Sofia Coppola has joined the list of filmmakers who will be attending the inaugural First Time Fest fllm festival in New York. The writer-director daughter of Francis Ford Coppola , whose latest film, The Bling Ring , is expected to be released this year, will screen and discuss her dreamy 1999 directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides . Coppola will be joining Nancy Savoca ( True Love ), Christine Vachon ( Poison , which she produced), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jack Goes Boating) and Darren Aronofsky ( Pi ). The Noah director will receive the John Huston Award for Achievement in Cinema at the festival, which will be hosted by the Players Club in the Gramercy Park section of New York from March 1 through 4. FTF founders Johanna Bennett, the actor and philanthropist daughter of singer Tony Bennett, and producer Mandy Ward ( Palestine Blues ), conceived of the festival to celebrate first-time filmmakers, and the Grand Prize winner will see his or her film released theatrically by Cinema Libre Studio in at least one major city (New York or Los Angeles) with the option for the expansion. The spoils also include DVD and digital release and international sales representation. (Cinema Libre distributed Oliver Stone’s South of the Border and is developing John Perkins’ bestseller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man .) Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you are a previously godless East coaster who’s found himself prostrate and praying for electricity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy , here’s a suggestion: Visualize Denzel Washington when you say those Lord’s Prayers. If God makes his will known through the people, then it turns out that the Flight star would be the top choice to portray Jesus Christ in a movie about the New Testament. By the way, this does not rule out God being a woman, since we all know that Denzel is so handsome and talented that the female God would want him to play her son so she could get closer to all that hotness. (Memo to God: Do not underestimate the power of Pauletta !) Washington is far and away the top choice, with 21 percent of the vote, seven points higher than Daniel Day-Lewis , who is the actor of choice when it comes to portraying god-like historical figures. Al Pacino finishes third, which suggests that Jesus says “Hoo-ah!” a lot, while Ryan Gosling , who evokes the most “OMGs” among the young female crowd would be fourth. (Come to think of it, if Baby Goose grew his hair out, he would look a bit like the Son of God). The biggest surprise of the poll: Woody Allen , who, cinematically speaking, was the King of the Jews back in the 1970s, beats out Philip Seymour Hoffman , who is generating Oscar buzz for portraying a man who appoints himself the god of a self-invented religion in The Master . Apparently, Americans do not want their big-screen Jesus on the beefy side. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
There’s a scene in the Paul Thomas Anderson’ s enthralling new film The Master where Lancaster Dodd ( Philip Seymour Hoffman ) — founder and leader of a cult-like movement called The Cause — instructs his “guinea pig and protege,” the aptly named Freddie Quell ( Joaquin Phoenix ) to face another man hurling taunts and insults at him without losing his hair-trigger temper. I felt like I was being put through a similar test on Tuesday night when, after being invited to a hastily arranged 70-millimeter advance screening of The Master at the wonderful Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, I arrived at the will-call table to find a crowd that, had they been carrying torches, would have been at home in the angry villagers scene of Frankenstein . The reason for their anger became apparent shortly after I joined the throng: A woman with bold eyeglass frames and a nervous look on her face announced to the mob that there were simply no more tickets left to hand out. Those who did not make the cut were instructed to sign up for a Thursday screening of the film. I managed to get Eyeglasses’ attention and explained that, as instructed on Monday, I had confirmed my attendance. She shrugged her shoulders and replied that the screening had been overbooked and my tickets had simply been given away. To add insult to injury, just a few seconds before Eyeglasses’ you’re-shit-out-of-luck announcement, one of Arianna Huffington’s minions slunk up behind me, invoked the HuffPo priestess’ name, and received an envelope with tickets. As a longtime observer of the Harvey Weinstein school of stealth marketing, I found the scenario more fascinating than infuriating because in New York preventing a large group of culture addicts from seeing a movie that everyone’s been talking about is actually a sneakily smart way of building interest in the all-important New York market. Now, I’m not saying the Weinstein Company hosed all those people on purpose, but New York is all about access, and last night, getting into The Master became a bit like getting into Studio 54 in the late 1970s. For most Gothamites, rejection is a tonic: When someone tells us we can’t do, see or experience something, we redouble our efforts and, better yet for people like Weinstein, in our quest to succeed, we recruit our friends and infect them with the same passion. Without going into details, that’s exactly what I did, and after seeing The Master , I’m glad I didn’t take no for an answer. (And, by the way, for a screening in which all of the tickets had been given out, I didn’t have any trouble finding a primo aisle seat at the front of the balcony.) To use a term from the film, I am still processing The Master. It’s an intelligent and emotionally complex film that doesn’t provide any easy answers the way that so many films do today. But if I can’t quite commit to saying it’s a great film, I can say that it has more than a few moments of greatness — and those usually occur when Joaquin Phoenix is onscreen. Phoenix gives the performance of his career so far as the feral Freddie Quell, a naval veteran, who can make moonshine out of torpedo fuel and anything else on hand. (“You can’t take this life straight, can you?” Dodd’s wife, played by Amy Adams, tells Quell at one point.) Freddie is the product of an alcoholic father, an institutionalized mother and a traumatizing war, and Phoenix literally embodies these psychic wounds while portraying a lost soul who is menacing, heart-breaking and darkly comic — sometimes all at once. The New York Times reported that Phoenix studied films of animals in captivity to prepare for his role, but his performance, which is pure id, brought to mind other references. The hunched, arms-akimbo way in which Quell stands recalled Martin Short’s Ed Grimley character from Saturday Night Live , and Groucho Marx. His squinting, sneering tomahawk-like face made me think of Hammerhead from The Amazing Spider-Man comics. When I wasn’t marveling at Phoenix’s performance, I found myself thinking that all of this talk about The Master taking on Scientology is a marketing MacGuffin. Yes, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a L. Ron Hubbard-like character, but this movie is really about the relationship between two kindred spirits who, in some respects, are Freudian polar opposites. Quell is pure id, while Dodd is mostly superego, and each seems to yearn for some of what the other man has. For me, one of the key lines of the movie comes near the end when Dodd tells Freddie that if he can find a way “to live without serving a master –any master,” he should report back. Like I said, I’m still processing The Master , and I plan to see it again as soon as I’m able. Thanks to Harvey Weinstein, I suspect I’ll be waiting in a long line. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter
Director reveals that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is based on L. Ron Hubbard, but not the organization itself. By Kevin P. Sullivan Philip Seymour Hoffman in “The Master” Photo: he Weinstein Company
In the latest installment of One-Sheet Wonder , a column going deep on the best, worst, weirdest and other milestones of contemporary movie-poster art, Movieline takes a look at the new poster for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master . — Ed. The Master , Paul Thomas Anderson’s enigmatic follow-up to There Will Be Blood , has been trailed by speculation and assumption for months — Is it about Scientology? Is Philip Seymour Hoffman portraying L. Ron Hubbard in a biopic capacity? — and every question has been met with denials and mystery. But each new marketing piece sheds more light on what we’ll get. After two beautiful , beguiling teaser trailers, a beautiful, beguiling one-sheet for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master debuted today over at Ain’t It Cool News . But like the clips before it, the poster tells us almost nothing about the movie. (Or do they?) The first trailer was peppered with Scientology-ish personality questions, and this poster seems based on an abstraction of an e-meter, the device used in Scientology auditing. The close-up of a barreled piece of silver metal seems like an unfinished soda can. But take a look at the tubes in this photo (pictured right) and it’s not a far leap to see the poster as a macro view of one of those e-meter tubes. But then what’s that dirty, flat-champagne-like liquid draining out of the poster (notice the drops at the top)? It could reference Hubbard’s Naval background and his life on a yacht, and there’s a vague nautical element to the fonts. Or it could refer to the flushing of alcohol that comes with the Scientology auditing process. Whatever the case, it creates a nice refraction in the word “MASTER,” bisecting it and putting the halves increasingly off kilter as you go from left to right, a reflection of the schism hinted at in the second trailer (” Just say something that’s true! “). This probably won’t be the only poster for The Master , but don’t expect a second one-sheet to bathe the plot in sunlight. There Will Be Blood had two domestic one-sheets, and while the teaser was far more engaging than the final art neither gave the game away. Time will tell whether The Master follows suit, but like with TWBB the mystery surrounding the film — encapsulated in this excellent first poster — makes the wait to see it interminable. Dante A. Ciampaglia is a writer, editor and photographer in New York. You can find him on Twitter , Tumblr , and, occasionally, his blog .
Francis Lawrence’s Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire has nabbed yet another notable name for film fans in Amanda Plummer, the stage/TV/film veteran perhaps best known as the diner-robbing “Honey Bunny” in Pulp Fiction as well as for her roles in The Fisher King and So I Married an Axe Murderer . Plummer will take the role of a Tribute and former Games winner whose eccentricity belies an uncanny intelligence as she competes with Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss & Co. in the arena. Plummer will play Wiress, an older Tribute called to compete in the Quarter Quell, the all-star death match of sorts that propels the second installment of the series. She joins fellow cast newcomers Philip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch Heavensbee and Jena Malone as fellow Tribute Johanna Mason in the sequel, slated for release on November 13, 2013. [ THR ]
Oscar-winner qualified to take on complicated role of Plutarch Heavensbee in second ‘Hunger Games’ film. By Kara Warner Philip Seymour Hoffman Photo: WireImage
The first trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen ‘s The Dictator had Megan Fox and Kardashian jokes, but those pop culture touchstones have been replaced by Anna Faris and terrorism gags in the new, longer trailer. An upgrade? Eh, sure. Maybe. Or not: Faris’s brunette pixie ‘do does make her look particularly adorable, but juxtaposed with her natural poise Cohen comes off as a poor man’s Adam Sandler . Like, hammy Zohan-lite Sandler. Here’s why Cohen’s Dictator schtick hasn’t really worked thus far, from the film footage that’s been released: When Cohen is 100 percent in character — clueless, masking any hint of self-awareness, as he was best in Borat or while Kim Jong-illing Ryan Seacrest recently at the Oscars — he absolutely slays. That unapologetic ignorance is key, and that’s how The Dictator seems to start out. But throw in those rom-com cliches and the lessons in humility and/or humanity that will surely come once Admiral General Aladeen falls for Faris’s hippie love interest, redeems himself, etc. (as the trailers suggest he will) and he’s instantly less interesting. Is it too late to cut together a version of The Dictator made entirely of Obama footage, Aladeen at the Wadiya Olympics, and scenes of Cohen frightening bigoted Americans with his terrifying “otherness?” Because that’s the movie I want after seeing all this learning lessons BS. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Looks like indie film financier/Tweeter Megan Ellison’s promise came true : According to a Box Office Mojo update, Paul Thomas Anderson ‘s The Master has been added to the fall 2012 release calendar, to open on October 12 — just in time for an awards run! No official word from distrib The Weinstein Co. on the date or final title for the Philip Seymour Hoffman-starrer, nor mention of if/when the pic will first debut at one of the season’s prestigious film festivals. While you await more info, mark your calendars… [ Box Office Mojo via The Playlist ]
Critics argue that script doesn’t match the talent level of the A-list cast in George Clooney’s political drama. By Kevin Sullivan Ryan Gosling in “Ides of March” Photo: Sony Pictures George Clooney returns to the director’s chair for the first time since 2008’s “Leather Heads” in one of the first big releases of Oscar season with “The Ides of March.” But then again, we might just be interested in Ryan Gosling’s third major role this year. Everything about “Ides of March,” from the critically lauded cast and director to the political story line seems to scream for awards season attention, but does it live up to high expectations? Critics can’t seem to agree, but the general consensus is that the script doesn’t meet the talent level of the cast, which is pretty fantastic all around. We’ve rounded up some of the reviews to give you a better idea of what to look for this weekend at the movie theater. The Story “Mr. Gosling’s consultant, Stephen Meyers, would seem to be a true believer. Speaking of his candidate, Gov. Mike Morris (Clooney), he tells a reporter, played by Marisa Tomei, ‘He’s the only one who’s going to make a difference in people’s lives.’ (At that point it’s hard to know if this is true, or if the movie thinks it’s true, since some of Morris’s positions — i.e. that we don’t need Arab oil any more — sound awfully fatuous.) And Steve’s boss, Paul Zara, the campaign manager played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, would seem to be cynicism incarnate. The problem is that the news the story brings may be perfectly accurate, but it isn’t particularly original, and it’s certainly not what we hunger for in these dispiriting, cynical times.” — Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal The Direction “Clooney has a keen eye for a good story. With this, his fourth turn as a director, he has chosen wisely. While perhaps not as nuanced as 2005’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ it’s more assured than 2008’s ‘Leatherheads’ and more accessible than 2002’s ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.’ It grows a little overheated but works particularly well as a morality tale about power and its tendency to corrupt absolutely.” — Cynthia Puig, USA Today The Screenplay “What is surprising, and disappointing, is that the plot borrows, not once but twice, from the hoariest tropes in the book of smug clich
