On Friday night, the icons surpass the sky-high expectations set by their 2006 festival appearance. By Mary J. DiMeglio Radiohead’s Thom Yorke performs at Bonnaroo Friday Photo: C Flanigan/ Getty Images MANCHESTER, Tennessee — With two very different albums under their belt since they last graced the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival’s farm with their fabled 2006 appearance, Radiohead more than lived up to the hype with their Friday night return at the 11th annual event. Starting out with The King of Limbs’ propulsive opening cut, “Bloom,” the icons heavily favored their newer tracks when they brought their world tour to Tennessee, also adding “Give Up the Ghost,” “Lotus Flower” and “Morning Mr Magpie” to the set. In that legendary 2006 show, during which they delighted with an epic 28 songs, they tried out six new tunes that successfully made their way onto 2007’s In Rainbows . They represented that diverse album Friday night with fan favorite “15 Step,” “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “Nude” and “Bodysnatchers.” The recording’s “Reckoner” inspired amateur fireworks. With Amnesiac ‘s “I Might Be Wrong,” their dancy live version of Hail to the Thief ‘s “The Gloaming” and Kid A rave-up “Idioteque,” the set list was decidedly more energetic than the mellower selections they presented at the Coachella festival in April. Halfway through the set, just as casual fans were no doubt wondering whether they were going to hear anything familiar, “Karma Police” gave them the chance to participate in the “This is what you get when you mess with us” singalong. Another highlight was the “True Love Waits” lullaby seguing into “Everything In Its Right Place,” when a ponytailed Thom Yorke had everyone clapping along as he took to his keyboard. Radiohead also performed two new songs: “Identikit” and the groovy “Supercollider,” which Yorke said was “for Jack White.” As their scheduled midnight end time came and went, Yorke announced, “We bid you all farewell,” before answering the wishes of many by ending with “Paranoid Android,” dedicating it to “all the people we can’t see in the back.” Earlier in the day, Tune-yards jammed out the sax solo on “Bizness,” Sharon Jones commanded the main stage in the afternoon in a shiny bright-pink cocktail dress and Foster the People brought their feel-good tunes. Friday also featured Feist, Ludacris, Major Lazer, and Mos Def and Talib Kweli joining forces as Black Star. Jam-band mainstays Umphrey’s McGee, Flying Lotus and Dumpstaphunk, who busted out David Bowie’s “Fame,” kept fans dancing until the early morning. Still to come this weekend: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Skrillex, Alice Cooper and the Roots will take the stage Saturday (June 9), and the Beach Boys, Phish, the Shins, Fun. and Bon Iver will wrap things up Sunday. Are you at Bonnaroo? Share your review in the comments below! Related Videos Bonnaroo 2012 Gets The Party Started Related Photos 2012 Bonnaroo Music And Arts Festival Related Artists Radiohead Foster the People Ludacris
The troubled actress was rushed to an L.A. hospital Friday following a collision in her black Porsche along Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. Her car slammed into the rear of an 18-wheeler at approximately noon local time, totaling her car in a mishap that TMZ described as a “bad car accident.” She apparently did not go to hospital via an ambulance and word on her condition is pending. A Witness told the website that Lohan was driving the car.
Both of the trailers that preceded the screening I attended of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted featured burps as punchlines. Like, each one built to and then peaked with a bug-eyed animated creature’s belch. After the first burp the little kids a few rows ahead of me erupted in jubilant, little kid laughter; the second was met with bored silence. If even your short-limbed target audience doesn’t like being played for a chump, how to keep them entertained across two previews, much less two sequels? The Madagascar franchise offers a unique response to this problem in that it consistently borrows enough from the modern children’s movie playbook to get your guard up (or your eyes glazed), and yet it just as consistently manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own. Which is to say: Nobody burps in Europe’s Most Wanted . I felt pretty sure nobody would, having been drawn into the first movie, which I watched on a babysitting assignment back in 2005, despite myself. That movie had the shamelessly Shrek -derivative zebra voiced by Chris Rock and the reliance on pop-dance montages to fill the gaps, but there was also sharp writing, an actual storyline, and clean, distinctive computer animation. For its third installment, in addition to going 3-D, DreamWorks added Conrad Vernon ( Shrek 2 , Monsters Vs. Aliens ) to the franchise’s directing team of Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, and Noah Baumbach, of all cats, was brought in to co-write the script with Darnell. The result is almost exactly as good as it needs to be – no better and no worse. Where the norm is grimly assembled factory line products, that counts as a success. Structured more explicitly as a serial than most franchises, Europe’s Most Wanted begins right where the second film ended – with Alex the congenial lion (Ben Stiller) and his posse of Central Park zoo refugees re-installed in Africa, and the penguins and chimps headed to Monte Carlo with a windfall of loot. Alex soon becomes wistful about New York, and he and Marty the zebra (Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), and the trio of lemurs (Sacha Baron Cohen, Andy Richter, and Cedric the Entertainer) plan to head to follow the others and re-group for a voyage “home.” The first twenty minutes or so don’t bode well: Action and kids’ movies that lead with an elaborate chase tend to feel a little desperate, even if, as in this case, they serve to introduce an unkillable gendarme deliciously voiced by Frances McDormand. Captain Chantal DuBois is a nightmarish villain, from her rocket boobs and Gallic sneer to her ghoulishly sharp nose. Once Alex and Co. attract the wrong kind of attention in a Monte Carlo casino, DuBois and her crew (whom she rallies at one point, quite hilariously, with a quivering rendition of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”) are on their scent for the rest of the film. Once the enervating pace lets up a little, Europe’s Most Wanted settles into the engaging silliness that keeps ‘em coming back for more. In a clutch, Alex and Co. take refuge on a circus train, where they try to pass as performing animals. Vitaly the Siberian tiger (Bryan Cranston playing the proud, damaged Russian), Gia the cheetah (Jessica Chastain in a silky, indeterminately European accent), and Stefano the Italian sea lion (the genius Martin Short with a touch of Topo Gigio) lead a circus stuck licking old wounds and adhering to old ways. Circumstance leads Alex to take over the circus, with the hope that it might take him back to New York, and there ensues a solid stretch of involving character work (Vitaly, devastated by an old injury, needs to regain confidence; Stefano and Marty bond over finding their bliss) and an intriguing (if slightly outdated) storyline that challenges the group to re-inject passion into the same old song and dance and pits the liberating, American way of doing things against constraining European tradition. But it’s the details that wind up sustaining adults through these things: The sequence in which Cohen’s King Julien strikes up a romance with a massive bear in a tutu is so silly it hurts, and all along there are little gifts – throwaway lines involving a borscht dependence, fleeting sight gags, and consistently inspired line readings – to keep you feeling goofy. Were it to calm down even half a notch, the moments in Europe’s Most Wanted that threaten to make it more than a fun way to suck back a soda might have room to bust a few moves of their own. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Also for Thursday morning’s look at news headlines, Kevin Smith will embark on a tour promoting a Slamdance film, Obama cha-chings at an exclusive fundraiser in L.A. with A-listers, Matthew Modine lands a role in Steve Jobs pic and New York’s Stony Brook Film Festival set to bow this summer with No God . Prometheus Heads to IMAX Theaters Friday in N. America The Ridley Scott-directed movie will feature a larger aspect ratio of 2.0:1 versus the traditional 2.39:1 ratio. Domestically, the film will be released in 298 theaters beginning Friday, June 8, simultaneous with the film’s North American release. Internationally, the film debuted in select territories last week and will be expanding to additional theaters through the coming weeks for a total of 123 theaters confirmed to date. Kevin Smith to Tour with Slamdance’s Bindlestiffs The Clerks director will support Andrew Edison’s high school comedy under the “Kevin Smith’s SModcast Pictures Presents” label with Phase 4 Films. The tour will kick off its theatrical tour June 12th in New York City. In the film, three high school virgins, suspended from school on a graffiti charge, flee to the city to live out the plot of The Catcher in the Rye Bindlestiffs had its world premiere at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival and Phase 4 will release the film via VOD June 19th. Around the ‘net… George Clooney to Direct The Yankee Comandante Focus Features is nabbing the rights to the story which appeared in the May 28th edition of The New Yorker under the same title. The story is about William Alexander Morgan who helped Cuba’s Fidel Castro and his band of rebels to overthrow dictator Batista and reached the level of ‘Comandante,’ the only other foreigner besides Argentina’s legendary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Deadline reports . Glee Creator Hosts Star-packed Obama Fundraiser The President attended a $40K per couple fundraiser attended by 70 people including Julia Roberts, CAA’s Kevin Huvane and Bryan Lourd, Glee star Jane Lynch and Reese Witherspoon at the home of Glee creator Ryan Murphy and his partner David Miller’s house, Deadline reports . Matthew Modine Boards Steve Jobs Pic Modine will play John Sculley who lead Apple in 1983 after Jobs picked him as CEO and then fired Jobs two years later. Ashton Kutcher stars as the late Apple founder in the movie that Joshua Michael Stern ( Swing Vote ) will direct, THR reports . World Premiere of No God to Bow Stony Brook Fest Terry Green’s No God No Master starring David Strathairn will open the 17th Stony Brook Film Festival, taking place in Stony Brook, NY July 19 – 28. Other highlights include doc Side by Side narrated by Keanu Reaves and director/star Julie Delpy’s Le Skylab , Variety reports .
Jane Fonda shows up so infrequently in movies these days that it doesn’t matter if they look potentially good or dismal: Even when the performances (not to mention the movies around them) don’t quite work, Fonda always gives you something to watch. That’s certainly true in Bruce Beresford’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding , an aimless if good-natured picture that casts Fonda in the role of a Woodstock-dwelling, ugly-art-making hippie-dippie mom who welcomes her estranged and very uptight daughter – played by Catherine Keener – back into her mother-earth arms. Her goal: To get her offspring, and her offspring’s offspring, to loosen up and start getting it on. What’s that you’re saying? You really don’t want to see Jane Fonda in twirly Grateful Dead skirts and dreadful ethnic earrings, urging the younger folk to get in touch with their inner Alex Comfort? Neither did I. But the more I think about Peace, Love & Misunderstanding , the more I marvel that anyone would even cast Fonda, the most iron-willed of actresses, in this sort of role. None of it quite works, but it seems Beresford did his damnedest to try to pull it off. As the movie opens, the marriage between rich city people Diane (Keener) and Mark (Kyle MacLachlan) is clearly on the skids. Mark is the kind of guy who proclaims at a dinner party that all of Eugene O’Neill’s plays could easily be cut in half. How anyone could share a bed with this boob, let alone not murder him in his sleep, is beyond me, but Diane is crestfallen when Mark asks her for a divorce. She packs up the couple’s two teenage kids, awkward adolescent Jake (Nat Wolff) and luminous alien child Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), and heads to her mother’s house upstate – even though, we soon learn, she can’t stand the woman who raised her, a free spirit named Grace (Fonda) who lives on a ramshackle but very expensive bit of hippie real estate adorned with hideous sculptures (which she makes herself, natch) and roaming chickens. Diane is a high-strung lawyer type who resents her mother for not having given her enough structure, guidance and security while growing up; Grace – who also, incidentally, sells pot on the side – just wants her daughter to chill out. She also doesn’t think it would be a bad idea if Diane got together with the local hottie, a woodworker – yes, ladies, a man who works with his hands! – played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. But that’s not all: Grace also wants her grandchildren to enjoy the pleasure and freedom of human sexuality, and there are several mildly embarrassing scenes in which she counsels the young ’uns on how to get things cooking with their respective crushes (played by Marissa O’Donnell and the unnervingly good-looking Chace Crawford). If the van’s a rocking’, don’t come knockin’. Grace is the kind of woman who not only keeps chickens, but allows them to wander into the house. It must be said, though, that these are very clean, pretty chickens, and next to Fonda, they were my favorite part of Peace, Love & Misunderstanding . To watch Jane Fonda cradle a speckled puff of tawny feathers, all the while radiating a sort of businesslike affection – well, that’s something to see. But the rest of Peace, Love & Misunderstanding doesn’t go down so easy. The script, by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert, wanders along very familiar trails, and even though Beresford tries to keep things clicking at a reasonable clip, the thing moves like a pair of too-long bell-bottoms dragging in the mud. Keener, an actress who’s usually great fun to watch, can’t seem to muster much enthusiasm for her extremely constrained character, and can you blame her? But again, at least there’s Fonda. Fonda’s last two movies, Garry Marshall’s 2007 Georgia Rule and Robert Luketic’s 2005 Monster-in-Law, were ridiculous little things, though there’s some faint hope looming ahead in the form of Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming show The Newsroom . Meanwhile, in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding , we need to reckon with the idea of Fonda as a woman who lets it all hang loose – which, as brilliant an actress as Fonda may be (and her radical politics aside), is a pretty big stretch. Still, this stroke of miscasting is fascinating to watch by itself. Fonda isn’t soft enough to play this kind of character, but she wraps herself around the task like an anaconda. When it comes to letting her freak flag fly, she’s damn serious.
Though he plays one of the great roués of literature – the social climbing, bloomer-dropping hero at the center of Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel – the focus on Robert Pattinson in Bel Ami is notably above the belt. This is certainly true in the literal sense, where first-time directing team Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod lavish attention on Pattinson’s extraordinary face, even get a little lost in it at times. But it also feels like the source of a larger lack – that of the libidinous physicality and charismatic breadth of a well-rounded scoundrel. Like Madonna’s recent W.E. , the look of Bel Ami is polished to a fine, if somewhat compensatory gloss. Even the prostitutes in the Parisian bar where Georges Duroy (Pattinson) washes up after his stint fighting on the Algerian front are styled like Moulin Rouge extras. A run-in with his former superior (and current newspaper man) Charles Forestier (Philip Glenister) at that bar yields the penniless Georges an invitation to a most fortuitous dinner. Donnellan and Ormerod, both veterans of the UK theater, give some cheek to the scene that follows, in which the beauteous Georges makes his social debut, and his future conquests are introduced only to align like a three-pineapple jackpot. George can’t believe his luck, and neither can we: Forestier’s formidable wife Madeleine is played by Uma Thurman; the wife of newspaper owner Rousset (Colm Meaney) is played by Kristin Scott Thomas; and the group’s pet, a lonely society wife named Clotilde, is played by Christina Ricci. Pattinson’s lips seem to visibly redden as the women take their bows, but the hope of watching him unleash a few eternities of Edwardian frustration in a highbrow bodice-ripper begins to dissipate as Georges proves to be more a man of reaction than action. When Madeleine proposes a newspaper column for Georges at dinner, he looks on with a smirk; when she writes the inaugural column for him during their first meeting à deux , informing him besides of her total disinterest in being his mistress, the camera lingers on a similar expression. Whatever feeling or calculation lies behind it is certainly well disguised, and the gap between Pattinson’s plentiful reaction shots and their meaning only widens as the film goes on. The women take to Georges immediately, though his knack appears to be less for insinuation than good timing. Clotilde is in the market for a lover, and lets a sumptuous apartment for their trysts. Meanwhile Georges’s ghostwritten column is a success, though the men see him as an empty waistcoat and Forestier in particular treats him with disgust. When his new position is jeopardized and Georges has to start scheming in earnest, his moves are sudden and poorly integrated. The hand-delivery of a basket of pears to Mme. Rousset seems to restore his job, and the idea that Georges is driven by a determination to abandon his peasant roots is most convincing when he spells it out for Clotilde. Characterization feels like an afterthought, and is only tended to when it becomes a necessity of the plot. And yet on the whole Bel Ami is highly watchable. As is often the case in costume pictures especially, the degree to which different characters are convincingly of the world of the film varies. Thomas, for instance, is at once tragically and comically lovely as the good, religious wife seduced out of her right mind. She can telegraph that world in a glance and a few words. Thurman has a tougher time with Madeleine; although she makes a shattering indictment of Georges near the end, her character in particular – the ambitious political player stymied by her sex – demonstrates an endemic problem with the script (by Rachel Bennette) and the direction: The best performances seem to inhabit a story that the filmmaking doesn’t bear out. Executive-produced by Simon Fuller (the American Idol creator is described in the press notes as being in the business of “world-class entertainment properties and icons”), at times Bel Ami feels like someone made an elaborate pretense of convincing both Pattinson and the audience that there’s more to the film than his pretty face. But what a face: Classically handsome one moment, darkly sensual the next, then almost grotesque in the wrong light, then back to boyish and unsullied. I haven’t seen David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis yet, but if there is one director who might get a handle on that face and put its chameleon planes to proper use, it might be him. Although his face is his fortune in Bel Ami , Pattinson feels ill used, his raw talents still waiting for not just the right role but the right director. In that way, one of the most welcome of the film’s twists – watching a young man engage in the Victorian bloodsport of making a good marriage – has a separate resonance. Something tells me a more perfect concord awaits. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Twilight / Snow White and the Huntsman star Kristen Stewart comes off as admirably self-possessed (“I don’t care about the voracious, starving shit eaters who want to turn truth into shit”) in Vanity Fair, even when bemoaning the photograph that changed her life: “You can Google my name and one of the first things that comes up is images of me sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe with my ex-boyfriend and my dog. It was [taken] the day the movie came out. I was no one. I was a kid. I had just turned 18. In [the tabloids] the next day it was like I was a delinquent slimy idiot, whereas I’m kind of a weirdo, creative Valley Girl who smokes pot. Big deal. But that changed my daily life instantly. I didn’t go out in my underwear anymore.” [ Vanity Fair ]
People with a strong sartorial sense know the difference between what’s elegant and what’s merely elaborate. It’s not the same in the movie world, where big and overcomplicated is so often mistaken for better, when really it’s only…big and overcomplicated. Ridley Scott ’s Prometheus , designed as a sort-of prequel to the director’s 1979 terror-in-space aria Alien , is elaborate all right. But it’s imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity – it doesn’t feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars – but it doesn’t inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either. Prometheus has been one of the most anticipated pictures of the summer, but its lackluster payoff is summed up perfectly by one of its chief characters, a scientist who travels a long way from Earth in the hope of meeting the allegedly superior beings who created us humans: “This place isn’t what we thought it was.” [ Some spoilers follow. ] That character, Elizabeth Shaw ( Noomi Rapace ), is an archeologist who, in one of the movie’s early scenes, circa 2089, stands hand-in-hand with her partner and beau Charlie Holloway (the exquisitely, painfully dull Logan Marshall-Green ) as the two gaze in wonder upon an Earth cave drawing they’ve just discovered. The pictogram shows a couple of unearthly creatures standing tall and pointing at something-or-other. Are they gods who created us, or just random visitors? Shaw thinks they may be the former, and she’s eager for a meet-and-greet. “I think they want us to come and find them,” she says, voicing one of those really bad ideas that make the world of science fiction go ’round. Before long the two have joined a crew of 15 others, all headed to an undisclosed destination in space where they will freely and joyfully act upon yet more bad ideas, including packing a severed alien head into a space baggie and reaching out to touch a slimy tadpole-penis-head thing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The others aboard the all-too-appropriately named Prometheus include a tall, icy businesswoman named Vickers ( Charlize Theron ), a representative of the corporate behemoth that’s funding the trip; the ship’s captain, Janek (played by the appealing, casual Idris Elba); David ( Michael Fassbender ), an android a la Ian Holm’s character in Alien , who has learned a healthy handful of ancient languages as a way of possibly communicating with whatever godlike forebears the crew may encounter; and a random Asian guy who wanders around idly in the background of a few shots until, inexplicably — mini-spoiler alert — he becomes one of the story’s heroes. (This disposable Asian is played by Benedict Wong, who also appeared in Duncan Jones’ 2011 Moon .) There are a bunch of others – including some dumb geologists/biologists (Rafe Spall and Sean Harris) and a doctory-scientist type (Kate Dickie) – but the cast of Prometheus suggests that 17 crew members on a movie space ship is about 10 too many. (The Nostromo , after all, carried 7, and Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon made it easy to distinguish one from another.) But Prometheus , both ship and movie, is overloaded in every way: Scott and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof have packed the picture full of noble themes, most of them having to do with the way our yearning to understand the unknown jostles uncomfortably against our desire to explain everything through science. “I just want answers, babe,” the logic-mongering Holloway tells the dreamier Shaw, though this is before – and here, take note of another mini-spoiler alert – a wriggly wormlike thing starts poking out of his eyeball. What do Shaw and the others discover on the mysterious planet to which they’ve trekked? They make their way into a cave where the air is actually breathable – they lift off their bubble helmets and take in deep gulps of the stuff, which seems inadvisable, but what the heck? Deep in the cave’s recesses they find a magnificent hallway replete with majestic murals and a large sculpture surrounded by a formation of conga drums covered with sweaty spores. Prometheus features a host of effects designed to make you say, “What the heck?” and yet none of it stirs real curiosity, awe or dread. The crew also encounters, of course, some variations on the magnificent spoodly pinky-gray creatures designed by H.R. Giger for the earlier Alien pictures. Perhaps these thingies are supposed to be bigger, more impressive and more realistic, whatever that might mean. Yet there’s a business-as-usual quality about them, and they herald their presence openly rather than lurk menacingly in the shadows, as if announcing cheerfully, “You expected to see us, and here we are!” That’s not to say there aren’t some lovely effects in Prometheus , including a sequence in which a group of hologram ghosts appear as shimmery dots and dashes of light – they rush toward and through our intrepid explorers, on their way to, or away from, something. But we never find out who they are or what they’re running toward or from. In fact, there are dozens of loose ends in Prometheus , hanging like so many squirmy, dangly tails. Fassbender’s android commits a significant, malicious act for reasons that are never made clear: We know he has no soul, and thus probably no conscience, but his actions seem like the result of some deeply human traits — Scott never bothers to explain. The geography of the ship is carelessly delineated: Creatures show up in one passageway or another – it’s never clear what room or area they’re coming from. One of these slimy, willfully malevolent wrigglers emerges at a significant climactic moment, and it’s unclear whether it’s a random critter or a larger version of a baby we’ve seen earlier – the lapse represents a missed opportunity, a possible means of fleshing out some of the movie’s ideas about the relationship between gods and the creatures they create (or destroy). Scott is trying to make sure Prometheus is about something, and his ideals may have distracted him from the more prosaic task of just getting on with the storytelling. When Brian De Palma presented, with Mission to Mars , a much more passionate, and more narratively sound, version of this sort of interplanetary spiritual idealism, it was treated as a “bad” science fiction movie. Prometheus , on the other hand, is tasteful even in the midst of all its squirm-inducing gross-outs, and that’s a liability: It’s impossible to have tasteful passion. The actors mostly seem lost here: Rapace comes off as a doll-like naïf, pretty but wholly lacking in charisma or even science-fueled ardor. Guy Pearce appears in heavy age makeup which, if you ask me, is a total waste of a perfectly good Guy Pearce. Theron and Fassbender have much more presence: Theron, at least, gets to suit up and fire a flamethrower – the vision of her big bubble-helmeted head perched upon a body that seems to consist mainly of two lily-stem legs is something to behold. And Scott gives Fassbender the quietest, most poetic sequence in the movie: Early in the picture, the robot David wanders the ship while the rest of the crew are still deep in their hypersleep dreams. He busies himself with assorted tasks, and then sits down before a massive wraparound screen, where he watches Lawrence of Arabia with rapturous admiration. David finds a physical, if not spiritual, twin in O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence, a model for the man he’d like to be, if only he were a man at all. But Scott doesn’t, or can’t, sustain the eerie, resonant beauty of that sequence. Prometheus isn’t a piece of junk. It feels as if Scott has tried very hard to please us, his audience, in an honest if costly way. He surely knows how high the stakes are: With Alien , Scott gave us one of the great science-fiction films of all time, a picture that was at once glorious and austere; when I looked at it recently, I was struck by how wonderfully slow-moving it was, and yet every minute is taut. But Prometheus is a world apart, a far more unwieldy picture that tries hard to defy this new, noisier age of movies and doesn’t have the agility or the suppleness to do so. You can practically hear Prometheus groaning under the weight of its ambitions; it’s a far cry from the sound Scott was going for, the music of the celestial spheres. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
This just in from Disney HQ: After bashing records across the globe, The Avengers will go from puny Earthbound box office domination to the final frontier, screening for six lucky multinational cosmonauts currently in orbit: “Marvel Studios announced today that they arranged with NASA to transfer their record-breaking blockbuster film Marvel’s The Avengers to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, which will uplink the film to the International Space Station (ISS), currently orbiting 220 miles above Earth. The film will then be screened for the space station crew’s exclusive enjoyment.” (Take that, Pentagon !) Keep an eye out for Loki up there fellas, eh? [Press release]
Filmmaker Chris Eyre made his name with his 1998 debut Smoke Signals , a delicate indie adapted from a short story by Sherman Alexie about two young men living on the Coeur D’Alene Indian Reservation who go an a road trip to retrieve the belongings of one’s recently deceased estranged father. It was a small, wistful thing that offered a look at characters and a community that don’t get a lot of time on screen. Hide Away, Eyre’s newest work — since Smoke Signals he’s made four features that have mostly headed to TV — is in the same emotional vein as that first film, but heads away from the rez for a setting that’s more figurative and characters that are more generic (by choice, though it’s also a problem). It’s a slender story of mourning that manages some lovely bits of mood while also being dreary and a little preposterous in its spareness. Josh Lucas does a heroic amount to ground Hide Away in real feeling in the lead role, an unnamed man who is in mourning for reasons we slowly start to understand, one related to the wife and kids we see him with in gauzy flashbacks. “Are you divorced?” people ask him. “No, I’m not,” he responds numbly. He’s told by the man from whom he buys a boat at the start of a film that a lot of divorced guys apparently do what he’s doing. He doesn’t know anything about boats — what he’s looking for is an escape, a refuge — which is why he ends up with a sailboat in barely functioning condition, the Hesperus, named for the evening star. Arriving in a black suit like he either fled straight from a business meeting or a funeral, the would-be mariner pokes around the decrepit vessel on which he plans to live, and starts learning his way around. Hide Away , which was written by Peter Vanderwall, was shot and is set in a real place — on Grand Traverse Bay in Michigan — but the film strips away most identifying details, leaving the dock on which the man’s ship is moored to seem like an outpost at the end of the world. The cinematography, by Elliot Davis, makes the place look fancifully lovely, with its still, reflective water and open skies, its winter storms and cloud banks. There’s a town nearby — the man heads in sometimes to buy groceries or booze — but he doesn’t really interact with it, having chosen solitude. A few people come and go around the dock, including a guy (Jon Tenney) who actually is divorced and using his recent boat-ownership to get women, but otherwise the man’s alone. Lucas is saddled with a lot of scenes in which he’s by himself on screen, and for the most part does an admirable job of conveying someone who’s so haunted by grief that he needed to leave the world behind without actually talking about what he went through. His moments of grief — staring out, sleepless, at night; drinking himself into a stupor at Christmas while lit-up boats past by — feel rough and believable, especially in the way he courts death by acting carelessly while never actually wanting to do the deed himself. Lucas turns the man’s repair of the ship into a series of bits of physical comedy — running out of the shower after it breaks, trying to raise the sail, setting off smoke alarms when starting a fire in the stove. He makes the repetition of work into something believably soothing, makes it seem like a process through which you could genuinely start to heal. But all the interactions the man has with the few visitors he encounters and friends he makes are leadenly infused with meaning. There’s the beautiful waitress (Ayelet Zurer) at the restaurant by the dock who seems to have taken up residence there exclusively to offer comfort sex and a more maternal caring to the broken wanders who end up nearby. There’s the older man (James Cromwell) who offers words of wisdom with regard to his own sorrow — it’s “not a recipe I recommend a young man follow.” There’s the former work colleague (Taylor Nichols) who drops by to insist the man come back to his software company, offering to set him up to telecommute. And there’s the pretty check-out girl (Casey LaBow) who inexplicably comes to him for shelter after her boyfriend beats her. The entire world seems there only to patiently nurture the man back to mental health — as if he’s in some kind of extremely elaborate sanatorium in which patients are led to think that this whole recovery-by-way-of-fixing-a-sailboat thing was their idea from the start. Hide Away has more clunky moments than it does elegantly minimalist ones, the worst of which is the glimpse of what actually happened to the man’s family. It’s over-the-top and unnecessary, given that we’d already gotten the idea about why the guy feels such guilt and grief. In shaping a film so deliberately around things left out, it would have been better to give the audience the benefit of the doubt and leave a little more mystery to the nameless man and his pain. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
