Valentine’s Day is a little less than a month away, and much like you trawling the supermarket for last-minute goodies to romantically rain down on your perennially disappointed significant other, Hollywood has cobbled together not one but two faintly savory last-minute options for the lovers out there. Fox announced late Wednesday that thanks to “outstanding test screenings and strong word of mouth,” it would release the Reese Witherspoon/Tom Hardy/Chris Pine-starring, McG-directed spy-love triangle rom-com This Means War on Feb. 14 proper — a Tuesday, three days ahead of the film’s original Feb. 17 release date. “Starting Valentine’s Day, we’re making WAR, not love,” said distribution boss Bruce Snyder in a statement. “We’re armed and ready with the perfect movie. This is a picture that that has it all – humor, charm, wit and action – and it plays through the roof.” Forsooth! Hath thy loins bestirred? OK, fine. How about this, then: The Catherine Zeta-Jones/Justin Bartha rom-com The Rebound , shot in 2008 at the apex of the whole “cougar” movement. This was the one bankrolled by the defunct studio/distributor The Film Department, on whose shelf it sat domestically for years while doing reasonably well on the international circuit. Now it, too, is under the Fox label, but straight to video, alas. So what could keep a Catherine Zeta-Jones rom-com in limbo all these years? Was No Reservations so bad? What’s it all about? Here’s Fox’s sell (via press release): Upon discovering her husband’s infidelity, Sandy (Zeta-Jones) and her two kids move from the suburbs to pursue a new life in the big city. There she meets Aram (Bartha), a local coffee shop employee whose wife only married him as a means to getting her green card. The two strike up a friendship which eventually evolves into something more. But it isn’t long before they’re faced with the big question – “Is this real or just a rebound?” Arriving just in time for Valentine’s Day and featuring electrifying chemistry between Zeta-Jones and Bartha, The Rebound also features fantastic supporting performances from Lynn Whitfield ( The Women, Madea’s Family Reunion ), John Schneider ( The Dukes of Hazzard, Lake Placid 2 ) and music legend Art Garfunkel. AHEM. John Schneider and Art Garfunkel? Hardy and Pine don’t stand a chance! Neither do you! Just break up already, seriously.
And/or be able to tell time: “Odeon Liverpool One can confirm it has issued a small number of refunds to guests who were unaware that The Artist was a silent film. The cinema is happy to offer guests a refund on their film choice is they raise concern with a member of staff within 10 minutes of the film starting.” [ The Telegraph ]
Today in the NY Times , David Carr has an intriguing look at the notorious 28-minute “documentary” When Mitt Romney Came to Town , a piece of presidential-campaign propaganda so slick and evocative that it brings to mind the work of contemporary Hollywood pros. Perhaps most notably, Carr writes, the film implicates Romney in a kind of “vampire capitalism” — which calls for some perspective from the Oscar-winning director of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn , Bill Condon. Naturally . It’s precisely the cheeky antidote the piece needs to counteract the sniffling stridency of Michael Moore (“Those in power will appropriate the counterculture to their own ends,” he tells Carr), but it’s also a concisely nifty illumination of how choices behind the camera affect perceptions of those in front of it: “From a technical perspective, they were very effective of taking the imagery of [the 1984 Ronald Reagan spot] Morning in America and gradually turning it into an episode of America’s Most Wanted ,” Mr. Condon said. “In the film, Romney literally blocks out the sun and the weather seems to turn. You are always looking down at Romney, while they shoot the people who lost their jobs from below. And there is a literal money shot, where Romney is posing with money, that looks like it was captured from a surveillance video.” “The title in particular is very good,” he said. “It sets it up right away that this is the mainstream versus Wall Street. The populism of that message took me by surprise and represents a calculation that the white working class, who are everywhere in this movie, are a big part of the Republican electorate.” Indeed. Now if only it were factual ! Can’t have it all, I suppose. Check the film out below, FWIW…
It’s been a long awards season talking about animal performances and the variations therein — from Uggie’s full-blooded canine craftsmanship in The Artist to Andy Serkis’s arguably Oscar-worthy performance-capture efforts as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes . And then there’s Joey, the eponymous equine stud of War Horse , played by roughly a dozen or more different horses over the course of Steven Spielberg’s epic. But there’s something strange about the one recently revealed in some War Horse test footage. You have to go to watch the (currently unembeddable) video over at Facebook . I’ll offer little more beyond my recommendation, except to add that Uggie never would have gone for this. [ Chris Clarke via AICN ]
The latest publicity shot to come from the Skyfall set is several steps up from the Banal 007 meme witnessed a while back, though it’s still pretty banal: Daniel Craig, with his back to the lens, sits on the ledge of a pool. At night. Ripped. Part movie photo, part gay-resort brochure. Alas! It’s just James Bond chillin’ at the London Four Seasons. Meanwhile, according to the synopsis accompanying the fist-look photo in Empire , “With Craig and director Sam Mendes promising something on an even bigger and more emotional canvas than ever before, expect great things from Bond 23…” Will do. [ Empire ]
Mickey (Michael Biehn), the paranoid building superintendent unwillingly responsible for allowing the characters in The Divide to survive the apocalypse, didn’t plan for or want company. And who can blame him? These people are awful . Like so many groups left in a survival situations (at least in movies, books and MTV reality shows), they shed their veneer of civilization with alarming rapidity as their lives take a turn for the worse. Written by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean and directed by Xavier Gens, who earned a place for himself in the New French Extreme movement with his 2007 Frontier(s) before heading to Hollywood to make Hitman , The Divide is a stylish and would-be shocking variation on a familiar scenario, in which the horrors isolated survivors inflict on each other turn out to be worse than those lurking outside. Gens has talent, if also tendencies to steer the visuals into the music video realm, but he treats the characters here like mobile props and nothing more — the curve of a shaved skull or a tear trickling down a cheek just another bit of nice art direction on the gradual path toward the inevitable destruction of everyone on screen. What happened to the outside world is left to speculation — what looks like a bomb hits the city in the first scene, sending the inhabitants of a New York apartment building scrambling downstairs in search of shelter. Eight people force their way into Mickey’s shelter in the basement before he locks the door. There’s angular heroine Eva (Lauren German), her whiny French fiancé Sam (Iván González), Delvin (Courtney B. Vance), Bobby (Michael Eklund), brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes), and Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her daughter Wendy (Abbey Thickson). Mickey has food and water saved up, though not enough — at least not after strange men in hazmat suits barge into the underground shelter, kidnap the little girl, and weld the door shut on the remaining inhabitants. Hell may be other people, but it can also be scenarios in which people endlessly bicker their way to certain doom (this is why I find The Walking Dead so hard to watch). Power games, alliances and divisions break out as time passes with no hope of rescue or an end, and as the characters grow more unstable and unhealthy, teeth falling out, hair growing patchy as they sit in the dark. Josh establishes himself as the alpha male, sharing Marilyn with Bobby in a scenario that degrades into violent sexual slavery — Arquette deserves either kudos or condolences for the degree to which she surrenders to a role that finds her being chained up, continually degraded and humiliated, treated like a dog, and smearing makeup on her face like some kind of crazed goth dolly. Eva is forced to protect Sam, who’s at the bottom of the totem pole, though she’s drawn to Adrien, who holds on to his sanity as the situation falls apart. These characters are at best doodles, and none of the performances are able to tease more depth out of them — the hints at history between them, like how Sam and Eva met, or the strained relationship between Josh and Adrien, are so sparse that when they’re thrown in they confuse more than they illuminate. The sprinkles of political relevance are clunkier and more problematic. Any film these days that includes the destruction of the New York skyline is going to calls up echoes of 9/11, but The Divide strongly suggests that Mickey was a firefighter working that day whose issues and isolation are all related to that trauma, from his convictions that “the ragheads” are responsible for bombing the city to his creation of the underground bunker, decorated with an American flag. (Admittedly, Gens makes the Frenchman the least likable character — if the film’s a rough metaphor for a world in decline, the U.S. isn’t alone in taking on the chin.) At two hours, with its elegiac tone and deliberate pacing, The Divide may lose gorehounds before it gets around to the finger chopping and corpse dismemberment. While there certainly are moments that will have the sensitive covering their eyes, the film’s most disturbing imagery isn’t actually related to carnage. A segment in which Josh heads outside to attempt to figure out what the suited-up soldiers are up to has a hallucinatory, medical nightmare feel to it, rich with the promise of terrible things going on just beyond our comprehension. Later, two characters shave their heads and eyebrows and transform themselves into near-alien figures out of a Matthew Barney video. Gens’s deftness with these visuals, and with the claustrophobic glide of his camera through the dim warrens of the underground space in which The Divide is almost exclusively set, is undeniable. It’s his apparent disinterest in the people filling it that makes the film such an uphill battle, in which the world ends and you can’t wait for the survivors just kill each other off already. Follow Alison Wilmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Mickey (Michael Biehn), the paranoid building superintendent unwillingly responsible for allowing the characters in The Divide to survive the apocalypse, didn’t plan for or want company. And who can blame him? These people are awful . Like so many groups left in a survival situations (at least in movies, books and MTV reality shows), they shed their veneer of civilization with alarming rapidity as their lives take a turn for the worse. Written by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean and directed by Xavier Gens, who earned a place for himself in the New French Extreme movement with his 2007 Frontier(s) before heading to Hollywood to make Hitman , The Divide is a stylish and would-be shocking variation on a familiar scenario, in which the horrors isolated survivors inflict on each other turn out to be worse than those lurking outside. Gens has talent, if also tendencies to steer the visuals into the music video realm, but he treats the characters here like mobile props and nothing more — the curve of a shaved skull or a tear trickling down a cheek just another bit of nice art direction on the gradual path toward the inevitable destruction of everyone on screen. What happened to the outside world is left to speculation — what looks like a bomb hits the city in the first scene, sending the inhabitants of a New York apartment building scrambling downstairs in search of shelter. Eight people force their way into Mickey’s shelter in the basement before he locks the door. There’s angular heroine Eva (Lauren German), her whiny French fiancé Sam (Iván González), Delvin (Courtney B. Vance), Bobby (Michael Eklund), brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes), and Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her daughter Wendy (Abbey Thickson). Mickey has food and water saved up, though not enough — at least not after strange men in hazmat suits barge into the underground shelter, kidnap the little girl, and weld the door shut on the remaining inhabitants. Hell may be other people, but it can also be scenarios in which people endlessly bicker their way to certain doom (this is why I find The Walking Dead so hard to watch). Power games, alliances and divisions break out as time passes with no hope of rescue or an end, and as the characters grow more unstable and unhealthy, teeth falling out, hair growing patchy as they sit in the dark. Josh establishes himself as the alpha male, sharing Marilyn with Bobby in a scenario that degrades into violent sexual slavery — Arquette deserves either kudos or condolences for the degree to which she surrenders to a role that finds her being chained up, continually degraded and humiliated, treated like a dog, and smearing makeup on her face like some kind of crazed goth dolly. Eva is forced to protect Sam, who’s at the bottom of the totem pole, though she’s drawn to Adrien, who holds on to his sanity as the situation falls apart. These characters are at best doodles, and none of the performances are able to tease more depth out of them — the hints at history between them, like how Sam and Eva met, or the strained relationship between Josh and Adrien, are so sparse that when they’re thrown in they confuse more than they illuminate. The sprinkles of political relevance are clunkier and more problematic. Any film these days that includes the destruction of the New York skyline is going to calls up echoes of 9/11, but The Divide strongly suggests that Mickey was a firefighter working that day whose issues and isolation are all related to that trauma, from his convictions that “the ragheads” are responsible for bombing the city to his creation of the underground bunker, decorated with an American flag. (Admittedly, Gens makes the Frenchman the least likable character — if the film’s a rough metaphor for a world in decline, the U.S. isn’t alone in taking on the chin.) At two hours, with its elegiac tone and deliberate pacing, The Divide may lose gorehounds before it gets around to the finger chopping and corpse dismemberment. While there certainly are moments that will have the sensitive covering their eyes, the film’s most disturbing imagery isn’t actually related to carnage. A segment in which Josh heads outside to attempt to figure out what the suited-up soldiers are up to has a hallucinatory, medical nightmare feel to it, rich with the promise of terrible things going on just beyond our comprehension. Later, two characters shave their heads and eyebrows and transform themselves into near-alien figures out of a Matthew Barney video. Gens’s deftness with these visuals, and with the claustrophobic glide of his camera through the dim warrens of the underground space in which The Divide is almost exclusively set, is undeniable. It’s his apparent disinterest in the people filling it that makes the film such an uphill battle, in which the world ends and you can’t wait for the survivors just kill each other off already. Follow Alison Wilmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
In 1865, actor and Confederate loyalist John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in the balcony of Ford’s Theatre, committing one of the most notorious crimes in American history. In 2013, Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly will team up with Tony and Ridley Scott for a two-hour National Geographic documentary exploring the events surrounding Lincoln’s death, adapted from Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever , co-written by O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. But with so many previous Lincoln assassination projects in the ether, what new ground can O’Reilly and the Scott brothers tread in Killing Lincoln ? Lincoln’s death, of course, was so violent, tragic, and significant an event that it inspired many a filmmaker over the years. D.W. Griffith made a film in 1930 — his second screen depiction of the act — entitled simply Abraham Lincoln , that examined the president’s life, taking a few creative liberties along the way. (You can watch it here in its entirety, if you’re so inclined.) In the same decade, John Ford made two movies with ties to Lincoln: The Prisoner of Shark Island , about the doctor who tended to Booth after the attack on Lincoln, and Young Mr. Lincoln , which focused on the future president’s career as a young lawyer. And as the decades went on, scores more depictions of Lincoln’s life and death were committed to celluloid as generation after generation of filmmakers sought to mine the event for the social and historical significance it bore to the shaping of America. Unfortunately, other attempts, like Robert Redford’s recent The Conspirator , proved downright snoozeworthy. Hence, it seems, O’Reilly and the Scott brothers’ attempt to jazz up the Lincoln saga with “feature-like re-enactments, rare historical archives and CGI.” CGI! O’Reilly and Dugard’s 2011 nonfiction book promised “history that reads like a thriller.” Set your DVRs for high intrigue at Ford’s Theatre! (And if that’s not enough Honest Abe for ya, there’s also Steven Spielberg ‘s Daniel Day-Lewis-starring Lincoln biopic and the promising Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter coming up later this year.) Regardless of how much adrenaline the O’Reilly factor pumps into recreating Booth’s dastardly attack in Killing Lincoln , I’m not sure it could stand up to the rollicking menace of this recreation, as seen in the major motion picture National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets : Or: Might it unearth new theories regarding what motivated Booth to pull the trigger, a la Family Guy ? In any case, there’s no way Killing Lincoln can capture the truth of the event quite like this sketch from The Whitest Kids U Know . I’m pretty sure this is totally historically accurate .
BREAKING: TMZ is reporting that Oscar-winner Gene Hackman was injured earlier today when a car hit him as he was bicycling in Key West, Florida. Details are very sketchy at this point, with the extent of Hackman’s injuries unknown; the report claims said injuries are “serious” but also that the 81-year-old Hackman is currently in stable condition at a local hospital. Developing… [ TMZ ]
TCA events bring news that A&E is developing a prequel series to Alfred Hitchcock ‘s Psycho , to revolve around the early life of one Norman Bates and his beloved mother at the infamous Bates Motel. While intriguing, it prompts more than a few questions… like, who wants to watch teenage Norman devolve into filmdom’s most notorious creep on a weekly basis? What gives writer Anthony Cipriano the authority to explore Hitch’s iconic killer? And, most depressing of all to ponder — do people these days even care about Psycho anymore? Granted, the A&E audience is more sophisticated than your average Jersey Shore -obsessed dilettante, and Hitchcock has plenty of fans, even in the age of reality TV. In fact, the sordid melodramatics we’re used to seeing in mainstream television coupled with the elevated profile of dramas on cable TV might actually prepare audiences for such a series; it can’t be any more twisted than, say, American Horror Story , or as grisly as an episode of CSI . The idea of exploring a fictional character’s story in further detail is always intriguing, and often works in surprisingly great ways; see Wicked , for example, which imagined a tenacious but vulnerable humanity for The Wizard of Oz ‘s Wicked Witch, decades after L. Frank Baum wrote her. But there’s a degree to which, as with remakes and adaptations and sequels, it sometimes seems wise to leave good enough (or great, in Psycho’s case) alone. Psycho revealed just enough of Norman Bates’s demented interior to make that film a classic; do we need to see exactly what Mother did to young Norman to mess him up for life? Maybe we do, or maybe we already saw what comes of taking liberties with Hitchcock’s work, without Hitch: of the 1983 and 1986 Psycho sequels, the subsequent 1990 prequel, the abysmal made-for-TV spin-off, and Gus van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake, none have been especially good. What could help Cipriani’s Bates Motel to avoid repeating history? Take a gander at the unfortunate 1987 Lori Petty/Bud Cort/Jason Bateman pilot-turned-telefilm, also titled Bates Motel , and muse over the possibilities. • A&E Develops ‘Psycho’ Prequel Series: TCA [ Deadline ] Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
