Also in Tuesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Charlie Kaufman has turned to crowd funding (seemingly quite successfully) for a stop motion animation project. Richard Gere ‘s Arbitrage is set to open a Middle Eastern film festival. And Park Chan-wook is set to direct a Corsican mafia story. Judge Rules James Cameron & Fox Did Not Interfere with Copyright for Avatar A U.S. district court said that Avatar did not infringe on the copyright of a screenwriter’s novel, Bats and Butterflies . The court said the novel is a “children’s story with a simple protagonist,” while Avatar is a “more complex story about a conflicted protagonist,” Deadline reports . Philip Seymour Hoffman to Direct Supernatural Drama Ezekiel Moss The script, written by Keith Bunin, which appeared on the 2011 Black List revolves around a mysterious stranger with the power to speak with the dead. He arrives in a small Nebraska town, transforming the lives of the people there including a widow and her young son, THR reports . Charlie Kaufman Stop Motion Project Turns to Crowd Funding Kaufman and his producing partners are using crowd funding source Kickstarter for their adaptation of a play, Anomalisa and have raised $406,237 for its production in 60 days. “We want to make Anomalisa without the interference of the typical big studio process,” said a pitch video, Deadline reports . Arbitrage to Open Abu Dhabi Film Festival The Richard Gere starrer, which open to initial box office success in the U.S. in limited release last weekend will open the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Gere and co-star Nate Parker are expected to attend the screening of the film set against the backdrop of hedge fund manipulation. The festival in the United Arab Emirates takes place October 11 – 20, THR reports . Park Chan-wook to Direct Corsica 72 Park Chan-wook ( I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK ) will direct from the script that made the 2009 Black List. Set on the French island of Corsica in 1972, the story revolves around two friends heading in two different directions. One toward the a life in the mafia while the other toward a simpler life with his sweetheart. But when the Corsican mob kills the latter’s brother, the two enter a blood feud that leads to a final showdown, Variety reports .
Poor Lana Del Rey . She had to go to boarding school at the age of 14 to get sober… The 26-year-old “Video Games” crooner ditched her clothes and her inhibitions for a nude photo shoot and even more revealing interview in the latest issue of British GQ magazine. The New York product told the men’s mag, which named her Woman of the Year, that even before she moved back to the Big Apple to seek fame as 18-year-old Lizzy Grant, she was already living a rock n’ roll lifestyle. “It’s been nine years since my last drink,” she said in the GQ UK interview. “That’s really why I got sent to boarding school aged 14 – to get sober. “I was a big drinker at the time. I would drink every day. I would drink alone. I thought the whole concept was so f—ing cool.” Even while writing her cryptic love songs after cleaning up her act in a Brooklyn rehab, one muse was alcohol, which she calls “the first love” of her life. “A great deal of what I wrote on ‘Born To Die’ is about these wilderness years. My parents were worried, I was worried. I knew it was a problem when I liked it more than I liked doing anything else. I was like, ‘I’m f—ed. I am totally f—ed’.” “It didn’t affect my writing, but it affected my happiness,” she said. “I became depressed. Because I love New York so much. I was born there; it was my city. I was going to die there. “As a person who becomes really attached to places for their energy and their beauty, for me New York was a match. To lose it, it really felt like my life was over.” Poor thang. White folks sure have some different problems! Source
“… The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww! ‘” Sam Riley’s Sal paraphrases the famous Jack Kerouac line, but it works: Watch the jazzy, frenetic first U.S. trailer for Walter Salles’ On The Road and feel your pulse quicken. The adaptation, which also stars Kristen Stewart , Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Terrence Howard, and more (phew!) debuted at Cannes but premieres at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival ahead of its December release. I’d count this as the most effective of the many trailers to debut so far; something about the pace and the energy and abandon glimpsed in snatches and quick edits ratchets up my excitement. Or maybe it’s the looming long holiday. Here’s to everyone out there burning like Roman candles this Labor Day weekend. Thoughts? On the Road debuts in limited release on December 21. [ Yahoo ]
Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders will direct 90 Church for Universal. Tobey Maguire joins an indie project by Craig Zobel and the New York Times names a new chief. Bachelorette is an iTunes Hit Leslye Headland’s Sundance premiere Bachelorette is at number one on the iTuens top movies chart, the first pre-theatrical release to mount the spot, Deadline reports . Snow White and the Huntsman Director Rupert Sanders to Direct 90 Church Universal acquired 90 Church: The True Story of the Narcotics Squad from Hell , a book written by Dean Unkefer that Random House will publish Stateside. “The upcoming novel 90 Church refers to the address of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when it was formed in New York City to combat organized crime and drug traffic in the mid-1960s through early ’70s,” Deadline reports . Kristen Stewart Won’t Be in a Snow White Sequel In related news to above, Universal has decided to shelf its Snow White and the Huntsman sequel and will focus on a solo Huntsman movie starring Chris Hemsworth. A sequel is being re-conceived as a spin-off story and it’s not clear if Rupert Sanders will return, but Stewart will not be returning, THR reports . Tobey Maguire Joins Z for Zachariah Maguire will star in the project which Compliance director Craig Zobel will direct. Based on the novel by Robert C. O’Brien, and adapted by Nissar Modi, the story is a post-apocalyptic drama centers on a teen who survives both a nuclear war and nerve gas because of a self-contained weather system. Carey Mulligan will also star, Variety reports . New York Times Names BBC’s Mark Thompson its New Head “The New York Times Company has announced that BBC director general Mark Thompson is to become its chief executive and president in November. The NYT runs national and regional newspapers and websites and said his experience in digital media on a global scale made him the ‘ideal candidate,'” BBC reports .
Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders will direct 90 Church for Universal. Tobey Maguire joins an indie project by Craig Zobel and the New York Times names a new chief. Bachelorette is an iTunes Hit Leslye Headland’s Sundance premiere Bachelorette is at number one on the iTuens top movies chart, the first pre-theatrical release to mount the spot, Deadline reports . Snow White and the Huntsman Director Rupert Sanders to Direct 90 Church Universal acquired 90 Church: The True Story of the Narcotics Squad from Hell , a book written by Dean Unkefer that Random House will publish Stateside. “The upcoming novel 90 Church refers to the address of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when it was formed in New York City to combat organized crime and drug traffic in the mid-1960s through early ’70s,” Deadline reports . Kristen Stewart Won’t Be in a Snow White Sequel In related news to above, Universal has decided to shelf its Snow White and the Huntsman sequel and will focus on a solo Huntsman movie starring Chris Hemsworth. A sequel is being re-conceived as a spin-off story and it’s not clear if Rupert Sanders will return, but Stewart will not be returning, THR reports . Tobey Maguire Joins Z for Zachariah Maguire will star in the project which Compliance director Craig Zobel will direct. Based on the novel by Robert C. O’Brien, and adapted by Nissar Modi, the story is a post-apocalyptic drama centers on a teen who survives both a nuclear war and nerve gas because of a self-contained weather system. Carey Mulligan will also star, Variety reports . New York Times Names BBC’s Mark Thompson its New Head “The New York Times Company has announced that BBC director general Mark Thompson is to become its chief executive and president in November. The NYT runs national and regional newspapers and websites and said his experience in digital media on a global scale made him the ‘ideal candidate,'” BBC reports .
Easier to admire than to love, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is an amplified, feverish vision of the one percent as scarcely human — not because of any innate maliciousness, but because they’re so removed from the lives of the masses. They’re like children who’ve already won a video game and now play carelessly, without any need to observe the rules. The lead role of 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer is played by Robert Pattinson, although the star of the film is just as much Packer Capital’s high-tech stretch limousine, which serves as his mobile office as he inches across Manhattan in search of a haircut and, perhaps, his own destruction. That limo, equipped with glowing console panels, a slide-out urinal and what’s essentially a throne in the back, is the primary setting of Cosmopolis. It’s a hermetically sealed bubble in which Eric can glide through the roiling urban landscape, jumping off or taking on passengers at whim. He is in the city, but not a part of it. The vehicle is armored and, he explains to his aloof wife Elise (Sarah Gadon), “Prousted” — lined with cork soundproofing — though the latter gesture is, he admits, largely symbolic, as the New York noise manages to bleed through. Despite this, the barrier between him and the world is considerable, bolstered by watchful presence of his security chief Torval (Kevin Durand), who informs him tersely of any credible threats to his life. Cosmopolis is based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo, but Cronenberg adapted the tale to the screen and it feels very much like a Cronenberg work. It’s the chilly sibling to eXistenZ , without the comfort of slipping realities. If the universe of Cosmopolis were to come loose, it would only reveal a void underneath. Pattinson does a quietly marvelous thing in finding vulnerability in Eric without making it seem like softness. The film depicts Eric’s financial kingdom (and with it his sense of self) crumbling over a day, but his breakdown is a gradual one. His panic rises in barely perceptible increments. Despite Torval’s warnings, Eric has set out to get a haircut, though he doesn’t seem to need one. (Pattinson begins the film looking like a character from The Matrix , pale and immaculate in his dark suit and sunglasses.) The city is in a state of intense gridlock thanks to a presidential visit, the funeral procession of a famous Sufi rapper and by anti-corporate protests that strikingly recall Occupy Wall Street, though instead of a tent the crowd’s chosen symbol is a giant rat. As the limo crawls along, Eric takes meetings with coworkers and employees who appear in his car as if beamed in: his partner Shiner (Jay Baruchel), his art consultant and lover Didi (Juliette Binoche), his finance chief Jane (Emily Hampshire) and his adviser Vija (Samantha Morton), with whom he sips vodka while calmly discussing the rioters outside rocking his limo and spray-painting anarchist symbols on it. “This is a protest against the future,” she says. Packer Capital is attempting to short the yuan, a gambit that is not going well and bleeding the company of vast amounts of money as the hours roll by. Eric is a big fat symbol — the film treats this fact with a wink — never more so than in scenes with his wife Elise (Sarah Gadon), who’s as much an enigma to him as he initially is to us. A poet from a massive wealthy family, she’s indifferent to the wealth he’s built and the position he’s achieved. She’s also apathetic to his more animal needs: Elise solemnly refuses to have sex with Eric because, she tells him, she needs to conserve her energy for work. Their connection is so tenuous and they know so little about each other that their marriage might as well be an arranged one between two royals. Cosmopolis is a film about the demeaning and dehumanizing effects of money, and Eric’s wealth has left him untethered. He can buy things or simply have them at will — security, sex, an appropriate spouse, maybe even the Rothko Chapel, which he wants to keep whole in his apartment — but few of these acquisitions seem to resonate with him. As a portrait of the far end of wealth, Cosmopolis is hauntingly hollow, its world deliberately crammed with things but empty of meaning. It’s possible that Eric courts death — by intentionally putting himself in the way of a “credible threat” — because he’s losing his fortune, or maybe he set out to lose that fortune first as part of plan for complete self-destruction. Either way, Cosmopolis presents a world of vivid and sometimes nightmarish imagery outside those tinted windows, and finds something elegiac and terrible in the detached way its characters process what they see. As Morton’s character says as she gazes at a protester who’s set himself on fire outside the limo: “It’s not original — it’s an appropriation.” Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Easier to admire than to love, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is an amplified, feverish vision of the one percent as scarcely human — not because of any innate maliciousness, but because they’re so removed from the lives of the masses. They’re like children who’ve already won a video game and now play carelessly, without any need to observe the rules. The lead role of 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer is played by Robert Pattinson, although the star of the film is just as much Packer Capital’s high-tech stretch limousine, which serves as his mobile office as he inches across Manhattan in search of a haircut and, perhaps, his own destruction. That limo, equipped with glowing console panels, a slide-out urinal and what’s essentially a throne in the back, is the primary setting of Cosmopolis. It’s a hermetically sealed bubble in which Eric can glide through the roiling urban landscape, jumping off or taking on passengers at whim. He is in the city, but not a part of it. The vehicle is armored and, he explains to his aloof wife Elise (Sarah Gadon), “Prousted” — lined with cork soundproofing — though the latter gesture is, he admits, largely symbolic, as the New York noise manages to bleed through. Despite this, the barrier between him and the world is considerable, bolstered by watchful presence of his security chief Torval (Kevin Durand), who informs him tersely of any credible threats to his life. Cosmopolis is based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo, but Cronenberg adapted the tale to the screen and it feels very much like a Cronenberg work. It’s the chilly sibling to eXistenZ , without the comfort of slipping realities. If the universe of Cosmopolis were to come loose, it would only reveal a void underneath. Pattinson does a quietly marvelous thing in finding vulnerability in Eric without making it seem like softness. The film depicts Eric’s financial kingdom (and with it his sense of self) crumbling over a day, but his breakdown is a gradual one. His panic rises in barely perceptible increments. Despite Torval’s warnings, Eric has set out to get a haircut, though he doesn’t seem to need one. (Pattinson begins the film looking like a character from The Matrix , pale and immaculate in his dark suit and sunglasses.) The city is in a state of intense gridlock thanks to a presidential visit, the funeral procession of a famous Sufi rapper and by anti-corporate protests that strikingly recall Occupy Wall Street, though instead of a tent the crowd’s chosen symbol is a giant rat. As the limo crawls along, Eric takes meetings with coworkers and employees who appear in his car as if beamed in: his partner Shiner (Jay Baruchel), his art consultant and lover Didi (Juliette Binoche), his finance chief Jane (Emily Hampshire) and his adviser Vija (Samantha Morton), with whom he sips vodka while calmly discussing the rioters outside rocking his limo and spray-painting anarchist symbols on it. “This is a protest against the future,” she says. Packer Capital is attempting to short the yuan, a gambit that is not going well and bleeding the company of vast amounts of money as the hours roll by. Eric is a big fat symbol — the film treats this fact with a wink — never more so than in scenes with his wife Elise (Sarah Gadon), who’s as much an enigma to him as he initially is to us. A poet from a massive wealthy family, she’s indifferent to the wealth he’s built and the position he’s achieved. She’s also apathetic to his more animal needs: Elise solemnly refuses to have sex with Eric because, she tells him, she needs to conserve her energy for work. Their connection is so tenuous and they know so little about each other that their marriage might as well be an arranged one between two royals. Cosmopolis is a film about the demeaning and dehumanizing effects of money, and Eric’s wealth has left him untethered. He can buy things or simply have them at will — security, sex, an appropriate spouse, maybe even the Rothko Chapel, which he wants to keep whole in his apartment — but few of these acquisitions seem to resonate with him. As a portrait of the far end of wealth, Cosmopolis is hauntingly hollow, its world deliberately crammed with things but empty of meaning. It’s possible that Eric courts death — by intentionally putting himself in the way of a “credible threat” — because he’s losing his fortune, or maybe he set out to lose that fortune first as part of plan for complete self-destruction. Either way, Cosmopolis presents a world of vivid and sometimes nightmarish imagery outside those tinted windows, and finds something elegiac and terrible in the detached way its characters process what they see. As Morton’s character says as she gazes at a protester who’s set himself on fire outside the limo: “It’s not original — it’s an appropriation.” Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Marilyn Monroe’s death occurred 50 years ago today. The star died of a drug overdose under still-debated circumstances at the age of 36. To say her legend has grown in the last half century is an understatement. Marilyn . Her name alone conjures up memories of an icon blessed with beauty, shrouded in mystery, befallen by tragedy and passing away far too soon. Those who knew Marilyn Monroe considered her talented, versatile, vivacious, troubled and profoundly sexual. Today, future generations know her no differently. Marilyn Monroe, age 23, in 1949 . The blond, curvy, breathy-voiced star fascinates and inspires fans to this day (see Lindsay Lohan Playboy photos and countless other celebrity homages). Monroe and her world became the focal point of NBC’s Broadway-themed series Smash , which is fitting as Marilyn’s career, and life, was pure theater. This year, there have already been 16 books added to the list of Monroe tomes. Marilyn’s staying power may reveal as much about us as about her. Enigmatic, vulnerable and innocent, yet sexually iconic and always tinged with a hint of scandal, Monroe embodies everything that rivets us culturally. She’s also sympathetic in a sense, dying young, the victim of her own success, thrust a world beyond her control and taken advantage of routinely. Whatever hopes, dreams, memories, indelible images and cautionary tales we project onto Marilyn, one thing is clear: There will never be another like her.
For the record, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are JUST friends. The One Direction members are not dating. For the unofficial record, however, Styles may be seeing a 19-year old model named Cara Delevigne. The young hotties were spotted driving off in the singer’s Range Rover at 1 a.m. Wednesday, following an evening together at Soho’s Omega House. If true, Delevigne would be quite the catch for Styles. She’s already posted for Chanel and Stella McCartney and is considered by many to be The Next Big Beautiful Thing. “[She has] the most beautiful face in the most engaging personality,” an insider tells Heat World. “She is adorable and very talented. She also has the ability to shake up the energy in a room full of stuffy people and make people ask ‘who is that girl.'” Why might things be awkward, though, if she is getting it on with Styles? Earlier this year, Delevigne sister, Poppy, said: “I want to sit on Harry Styles’ lap. I have a total crush on him. He walked past me at the Aquascutum show and I was salivating. I like his curly hair and he looks like a little cherub.”
