In this weekend’s Margin Call , Demi Moore plays a workaholic risk management exec whose reckless peers at a fictional Wall Street investment firm help ignite the 2008 economic crisis. So how did a Brat Packer from the ’80s transform herself into a high powered finance exec?
Friday! Huzzah! Time to gather some friends for a fun night out getting beaten senseless on a Vancouver sidewalk — or , if partying Shia-style isn’t your bag, feel free to just trawl through the lively memories gathered in Movieline’s Week in Review. It’s all here, with more delight to come in the days ahead from the winsome wit of Louis Virtel. Don’t be a stranger, and have a great weekend!
Both Joan Fontaine and her big sister Olivia de Havilland are thriving well into their nineties, and even though they still don’t appear to be speaking to each other, they remain two of Hollywood’s most esteemed thespians ever. (Watch de Havilland’s “Melanie Remembers” interview from 2004’s Gone with the Wind re-release — just lovely!) On the occasion of Ms. Fontaine’s 94th birthday, let’s take a stroll into the Oscar winner’s filmography and find her greatest cinematic moment.
So you might remember that Angelina Jolie wrote and directed a feature — a real good-time-party-blast called In the Land of Blood and Honey , about the illicit romance between a Muslim woman and a Serbian troop at the peak of the war in Bosnia. Now there’s a trailer.
This weekend, Paul W.S. Anderson brings his own adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Three Musketeers to movie theaters. This is hardly the first feature film foray for the titular trio of sword-fighting adventurers though. The Three Musketeers , first published in 1844, has been interpreted for the screen over twenty times in the past century and framed as everything from a silent film to a Russian musical to a Charlie Sheen star vehicle. In celebration of this weekend’s latest rendering of the classic, let’s re-examine the Musketeers ‘ long cinematic history.
There’s a danger in dismissing Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre as lightweight just because it takes the most generous attitude possible toward human nature. Being jaundiced about the world is easy — it takes relatively little energy to expect the worst from everyone. But it’s harder, as the dour Finnish filmmaker has shown us time and again, to allow for the possibility of surprise in the way people behave and treat one another, and the rewards are far greater. Kaurismäki’s comedies are characteristically charcoal-toned — never quite black — but the unapologetically hopeful Le Havre is more silvery-gray. It’s an open-hearted Eeyore of a movie.
Kathryn Bigelow ‘s upcoming movie about the team of Navy SEAL s who killed Osama bin Laden was originally set to debut right before election day 2012, prompting U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) to call for an investigation of the extent of the Obama administration’s assistance to the project. Now, that point seems moot; Sony has rejiggered its release schedule so that the Mark Boal-penned picture will debut after the Presidential election, and possibly not until 2013. Then again, with today’s news of Muammar Gaddafi’s death , Obama might not need as much help raising the victory flag, pre-election. [ NYT ]
The long-gestating live-action adaptation of the popular manga and anime tale Akira has been resuscitated at Warner Bros. months after Albert Hughes dropped out of the director’s chair . Is this good news for diehard fans of Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk saga? What if the front runner to play Kaneda is Tron: Legacy ‘s Garrett Hedlund ?
This weekend, Carla Gugino and Ellen Burstyn storm the multiplex with The Mighty Macs , an inspiring action drama about how women’s basketball coach Cathy Rush (Gugino) trained a small Catholic college team to unlikely victory in the ’70s. In celebration of this upcoming show of cinematic she-sportsmanship , Movieline has compiled (what we consider to be) the nine best women’s sports movies.
Happy Wednesday! Also in this midweek edition of The Broadsheet: Meet the burglars inspired by The Town … Steve Guttenberg still hoping for Police Academy reboot… Channing Tatum may wrestle with Foxcatcher … Make Facebook enemies with Johnny English … and more.