Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively’s secret wedding September 9 wasn’t actually official. The pair tied the knot, legally, five days later in Charleston, S.C. Say what now? Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds married in an intimate ceremony a week ago Sunday, but legally, the happy couple wasn’t hitched until September 14. Documents show Reynolds, 35, and Lively, 25, applied for a marriage license on Thursday, September 13, and actually got married the following day. The law mandates that there be a 24-hour waiting period between filing an application for a marriage license and the time the license can be issued. A couple is also required to apply for the license in person. The cost of a marriage license: $70. This certainly helps explain how they kept it secret . Everyone involved was asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, from the children’s choir to the cake makers, and phones were confiscated at the door. Congratulations again to the newlyweds! And well played!
The film: Telling Lies in America (1997) Why It’s An Inessential Essential: Two years after Showgirls got screenwriter Joe Eszterhas ( Basic Instinct , Burn Hollywood Burn: An Alan Smithee Film ) blacklisted, the wily self-promoter returned with Telling Lies in America . Lies , based on a semi-autobiographical story, is somewhat similar to Showgirls in that they have common themes. Both films treat selling out and deception as an integral part of getting ahead in show business. But Lies , directed by Guy Ferland, is obviously not as garishly sarcastic as Showgirls is (few films are…). It’s refreshing in that sense to see Eszterhas show genuine affection for his con men and hucksters in Lies rather than alternately mock and then half-heartedly show affection for his desperate protagonists. Set in heartland America during 1960, Telling Lies in America stars a young Brad Renfro as Karchy, a high school-aged immigrant that dreams of becoming a disc jockey. Karchy hates the catholic school his father Dr. Istvan Jones (the ever-reliable Maximilian Schell) has sent him to and is, as stiff-necked Father Norton (Paul Dooley) delights in reminding him, on the verge of flunking out. Karchy’s dream of becoming a disc jockey is his ticket away from his mundane troubles and possibly even his means of scoring with older woman Diney Majeski ( Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart). Thankfully, DJ Billy Magic (a winningly sleazy Kevin Bacon) is looking for a young dupe/assistant. Johnny and Karchy, who changes his name to Chucky, are thus able to form a symbiotic relationship. They each lie and take advantage of each other but not necessarily with malicious intent. All praise is due to Eszterhas, whose name is plastered on Lies ‘s opening credits (though “Joe Eszterhas Presents” undoubtedly didn’t mean what Eszterhas wanted it to mean at the time), for giving an ostentatiously moral bildungsroman an appreciable level of sophistication. Everybody cheats everybody else in Lies , even Diney, a female protagonist that Eszterhas allows to be intelligently ambivalent about her relationship with Karchy. Thanks to Eszterhas’s sensitive scenario and Flockhart’s semi-nuanced performance, Diney isn’t a tease but rather just uncertain about what she wants. Magic is similarly complex. He starts out as a loser scrounging for work but never once blows his cool so much that he shouts or pouts his way out of a confrontation. The affection Eszterhas has for his characters is salient and it makes Telling Lies in America proof that he’s not just coasting on the reputation he got from working with Paul Verhoeven. How the Blu-Ray Makes the Case for the Film: The only special feature on Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray release of Telling Lies in America is a B-feature of Traveller , another 1997 drama about, well, telling lies in America! Bill Paxton and a very young Mark Wahlberg co-star as Bokky and Pat, a pair of grifters that are also members of a community called, “travellers.” Against the advice of his fellow travelers, Bokky takes Pat in and the two form a father-son bond. Bokky and Pat’s relationship is one of several ways that Traveller is more generic than the idiosyncratically thoughtful Telling Lies in America . In Traveller , Bokky makes the same mistakes that got Pat’s biological father killed, including falling in love with one of his own marks (Juliana Margulies!). Pat thus has to save Bokky, his surrogate dad, from his own worst impulses. Traveller therefore suggests that being jaded is a good thing, which decidedly sets it apart from the relatively straight-laced Lies . Still, the two films make a good double feature as they both feature snappy dialogue and similarly polished takes on very seedy characters. Simon Abrams is a NY-based freelance film critic whose work has been featured in outlets like The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Vulture and Esquire. Additionally, some people like his writing, which he collects at Extended Cut .
If you’re going to watch Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds traipse through the stinker that is Safe House , at least have fun with the unofficial Safe House Drinking Game, courtesy of the fine folks at Film School Rejects : “TAKE A DRINK WHEN YOU SEE: a flag, an explosion, a close-up on a computer screen… TAKE A DRINK WHEN SOMEONE SAYS ‘Frost,’ ‘house,’ ‘file’ or ‘files,’ the name of a city…” Might I also suggest taking a swig every time you find yourself on the verge of a shaky-cam migraine ? Prepare to get wasted . [ Film School Rejects ]
This week on Khloe & Lamar, the tandem took a brief hiatus from having emotional talks about babies to get all emotional about Odom’s return to L.A. “I got a game coming up versus the L.A. Lakers, my former team,” he says of his first game back. “It’s going to be a little weird playing against them.” How did Lamar do against Kobe Bryant, Metta World Peace & Co.? It almost didn’t matter, given the warm reception he was given at Staples Center. What else went down in Tinseltown? On to Sunday’s recap! Khloe Kardashian feels tense once they’re back in their home and reality starts to sink in, saying, “I can’t really imagine how that feels and the pressure.” It doesn’t compare to the paparazzi following you to the Ivy, no. Plus 20 . Lamar’s BFF Jamie Sangouthai is feeling the effects of Odom’s trade to Dallas, too. “I feel like I got traded too, but I’m still here,” he tells Lamar. “I don’t get the VIP treatment anymore.” Dude, way to make it about you. Minus 50 . “He didn’t even say ‘How are you?’ or ‘How you’re doing?’ or ‘Are you OK?’ I’m the one who had to get up and move and go play for a different team.” – Lamar to Khloe. Plus 10 for noticing and calling out that nonsense. Khloe just doesn’t how to help her husband get his head in the game and handle the tense situation. Two words: Hand … nevermind. Minus 10 for us on that one. Khadijah and Malika are doing a photo shoot and appear nude. Plus 25 . “I think it’s time for some honest communication.” – Malika. Jaw-dropping analysis! That’s the best she could come up with? But Plus 5 because she’s not wrong. Jamie walks in looking for his Lakers tickets. What a douche. Minus 20 . Khloe sets him straight, finally. Girl stands up for her man! Plus 20 . “Change is difficult, but at the end of the day, this is my guy. I want to be there for him and maybe I’ve been kind of selfish,” he says. Attaboy. Plus 10 . The L.A. crowd applauds Lamar. Plus 15 for basketball appreciation. A message proclaiming “Welcome Back L.O” along with highlights from his games plays on the JumboTron. Talk about a hero’s welcome! Plus 15 . LO: “I look up and I see all the highlights in that uniform, I have a lot of pride… Those guys will forever be close to me and it just feels good.” Plus 10 . Maybe things will work out in Dallas after all … or not. Of course, we all know how this saga ends – Lamar leaving the team . Oh well. Minus 60 . Can L.A. trade for his rights back? Plus 5 ? EPISODE TOTAL: -5. SEASON TOTAL: -130.
With his motivation unclear, yet his message direct, Justin Bieber took to Twitter over the weekend and taunted the young woman who accused him of fathering her baby last year. During his self-proclaimed #RANDOMTWITTERHOUR, Bieber aimed some pent-up wrath at Mariah Yeater and wrote: “Dear Mariah Yeeter…we have never met…so from the heart i just wanted to say…” – and here he linked to the following Borat clip – “You will never get this. You will never get this. La la la la la.” Borat Clip: “You Will Never Get This” In late 2011, Yeater spoke to the tabloids and claimed she had sex with Bieber backstage after a concert in Los Angeles. She then sued him for paternity of her three-month old son. But Bieber’s lawyers fought back, the suit was eventually dropped and little has been said about Yeater since December, when an ex-boyfriend came out and said he was the father of her child. Why did Justin choose this moment to revisit the past? Who knows. But the overall message is all that matters: You such, Mariah Yeater! Leave JB alone!
It looks as thought Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are totally nesting. Just a few days after reports surfaced that they were house hunting in Connecticut, the Gossip Girl star and her beau reportedly did buy their own place. The couple, who were first linked late last year, “bought a beautiful country home” in Bedford, N.Y., a source tells PEOPLE. Spoiler alert: It’s not cheap. “The house cost more than $2 million,” a source said of the property. The two actors, who starred together in the super-hero film The Green Lantern , have been seen in Boston, New York City and New Orleans in recent months. It looks like Bedford, N.Y., is their new spot of choice, however. Just 45 minutes outside New York City, but offering privacy in a country setting , it will serve as the perfect respite for the couple of … several months. They have been spotted around town doing everything from horseback riding, to buying chocolate milk and dining at the Bedford Post Inn. Quite cute really.
Welcome back to the first annual Tournament of THG: Couples Edition, where fans vote on the most popular celebrity couple in the entire universe! The concept is simple: Pick your favorite of the two pairs in each poll. Done. YOUR VOTES will determine the winners of this tournament showdown. After eight hotly-contested first-round battles, the quarterfinal bracket is set. Tuesday, Robsten took on JT and Jessica Biel in a #1 vs. #9 matchup. Today’s contest: The President and First Lady of the United States, Barack and Michelle Obama, against upstarts Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. The Gossip Girl and Safe House stars have their work cut out here, but they’ve already knocked off Brangelina, so all bets are off. Cast your votes below!
The filmmaker clarifies: “We’re still in discussions about whether it should be a prequel or sequel. It’s an interesting conversation. I’m meeting with writers and I’ve also gone back to [ Blade Runner co-writer] Hampton Fancher and he still speaks the speak. He’s right there. I spoke with him this week. But we don’t even have a script yet. I’m not sure that that’s going to be a story point, so I don’t know. But if it were, nothing would please me more. Honestly.” [ EW ]
Based on a true story out of World War II-era Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In Darkness seeks to distinguish itself from the painfully distended genre of Holocaust movies with relentless “you are there” realism. It’s not quite Smell-o-vision, but the idea seems to be to try and make the experience of the 12 Polish Jews who hid in a sewer for 14 months as uncomfortable for the audience as it was for them. It seems significant that even a movie like The Reader paused in the midst of its “I was deflowered by a war criminal” melodrama to acknowledge that there is nothing to be learned from the Holocaust. Because its stories of annihilation and survival have taken on the ritual interplay of genre, often they have as much to tell us about current narrative appetites as they do about history. In Darkness , currently nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, is foremost a Holocaust movie that asks to be measured against all the others; its primarily lessons are directed toward the genre itself. Not all of the victims, for instance, are noble or even particularly nice. Director Agnieszka Holland ( Europa, Europa ) seems so enamored with her own resolution on this account that little more is offered in the way of characterization. But making the victims “human” does not necessarily make them complicated, or well drawn; in fact it leaves them vulnerable to cliché. So here we have the upper-class couple (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup) and their two small children, the resourceful hero (Benno Furmann), the rogue (Marcin Bosak), the pretty sister (Agnieszka Groshowska), the wanton redhead (Julia Kijowska), and a few others who never really emerge from the sewer’s shadows. Crammed together into a miserable crevice of the Lvov underground after a pogrom destroys the city’s Jewish ghetto, they all behave badly some point. There are fights over food, space, noise — and though bitter religious recrimination occasionally erupts, it feels more like a requirement of the genre than a reflection of deteroriating inner lives. In Darkness is based on the story told in a 1991 book called In the Sewers of Lvov , by Robert Marshall (adapted here by David F. Shannon). Its central figure is also one we have come to recognize on film: the benevolent gentile. Leopold Socha was a Catholic Pole and prolific thief when the war broke out; he also worked in the sewer system, and offered to help hide the group of Jews in exchange for payment. Robert Wieckiewicz, an enigmatic performer with a tough potato face, plays Socha as a Polish Tony Soprano by way of Graham Greene, with all the charisma, martyr issues and ambivalence about his own better nature that suggests. In Darkness is most successful when it follows Socha through a city where life goes on despite the nightmares unfolding in plain view and underfoot. The opening scenes use an effective contrast to set up the question: What kind of times are these? Socha and his sidekick (Krzysztof Skonieczny) shake down a couple of teenagers in what appears to be a middle-class family home; during their getaway they cross paths with a group of naked women racing through a forest, pursued to their death by nattily uniformed gunmen. From there Holland continues to effectively exploit the tension between Lvov’s ominous sense of suspended reality and the denial human beings are capable of when not directly threatened themselves. Socha and his wife (Kinga Preis) speak about the massacres that take place in their streets like they have just read a report about a country halfway around the world. Though the tensions are not addressed in depth, the fact that German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian are spoken more or less interchangeably evokes the clashing ethnic currents that made Poland the Holocaust’s crucible, a better host than most of the region for genocide. Absolutely everyone is on the take, and the sudden perishability of human life has only heightened the instinct for self-preservation. That that instinct is more acutely felt in the character of Socha and his life above ground suggests the overriding misery emanating from the film’s depiction of life in the sewer. With a few exceptions — including cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska’s bravura depiction of a flash flood that threatens to drown the stowaways — Holland cannot make the group’s determination felt because she’s so intent on making us feel the mortification of their suffering. The squeaking and scampering of rats becomes a motif over two and a half hours — it ends almost every scene with one last dash of disgust — and the seemingly high incidence of sewer sex gets lingering attention as well. Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews’ plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it’s boring as shit. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings. Let’s forget, for a moment, about the sub-sub-sub- Training Day plot, in which a wily old-coot operative played by Denzel Washington simultaneously annoys and educates spring-chicken CIA agent Ryan Reynolds. The plot mechanics don’t matter much. What does matter is the inexplicable horror of how lousy this film looks. Movies aren’t strictly a visual medium — they’re too complicated for that — but there’s something wrong when the only thing you can think of while watching a picture is, “Damn! My eyes!” Where to lay the blame? It’s hard to say, but let me unwrap these gauze bandages and I’ll try. The director of Safe House is Swedish-born director Daniel Espinosa, who made a 2010 crime caper called Easy Money . Are the horrors of Safe House completely his fault? Probably not. The script, by David Guggenheim, seems serviceable enough, if generic: Washington’s character, a fugitive smoothie named Tobin Frost, is brought in by the CIA for questioning and a little waterboarding. It’s all in a day’s work, right? Frost has info the organization desperately wants. Of course, other people want it, too: The joint where Frost has been locked up is suddenly overrun by Middle Eastern-looking baddies, who try to kill him. Poor Matt Weston, Reynolds’ character, has been entrusted to watch Frost and needs to spirit him away to safety, thus giving Frost many opportunities to chuckle derisively at the antics of this plucky little greenhorn. Meanwhile, somewhere at CIA headquarters, a bunch of people in suits — played by Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga, among others — call up info on Frost on big computer screens, loudly reciting Important Facts about this Very Dangerous Man. Through it all, Frost and Weston have to run around. A lot. They also have to shoot people. A lot. And they also get shot at. A lot. All of these things are standard in contemporary action thrillers — by themselves, they’re not enough to make or break a picture. Washington and Reynolds don’t seem to give particularly bad performances — in fact, they run around, shoot people and get shot at with actorly proficiency. The problem is, it’s just so hard to look at them. Like many features these days, Safe House was shot with a handheld camera. But while smart filmmakers have learned to chill out with the camera jiggling, the Safe House cameras are partying like it’s 2009: This isn’t just shaky-cam, it’s super -shaky-cam. The camera moves back and forth, up and down, just because it can. Craving a bunch of wholly unnecessary circular pans? Safe House has ’em! The tonal palette consists mostly of ochre yellows and greeny grays — cataract colors. And the editing is razor-sharp, meticulous and rapid-fire — so razor-sharp, meticulous and rapid-fire that you can’t really see anything. It’s like eating vegetables that have been sliced so thin they barely exist. Safe House is, I guess, pretty violent, from what you can actually see: There’s some ewky business in which flesh is stabbed with a shard of glass. Yet despite the presence of this sort of brutality, the picture has no pulse. It’s so crappy looking it anesthetizes you — the story it’s trying to tell dissolves away to vapor. So who’s holding the bag for this stinkbomb? The cinematographer, Oliver Wood, has shot plenty of other movies that look perfectly fine, including Surrogates and Fantastic Four , as well, as perhaps most tellingly, the Bourne movies. The editing is by Richard Pearson, who cut The Bourne Supremacy , as well as other cogent features like Quantum of Solace and United 93 . Moviegoers are divided, of course, on the way the Bourne movies have been shot and edited: For some, they’re too crazy, too disconnected, too frenetic. I think they generally work, coasting on their sheer peripatetic energy — but it’s possible their time has passed. It’s also possible that Safe House , while borrowing its style from the Bourne movies, is simply missing some key ingredient: What if every shot were held just one or two seconds longer? What if the camera jiggle was controlled even by just a few centimeters at the top, bottom and sides of the frame? What if the colors didn’t look as if they’d been run through the washer and dryer on the extra-hot setting, every day for three months straight? Then, maybe, it would be possible to look at Safe House directly without having to immediately remedy the experience with two Tylenol. Extra-strength. And throw in some Codeine, too. Please. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
