When you get a chance, go read Dennis Hensley’s interviews with Elizabeth Berkley and Paul Verhoeven from the days before Showgirls was a cult cause célèbre. It’s worth every minute: “Oh my God, I just saw it like a week ago. You have to understand, I’ve been working at this since I was like 5 years old so it was pretty overwhelming. I sat in the screening room by myself. The lights went down and I started to cry because it was just overwhelming at first. I’m such a perfectionist, but a certain point, was able to get lost in the story, which was a good sign to me. I really thought that I was watching another girl.” Oh, you wish , honey. [ Dennis Hensley via The Hairpin ]
Remember that 1998 movie adaptation of the old British TV show The Avengers , starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman? Me neither, but set artist Stephen Morahan does — if only because he was reminded after working on this week’s Marvel blockbuster of the same name: “[I]t looks a bit odd on your resume. So, I made this before, now it’s something completely different. And when you talk about it, people don’t even know about the other film. it didn’t do very well. I mean, that’s another big difference, too. The original Avengers was a big flop. It bombed.” [ Huffington Post ]
Get excited: “After eight years, the Australian actor Paul Hogan, best known for his Crocodile Dundee movies, has resolved his dispute with the authorities there, who said he and his former manager, John Cornell, owed $156 million in unpaid taxes and penalties dating to the 1980s heyday of the film series. As the settlement was announced Mr. Hogan’s lawyer, Andrew Robinson, criticized the tax inquiry as a waste of taxpayers’ money, saying it may have cost more than $20 million. He also suggested that Mr. Hogan, who has largely been inactive in recent years, might soon be back with a new project. ‘Who knows, now that this monkey is off his back?’ Mr. Robinson said.” [ NYT ]
Get excited: “After eight years, the Australian actor Paul Hogan, best known for his Crocodile Dundee movies, has resolved his dispute with the authorities there, who said he and his former manager, John Cornell, owed $156 million in unpaid taxes and penalties dating to the 1980s heyday of the film series. As the settlement was announced Mr. Hogan’s lawyer, Andrew Robinson, criticized the tax inquiry as a waste of taxpayers’ money, saying it may have cost more than $20 million. He also suggested that Mr. Hogan, who has largely been inactive in recent years, might soon be back with a new project. ‘Who knows, now that this monkey is off his back?’ Mr. Robinson said.” [ NYT ]
It’s hard to say whether Sound of My Voice is a wholly bogus and pretentious indie enterprise or a weirdly compelling bit of low-budget storytelling. Probably it’s a little of both – this is the kind of picture that may often make you snort audibly, even as you’re wondering how the heck it’s going to resolve itself. And ultimately, even if the payoff isn’t quite what it should be, the picture leaves a faint chill in its wake. You probably won’t feel totally shafted for sticking with it – maybe just a little punk’d. Snuggly couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) have set out to make a documentary about cults, hoping to infiltrate one mysterious group in particular. The gang’s meeting place is a top-secret basement location; the faithful are ferried to and fro in a van, but they’re not allowed to see where they’re going. Once the loyal subjects have gathered, decked out in aggressively peaceful looking white yoga clothes, a mysterious creature appears in their midst. Her name is Maggie — she’s played by indie darling Brit Marling , who also co-wrote the script – and she greets her followers while hooked up to an oxygen supply. You see, Maggie is a refugee from the future – 2054, to be exact – and she’s come back to show the human beings she loves how to prepare for what lies ahead. To do this, she wears white leggings and swaths her long blond tresses in a white scarf. Because she’s allergic to modern food, she grows her own fruit in the basement. Also, she’s wearing massively chipped dark nail polish, the kind of WTF touch that makes you stop and wonder – WTF? Actually, Sound of My Voice relies heavily on just that kind of WTF-ness. Is Maggie a con artist, a master manipulator, as Peter and Lorna at first believe her to be? But when she appears to have read bits of Peter’s past as if they were tealeaves, doubt begins to creep in, driving the couple apart. Maggie certainly knows how to challenge her followers, urging them to eat apples tainted with something that causes them to throw up (the fruit is a metaphor for logic, you see) and serving them a post-fast repast straight out of Fear Factor (I won’t tell you what it consists of, but she seems to carry a supply of it around in a baggie). There’s also lots of sharing and hugging, Esalen-style, as Maggie probes the psyches of those in her midst, testing them to see if they’re worthy of the wisdom she’s carrying around in her futuristic noggin. Director Zal Batmanglij – also Marling’s co-writer — doesn’t attempt too many fancy tricks, other than dividing his movie into convenient, bite-sized chapters. He and Marling infuse the story with just enough slackerish suspense: You may not care much about the rather aimless lead characters, but you do want to know what this Maggie shaman is all about. That’s partly thanks to Marling’s off-kilter charisma, which appears to be equal parts nerd-girl intensity and beach-babe shrug. Marling garnered heaps of attention last year for Another Earth , a movie she both cowrote and starred in, and it’s clear to see she knows how to do a lot with a little. The question of whether it’s enough depends on your expectations, and it’s possible that people have taken Marling too seriously too soon, which in turn has led her to take herself too seriously. She certainly digs right into this enigmatic role, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find her weirdly fascinating, with her heavy eyebrows and serene, pillowy half-smile. Still, a bit of skepticism is a good thing when dealing with either cults or alleged wunderkinds. At one point in Sound of My Voice , Maggie’s followers urge her to sing a song from the future, and she obliges, reluctantly, with an a capella version of a sweet little ditty about life changing all around us. A guy named Lem is banished from the circle forever after he points out that, far from being a song from the future, the tune Maggie just warbled is actually a Cranberries hit from the ’90s. Lem just may be the hero of the movie. Similarly, the jury is still out on just what it is, exactly, Marling is trying to sell us. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Marvel and Disney’s The Avengers is set to close out the 11th Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday night, but the blockbuster has already started cashing in abroad, where it’s an early hit with audiences. The superhero blockbuster featuring Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson opened in 10 markets this week, earning a total of $17.1 million internationally. The haul included opening-day records in New Zealand and Taiwan, as well as new marks for a Disney release in Australia and Italy. As Bloomberg notes, the studio could use the hit after its recent $200 million loss on John Carter . [ Bloomberg ]
The latest feature to emerge from Britain’s Aardman Productions workshop, The Pirates! Band of Misfits , succeeds in spite of a faint but persistent sense of factory settings and finishes. Following their partnership with Sony Animation for last year’s computer animated Arthur Christmas , Aardman (whose co-founder, Peter Lord, directs here, along with Jeff Newitt) has returned to the stop-motion claymation that helped build the company name. It’s a strange thing, knowing that a movie was literally handmade and still feeling it is vulnerable to the glaze of mass-farmed entertainment. The story, adapted from the first two installments of a children’s serial by Gideon Defoe (who also wrote the screenplay), is the first source of this feeling. It’s 1837, and we meet the garrulous Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant, dining on his dialogue with impeccable form) as he resolves to enter an annual Pirate of the Year contest somewhere in the West Indies. Pirate Captain leads a ship of holy fools, each one sillier and more plainly named than the next. There is The Albino Pirate (Anton Yelchin), The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), and The Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman), among others. Pirate Captain’s rivals are announced with fanfare: Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven), the brash American, Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), the Jamaican cutthroat, and Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry), the… peg legged one. It’s all rather casual — not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own. Flashy introductions are made, but the set-up feels like that of a franchise coasting through its third or fourth installment. Pirate Captain cuts an inglorious figure—he lacks looting and pillaging chops but desperately seeks the validation of his co-pirates, who see him as something of a tragic clown. The Pirate with a Scarf plays ego-fluffer, insisting that real piracy isn’t about winning trophies, it’s about swashbuckling adventures and glossy beards. And Pirate Captain is certainly blessed with the latter: His facial hair is much discussed and much deployed, for good reason — it forms a perfectly sculpted pelt, with curls like browned fiddleheads. Much of Pirates! is as beautifully made, but you wouldn’t know it to look through the murkifying lens of 3-D glasses. About halfway through, around the time Pirate Captain attacks a ship carrying Charles Darwin (David Tennant) and is informed that his beloved parrot is actually a rare dodo bird, I slipped the glasses down my nose. Like many animated films with 3-D packaging, plenty of Pirates! doesn’t use the technology to much discernable effect. What you notice, then, is the way the animator’s work comes to life — begins to gleam, even — without the darkening of the glasses. I watched as much as I could of the rest of the movie this way, and began to resent the shots where the effects were central, forcing a reversion to three dimensions. In this case the depth of the actual fields involved in making the film are not worth what they cost in the color and texture of the clay figurines. As the images begin to feel drained of their luster, the story starts to spark with more of Aardman’s antic spirit. Devout monarchists will want to skip the part where Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton), with whom poor Darwin is painfully besotted, goes into martial mode to acquire the dodo bird Pirate Captain is lured into presenting to a scientific conference in London. A deadpan monkey whom Darwin has trained to speak with cue cards is a clever touch, and Grant and his inspired line deliveries only get better as Pirate Captain sells his soul for a bit of glory and then faces off with a Queen who runs a rare animals eating club and hates pirates for being so sentimental and passé. The sight of Queen Vicky slashing and burning in her bloomers in the set-piece finale make you wonder what might have happened had the movie not felt obliged to dull its shine for anyone’s sake. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
While officials in Kazakhstan were initially perturbed by Borat and the adventures of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh journalist in America, now one leader has thanked the filmmakers for a subsequent boost in tourism to the former Soviet republic. “With the release of this film, the number of visas issued by Kazakhstan grew tenfold,” Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov told the nation’s parliament. “I am grateful to Borat for helping attract tourists to Kazakhstan.” Very nice! [ IMDb , AFP ]
“There’s this expression that it’s written three times: during the script, when you’re filming it and when you’re editing it. And I believe that’s wrong. I think it’s written once, in editing — and everything is clay for that. And I wanted to learn about it — I thought it would be neat . It’s like learning to play the piano and I need a lot of clay. And I thought if I did one movie out of these three … whatever. But I’m never going to show it to anyone. So I think that’s why they were cool with it. By the way: It doesn’t make fun of Star Wars at all.” Also: Close Encounters is apparently Grace’s next. Now you know. [ Huffington Post ]
Exciting news for Gina Carano fans: According to a THR report, the Haywire star/former MMA fighter is in talks to join the cast of Justin Lin’s Fast & Furious 6 . Carano would play a member of the Diplomatic Security Agent working under Dwayne Johnson’s agent Luke Hobbs, who was last seen in the post-credits of Fast 5 sniffing out the trail of Dominic Toretto & Co. Details on the plot are still under wraps, but give how the last sequel ended it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to hope for a potential… girl fight , if you will, between Carano’s character and a certain franchise favorite. Do you believe in fighting ghosts? [ THR ]
