What? We ruined a perfect 0% on Rotten Tomatoes for this? “[Katherine] Heigl herself does an okay job in the role. She never quite pulls off the Jersey persona but she comes close enough. With her dyed brown hair and slightly more curvy appearance she certainly looks better than I’ve ever seen her look. I never thought of her as that attractive before, but she’s quite sexy here. She should definitely keep the dark hair. Despite the weakness of the mystery and the failure of the humor to be as funny as it should be, there is just enough of everything plus a dose of likable charm from Heigl to keep the story moving along.” Get me my pitchfork and torch, please . [ Three Movie Buffs ]
“Only on afternoons when the cinema offers retirees half-price tickets has there been much of a crowd for The Iron Lady , the controversial film about Mrs. Thatcher, who is now 86. A therapist, Lauren Hall, 24, had her own perspective. ‘People who come to Grantham are more interested in Isaac Newton,’ who attended school in the town from 1655 to 1661 and has a statue in the town’s main square, she said. In case the visitor had not grasped Newton’s place in history, she offered a prompt. ‘Did you know he invented the cat flap?’ she said.” Huh. This can only benefit Viola Davis , right? [ NYT ]
What, ya didn’t know rapper/personality Ed Lover was a closet cinephile-slash-Oscar pundit? To borrow from the man himself: “C’mon, son!” In a searing video rant over at NextMovie, he reacts to this year’s batch of Oscar nominees and glaring snubs (what, no Drive , Harry Potter , or “Dame Julie Dench?”) and pretty much takes the words out of my mouth. “They had the Academy Award nominations the other day at like 7 o’clock in the damn morning… C’mon, son!” Among the salient points from Lover: – The three nominees of color this year (Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, and Demián Bechir) played minorities in servitude of some sort or another. – “Janet McWho?” – What about Ryan Gosling in Drive ? – “So, Academy: You’ve got 9 mothaf***in’ nominees, and you can’t find room for Harry Potter ?!” Props to NextMovie for this bit of Oscar race brilliance. Ed Lover drops his “C’mon Son” knowledge here . Meanwhile, check out S.T. VanAirsdale’s ongoing Oscar musings in Movieline’s Oscar Index . [ NextMovie ]
“I’m trying to work in studio movies, but they won’t hire me. I get feedback from my agent saying, ‘She’s too much of an indie queen.’ And then on the other side, my name doesn’t get the financing to do a movie over $1 million. And I’m called ‘the indie queen.’ So it’s really a challenging path because I know so much about the indie side of the business. Because I grew up in it. It’s like I’m back in junior high here at Sundance . There’s John Cooper and Trevor Groth and we all grew up together, you know? But it’s different times. And this stuff gets projected onto me. People are like, ‘You’re here every year, you do so many indie movies.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I did Broken English five years ago.'” [ indieWIRE ]
Remember Patton Oswalt’s Oscar-snubbee Twitter fan fiction — specifically the part wherein Tilda Swinton and Andy Serkis rocked out together to “Life on Mars”? Well, Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert or someone might want to get on that, if Swinton’s priceless reaction is any indication. Per Vulture : “Oh, how fun! Is he there now?” she said. We explained that it was merely his Twitter feed. “But is it real? We should go! Where is he?” she asked, grabbing for her keys and heading for the door. Actually, we explained, he was kidding. “Oh, he’s making jokes. What a shame. I think we should do it for real. How faaabulous!” she said. When she read the tweet, “Serkis & Tilda are singing ‘Is There Life on Mars?'” Swinton said, “That’s a dare! That’s an excellent dare. Okay, Patton, you’re on. Let’s get Andy and let’s go for it!” Genius . Or maybe Swinton could finally fulfill her promise to portray Conan O’Brien on Conan , introducing her and Serkis? There would not be enough health insurance in the world to cover all the exploded heads. [
I ran into Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean Means tonight at Sundance in a packed RV decked out with a mini tiki bar, neon lights, and a booming sound system — also known as the RVIP Lounge and Karaoke Cabaret , a tricked-out mobile karaoke mecca and the jammingest place you’ll find in Park City all week. Since the word’s out ( read his account of the karaoke madness ), here are my two cents: You can have your Drizzy Drake concerts and Bing Bar bashes, but for my money there’s no better way to thaw out from the snow and mingle with Sundance strangers than while belting a karaoke jam or two. The thing about socializing at Sundance is that it can be incredibly frustrating and annoying if you do it the old-fashioned way. Park City imports non-film folks every year who show up to ski by day and get past velvet ropes at night, turning Main Street into douche-infested waters at sundown. Bars are overcrowded and parties all look the same after a while, so thank goodness for alternatives… like recreational vehicles outfitted with karaoke rigs and loud microphones. The RVIP Lounge hails from Los Angeles, courtesy of master KJ/party hosts Kestrin Pantera (pictured above), Jonathan Grubb, and Eva Kim where it zooms from place to place picking up eager singers. When the RVIP folks announced they were Park City bound this year, my heart leapt; no film festival, at least stateside in my experience, is complete without some sort of karaoke. (And while I haven’t quite figured out why movie people love karaoke so much, it’s an inarguable constant in this world, the social lubricant that unites many folks in the film community at large.) Friday night the Tim & Eric crowd sang as the intrepid RVIP navigated the icy mountain roads of Park City, but Saturday the mobile karaoke lounge held court near Sundance HQ. Look for them there Sunday as well – they’ll be the ones in the RV illuminating the night sky with bright colored lights. (Make sure to check their whereabouts on Twitter , this week in Park City and back in L.A.) Inside the RVIP you’ll find a cross-section of Sundance-goers – industry folk, journalists, filmmakers. The songbook is decent, the company even better, and when the place gets packed it takes on a life of its own. “How did I get to this magical place? What the hell is happening right now?” you may wonder as the entire RV erupts in song and someone plays air guitar on a light saber as you sing ditties like 2Pac’s “California Love” or Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” It’s all part of the wonder that is the RVIP, which may have single-handedly saved the 2012 Sundance party scene. [Bonus: This week in addition to the RVIP, at least one other karaoke event is on the docket for the remainder of Sundance 2012 as CAVU Pictures hosts a karaoke throwdown Monday, January 23 for film and industry folks.] Got a hot tip on Sundance 2012 karaoke? Drop Jen Yamato a line on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter . Get more of Movieline’s Sundance 2012 coverage here .
Every so often festivals feature films that so offend the sensibilities of audience members that post-screening Q&As take an ugly turn, with upset viewers voicing their beefs, and loudly, straight to the filmmakers in attendance. This year that provocation came in the form of Craig Zobel’s Compliance , a drama based on an outrageous real-life crime that drew immediate backlash from some in attendance. Is being this year’s The Killer Inside Me / The Woman a buzz-building coup for the film? According to multiple media reports, the animosity emerged fairly quickly following the screening of Compliance , which follows the employees of a fast food chain as a caller claiming to be a police officer remotely instructs the investigation of a teenage clerk, leading her manager to detain her, humiliate her, and worse. The lengths to which Zobel’s film go to depict these events, based on an actual crime, prompted some moviegoers to cry foul. “Sundance, you can do better!” one woman reportedly shouted. According to The Hollywood Reporter , the comments went from admonishing to uncomfortable for star Dreama Walker. When Walker attempted to talk about her role and performance, which required her to be at least partially nude for a large portion of the film, a man in the audience yelled: “Your body is pretty appealing,” leaving Walker visibly shaken as a few other audiences members joined in with catcalls directed toward the cast and director. And then: “The Compliance Q&A has people yelling across the room,” Tweeted Twitch Film’s Ryland Aldrich. “Claims of misogny. ‘I’m a f*ggot! I don’t get off on her body!'” The brouhaha is reminiscent of the public receptions in recent years to Lucky McKee’s The Woman , which was accused of misogyny during its Sundance premiere Q&A, and Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me , which provoked numerous complaints for its brutal violence, including a scene in which Jessica Alba is viciously attacked. Those festival controversies earned attention and piqued curiosities, making those films instantly more interesting must-sees in the days that followed, and arguably floated some additional interest when both hit theatrical release. The same is already happening for Compliance , whose publicity reps sent out media alerts today calling it “the provocative movie festival-goers are buzzing about.” Which is fine, but Zobel, for his part, must have known his film would test boundaries from the start given the material. It remains to be seen if further screenings of Compliance this week prompt more outbursts, not to mention whether or not the “provocative” reputation can propel it further towards eventual post-festival success without overshadowing its actual content. [ THR , @ RylandAldrich ]
If Kim Novak sincerely thought that hearing music cues from Vertigo in The Artist was tantamount to artistic “rape,” then wait until she gets a look at the expropriation binge underway at Press Play . The site, known for its terrific video essays on all things film, is in the waning hours of a ” Vertigo ed” contest that has found Bernard Herrmann’s celebrated “Scene D’Amour” theme applied to everything from Star Wars to Freddy Got Fingered to — praise God — Jackass 2 . Check out the latter, priceless, obviously NSFW clip below, and find dozens more (and/or submit your own) videos over at Press Play. Happy Friday! You were done working for the most part anyway, right?
“ That was excruciating,” exhaled director Kieran Darcy-Smith as the lights came up on the Sundance opening night premiere of his first feature, the Australian dramatic thriller Wish You Were Here . The theater buzzed with appreciation, sure enough, and the film’s emotional blows strike as sharply thanks to strong performances by Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price. But movies like these almost always prompt that irksome question: Are we all at risk of suffering a case of the film festival goggles? Wish You Were Here follows two Aussie couples (Edgerton and Price, Antony Starr and Teresa Palmer) who go on holiday in Southeast Asia only to see one of their party go missing, with ramifications that ripple out like shockwaves when they return home with fried nerves and secrets galore. Shot beautifully in Australia and Cambodia, it’s a slow-burn character drama that begins as a missing persons tale before switching gears to domestic drama/paranoia thriller in its rapidly escalating last act, doling out bits of information about what really happened on that last drug-fueled night. It’s easy to see why Wish You Were Here was chosen to open the festival; just two years ago the Aussie import Animal Kingdom premiered at Sundance, leading the charge for a new wave of Australian cinema. Wish You Were Here unites Animal Kingdom actors Darcy-Smith and Edgerton, whose star has risen considerably in the past few years, under the Blue-Tongue Films banner they founded with Edgerton’s brother Nash. But while there’s a lot to like in Here , it doesn’t live up to David Michôd’s explosive 2010 feature debut. The film flashes between moments in time: Married couple David and Alice (Edgerton and Price) and Alice’s sister Steph (Palmer) struggle to adjust to normal life but are plagued by memories of the night Steph’s boyfriend Jeremy (Starr) disappeared. Are there clues to his fate in their foggy recollections? Did he willingly leave everything behind, or did something awful happen to him? What begins as a somber exploration of survivor’s guilt – inspired by a similar event that happened to mutual friends of Price and Darcy-Smith when two couples went on vacation and returned minus a member of their party – unfolds into a far less realistic thriller that throws almost every cliché imaginable at the screen. Still, the performances are so uniformly impressive that they often overshadow the plot machinations, if only for those times when we’re lost in the crush of a devastated face, or a desperate, tragically human moment. Edgerton in particular does great subtle, tortured work; his David is a family man roiling with conflicting emotions, slowly losing his grasp on his own psyche. Price, who co-wrote the script with husband Darcy-Smith, admitted to writing the film partly to give herself a great role; as a result Wish You Were Here ably highlights her talents as Alice, who finds her marriage to David unraveling in the wake of their friend’s disappearance. Unfortunately, in the service of giving the leads meaty acting bits to play out, the film relies too heavily on soap opera-like plot devices, shortchanging characters like Palmer’s reckless Steph in favor of upping the dramatic complications. (Palmer nevertheless does her best with a role that deserves more exploration and explanation.) Some of these moments hit hard, and effectively, but it says something that with an 83-minute runtime Wish You Were Here feels exhaustively laden with too many twists and turns and melodramatic events. In the immediate afterglow of Sundance’s opening night (which saw three additional films premiere to mostly positive reactions: Searching for Sugar Man , Hello I Must Be Going , and Queen of Versailles ) the audience reaction to Wish You Were Here was quite warm, with Twitter reactions ranging from mixed to positive over its performances and cutting emotional impact. But fast-forward to an eventual release and I can see it being mashed, wrongfully, into the couples-on-holiday-thriller subgenre previously populated by your Turistas and Perfect Getaways . It’s possible the “From the stars of Animal Kingdom ” tag bumps it beyond simple genre categorization, but does it deserve to be placed into the same terrain as that vicious breath of fresh air? Not quite. Here is a beautifully made but flawed directorial debut for Darcy-Smith and certainly an acting showcase for its cast, but it demonstrates the cardinal rule of watching movies at festivals, where anticipation and atmosphere can inflate a film’s profile: Don’t blow your wad on a film that’s not quite up to snuff when the festival’s just starting. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter . Find all of Movieline’s Sundance 2012 coverage here .
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 .
