Isn’t it incredible? It’s such a beautiful song. I literally picked up blind, I think on vinyl on the Twinights [album]. Listening to that song just sticks, then the lyrics somehow attach themselves to the meaning of the whole thing and it ends up jamming in your head and it becomes a really obvious choice, you know? Actually, in pre-production I sent an mp3 of that song to Bruce [Willis] right when he signed on and told him this song is the heart of the movie, and he got really excited about it. I was listening to that song over and over while we were shooting it. That and a lot of Sam Cooke. A soul connection. I’m really happy that you felt that from the movie. There is a real deep heart of romance in the movie, and not just boy-girl romance but romance with a capital R. Love. Yeah – love in the sense that love can somehow fix things. I hope that that’s baked into it. As dark and as bleak as the movie can get at times, the reason I feel comfortable having it go there is I hope that it gets to a really hopeful and redemptive place at the end. Do you see Looper as dark and bleak? I think it goes to some pretty dark, bleak places and shows these characters, even the ones who are supposed to be good guys, doing some terrible things. I think it shows the dark side of everybody and gets to some spots where you wonder if it’s all going to be okay, but I hope it shows you that people can change and people can make decisions for the right reasons. I was really surprised to be crying as the credits rolled. Yes! I was trying to make you cry. That makes me really happy. My little sister cried! That’s what we were going for, that kind of rush of emotion at the end. Your films have been quite different, playing in different genres. When you decided Looper would be your next feature did you have any trepidation about tackling the time travel aspect knowing the geekosphere would scrutinize it? Well, yes – especially because I’m part of the geekosphere and I’m one of those guys. The thing is, I’ve never had time travel inconsistencies in a movie deny me the pleasure of enjoying a movie. For me those are two separate things. And that’s something I can’t understand. I can’t understand someone who says “I didn’t like that movie because that, that, and that…” For me it’s like, wow, that’s a cool movie with a well-told story that was awesome, and this didn’t make sense and that’s fun to dive into and pick apart. But every time travel movie that’s ever been made, if you really dig into it you’re going to hit bedrock where paradoxes kind of hit each other and it doesn’t make sense. The important thing is that the storytelling works and that it has a consistent set of rules that it plays fair by. But I was mostly terrified just because time travel is a tough thing to work into the fabric of a story. It’s a tough thing to put into a story and still have the whole thing tick – it can be like pouring grape jelly into a clockwork watch. It’s a messy ingredient that’s hard to tame. As your films have gotten bigger and your career has gone from indie to increasingly more mainstream audiences, how do you feel your trajectory has evolved? I guess the movies have gotten bigger, one by one – I still haven’t worked with a studio. Sony’s putting this out and have been awesome and I would love to work with a studio someday, but so far we’re doing each of these independently. I guess I’ve crept up in scale with each one, but at the end of the day they’re all motivated by the same thing; they all start with a story that I care about that I want to tell. It is fun to see how broad a canvas we can accomplish; even with the next step I think it would be really fun to do something bigger, working on a broader canvas and reaching a bigger audience. But it can never come from that place. It’s so much work to make a movie, and for me it has to get me off my butt. To get me actually writing you have to strike something inside, you have to hit a power main to get the energy. You have to strike something you care about. Have studios approached you a lot more in recent years with projects? Not so much after Brick – I got anything that was dark and had to do with high school. Not so much after Brothers Bloom . In the lead up to Looper there have been more people calling… but the thing that’s interesting to me is if this group, this little family that we have that we’ve made these movies with, can tell one of our stories on that scale – and that doesn’t just mean doing something, I think you have to be conscious of the size of the canvas that you’re working on, the amount of money you’re spending, and the audience you’re trying to reach and you have to adjust your storytelling. I think that’s part of your job as a storyteller. You mention this “family” of filmmakers and collaborators, from using Joseph Gordon-Levitt again to working with Nathan Johnson on the music. You named Noah Segan’s character after his own nickname. Even Joe’s character is named Joe. I was really lazy with these names! [Laughs] When it comes to working with this group of people again and again, how do you synthesize all this? Did you write these characters with their personalities or capabilities in mind? Their capabilities more than their personalities, their strengths. This is a unique case with Noah and Joe, but usually I don’t have any idea who’s going to play [my characters]. It’s not like when I’m writing these characters I’m picturing my friends. You’re creating a completely new character and hiring somebody to play to that and against it and shatter your expectations of what that character could be in some ways. With Joe for instance, the way that Joe loves transforming himself on film and the way that he loves disappearing into his role I knew was specifically suited to something where he was going to have to sell himself as a younger version of an older actor. And there’s just something about Noah that’s inherently likeable and I knew that’s a trait I wanted to shine through with this weird little pathetic villain character – I wanted there to be something where you could see the little boy in him who’s trying to be a cowboy. That’s the sort of thing you know from your friends that you can hopefully use to your advantage. How much do you think our world will be like the world of Looper by the year 2044? I think that our world will be much nicer. I’m an optimist, actually. I think everything’s going to get better. I think we’re evolving. Looper is in theaters Friday. Read more from Fantastic Fest! Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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 ]
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.
Pixar Animation storyboard artist Emma Coats took to Twitter last month to share the storytelling tips she’s gleaned during her time at the Oscar-winning animation house, and taken together they comprise one of the most comprehensive, sensible, must-follow rules for writing you can find. ( Ridley Scott , Damon Lindelof , whoever’s working on the next Prometheus — are you listening?) Among Coats’ best tips, as collected by blog The Pixar Touch (via i09): “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” Amen to that. #1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes. #2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different. #3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite. #4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. #5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free. #6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal? #7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. #8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time. #9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up. #10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it. #11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone. #12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself. #13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience. #14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it. #15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations. #16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against. #17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later. #18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining. #19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. #20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like? #21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way? #22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there. Coats, who has written and directed her own short, Horizon , and is a credited storyboard artist on Brave , is still engaging in storytelling talk over at Twitter and on Tumblr . [ The Pixar Touch via i09 ]
‘He’s the best celebrity dance partner anyone could ask for,’ his pro dance partner Peta Murgatroyd said. By Kelley L. Carter Peta Murgatroyd and Donald Driver on “Dancing With the Stars” Photo: ABC Upon hearing his name called as the season 14 winner of ABC’s hit show “Dancing With the Stars,” Donald Driver stopped, dropped and rolled. “Amazing! This is awesome!” he said, his fist punching the sky in excitement. It was a sweet moment, considering that Driver, an NFL star, revealed that he’s been a longtime fan of the show and had watched it since its inaugural season. Driver ran around the ballroom dance floor and screamed his excitement, while rolling around on the floor after he found out he outscored classical singer Katherine Jenkins (Monday night’s top scorer) and her partner Mark Ballas. On Monday night, Driver and his partner, Peta Murgatroyd, danced the Argentine tango for their first dance, and head judge Len Goodman said he loved Driver’s intensity. The other judges thought his storytelling through dance was moving. The three judges gave him one point shy of a perfect score for that round. For the freestyle round, the Green Bay Packers wide receiver two-stepped to country music, which could have been a risk on the ballroom floor. The judges loved it, and Carrie Ann Inaba actually jumped up on the table and proclaimed, “This is my favorite dance of the season!” For that, Driver earned a perfect score. As for Tuesday night’s finale, he danced one last shirtless dance, for which the judges gave him another perfect trio of 10s. Len Goodman named him the best dancing footballer they’ve ever had on the show. “He’s the best celebrity dance partner anyone could ask for,” Murgatroyd said before her partner was crowned the winner. “I was lucky.”
It’s spring rummage week at the movies, with four releases – Lockout , The Three Stooges , Cabin in the Woods and Craig Moss’s vigilante goof Bad Ass – retooling old gems and selling off genres for parts. Maybe next year we can look forward to a film made up solely of references to this quartet – The Three Bad Asses Escape Lockout in the Woods ? Wait, don’t Google that. I don’t want to know. Spoofing all the ways that it’s all been done before has itself become a pretty predictable gig. A genre, even. But every once in a while a movie like 21 Jump Street manages to stay two steps ahead of our endlessly attenuated expectations, making clued-in silliness look like a (funny) walk in the park. Bad Ass has a bit of that gonzo energy – a fair bit, actually. In the first few minutes a montage sequence challenges the record for film clichés-per-second to tell the back-story of Frank Vega, a Santa Rosa farmboy who grew up to fall in love in a pasture and then fight in Vietnam, where the memory of his girl back home sustained him through unimaginable torture. Once returned, Frank (played as a young man by Shalim Ortiz) finds his true love married with kids, and his hope of becoming a police officer is snuffed out by a bum leg. He begins selling hot dogs in the street, a career that carries him all the way to the moment where he turns into Danny Trejo. A considerable part of the point of any Danny Trejo performance involves the question of what a person has to do to get a face like that. It’s what made him a favorite of genre geeks like Robert Rodriguez: The face is its own movie with its own set of references. Here he is the gentle ogre, a scary-looking softie in combat shorts and a camo jacket who just wants to get through the day and nurse his disappointments with a bottle of El Matador at night. The problem is he lives in the vicious Los Angeles of Falling Down, where there’s always some racially charged a-hole trying to bring you down. The morning of one particular bus ride, it’s a couple of skinheads harassing an older man in a Black Panthers beret. When Frank intervenes with a few definitive blows – the geriatric set has all the hand-to-hand skills in Bad Ass – a cell phone video taken by a member of the generation that doesn’t do much else with their hands makes him a YouTube star. But Internet celebrity doesn’t pay the bills, nor does it protect your best friend from his enemies. Shortly after his Vietnam buddy Klondike (Harrison Page) joins Frank in his recently deceased mother’s home, he is gunned down by a couple of gangsters. Frank’s abiding faith in the police (a little strange, given the routing the system gave him) is shaken when they fail to follow up on the murder, and he takes matters into his own iron-cast hands. Frank doesn’t want to fight, but the world keeps demanding (and then rewarding) his beat-downs, whether they involve the cholos shaking down the local liquor store, the barflies spoiling for a piece of the tough guy, or his jerk-ass neighbor, who beats on his pretty wife (Joyful Drake) and yells at his sitcom-ready son (John Duffy). “Violence just seems to follow me,” he protests when one of his cop buddies tells him to cool it with the public beatings. It’s one of many lines in a script (also written by Moss) that plays like the entire Charles Bronson oeuvre was fed through a shredder, tossed into the air, and glued into a new configuration wherever it landed. The effect, a kind of hard-boiled camp, makes the first two-thirds of Bad Ass lots of fun. Moss, the Weird Al of genre goofs, has a surprisingly light touch (especially given that his last film was a Twilight take-off called Breaking Wind , also starring Trejo). Very often the line between spoofing and playing it straight is too subtle to make out. When Frank tackles an old lady to shield her from drive-by fire and she makes a corny joke about being manhandled, Moss uses a sound bridge of sitcom canned laughter to carry us into the next scene of Frank alone in front of the television that night. When a cop warns Frank, “They say you’ve been leaving a bloody trail all across the city,” Frank shrugs: “Doesn’t sound familiar to me.” It’s the casual tone that makes all the difference, but it can’t quite carry the movie. When the mystery behind Klondike’s execution begs resolving and Frank begins romancing his battered neighbor, the plot’s worminess proves a distraction from Bad Ass ’s more mindless charms. It’s a funny catch for this kind of thing – to really let it fly the movie needs the safety of a narrative’s inner logic. The Internet celebrity factor adds novelty but not much else, and by the time Frank is hunting down the gang boss behind a vague political conspiracy (involving Ron Perlman and Charles S. Dutton) an anomalous chyron introduces a key location because the storytelling isn’t strong enough to get us there on its own. This feels disappointing mainly because, to do some borrowing of my own, in the world of classic send-ups, Bad Ass coulda been a contender. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
