William Friedkin barrels into theaters this Friday with Killer Joe , boldly adapted from Tracy Letts’ ultra-violent Southern-fried play about a Texas lawman/assassin who ingratiates himself into the family of the low rent punk ( Emile Hirsch ) who’s hired him to murder his mother. Los Angeleno Movieliners, grab a bucket of fried chicken and your twisted wits and dive into our latest 10-word review contest, tackling any of Friedkin’s cinematic output for a chance to win tickets to see Killer Joe this Thursday! Movieline has five (5) pairs of tickets to attend a special screening of Killer Joe this Thursday, July 26 at 7:30pm at the Arclight in Hollywood — attendees must be 18 and over, due to its unapologetic NC-17 rating. To win, enter your best 10-word review of any William Friedkin movie and Movieline’s editors will select the five best, boldest, most original entries. Where to start? Maybe with landmark crime pic The French Connection , which won Friedkin the Oscar for Best Director. Or The Exorcist , his nightmare-inducing, Oscar-winning horror classic? Or Sorcerer , or Cruising , or To Live and Die in L.A. , Blue Chips , Jade , Bug … so much Friedkin! Have at it, and remember: Entries must be exactly ten words, only one post per person, and make sure to include your email address when you enter. Contest will end Tuesday, July 24, at 3pm PT/6pm ET. Winners will notified via email. Killer Joe hits theaters in limited release on Friday.
A community of survivors exists on the outskirts of a Louisiana levee, where a six-year-old girl with a boundless imagination and a deep connection to the world around her lives with her father. In Movieline’s exclusive clip, enter the world of Benh Zeitlin’s impressive feature debut/Sundance hit Beasts of the Southern Wild (in limited release this week), as seen through the eyes of the film’s pint-sized heroine, Hushpuppy (played with tremendous fearlessness by discovery of the year, Quvenzhané Wallis). Beasts of the Southern Wild debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Cinematography Award before nabbing four honors at Cannes , including the FIPRESCI Prize and the Caméra d’Or. Zeitlin’s magical-realist fable is a deeply emotional experience, thanks in great part to Wallis’s central turn as the fierce Hushpuppy, whose relationship with her troubled father Wink (local chef/baker Dwight Howard, in his acting debut) anchors the film. Plucked from over 4,000 prospective actresses, Wallis, who was just five years old when she auditioned, commands the screen with an impressive intensity and naturalism. “When she first walked in, she was defiant towards me,” director Zeitlin told Movieline . “Most of the times you figure you can easily puppeteer a kid, but she was not like that at all. She was refusing to do this thing that I asked her to, because she didn’t it was right. I wanted her to throw something at somebody, and she said, ‘No, that’s not right to throw something at somebody you don’t know.’ Filmed on location in Louisiana, Beasts began principal photography on April 20, 2010 — the day of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the impact of which mirrored the plight of the residents of the Bathtub within the film. The story celebrates the resilience of a community in the face of disaster, highlighting the spirit of the people who remain. Beasts of the Southern Wild is in limited release today. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
LOL , the coming-of-age drama starring Miley Cyrus and Demi Moore, opened in limited release this weekend. And we mean VERY limited release : The movie played in seven cities across the country. Total. As a result, it earned about 1/1,000,000,000th of what The Avengers brought in : $46,500. Still, Miley has taken to Twitter and expressed gratitude for the dozen or so folks who did shell out their hard-earned money for this unfortunate flop. “Thank u so much for everyone who went to see LOL,” Cyrus Tweeted on Monday. “It is a film I loved making and I am proud of…. That’s really all that matters to me.” As for what the future holds for Cyrus at the box office? Analyst Len Klady isn’t optimistic. He tells Yahoo: “Miley Cyrus has a real image problem. Basically she’s been undone by Saturday Night Live … people don’t take her seriously.” And that’s, like, totally not cool for Miley and her team. But it might bode well for fans of this star’s music. The more flops she makes, the more likely it is that Cyrus wll return to the album scene.
When I was in college, I once went on a weekend trip with my two roommates to Cape Cod, where someone had scrounged up a summer home belonging to a family friend who was willing to let us stay for a few days. The owners were in the middle of renovating the place, so instead of windows there were just sheets of plastic that bulged in and out with the wind. Half the rooms didn’t have electricity, and we had to go to the tap outside to get water — but hey, someone was letting us stay in their house in a scenic location far from our shabby apartment near campus, and for free. No one was complaining. Except that it got dark, and the fact that we were out in the woods down a narrow driveway removed from the road with nothing sheltering us from the outside but transparent tarps (just the thing for wrapping up dead bodies) started to seem a little spooky. We were three young women huddling around one of the few working lamps in a house in the middle of nowhere, and I started to reflect on the fact that if we were in a movie, we’d for sure get murdered in a few minutes by someone with chainsaws for hands or something. And then the friend who’d set this up, a sporty, outgoing environmentalist who’d definitely outlive me in any theoretical slasher flick, mentioned offhand (she wasn’t joking ) that the owners of the house had mentioned that if we saw a guy in the woods outside in the middle of the night, it was probably their friend Bill, who was helping with the remodeling and sometimes stayed in their shed. What’s my point? My point is that you don’t want me telling you about the premise for The Cabin in the Woods , so instead I’m inflicting on you this personal story of a cabin in some woods (spoilers: we then drove into town and ate seafood). It’s true that the film, which was written by geek demigod Joss Whedon with Drew Goddard (the latter of whom served as director) is much more fun to watch if you don’t know anything about the plot going in. But I’m concerned that all this trumpeting about how sensitive the movie is to being disrupted by oversharing will set up expectations for something filled with reversals and silly twists, when in fact your enjoyment will be derived from an appreciation for how clever its concept is. Goddard and Whedon have devised a meta-movie about horror tropes that comments on its genre without foregoing a plot or characters of its own — it’s funny and scary enough to please the deeply fannish, while being sufficiently quick and smart to entertain those less inclined to dork out on the many horror in-jokes in store. Suffice it to say, the film introduces two groups of characters. The first, made up of Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Amy Acker, Brian White and others, work in a compound somewhere seemingly official, though not so official that they don’t sexually harass each other for fun, bitch about their spouses and run office pools. The point of the film is how they fit together with the second group, which consists of five college students headed out for a weekend away at, yes, a cabin in the woods. There’s good girl Dana (Kristen Connolly), her friend Jules (Anna Hutchison) and Jules’s football-player boyfriend Kurt (Chris Hemsworth), Kurt’s studious teammate Holden (Jesse Williams) and their stoner friend Marty (Fran Kranz, who steal the show). The five fit these types from afar, but don’t up close. Kurt and Jules aren’t just a jock and his blonde bimbo girlfriend — when he teases her about bringing textbooks along, they fall into a pitch-perfect reenactment of the old “I learned it by watching you!” anti-drug PSA. Dana’s getting over a complicated break-up, Holden’s kind and perceptive, and Marty sees a lot more than you’d expect through his haze of pot smoke. The relationship of our expectations of characters and plot developments to the genre and why we keep coming back for more even when we think we know what’s going to happen is examined throughout the movie, which plays off all the old slasher standards while being about something very different. Making a film that depends on an audience’s recognition of other films is a tricky thing — not just because it presumes existing knowledge, but also because meta-humor often just stops at making a reference instead of actually going on to do something with it. When you look at Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s _____ Movie series of (for the most part) awful spoofs, most don’t get further than a “Remember this? How about this? You saw this one, right?” Cabin in the Woods touches on everything from characters who have sex being doomed to J-horror to classic monsters, but it is also questions, for the most part not in a scolding way (the slight but discernible touch of that is the film’s only real downside), the reasons why we like watching these scenarios unfold so much that we’ve worn the ideas out like an overused record. Cabin in the Woods does what Scream only halfway managed, which was to find something new by looking back at the familiar — and at least in Whedon’s world, the geeky ones are never first on the chopping block. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
While no one is in any rush to revisit the most recent Oscar season, I’d be remiss not to point you back to our virtual roundtable of nominees for Best Foreign Language Feature — specifically, Canadian filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, whose classroom drama Monsieur Lazhar makes its way into limited release this weekend. He’s pretty awesome, having brought a lot of the most poignant and intriguing points of view of any of the generous nominees who spent their Oscar week with Movieline. To wit, when asked about his thoughts leading up to the big day: You grow up watching the Oscars like anybody else. It is something fascinating, intriguing, but you feel it doesn’t concern you personally. You watch it as a form of entertainment. As a teenager, I remember being angry at the Oscars for always choosing dramas for best films, Chariots of Fire winning instead of Raiders of the Lost Ark , for example (lol). That was many years before I knew I would be making films. But even two years ago when I started Monsieur Lazhar , the Oscar remained something very distant. I saw little connection between what I did and the Academy Awards. So how do I feel about the big day? It’s still surreal for me to be California-bound, but I find myself enjoying every moment, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. I met Norman Jewison recently, and he told me: “No matter what happens, you have an Oscar nomination, and you will have it for the rest of your life. Nobody can take that away.” There’s more where that came from . Meanwhile, Monsieur Lazhar opens Friday in limited release , with more locations to come in the weeks ahead. Enjoy! Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter . [Photos: Music Box Films]
After making just $30 in its initial limited release theatrical run in 2006, Leo Grillo’s indie noir Zyzzyx Road — which starred an on-the-cusp Katherine Heigl and an in-decline Tom Sizemore and also managed to misspell the California desert locale it was named for , unless that was intentional — will be released digitally this summer by the intrepid folks at GoDigital. “We love the story behind this film and are thrilled to be part of what we believe will be a happy ending, I am confident it will make us more than $30,” said GoDigital Director of Marketing Barry Daffurn of the distribution coup. Ba-dum ching! Oh, humor. What’s not funny: Actually watching any part of Zyzzyx Road . Here’s the trailer, see for yourself! Every time you curse Heigl for making yet another inane chick flick , just remember: She’s already paid her penance in advance. Zyzzyx Road will be available digitally via GoDigital this summer. [Press release]
The producers of Bully and the Motion Picture Association of America agreed on a unique compromise to re-release the controversial documentary film as PG-13. The Weinstein Co., in response to its initial R ratingby the MPAA, made the unusual move of releasing the film in limited release without a rating at all. That gave each individual theater owner the decision whether to show the film or not, and potentially limited the scope of its release – all on principle. Bully Trailer Bully’s producers appealed the R rating and lost earlier this year in a move that could’ve derailed its effort to highlight the epidemic of adolescent bullying. The new version of the film deletes some obscenities, but in an interesting move, keeps a controversial scene on a bus in which the ‘F-bomb’ is lobbed. Three times at a bullied child, in fact. This is a major exception to MPAA rules; the group typically imposes an R rating on any film with more than two.
This red-band promo clip of Young Adult indicates that Mavis Gary’s (Charlize Theron) confrontation with Beth Slade (Elizabeth Reaser) will be mean, profane and pretty embarrassing for both characters. According to my calculations, that’s a level-four tantrum in the “angry lady” cinematic universe. Young Adult opens in limited release this week, and to celebrate, let’s counting down 10 classic types of female conniptions in film. Everyone from Ellen Ripley to Joan Crawford is accounted for — but who’s the grande dame of femme freakouts?
Maybe it’s coincidence that Ezra Miller had two films premiere at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, including Beware the Gonzo — which finally arrives theaters this weekend in limited release and is currently available everywhere on VOD. (His 2009 Tribeca entry, City Island won the festival’s audience prize.) But it’s no accident: Since his 2008 screen debut in the harrowing prep-school drama Afterschool , the 18-year-old actor has built a reputation behind the scenes for fearlessness, intensity, comic chops, and holding his own against alpha-castmates like Andy Garcia, Liev Schreiber and Helen Hunt. And coming soon: Tilda Swinton.
Nick Broomfield’s documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha! , which premieres this week at the Toronto Film Festival, has made a domestic theatrical deal with Freestyle Releasing. The crowd-funded film is said to scrub away the sheen of the miserably received pro-Palin doc The Undefeated , trickling into limited release in New York and L.A. on Sept. 30 — not long after when the ex-governor’s long-rumored presidential bid would likely launch, if it launches at all. Intrigue! [ Deadline ]
