Also in Friday’s Biz Break: indie horror maven Ti West goes “mainstream,” Daniel Craig signs for more Bonds, and Spike Lee ‘s Oldboy is snapped up by FilmDistrict for U.S. release. Jeffrey Wright Cast In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Lionsgate continues to beef up its sequel cast with stellar veteran talent. The Tony- and Golden Globe-winning actor will play Beetee, a former victor from District 3 thrown into the Quarter Quell competition with Katniss Everdeen. [Press release] Robert Pattinson’s The Rover Makes International Sales The pic from David Michod ( Animal Kingdom ) sees RPattz teaming up with Guy Pearce for a gritty dystopian Outback thriller ; actor-filmmaker Joel Edgerton co-conceived the story, and filming begins this winter. Rights have been sold in “United Kingdom, Canada and Benelux to eOne, Scandinavia to Nordisk, Latin America to Sun Distribution, the Middle East to Italia Film and Eastern Europe excluding Russia to Revolutionary Releasing. Village Roadshow already picked up the film in Australia and New Zealand,” per THR . Ti West And Eli Roth Team Up For The Sacrament Indie horror auteur West ( House of the Devil , The Innkeepers , V/H/S ) begins filming this month on the under-wraps horror thriller, which will court buyers at the Toronto Film Festival. Roth will produce and West will direct from his own script in what Roth describes will be West’s “first mainstream movie,” via Variety . Daniel Craig Commits To Two More Bonds With his third turn as 007 in the can ( Skyfall hits theaters in November), Daniel Craig has signed up for at least two more Bond pics in the current EON Production series. According to MI6 , Sony/MGM execs are aiming for an aggressive two year gap between films. Spike Lee’s Oldboy Gets U.S. Distribution He hasn’t even begun filming yet (though he told Movieline he’ll definitely shoot on celluloid ), but Spike Lee continues to put his ducks in a row for his Oldboy remake. FilmDistrict will take U.S. rights as Lee heads into production this month, according to THR . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“After the show I have to really put some more attention to sex in my life,” Marina Abramovic vows near the beginning of Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present , an elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. “Semi-intellectual artist at the top of her career,” goes Abramovic’s self-drafted personal ad, “looking for single male.” My head completed a few full rotations taking in what all’s going on in that sentence, but let’s begin with the part about being on top. That Abramovic seems to have willed her own peak into being — the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen (AKA “Ulay”) teases his former partner about whether she now prefers to be addressed as “the grandmother of performance art” or “the diva of performance art” — is deftly interlayered with director and cinematographer Matthew Akers’s presentation of a life and career united by the stubborn pursuit of meaning. The picture gives a sense of life’s fragments aligning, finally, to form a coherent story. What that story is depends on who’s doing the telling, of course. At the outset of her three-month MoMA performance — where the artist sat like a Buddha in a red (or blue, or white) dress, receiving an intrigued, then entranced, then near-hysterical public, one at a time, for a bout of eye contact across a wooden table — Abramovic outlines the three different versions of herself, her favorite being the pure, unshackled sensibility watching over the two other, more mortal selves. Hers is a very physical feat, as is made clear; there’s a bedpan built into her chair, and Ulay describes being wrecked by a similar performance during their partnership. As she did then, Marina carries on, outlasting her lover and smiting her doubters, a martyr to an indeterminate and therefore capacious cause — to “create a charismatic space” that will slow down time, return us to the present, absorb our ills, reflect us to ourselves, and/or furnish an insatiable attention-seeker with patiently queued reams of admirers. There is a careful reverence to these kinds of commissioned artist studies, and the earnest styling of the subject as a kind of time-bending sensei — a destination and a journey — might feel more poncy if it hadn’t played out pretty much exactly that way over three months in midtown Manhattan. Walking into the atrium the first day of the exhibition, Abramovic jokes about feeling like Marie Antoinette being led to her fate. But if the crossover success of “The Artist Is Present” came as a surprise, The Artist Is Present suggests a woman very consciously stepping forward to collect her due. “Excuse me,” Abramovic says in her smoky Balkan accent, “I’m 63 — I don’t want to be alternative anymore.” But the HBO treatment (it will air on that channel after a brief theatrical run) makes a strange and occasionally unsatisfying match for its subject. Entire corollary documentaries are glimpsed in a scene or a comment: Ambramovic’s ambition is alluded to in somewhat dark tones; the footage of striking and often disturbing previous performances barely outlines a complex and sometimes confounding sensibility; gallerist Sean Kelly speaks of his team’s invention of a market for her work, a model that has become a standard in the performance-art world; Ulay’s reappearance and the couple’s awkward, poignant reunion suggests untold romantic galaxies. And then there is curator Klaus Biesenbach, who in word and manner reveals a critical, under-investigated side of Abramovic. “Klaus, I love you,” Abramovic murmurs to him in the moments before her performance begins. “Is this okay?” Biesenbach acquires a curiously steely look when he describes the way “Marina seduces everyone she ever meets.” They are great friends now, he says, repeating it twice, “but we’re divorced .” Groupies and pranksters abound, as do would-be artists who see themselves as part of the show; all shenanigans are quickly shut down as Abramovic lowers her head like a mournful deity. In fact, Biesenbach says, the exhibition is ultimately a self-portrait, and just as he mistakenly believed Abramovic to be in love with him, so the same misunderstanding is repeated “with every single person in the atrium.” The better part of Abramovic’s personality slips out in asides and interactions, rather than in the rehearsed bits about her trinity of selves. Eerily untouched by age, her imposing physicality is softened by girlish accents. A shadow storyline trails Akers’s art show procedural, and it involves, of all plainly human things, Marina Abramovic getting laid. And yet the sideways frequency with which the issue comes up feels telling. As so often seems to be the case with successful women, for Abramovic being at the top of her career means forever looking past that next big project for her “other” life to begin, the one where she falls in love and has heaps of sex and looks up the hot Asian guy from day X and hour Y of her MoMA residency. At the outset Abramovic says she wanted to show the world, one time, the unglamorous underside of art’s creation; in fact the result has a slickness some might find disconcerting. Seeing her pinned down and packaged as an art star or even just a documentary “personality” might feel antithetical to a body of work committed to its own transience. And yet The Artist Is Present is ultimately an Abramovic production, whether the purists care to acknowledge her love of designer clothes and way with a one-liner or not. Why shouldn’t this be the woman who made an entire city confront the tyranny of time’s passage? Because I wasn’t seeking anything so grand from this clean-lined documentary, I came away moved most of all by the perseverance of an artist who, having put the time in, was rewarded with a moment that set a life lived largely through performance into meaningful relief. There’s also something to be said for having your ex come and pay homage to you, on your turf, at a MoMA restrospective of your career. As Ulay himself demurs: Only respect. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“After the show I have to really put some more attention to sex in my life,” Marina Abramovic vows near the beginning of Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present , an elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. “Semi-intellectual artist at the top of her career,” goes Abramovic’s self-drafted personal ad, “looking for single male.” My head completed a few full rotations taking in what all’s going on in that sentence, but let’s begin with the part about being on top. That Abramovic seems to have willed her own peak into being — the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen (AKA “Ulay”) teases his former partner about whether she now prefers to be addressed as “the grandmother of performance art” or “the diva of performance art” — is deftly interlayered with director and cinematographer Matthew Akers’s presentation of a life and career united by the stubborn pursuit of meaning. The picture gives a sense of life’s fragments aligning, finally, to form a coherent story. What that story is depends on who’s doing the telling, of course. At the outset of her three-month MoMA performance — where the artist sat like a Buddha in a red (or blue, or white) dress, receiving an intrigued, then entranced, then near-hysterical public, one at a time, for a bout of eye contact across a wooden table — Abramovic outlines the three different versions of herself, her favorite being the pure, unshackled sensibility watching over the two other, more mortal selves. Hers is a very physical feat, as is made clear; there’s a bedpan built into her chair, and Ulay describes being wrecked by a similar performance during their partnership. As she did then, Marina carries on, outlasting her lover and smiting her doubters, a martyr to an indeterminate and therefore capacious cause — to “create a charismatic space” that will slow down time, return us to the present, absorb our ills, reflect us to ourselves, and/or furnish an insatiable attention-seeker with patiently queued reams of admirers. There is a careful reverence to these kinds of commissioned artist studies, and the earnest styling of the subject as a kind of time-bending sensei — a destination and a journey — might feel more poncy if it hadn’t played out pretty much exactly that way over three months in midtown Manhattan. Walking into the atrium the first day of the exhibition, Abramovic jokes about feeling like Marie Antoinette being led to her fate. But if the crossover success of “The Artist Is Present” came as a surprise, The Artist Is Present suggests a woman very consciously stepping forward to collect her due. “Excuse me,” Abramovic says in her smoky Balkan accent, “I’m 63 — I don’t want to be alternative anymore.” But the HBO treatment (it will air on that channel after a brief theatrical run) makes a strange and occasionally unsatisfying match for its subject. Entire corollary documentaries are glimpsed in a scene or a comment: Ambramovic’s ambition is alluded to in somewhat dark tones; the footage of striking and often disturbing previous performances barely outlines a complex and sometimes confounding sensibility; gallerist Sean Kelly speaks of his team’s invention of a market for her work, a model that has become a standard in the performance-art world; Ulay’s reappearance and the couple’s awkward, poignant reunion suggests untold romantic galaxies. And then there is curator Klaus Biesenbach, who in word and manner reveals a critical, under-investigated side of Abramovic. “Klaus, I love you,” Abramovic murmurs to him in the moments before her performance begins. “Is this okay?” Biesenbach acquires a curiously steely look when he describes the way “Marina seduces everyone she ever meets.” They are great friends now, he says, repeating it twice, “but we’re divorced .” Groupies and pranksters abound, as do would-be artists who see themselves as part of the show; all shenanigans are quickly shut down as Abramovic lowers her head like a mournful deity. In fact, Biesenbach says, the exhibition is ultimately a self-portrait, and just as he mistakenly believed Abramovic to be in love with him, so the same misunderstanding is repeated “with every single person in the atrium.” The better part of Abramovic’s personality slips out in asides and interactions, rather than in the rehearsed bits about her trinity of selves. Eerily untouched by age, her imposing physicality is softened by girlish accents. A shadow storyline trails Akers’s art show procedural, and it involves, of all plainly human things, Marina Abramovic getting laid. And yet the sideways frequency with which the issue comes up feels telling. As so often seems to be the case with successful women, for Abramovic being at the top of her career means forever looking past that next big project for her “other” life to begin, the one where she falls in love and has heaps of sex and looks up the hot Asian guy from day X and hour Y of her MoMA residency. At the outset Abramovic says she wanted to show the world, one time, the unglamorous underside of art’s creation; in fact the result has a slickness some might find disconcerting. Seeing her pinned down and packaged as an art star or even just a documentary “personality” might feel antithetical to a body of work committed to its own transience. And yet The Artist Is Present is ultimately an Abramovic production, whether the purists care to acknowledge her love of designer clothes and way with a one-liner or not. Why shouldn’t this be the woman who made an entire city confront the tyranny of time’s passage? Because I wasn’t seeking anything so grand from this clean-lined documentary, I came away moved most of all by the perseverance of an artist who, having put the time in, was rewarded with a moment that set a life lived largely through performance into meaningful relief. There’s also something to be said for having your ex come and pay homage to you, on your turf, at a MoMA restrospective of your career. As Ulay himself demurs: Only respect. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The horror anthology V/H/S was one of the freshest genre discoveries to come out of Sundance ’12 , and this fall it finally arrives in theaters and on VOD. Revel in the found-footage conceit — done particularly well here, spanning short segments by the likes of Adam Wingard, Ti West , Joe Swanberg , and more filmmakers to keep on your radar — with a look at the official poster, itself a clever, cryptic spin on the old hand-marked VHS tapes some folks still have lurking in dusty closets and basements. Of course, most vintage mystery tapes don’t house footage of untold horrors like the ones “documented” in V/H/S — I hope. Over the course of six segments (tied together by a set-up about a gang of punks tasked with breaking into a house) surprises abound, which I’ll leave for you to discover. Head to Movies.com for the poster premiere, where you can view a high-res version of the poster and pore over the meaning of each VHS label in the design… which reveals far more dated tapes than what is shown in the film. What does that mean? HOW MANY HORRORS HAVE WE YET TO DISCOVER?? V/H/S will be released On-Demand via Magnolia on August 31 in theaters on October 5. [via Movies.com ]
The horror anthology V/H/S was one of the freshest genre discoveries to come out of Sundance ’12 , and this fall it finally arrives in theaters and on VOD. Revel in the found-footage conceit — done particularly well here, spanning short segments by the likes of Adam Wingard, Ti West , Joe Swanberg , and more filmmakers to keep on your radar — with a look at the official poster, itself a clever, cryptic spin on the old hand-marked VHS tapes some folks still have lurking in dusty closets and basements. Of course, most vintage mystery tapes don’t house footage of untold horrors like the ones “documented” in V/H/S — I hope. Over the course of six segments (tied together by a set-up about a gang of punks tasked with breaking into a house) surprises abound, which I’ll leave for you to discover. Head to Movies.com for the poster premiere, where you can view a high-res version of the poster and pore over the meaning of each VHS label in the design… which reveals far more dated tapes than what is shown in the film. What does that mean? HOW MANY HORRORS HAVE WE YET TO DISCOVER?? V/H/S will be released On-Demand via Magnolia on August 31 in theaters on October 5. [via Movies.com ]
Continuing along the theme of projects that make you feel unsafe within the confines of your own house/cabin/local bed and breakfast, Innkeepers director Ti West has been tapped to script Bedbugs , adapted from Ben H. Winters’ 2011 novel of the same name. The tale follows a woman who moves into the perfect Brooklyn brownstone with her family, only to be plagued by an infestation of bugs … that only seem to be biting her. Is your skin crawling yet? West, who also has Liv Tyler signed for his next directing project The Side Effect , previously wrote and directed 2005’s The Roost , 2007’s Trigger Man , his 2009 breakout horror House of the Devil , the disavowed Cabin Fever 2 , and his haunted hotel tale The Innkeepers , and contributed shorts to the forthcoming horror anthologies V/H/S and The ABCs of Death . The psychological horror of Bedbugs , meanwhile, drew comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby upon publishing last year. Take a look at the book trailer for Bedbugs for a general taste of the “urban paranoia” at hand. Though no director has yet been set for the film, you can at least count on West to pen better atmospherics than the infomercial-grade scares seen here. The book’s synopsis, via Amazon: FOR RENT: Top two floors of beautifully renovated brownstone, 1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2BA, eat-in kitchen, one block to parks and playgrounds. No broker’s fee. Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up. Big mistake. Susan soon discovers that her new home is crawling with bedbugs . . . or is it? She awakens every morning with fresh bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter Emma has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until a more sinister explanation presents itself: she may literally be confronting the bedbug problem from Hell. [via Deadline ]
The heroes and heroines of old-fashioned ghost-story flicks resemble the average horror fan more closely than any other of the genre’s archetypes. Amateur ghostbusters like The Innkeepers ’s Claire (Sara Paxton), for instance, troll spooky hallways and scour dank basements for thrills, which is to say without the real threat of physical harm. We go to movies like The Innkeepers , Ti West’s follow-up to his delightful old-school creep-out The House of the Devil , to explore and experience fear from a similarly safe remove. Like the average horror fan, Claire can be her own worst enemy; on both sides of the screen, much depends on the question of whether one can be scared to death. Along with her laconic co-clerk Luke (Pat Healy), winsome, asthmatic Claire is the only staff on site at the Yankee Pedlar Inn during its closing weekend. A grand old establishment with a rumor-laden pedigree, the inn has only a few last guests to deal with, including a harried mother and son (Alison Bartlett and Jake Ryan) and a fading television actress named Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis). The fact that a couple of low-ranking attendants have been left to close up the joint adds to the cavernous building’s feeling of abandonment. Like all haunted houses, the emptiness of this one poses a mournful and ominous question: Where did all the people go? Luke and Claire have an idea of where at least one wound up. The legend of a bride who committed suicide on her wedding day and was left to rot in the inn’s basement fuels their idle, overtime chatter. Luke is working on a crude, paranormal activity-type web site and claims to have seen the undead bride once; Claire, bored and curious, marshals his electronic voice phenomena kit and pokes around for sound vibrations. The first two “chapters” pass congenially, as characters come and go and we’re played for a couple of cheap scares. Unlike Devil , which builds slowly to an almost excruciating peak of tension, The Innkeepers is dotted with dead-end sequences — a YouTube prank, a bat in the attic — that break up a sometimes sluggish pace but also promote a certain aimlessness in the narrative. More so than in West’s previous film, which worked on its own steam right up until the end, The Innkeepers feels like a devoted horror fan’s attempt to reinvent a classic genre by sheer force of quality. Without a strong story to dance with, all of those fabulous tracking shots, lovingly uncanny art direction details and flickering shafts of light can make The Innkeepers feel more like an exercise in craft than a scary movie. Still, there is pleasure in Paxton’s slightly daffy, tomboyish take on the final girl and in McGillis’s welcome, perfectly anomalous presence. Leanne turns out to be something of a ghost whisperer, and it’s fun watching McGillis sell some pretty fruity lines between pulls on her cigarette. Luke is an intermittent and oddly diffident player in what becomes Claire’s adventure, although they share a pivotal and terrifically frightening séance scene toward the end. He warns Claire that chasing spirits has serious side effects — you’ll start seeing things everywhere you go, he says, you’ll warp your radar for what’s real and what’s not. It sounds like a statement of ambition for the best kind of ghost story, which is ultimately what The Innkeepers turns out to be. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
21 Jump Street : Not the first ’80s series that comes to mind when I think of revival-worthy properties in 2011, but it appears that Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Nick Offerman and Ice Cube are making it work in the new movie’s red band trailer . Original stars Johnny Depp and Holly Robinson-Peete are rumored to make appearances, and even if they don’t, there’s enough starpower to make this Never Been Kissed -esque high school infiltration a worthwhile venture. Mysteriously, the funniest line delivery in the whole clip belongs to a very supporting player. Click through for the full, NSFW (language) clip.
“You might say hey, maybe punk rock was never meant to grow up — but it did, so too bad. We’re in uncharted territory,” Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz, also the owner of Epitaph Records, says early in Andrea Blaugrund’s documentary The Other F Word . Billing itself as a “coming of middle age story,” this earnest and intermittently lovable look into the lives of prominent punk rockers who’ve gone on to become responsible fathers doesn’t break as much ground as it seems to hope and believe.
Halloween may be over but that doesn’t mean that the movie theater scares will be. How do we know? Because Dark Sky Films has released a trailer for Ti West’s latest horror film The Innkeepers , which stars Sara Paxton and Pat Healy as the last remaining employees of the Yankee Pedlar Inn who decide to investigate for ghosts one last time.
