The film played to a mixture of reactions when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and this latest film by Andrew Dominik, starring Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta packs a wallop of gun shots, fights and explosions. Harvey Weinstein recently suggested a violence summit might be in order to take place among Hollywood types in the wake of the tragedy in Aurora, CO. If so, this Weinstein Company release may be a good example of what he’s talking about. But in Cannes, both Dominik and Pitt took exception to suggestions the film had “too much violence.” “I don’t understand the obsession with violence,” Dominik said. “It’s like people who don’t want to show children fairy tales. But fairy tales dramatize children’s concerns and emotions.” Added Pitt: “Violence is an accepted part of the gangster world. It’s an accepted possibility when dealing in crime. I’d have a much harder problem playing a racist for instance than, say, shooting someone right in the face.” Pitt’s character in Killing Them Softly is centered on self-interest. He doesn’t particularly crave violence, but uses it as a means to an end. He’s not bloodthirsty nor does he particularly find murder palatable, but he’s willing to do it as painlessly as possible in order to get ahead. “It’s a metaphor for business — it’s cutthroat but has to be done,” he said. The trailer opens with a robbery pulled off during a mob-packed back room card game. The trailer continues with intermittent moments of Pitt’s character, Jackie Cogan, meandering sveltely through hails of bullets and high-stakes banter. Watch the trailer on YouTube .
Celeste and Jesse Forever star Rashida Jones and director Lee Toland Krieger at the after-party for their film Wednesday night in NYC. Photo by Amanda Schwab/Starpix . Indie pic Celeste and Jesse Forever played Sundance back in January and achieved that much sought-after hallmark of success: an acquisition deal with a big-name distributor – in this case the venerable Sony Pictures Classics. But the movie that had some false starts before shooting began did make it to the screen and if a gala screening of the film last night in New York is any measure, it should see more success. In addition to cast members Rashida Jones (who also co-wrote the film) and Rebecca Dayan as well as writer Will McCormack and director Lee Toland Krieger, Anne Hathaway , Paul Rudd , David Schwimmer , Amy Poehler , Aziz Ansari , Andy Cohen and Max Greenfield turned out for the event, hosted by The Peggy Siegal Company and the International Rescue Committee. A second-floor bar with a view of the Williamsburg Bridge at the Hotel Chantelle in Manhattan’s Lower East Side played hotspot for the after-party where Hathaway and others mingled with cast and invitees. Krieger told Movieline that producer Jennifer Todd approached him with the Celeste and Jesse Forever script back in 2010. “I thought I’d just read it, but then I fell in love with it,” he said. “I am a big Woody Allen fan and especially love Husbands and Wives . Both movies are full of comedy, but they’re about heartbreak.” Earlier at the screening, Sony Classics co-president Michael Barker praised Krieger and the cast. “We came to realize they’re major talents,” said Barker. “We think with this movie, you’re in the hands of a major American independent filmmaker.” Also in the crowd were Brady Corbet ( Simon Killer ), Olivia Culpo (Miss USA), Nadia Dajani ( Delocated ), Abby Elliott ( SNL ), Alex Karpovsky ( Girls ), Matthew Settle ( Gossip Girl ), Joey Slotnick ( Too Big to Fail ), Tennessee Thomas, ( Scott Pilgrim vs the World ), Mike Nichols & Diane Sawyer. Sony Classics will open Celeste and Jesse Forever in New York and Los Angeles beginning this Friday; stay tuned for our Movieline chat with Rashida Jones. Plot: Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) met in high school, married young and are growing apart. Now thirty, Celeste is the driven owner of her own media consulting firm, Jesse is once again unemployed and in no particular rush to do anything with his life. Celeste is convinced that divorcing Jesse is the right thing to do, and if they do it now instead of later, they can remain supportive friends. While navigating the turbulent changes in their lives and in their hearts, these two learn that in order to truly love someone, you may have to let them go. View the trailer on YouTube .
Christopher Eccleston has quite the fan base. News that the former Doctor Who and 28 Days Later star will play supervillain Malekith the Accursed in the upcoming Thor sequel — as Deadline’ s Mike Fleming reported Wednesday night — set the Twitter-verse reeling today. Late Thursday morning, Eccleston was trending on the social media site, thanks to, it appeared, the many contributions of Doctor Who fans everywhere. Eccleston was the first to play the impish Time Lord when the BBC rebooted the series in 2005. He was succeeded by David Tennant, which prompted @teaspoonofsugar to tweet, “Christopher Eccleston in Thor 2? Does this mean David Tennant will be in Thor 3?” Based on illustrations of Malekith, Eccleston — a dead ringer for Men at Work lead singer Colin Hay — will be donning a flowing white mane, large pointy ears and two-toned blue skin to play the leader of the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim. (Say that three times fast without laughing.) His casting ups the probability that the Casket of Ancient Winters, which figured in the original Thor will make a return appearance in the sequel. In the Marvel comics series, Malekith used the Casket, which is capable of creating massive, brutal snowstorms, to bring Thor’s home, Asgard, to its knees. As Count Floyd would say, “Oooh, very, very scary!” The sequel, which will be directed by Alan Taylor ( Game of Thrones , Mad Men , Palookaville ), begins shooting in the U.K. later this month.
Yes, there is a triple-breasted hooker in Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake. If you happened to have missed the news posts and Comic-Con appearances (it was a lot of publicity for a three-line role), please rest assured that a futuristic working girl does indeed flaunt her unusually augmented bosom for Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), just as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. It’s one of the few callbacks to the hallucinatory nature of Paul Verhoeven’s wild-eyed, schlocky, terribly fun 1990 blockbuster, few other qualities of which this redo shares. The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre. Instead of Earth and Mars, this Total Recall world is split between the United Federation of Britain and the country formerly known as Australia, now called the Colony. (Reportedly the two were originally Euroamerica and New Shanghai, but in the spirit of the rest of the film any potential political commentary seems to have been neutered.) Most of the world has been rendered uninhabitable by warfare, and the remaining population clusters in and threatens to overrun these two cities, which are joined by a giant transportation device that travels through the center of the Earth and is called The Fall. The Fall, half space shuttle and half commuter rail, is the film’s most interesting idea, uniting the oppressive UFB and its head of state Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) with the have-nots in the Colony — as many of the latter, including our hero, travel to the more industrialized nation each morning to serve as cheap labor. Quaid shares an all-concrete studio in the Colony with his wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who like him heads out via The Fall to work every day. She’s in emergency services, he’s at a factory that makes the synthetic soldiers that serve as the UFB’s army. Quaid’s been having recurring dreams of a woman (Jessica Biel) trying to rescue him from a scientific facility. Exhausted by the grind of his day-to-day life, entranced by these nighttime visions in which, as he says, it “feels like I’m doing something important,” he stops by Rekall, a service that implants artificial memories of adventures that are practically like having done the real thing. He asks to be given the experiences of being a secret agent, which doesn’t go so well, because he may have actually been a spy in a past that’s been wiped from his mind. This Total Recall does away with the wonderfully queasy ambiguity of the 1990 film, in which we’re never sure if Quaid is a badass involved in a rebel conspiracy to decide the fate of the world or if he’s just a regular schmuck who’s become too fond of and given himself over to the illusion he purchased for himself as a bit of escapism. We never really doubt that Farrell’s Quaid/double-agent Hauser is experiencing a legit reality even when another character tries to convince him otherwise — there’s no sense, even when the trouble begins, that what happened at Rekall was anything but what we saw on screen, complete with an explanation for why the treatment might have triggered buried memories. It’s a shame, because that aspect of the first film allowed it to follow a typical movie arc while also carrying a pointed critique of it — how appealing, to learn you’ve actually always been one of the most important people in the world, that everything depends on you! Who wouldn’t find that more seductive than just being another working stiff filed away in a giant apartment block, even if choosing to believe it meant possibly abandoning the real world and demonizing your wife at the same time? As that wife, Beckinsale’s entertainingly indestructible and glowery, striding like a Terminator with an immaculate blowout down countless hallways while wielding a gun, and chasing Quaid over rooftops and along balconies after her cover as an enemy agent is blown (“I give good wife,” she sneers). Farrell and Biel are perfectly serviceable in uninspiring roles, while Cranston tries gamely to look like he could be the equal of Farrell in a brawl and Bill Nighy appears briefly as rebellion leader Matthias. The film flickers from fight scene to chase scene and back again, rarely pausing after the introduction for a quiet moment. Wiseman’s an adequate director of action, but only one or two of these sequences rise out from the ruckus of automatic machine fire — the standout involves The Fall and how gravity on the transport shifts when it passes through the Earth’s core. And while the sets and art direction are striking, with their multi-tiered urban landscapes, they also look familiar. The UFB is just a sleek, Minority Report future intent on taking advantage of the messily (and more Asian) Blade Runner esque future of the Colony. The synthetics are Star Wars battle droids by way of Tron . The floating car chase is awfully Fifth Element. This is a less cartoonish sci-fi vision, but to what end? The twists and turns of this convoluted tale of a guy who was bad but who may be able to reinvent himself as a better person thanks to having his brain scrubbed is fundamentally goofy, and it takes place in world that swarms with people but that only seems to have a handful of actual characters (when an important, dangerous attack takes place, Cohaagen of course heads it up in person, the way all world leaders do). These are elements that make sense when there’s a fair possibility the story might be all the protagonist’s indulgent delusion, but seem clumsy without it. Total Recall is an indifferent mean of whiling away two hours of your summer — but at least, unlike Quaid, you’ll be in no danger of getting lost in it. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Author, playwright, politician Gore Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills due to complications stemming from pneumonia, A.P. reports . His nephew said he had been sick for “quite a while” and had been living alone in the home when he passed away Tuesday. Vidal is remembered as one of the giants of the literary world as well as one of its first television-era celebrities. He was a prolific and argumentative writer, political commentator, novelist, essayist and screenwriter. He also acted on occasion, making a cameo appearance in Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma and in Tim Robbins’ 1992 political satire Bob Roberts . He voiced animated versions of himself in The Simpsons and Family Guy and appeared as himself in artist Francesco Vezzoli’s Trailer for the Reemake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula , a piece that was included in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Although Vidal wrote or contributed (in some cases, without attribution) to 14 screenplays, he is often remembered for his involvement in the controversial and problem-plagued Caligula , Penthouse founder Bob Guccione’s attempt to make a high-brow porn film. The film, which was directed by Tinto Brass, depicted the decadent rise and fall of the Roman Emperor, who was played by Malcolm McDowell. The movie also starred Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud and is considered the first major motion picture to combine both stars and scenes of pornography. Still a cult curiosity — and still banned in some countries — the film was originally titled Gore Vidal’s Caligula but the finished film bore so little resemblance to the writer’s script that he distanced himself from the picture and his name was removed from the title writer’s name was removed from the title in order to resolve a lawsuit Vidal filed against Guccione. Vidal was also an uncredited contributor to the 1959 epic Ben-Hur (the screenplay is credited to Karl Tunberg). In the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet , Vidal claimed the film contained homoerotic subtext, explaining that he had persuaded director William Wyler to direct actor Stephen Boyd as if he were a spurned homosexual lover. Charlton Heston later denied Vidal had much influence in the project. More recently, Vidal wrote the television movie Billy the Kid , which starred Val Kilmer, and the mini-series Lincoln . His play The Best Man is currently running on Broadway. He also twice ran for political office unsuccessfully. Despite his multimedia success, Vidal will be best remembered for his novels and essays. He published his first Williwaw when he was 20 years-old (the first of 26) in 1946 and followed it up with In a Yellow Wood the following year. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948) began a life-long quarrel with conservatives who took exception to the book’s open portrayal of homosexuality. His United States Essays, 1952-1992 won him a National Book Award in 1993, but he received relatively few honors considering the extent and reach of his writings, which also included Myra Breckinridge 1968, Duluth (1983) and Lincoln 1984. His fight with the political right infamously came to a head during the 1968 U.S. presidential campaign when Vidal and the late conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr tangled on national television. During a heated appearance on ABC News, Vidal dubbed Buckley a “proto-crypto-Nazi” and the furious National Review founder responded by calling Vidal, “you queer.” The two men continued to bash each other’s brains out in the pages of Harold Hayes’ Esquire — a showdown that eventually resulted in the two men suing each other for libel. During the 2000s, Vidal was the outspoken critic of another conservative force, the George W. Bush administration, which he accused of having expansionist policies. [Source: A.P. , Wikipedia ]
Ridley and Tony Scott know a thing or two about indelible movie scenes. So it’s not surprising that the filmmakers behind, respectively the chest burster scene in Alien and the “Bela Lugosi Is Dead”-accompanied blood-drinking scene at the opening of The Hunger would rely on an iconic single image to connect their A&E Network reboot of “Coma” to Michael Crichton’s original 1978 movie adaptation of Robin Cook’s novel about organ harvesting. With a nod to the late Joe Strummer, I like to refer to the image as Coma Girl, and if you troll the Internet or pay attention to mass transit bus advertisements, you’ve probably seen her: an apparently naked woman dangling in the supine position from a series of wires beneath the web address: “Comaconspiracy.com”. A photographic version of that graphic — which smartly manages to be both creepy and titillating in an S&M kinda way (back then, The Story of O was almost as popular as Fifty Shades of Grey is today) — was used in a movie poster for the ’78 film, and Guy Slattery, Executive Vice President of Marketing for A&E tells me that Coma Girl was intentionally used to connect the new production, which is a two-part miniseries, to the Crichton movie. “The original was so impactful and such an iconic image,” Slattery says. “The question was how could we update it and make it more of the moment.” To those ends, Slattery says his department went the graffiti route for the viral teaser campaign that involved “legal tagging” in New York and Los Angeles, and online clips in which, for instance, “hacktvists” post the graphic of Coma Girl on the Times Square Jumbotron to draw attention to mysterious goings on at the foreboding looking Jefferson Institute. Slattery explains that a subsequent campaign will feature actual “visualizations” of the hanging coma victims. “There are some very cool technological innovations that are used” in the A&E series, such as a silvery skin like “suit and feeding tubes” that are used to keep the coma victims alive. “I think fans are going to be blown away,” says Slattery of the series which will air over two nights, Sept. 3 and 4, and stars Lauren Ambrose, Steven Pasquale, Geena Davis, James Woods, Ellen Burstyn and Richard Dreyfuss. The marketing executive says the Scott brothers’ Coma will be a “modern telling” of Cook’s story. “It’s about corporations overstepping the bounds and putting profits before morality.” Cook’s story was ahead of it’s time in the late ’70s, and now more relevant than ever thanks to advances in medicine since then. Slattery also hinted that the A&E production may also reference another memorable scene in Crichton’s movie–in which an ill-fated janitor is murdered by electrocution and freaky blue sparks shoot from one of his eyeballs. “Without revealing too much, there is a creepy scene involving an eye socket,” he says. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Meet Hilton Carter. Writer. Director. All around Creative Genius. With the help of his partner Evan Guidera and under their Fresh Kill production company, Mr. Carter directed and wrote his short film Moth; the story of a young woman caught up in a world of drugs, based on Paul Delaroche’s painting ‘The Young Martyr”. The film is available on HBO now through August 31st…check it out! As Carter described “MOTH is a suspenseful short film about a troubled young model/starlet who “can’t find the right path, get it right at this moment.Drugs put her in a dangerous spiral that the viewer is not sure she will escape.” Escape or not, the film is well written and directed. While it may only be just under 15 minutes, it pulls you in with it’s immediate mood and undertone. Visually pleasing, the film and Hilton Carter are both worth watching.
Also in Tuesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs Miramax sells music rights to its film music; A thief in Mexico wearing a mask is holding up theaters playing TDKR ; Remembering Irish writer/journalist/playwright Maeve Binchy; And DreamWorks animation posts lower second quarter profits. Warner/Chappell Buys Miramax’s film music The music publishing wing of Warner Music Group is acquiring the masters and publishing rights for all film music owned by Miramax. “The Miramax music library contains music from Academy Award winners The Cider House Rules , Chicago , Cold Mountain and Frida , as well as Gangs of New York , Finding Neverland , Good Will Hunting , Chocolat , Sin City , The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and music from several hundred other Miramax films. Terms are not being disclosed. Around the ‘net… James Franco Boards Homefront Franco will join the cast of the Millennium Films action-thriller. Jason Statham is also starring in the film, which Gary Fleder will direct from a script written by Sylvester Stallone, Variety reports . The Dark Knight Rises Holds Solid in U.K. The Olympics opening ceremonies did not seem to result in a sluggish turn out for the latest Batman movie in host country, the U.K. The Christopher Nolan superhero pic took in £7.28 million ($11.412 million) across the pond over the weekend, for a 10-day cume of £30.55 million ($47.889 million), The Guardian reports . Masked Mexican Thief Hits Theaters Showing TDKR Officials in northern Mexico say a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun robbed two theaters showing the latest Batman installment Prosecutors in the Mexican state of Chihuahua said that a man went to ticket booths demanding the ticket money. No injuries were reported and the shows went on, AP reports . R.I.P. Maeve Binchy The Irish journalist and writer died yesterday at 72. Binchy’s books sold over 40 million copies with translations in 42 languages. Her work Circle of Friends was adapted into a 1995 film. Her radio drama work included the award winning ”Infancy” and ”Tia Maria”, which starred Oscar winner Kathy Bates, RTÉ reports . DreamWorks Animation Posts Lower Q2 Earnings Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted was the second quarter’s cash cow, but profits at the studio amounted to $12.8 million compared to $34.1 million in the time period one year ago. Revenue declined 25% to $162.8 million, THR reports .
Joined by series star Rupert Grint at the British Embassy’s Creative Content Summit, Harry Potter series producer David Heyman looked back on 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone , the first film in the lucrative J.K. Rowling boy wizard franchise, and revealed which parts now make him “want to cringe.” “The visual effects industry developed substantially over the 11 to 12 years of making the films. I look at some of the first film [made in 2001] and want to cringe,” he said, adding that later films in the series marked vast improvements on the screen and in the franchise’s behind the scenes technical infrastructure. Heyman also had issues with Warner Bros.’ merchandising campaign tied to the first film, reports Wired: He went on to say that for the first film there was so much merchandising that it was “shocking.” He said that he knew that Warner Bros. had gone “too far” when he saw Harry Potter toilet paper. However, since then, Warner Bros. has reined it in and produced a “really elevated, high-range program.” At least the studio didn’t go for Americanizing the very British tale — so British, Voldemort and Rowling made it into the Olympic Opening Ceremony — which Heyman says the suits wanted to do at one point: “Heyman was thankful that the movie franchise retained the Britishness of the books, after some movie execs initially considered moving the story to the United States with ‘cheerleaders and the likes’ but he said ‘that never rang true.'” [ Wired via Movie City News ]
The story of a man named Brady and his irritatingly chipper blended family is as much a part of ’70s pop culture as shag rugs and free love, maybe more; neither of those dated phenomena lived on in the popular consciousness as tenaciously, and exhaustively, as The Brady Bunch . The series already enjoyed five seasons, an afterlife in syndication, many lesser spin-offs, and — the true marker of any Hollywood institution — an E! True Hollywood Story . So who really thinks we need another Brady Bunch reboot? Vince Vaughn , that’s who! THR confirms that executive producer Vaughn and CBS are developing a rebooted version of the series that continues the cycle of marriage, divorce, and re-marriage centered around Mike Brady’s youngest kid, Bobby Brady, who’s now grown and building his own modern family. “The CBS effort would include Bobby and his new bride’s exes and, like the original, feature their kids from previous marriages, along with the couple’s shared child,” THR reports. Fine, fine. I can come to terms with a tenuously connected contemporary Brady Bunch spin-off made for the CBS primetime audience as long as nobody gets any funny ideas about making more movies. That said, I can’t say I don’t still chuckle at the sight of an airplane full of normal, sane people (read: AUDIENCE SURROGATES) telling the singing brood to STFU. [ THR ]
