The world sat on stitches as the Cold War raged. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Iceland as the world glared. Would the world order of two superpowers on the brink end after decades of a nuclear arms race come to a close? Would a Communist and a Republican actually come to an understanding? Could Mikhail and Ronnie get along? If Nancy and Raisa were any indication, that would be a – no! The meeting that might have ended the U.S.-Soviet standoff is of course heading to the big screen and Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz will portray Gorbachev in Reykjavik . Production will begin in March on the meeting that riveted the world in the Icelandic capital. The high stakes meeting pitted two men who had control of enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world many times over. Waltz will star opposite Michael Douglas who will play the U.S. President in the film spearheaded by Mike Newell, according to BBC and THR . “I feel very fortunate to have two such masters to portray the men who brought about the end of the third great war of the 20 Century. Reagan and Gorbachev were two of the most significant politicians and individuals of their times,” said Newell. “I’m very excited to see how each of these great actors gets to grips with their role as the history-changing giants we remember them to have been.” Written by Kevin Hood ( Becoming Jane ) the story recounts the summit which was viewed as a last chance to avoid a nuclear Armageddon. “This is a moment in history where two world leaders with fundamentally opposing beliefs held the future of the world in their hands”, said Headline Pictures president Stewart Mackinnon, a project producer. “They controlled nuclear arsenals which had the capability to destroy the world many times over but despite this, put the needs of humanity before their ideology and agreed to end the nuclear arms race. Informed by deeply-held private beliefs Reagan and Gorbachev reached an understanding that we can still draw lessons from today.” “The film will offer the viewer a unique look into two larger than life figures – Reagan and Gorbachev – who served as the catalysts for one of the most defining moments in our history, the end of the cold war,” said Ridley Scott whose Scott Free Productions will also produce. Waltz will next be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained , while Douglas most recently portrayed flamboyant pianist Liberace in Behind the Candelabra with Matt Damon. [ Sources: BBC and THR ]
Brad Pitt headed to WeHo in support of a documentary he produced and took a swipe at the decades-old war on drugs. Pitt apparently just said ‘yes’ back in the day, but said his days dabbling in illegal substances have long gone. Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki bowed his latest The House I Live In and stopped in a West Hollywood theater for a Q&A with his super-star producer who flew in from Europe for a chat. “My drug days have long since passed,” Pitt told THR as reported by The Guardian . “But I could probably land in any American city and within 24 hours find whatever you want. But we still support this charade called the drug war. We spent a trillion dollars over 40 years and a lot of people have lost their lives over it.” Pitt felt compelled to get involved with the project which won a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January. He said that the “subject has bugged me for a long time. It’s a backward strategy. It makes no sense and we keep going on the path like we’re winning, when it perpetuates more drugs being used.” Jarecki added his two cents and jokingly called Pitt “a drug addict,” and likened the U.S. government’s anti-drug crusade to Prohibition. “After prohibition, we regrouped and said it was a bad idea what we’re doing. Now we have a system where alcohol is illegal for children; the government profits off it; grownups can use it responsibly, which means if I go out in my car and kill some one it’s manslaughter. But if I’ve been drinking, it’s an aggravating prosecutorial factor. So why is it that drugs – which are less damaging to public health than alcohol – why is it we treat them more severely?” [ Source: The Guardian ]
What kind of bird are you? Make like Wes Anderson and pen your own ode to first love and you could win a grand prize iPad courtesy of Moonrise Kingdo m , which hits DVD and Blu-ray this week. We’ll award the Movieliner with the most powerful original haiku dedicated to childhood romance, Sam & Suzy style — so crank up that Françoise Hardy, traipse down memory lane, and get to memorializing your own nostalgia-fueled tribute to puppy love. The rules are simple: Submit an original haiku (using the 5-7-5 format) inspired by either Moonrise Kingdom or your own first love, in the comments below. One grand prize winner will receive a 32 GB Apple iPad and Moonrise Kingdom Blu-ray. Entries are open to ages 18 and up. Winners must be in the U.S. or Canada. Contest closes Wednesday, October 17 at 5pm ET/2pm PT. Entries must include an email address for contacting winners. Only one submission per person.
Hanks talks to MTV News about how he brought the ‘unexplained world’ of the animated series to life. By Kara Warner A still from “Electric City” Photo: Yahoo
Band pays homage to Tragic Kingdom roots, Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku girls and more in comeback video. By Jocelyn Vena Gwen Stefani Photo: Interscope Records
Indiana Jones junkies and future admirers will have a field day come September. The series of films are all coming out on Blue-ray full restored. It’s hard to believe that it was back in 1981 when Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas first brought Indiana Jones to the screen with Raiders of the Lost Ark . Now that film has been fully restored along with the archeologist’s (played of course by Harrison Ford) other adventures. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . Spielberg and sound designer Ben Burtt supervised the restoration of Raiders of the Lost Ark with special attention given to its “original look, sound and feel.” The franchise won a combined seven Academy Awards and will be available in the new format September 18th. The sites and sounds of the series – and even the snakes will be in pristine shape. “The original negative was first scanned at 4K and then examined frame-by-frame so that any damage could be repaired,” said Paramount Home Media. “The sound design was similarly preserved using Burtt’s original master mix, which had been archived and unused since 1981. New stereo surrounds were created using the original music tracks and original effects recorded in stereo but used previously only in mono. The result is an impeccable digital restoration that celebrates the film and its place in cinematic history.”
Indiana Jones junkies and future admirers will have a field day come September. The series of films are all coming out on Blue-ray full restored. It’s hard to believe that it was back in 1981 when Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas first brought Indiana Jones to the screen with Raiders of the Lost Ark . Now that film has been fully restored along with the archeologist’s (played of course by Harrison Ford) other adventures. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . Spielberg and sound designer Ben Burtt supervised the restoration of Raiders of the Lost Ark with special attention given to its “original look, sound and feel.” The franchise won a combined seven Academy Awards and will be available in the new format September 18th. The sites and sounds of the series – and even the snakes will be in pristine shape. “The original negative was first scanned at 4K and then examined frame-by-frame so that any damage could be repaired,” said Paramount Home Media. “The sound design was similarly preserved using Burtt’s original master mix, which had been archived and unused since 1981. New stereo surrounds were created using the original music tracks and original effects recorded in stereo but used previously only in mono. The result is an impeccable digital restoration that celebrates the film and its place in cinematic history.”
‘The numbers were eye-popping. You’d think Iron Man was in the film,’ one box-office expert tells MTV News of new Wes Anderson film. By Fallon Prinzivalli Ed Norton in “Moonrise Kingdom” Photo: Focus Features As “Men in Black 3” knocked “Marvel’s The Avengers” off its record-breaking throne and nabbed the title of #1 film in America over Memorial Day weekend, Focus Features’ “Moonrise Kingdom” broke its own box-office records. The Wes Anderson -directed film, which opened in two theaters in New York and two in Los Angeles, grossed more than $669,000 this weekend. It raked in an average of $130,752 per location, setting a new record previously held by 2006’s “Dreamgirls.” “Wes Anderson films always open in limited release with very high averages as his fanbase is very loyal,” says Box Office Guru editor Gitesh Pandya , “but the ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ numbers were eye-popping. You’d think Iron Man was in the film.” Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations also attributes the success to Anderson’s “ardent” fanbase. “[His fans] have seen him produce just a handful of films over the course of his entire career, which began with 1996’s ‘Bottle Rocket.’ Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ is Anderson’s first live-action film in five years, so there was no doubt a burning desire to see his latest whimsical dramedy,” he says. “Filmmakers with unique and authentic voices are far and few between, and Anderson is something of a national treasure for the hipster collective.” “Moonrise Kingdom” takes place in the summer of 1965 and follows the search for two 12-year-olds who flee their hometown in New England for a wilderness adventure. The film’s success follows its debut in Cannes, France , where it opened the city’s famous film festival. Bock believes its premiere at such a large venue contributed to the buzz, keeping it in the mind of audiences — despite an influx of blockbusters hitting cinemas around the globe. “There is always room for a small, original tale amongst the blockbuster giants of summer, and ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ may just be this summer’s ‘Midnight in Paris,’ ” he said, referencing the Woody Allen film that won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. “The big test for [‘Moonrise’] will be when it debuts in moderate wide release (400-plus theaters), reaching smaller markets that probably haven’t seen a film of his since his biggest hit, 2001’s ‘The Royal Tenenbaums,’ which grossed $52 million. While Anderson’s films are revered by critics and cinephiles, wide audiences haven’t exactly embraced the kooky sensibilities and eccentric outlook he emotes in his films.” But Phil Contrino of BoxOffice.com believes an A-list cast including Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Edward Norton and Tilda Swinton will help bring the film to a broader audience — though he does think widespread popularity may be limited. “If you don’t like Wes by now, this movie won’t change your mind,” Contrino said. “He’s burrowed very deep into his own style eccentricities.” “Moonrise Kingdom” was too late to earn any Movie Awards nominations at this year’s show, but tune in this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET to celebrate your other favorite films, including “Hunger Games,” “Bridesmaids” and the final “Harry Potter” film. Head over to MovieAwards.MTV.com to vote for your favorite flicks now! The 21st annual MTV Movie Awards air live this Sunday, June 3, at 9 p.m. ET.
Whenever I throw away one of those large round plastic lids from an orange-juice jug, in my head I hear my mother saying, as she would have said to my 8-year-old self, “That would make a great table-top for a doll’s house.” As an adult I don’t have a dollhouse, but I still have a hard time throwing away those orange-juice lids; the mentality dies hard. So why — with one luminous exception — can’t I love the movies of Wes Anderson, the most dollhousey of all filmmakers? Why, specifically, can’t I love Moonrise Kingdom , a sweet-natured picture set in 1965 on a mythical New Englandy island, in which two oddball kids run away together and pledge undying love? Moonrise Kingdom, like all of Anderson’s films, has been made with a master miniature-cabinetmaker’s care and specificity: It opens with what we might now call an Anderson special, a dollhouse-cutaway tracking shot that distills, in the space of a few minutes, the texture of one family’s life in their grand, ramshackle home. We see a bunch of little boys clustered around a mini record player (they’re spinning Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra , conducted by Leonard Bernstein), a distracted dad stomping around in madras pants (this would be that glorious deadpan peacock Bill Murray), a young girl who arrives from elsewhere in the house to sit near, yet apart from, her brothers, settling into a window seat with a book. There’s tension in that opening, as well as a sense of comfort: It turns out that the girl, Suzy (Kara Hayward) — a groovy nerdling in the making who loves François Hardy and has a collection of beloved library books she has failed to return — has been corresponding with a boy, whose faux-Boy Scout troop is stationed elsewhere on the island during this late-summer idyll. The boy, Sam (Jared Gilman), is an orphan who’s been bouncing from foster home to foster home, and he doesn’t fit in very well with his scout troop, either: Along with his badges he wears an ornate costume-jewelry brooch — it’s short a few scratchy pearls. For indiscernible yet understandable reasons, at least in the cruel logic of kids, the other boys don’t like him. He leaves a resignation letter for his ultra-conscientious Scout master (played earnestly and quite wonderfully by Edward Norton) and treks off to meet Suzy for the sojourn they’ve planned, an escape from all the grown-ups and kids who just can’t comprehend their weirdo world of wonder. That means, in this old Yankee version of The Blue Lagoon , that Sam and Suzy camp out on a deserted beach (where he makes earrings for her out of fish hooks and dead beetles; it’s a minor complication that her ears haven’t been pierced — yet). Eventually, there’s even a marriage of sorts, performed in the eyes of God and of Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman (as a disreputable but hardly heartless Scout master). It should all be so lovely, and yet… Anderson — who co-wrote the script with Roman Coppola — can’t forget for a minute how lovely it all is, and he reminds us with every detail: The aluminum ashtray into which Norton’s cigarette-smoking Scout Master Ward tips his ash; a record player that’s operated, impractically but wonderfully, by battery; Suzy’s shift dress, knee-sock and saddle-shoe getups, as if she were a ghost doomed to wear the perennial back-to-school outfit. These relics from a vanished childhood that we either lived or wish we’d lived are all designed to impart a shared intimacy, a response of “Oh! I remember that too!”, whether we actually remember it or not. And perhaps that’s why the picture’s exceedingly manicured quality works against it. All of Anderson’s pictures are stylized, and stylization is one of the great tools of moviemaking — its very broadness can capture nuances that naturalism fails to detect. But what’s the tipping point between “mannered” and “stylized”? Is a mannered movie simply a stylized one you don’t really like? Maybe. It could also be that most of the true emotion in Moonrise Kingdom exists in the world outside of the kids, a world Anderson dips into only occasionally: He shows us how the marriage between Suzy’s parents, played by Murray and Frances McDormand, is efficient yet frayed at the seams. (Oddly, and marvelously, the essence of this marital frustration is telegraphed best by a bit of shorthand dialogue from Murray, delivered as he grasps an axe in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in another.) The children, on the other hand, are relatively unformed and uncharismatic — they’re a little weird, a little cute, but they’re just not finished yet. They’re dream kids, too wispy to hold down a whole movie, and it’s not their fault. There are some wonderful things in Moonrise Kingdom : Bruce Willis plays yet another law-enforcement person with deep regrets, the kind of role he can do in his sleep and probably has, yet he infuses the performance with a cartoon melancholy that works — he’s the guy who’s never recovered from having an anvil dropped on his head. Alexandre Desplat provides a score that’s delicate where it needs to be and jaunty everywhere else. There’s a kiss that is, literally, electric. And the whole thing, shot by Anderson regular Robert Yeoman, looks characteristically gorgeous — its color palette is semi-psychedelic and dreamily pearlescent at the same time. So why can’t I love Moonrise Kingdom ? For all the movie’s technical meticulousness, the storytelling still has a wiggly-waggly quality, like a dangly loose tooth. In fact, while I appreciate the brashness of Rushmore , there is only one Wes Anderson movie I truly love, and I know I’m not alone: My informal investigations over the past few years have identified Fantastic Mr. Fox as the Wes Anderson Movie for People Who Hate Wes Anderson Movies. In addition to being a marvel of stop-motion animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox is joyous in trillions of unspoken ways — in the way the texture of the characters’ rangy fur changes in accordance with whatever they’re feeling at the time, in the way it finds such rapscallion pleasure in antiestablishment actions such as digging a tunnel into a rich fatcat’s storehouse. (I’m only just now realizing that Fantastic Mr. Fox was an unwitting precursor to Occupy Wall Street.) Maybe Anderson’s live-action movies don’t work as well because he’s asking real actors to do the work of puppets — human beings can’t help buckling beneath the thunderous burden of his precocious, overrefined ideas. And that’s Moonrise Kingdom in a tiny, mousebed nutshell: It’s oddly ambitious and weightless, a movie made with great care and, probably, love, that still sounds hollow when you thump it. Fantastic Mr. Fox explains why I want to save the orange-juice lids. Moonrise Kingdom explains why I steel myself and throw them away. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
You already know you’re in for a twee-fest packed with richly colorful characters and a healthy dose of quirky charm in Wes Anderson ‘s period kid romance Moonrise Kingdom , so watching these six newly unveiled clips from the film probably won’t spoil all that much. Instead, they give us more of what we’re already expecting: Game turns by Anderson regulars like Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman as well as Bruce Willis , Frances McDormand , and Ed Norton , the hazy muted palette of the isolated New England countryside as if filtered through Instagram, and our two preternatural adolescent heroes, plotting their summer camp flight through the wilderness in the name of love. Obviously, avoid the below clips if you’d like to go in completely spoiler-free. While I’m guessing the scenes in question occur in the below order in the film, who knows? The charm of Moonrise Kingdom promises to be in the performances (get a fun glimpse of Tilda Swinton ‘s ball-busting turn as Social Services, for instance), though I will add this spoiler: Moonrise Kingdom ‘s dolly shot budget appears to have been quite high. “New Penzance” “The Most Important Decision in Your Lives” “Were You Followed?” “Loaded Question” “I’m Deputizing the Little Guy” “Juvenile Refugee” Official synopsis: Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, MOONRISE KINGDOM tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore — and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle. Bruce Willis plays the local sheriff. Edward Norton is a Khaki Scout troop leader. Bill Murray and Frances McDormand portray the young girl’s parents. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the boy and girl. Moonrise Kingdom debuts at Cannes and opens in limited release May 25.
