After Lindsay Lohan’s got busted for allegedly slugging another woman at a New York nightclub in November, I wrote her off as a lost cause , but Stephen Rodrick’s fascinating New York Times piece about Paul Schrader’s making of The Canyons with Lohan left me thinking that there’s still a talented actress in that scandal-ravaged psyche worth saving. Although Lohan exhibits plenty of ridiculous (and tragic) behavior in the story that would prove my original point, and the media has predictably chosen to run with that, I was struck by a few passages in the story that indicate Lohan is more than just a self-destructive starlet whose career is hanging by a thread. Here are three of them: “The next day, Lohan arrived relatively on time for a makeup test. She sat behind a table with a can of Sprite, looked into the camera and flashed a wholesome smile that would not have been out of place in the world’s best soda commercial. Schrader grabbed my arm and pointed at Lohan’s image. ‘See? That’s why we put up with all the crap. You can shoot bad movies with actresses who are always on time. But look! The rest is just noise.’” Then there’s Rodrick’s description of Lohan’s preparation for a scene in which she was required to be scared and emotionally naked: “All that remained was to get a close-up of Deen touching Lohan’s face with a blood-streaked finger. Only half of Lohan’s face would be in the shot. Most actresses would pop in some Visine to well their eyes with tears and be done with it. Instead, Lohan went back to her room, and everyone waited. I was standing by her door, and soon I could hear her crying. It began quietly, almost a whimper, but rose to a guttural howl. It was the sobbing of a child lost in the woods. She came out of her room, and I watched the shot on a monitor. Now, without the garish makeup, Lohan looked sadly beautiful, and it was easy to see why men like Schrader were willing to put their lives in her hands.” The last excerpt appears at the very end of the story when, after all of the drama of shooting The Canyons, Rodrick asks the writer of Taxi Driver and the director of Affliction and the underrated Auto Focus , if he regretted casting Lohan: “He shook his head. “No, she’s great in the film.” Schrader then told me a secret. Until the screening disaster, Schrader had been in talks with Lohan to star in a remake of John Cassavetes’s “Gloria,” about a woman on the run from the mob. The director lighted up, childlike; hope triumphing over memories of being stripped naked. “It doesn’t involve a co-star. She would be perfect for it.” One of the things that makes Rodrick’s piece so good is that with passages like that, the reader has to make a judgement call: Is Schrader deluded because he really needs this film to move the needle, or is that the veteran filmmaker in him — the one who’s worked with Robert De Niro , Martin Scorsese and his brilliant, late brother Leonard Schrader — talking? I say it’s a mixture of both, but more of the latter. And though Rodrick certainly leaves the impression that The Canyons is a problematic film (that was rejected by the Sundance Film Festival), he also writes this passage about Lohan’s performance that suggests that, with a lot of tough love and self-discipline, her career is salvageable. “But about 15 minutes in, something clicked….Lohan was equal parts vulnerable and dissolute.” I know what you’re thinking: That line is a distillation of Lohan’s recent life, but go back and re-read the description of Lohan’s crying scene. In the right hands, Lohan is capable of tapping into all of chaos and pain she’s experienced and putting it into her performance. It’s too bad that Exorcist: The Beginning was such a debacle for Schrader. LiLo could probably turn in quite a performance as a woman possessed. As the Times piece demonstrates, the promising actress that Lohan once was is still alive in her. It’s just that the demons keep dragging her down. More on Lindsay Lohan: Lindsay Lohan Busted Again − Is She Beyond Help? Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
So there’s a new Pacific Rim trailer out. It’s not a whole lot different from the last one that was released, and, like the last one, it leaves me with one big suspension-of-disbelief problem. I can’t say I’m a student of the whole Gundam/Jaeger/Voltron school of big bad-ass mechanical suits, but every time I see the scene — that’s been in both trailers — in which two side-by-side soldiers operate the legs of the fighting machine by running in place, I have to ask, why would any defense contractor build a weapon that would requite more than one independent-thinking individual to operate it? I know that there’s some kind of neural piloting system called “pons” that keeps everyone in the Jaeger operating as one, but, I mean, those soldiers look pretty strapped in place. What if one of them gets a cramp? It looks like Guillermo Del Toro is going for a Real Steel meets Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by way of Michael Bay’s Transformers -type vibe, but I keep thinking that, on a logical level, operating one of these Jaegers would be a coordination nightmare, particularly in the heat of battle. And if I had Idris Elba yelling in my earpiece all day, I’d have an even bigger problem staying in sync. Also, if you look at this Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) video, the future of robotic warfare looks like the only humans required will be those operating the remote controls. (That AlphaDog just won’t go down.) Why make it more complicated than that? I’m betting that some Pacific Rim super fan out there will have answers to my questions and restore logic and balance to my world. Leave them in the comments section below. [ScreenRant ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Sony Pictures Classics took North American rights to the latest film by Woody Allen , starring Alec Baldwin , Cate Blanchett , Bobby Cannavale and more. Also in Tuesday’s news round-up, Australia’s Academy picks its nominees just two days before the Oscar noms; the Domestic Box Office hits a record; Mark Romanek is exiting Cinderella ; and R.I.P. director David R. Ellis. Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine Headed to Theaters Allen’s latest starring Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., Andrew Dice Clay, Sally Hawkins, Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg, which centers on the final stages of an acute crisis and a life of a fashionable New York housewife will head to theaters via Sony Pictures Classics. Silver Linings Playbook , Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty Tom Australian Academy Nominations The nominees for Australia’s International Award for Best Film include: Argo , Les Misérables , Life of Pi, Lincoln , Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty . More nominations from the organization available on Deadline . Domestic Box Office Sets 2012 Record The U.S. box office hit a record $10.8 billion with a 6 percent rise in admissions, the largest in more than a decade. The foreign box office is also ahead of the $22.4 billion set in 2011, Variety reports . Mark Romanek Exiting Disney’s Cinderella The studio and Romanek are parting ways on the updated fairy tale that has Cate Blanchett attached to star. The two apparently did not see eye to eye on how to re-tell the story, with Romanek preferring a darker version of the story, Deadline reports . Director David R. Ellis Dead at 60 The veteran stuntman and director of Snakes on a Plane and Final Destination 2 died Monday morning in Johannesburg, South Africa prepping to direct is anime adaptation, Kite . The project wold have re-teamed Ellis with his Snakes on a Plane star Samuel L. Jackson, Variety reports .
Combine a kind heart and the power of social networking and sometimes, the proverbial mountain will go to Muhammad. That was the case recently when director J.J. Abrams granted a dying cancer patient the chance to see Star Trek Into Darkness months before the feature is set to head into theaters. [ Related: New ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Teaser: The Wrath Of Cumberbatch? ] Abrams learned of the man’s wish last week on link-sharing site Reddit. A user identified as ideeeyut detailed how his 41-year old Trekkie friend, who has leukemia and other health issues, headed out to a screening of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hoping to catch a ten-minute preview of the upcoming Star Trek film. The theater, however, did not play the preview, which is showing in most theaters. The disappointment lead Daniel’s friend to give a “passionate plea” via Reddit for help to allow Daniel to see the film, according to CNET via Deadline. After the request hit Reddit, the story found its way onto a number of Trek and geek sites, leading one user to tweet the story to J.J. Abrams and other working on the film, leading to Abrams telephoning Daniel up about setting plans for a personal preview. Ideeyut went back to Reddit a few days later, quoting Daniel’s wife who said, “We saw it and we enjoyed it immensely as a film and as a gesture.” She said further that she hoped the message would spotlight the “heartfelt message of giving.” Star Trek Into Darkness opens May 17th. [Sources: CNET , Deadline ]
Given the behind the scenes false starts that seemed to plague the production of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – lawsuits, studio bankruptcy, a change in directors — it’s perhaps a tad ironic that beginning the story of Lord of the Rings before the story of Lord of the Rings was never a problem. No, for Peter Jackson , Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, the power troika behind the flick, beginning an episodic, rollicking, children’s adventure story cum three-film epic was the easy part. Deciding where to end, however… Spoilers follow. How does one pinpoint a climax for a first film in a trilogy before the whole story is even a third of the way over? With what may be the turning point of J.R.R. Tolkien’s entire massive legendarium, suggested Boyens. “We understood that you had to arrive the characters at an emotional location as opposed to a geographical location. Instead of just getting them to a geographical point on the journey, it was more important for to arrive them at an emotional place so that you didn’t continue to tell the same emotional story,” the Oscar winning scribe told Movieline . “It’s very hard for Bilbo to be that little Hobbit who has to find his courage,” she continued. “I mean, that could go on and on and on and on. [But when] the ring comes to Bilbo and in that moment he chooses not to take Gollum’s life, that has enormous resonance for the entire mythology.” Occurring almost exactly 30 percent of the way through Tolkien’s The Hobbit , the scene comes immediately after Bilbo finds the One Ring and puts it on for the first time in order to escape from the clutches of the treacherous Gollum, who he has just beaten in a Riddle Game. Perched before Gollum in front of an open doorway that promises freedom, Bilbo has a chance to kill the creature but chooses not to. The scene, sometimes referred to by fans of the series as “The Pity of Bilbo,” has consequences for the rest of the series in a literal sense, as it is ultimately Gollum who manages to destroy the Ring by falling with it into the lava at Mount Doom. So resonant is the scene, in fact, that it’s overtly referenced several times in Lord of the Rings . “The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many,” Gandalf tells Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring . “The pity of Bilbo rules the fate of all,” echoed director Peter Jackson. “Bilbo had a chance to kill Gollum. The fact that he didn’t [kill Gollum] has now created the story of Lord of the Rings , for good or for bad.” Perhaps more importantly for Boyens and Company, it represented a kind of ecclesiastical or moral totem, a crossroads from which Bilbo would never be able to return. (Gandalf believes, for example, that Bilbo was able to give up the Ring so easily because he took it in a moment of pity. “Bilbo has been well rewarded,” he tells Frodo. “Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With pity.”) Using this scene as the climax of the film then necessitated moving other things forward, like when in the story Thorin learns to trust and lean on Bilbo. From the cave scene forward in the film, Bilbo takes agency in his relationship with the dwarves, deciding to actively join them on their quest and helping to save Thorin from the orcs. “Bilbo discovers something in himself and I think that is true courage, knowing when, as Gandalf says, to spare a life,” Boyens insisted. “So we couldn’t just let that moment pass. And I think it would have gotten buried in the great morass of spider fights and other stuff that would have happened if [we didn’t end there and] kept pushing through.” The spiritual ramifications of the scene were so important to the screenwriters that they made a small but profound change in order to underline its moral importance, explained Boyens. In the book, Bilbo simply finds the Ring, as if it was misplaced by Gollum. In the movie, “[Gollum] loses it as he’s murdering someone and Bilbo receives it as he’s saving something,” Boyens explained. “So maybe that act – that unknown act without any knowledge of any greater consequence — is what Professor Tolkien wrote a lot about; [Goodness and grace] must be innate. It must be for its sake an act of charity, an act of kindness. That’s how fate works.” Is this the right place to end The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , even though it necessitated changing the text to move other things forward? Would you have chosen this spot? Sound off in the comments below. READ MORE ON THE HOBBIT : The Science of High Frame Rates, Or: Why ‘The Hobbit’ Looks Bad At 48 FPS Richard Armitage Talks ‘Hobbit’ And Thorin Oakenshield, Takes A Phone Call From Sauron ‘The Hobbit’ At 48 FPS: A High Frame Rate Fiasco? Follow Shawn Adler on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Brutally Abused Afghanistan Woman Gets Fresh Start In America A young Afghan woman who was brutally abused at the hands of her family is finally beginning the road to a new start and ready to share her story of pain, triumph and resilience in the face of hopelessnes and unimaginable violence. via CNN For as long as the world has known her face, it has told a story. In the beginning, when her disfigured image appeared on the August 2010 cover of Time magazine, the story was bigger than her. It symbolized the oppression of Afghan women. Today, Aesha Mohammadzai’s face tells a story that is hers alone. Aesha had never attended school and had experienced enough trauma to span 10 lifetimes. She lost her mother, she says, when she was only 2, was sent off to live with relatives elsewhere, then was retrieved by her father and forced into marriage at 16 to settle a family score. When she ran away from the Taliban family that abused her, they caught her, held her down, hacked off her nose and ears and left her for dead. Her forehead has ballooned to the size of a baseball, and narrow, darkened, peeling and drooping flesh protrudes from where her nose once was — before her Taliban husband and in-laws cut it off. She is six months into multistage reconstructive surgery, and her face hints at a new path lined with resilience, hope and change. This is sad and remarkable all in one. You can read Aesha’s entire story here . Photo Credit: CNN/TIME Magazine
Samuel L. Jackson has created, as he put it, ” the most reprehensible negro in cinema history ,” with his portrayal of Stephen, the slave who runs Calvin Candie’s ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) Candyland plantation in Django Unchained . But, the actor told Movieline that he’s even more despicable in scenes that were cut from the final print of Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti southern. Jackson’s character treats his fellow slaves with great cruelty as runs his master’s plantation with an iron fist and a calculating intellect. “I am the power behind the throne …the Spook Cheney of Candyland,” Jackson said of his role at a jammed press conference for the movie on Sunday morning that included Tarantino, Jamie Foxx , Kerry Washington , Christoph Waltz , DiCaprio, Don Johnson, Walton Goggins and Jonah Hill , despite that last actor’s miniscule cameo as a Klansman identified only as “Bag Head #2.”. Jackson’s sinister performance is one of the artistic high points of the movie and will have cineastes dissecting the complexity of his character for a long time to come. And if Tarantino decides to release a director’s cut of Django Unchained , there will be much more to discuss. In an interview with Jackson that will run in its entirety later this week, the actor told me, “There are scenes we shot that aren’t in the movie in which I do some things that are way more reprehensible than the things you actually see on screen.” Without getting too spoilery here, Jackson explained that a pivotal scene in which Django is captured originally ran much longer and involved Stephen torturing Foxx’s character. ” I burn his nipples off with a hot poker. I do all kinds of shit to him in that scene that would have just made people go Ahhhhh!” said Jackson, squirming in his seat for effect. (Tarantino may finally have shot a sequence more horrific than the ear removal sequence in Reservoir Dogs .) He added that the hot poker scene amounts to payback for another, earlier scene that was also cut from the movie in which Stephen and Django ( Jamie Foxx ) have a physical altercation upon the latter character’s arrival at Candyland. Although the tension between Django and Stephen is palpable in the final cut of the movie, Jackson said it underscored the two characters enmity for each other. Jackson also told me that the excised torture scene was his favorite of the movie, in part, because he got to explain to Django, “I’m doing this because you put your hands on me.” Although there’s no shortage of bloody brutality in the cut of Django Unchained that will open in theaters on Christmas Day, Tarantino explained that the scenes he cut would add a lot to the plot and in some ways change the story. Though he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I did” eventually release a director’s cut of the movie, “I want this to be the story for a while.” Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Any Day Now writer-director Travis Fine came across the story that would be his next film from a script that sat on the desk of original writer George Arthur Bloom and adapted it and tapped Alan Cumming to star in the story about a gay couple in the late ’70s who fight a discriminatory legal system to formally adopt a special needs teen who has been in their care. The feature, which opens Friday through Music Box Films, has won audience prizes at festivals throughout the year, including Tribeca where it debuted last Spring, to Provincetown, Chicago, Woodstock, Seattle and Outfest. Inspired by a true story and touching on legal and social issues that are more relevant now than ever, Any Day Now tells a story of love, acceptance, and creating your own family. In the late 1970s, when Marco (Isaac Leyva), a teenager with down syndrome who’s been abandoned by his mother, is taken in by committed couple Rudy (Alan Cumming) and Paul (Garret Dillahunt), he finds in them the family he’s never had. However, when their unconventional living arrangement is discovered by the authorities, Rudy and Paul must fight a biased legal system to adopt the child they have come to love as their own. Co-starring Frances Fisher, Gregg Henry and Chris Mulkey, Music Box Films will open the film in select theaters across the country on December 14.
I feel I have to confess to a certain partisanship. I grew up listening to Les Misérables . I’ve seen it performed twice and as a girl had the original Broadway cast recording down cold . It’s been years since I’ve heard it, but watching Tom Hooper ‘s adaptation of Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Jean-Marc Natel and Herbert Kretzmer’s musical I realized with amusement and discomfiture that I could still sing along to just about every damn word, at least until whomever was sitting near me took it upon themselves to murder me for the greater good. These songs — and the bridges in between, for Les Misérables is a sung-through affair with almost no spoken dialogue — are permanently etched in my psyche, and I am as far from being able to look at this material with critical distance as a highly trained stage star is from an actual consumptive 1800s French urchin. That said, can we admit that Les Misérables is an absolute beast of a musical? It faces the impossible task of compressing Victor Hugo’s 1500-page novel into three hours (the screen version running a leaner 157 minutes), starting in a prison in the south of France in 1815 before leaping ahead to the town of Montreuil in 1823 and then Paris in 1832, where the main action takes place against the backdrop of the June Rebellion. It’s the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean ( Hugh Jackman ), but it has a notable array of other significant characters to be dealt with, ones who love and suffer and (quite frequently) die, and all with musical accompaniment. The signature staging of the play involved a giant turntable that allowed for more fluid scene changes. On screen, that can be accompanied efficiently with an edit, but then you have to deal with the fact that smooshing a whole storyline about Valjean giving up a chance to let a stranger go down for his crimes and choosing to go on the run again (“Who Am I? / The Trial”) looks incredibly rushed when taken out of the abstract. In staging Les Misérables for screen, Hooper has taken a relatively naturalistic and grounded approach to the musical, a choice that’s better suited to the subject matter of the story than to the fact that it takes place entirely in song. The vocals were recorded live on set, the backdrops are grimy in a poetic period Gallic style and the big numbers are frequently recorded in close-up, the camera holding on intimate shots of the performers as they stand or sit and sing. The film (which was shot by Danny Cohen, who also served as cinematographer on The King’s Speech ) treats its songs as it would dialogue, except that dialogue rarely involves spouting about one’s feelings at length out loud to no one, a tic that makes much more sense set to music. It’s an infuriatingly static way to shoot musical numbers, and it diminishes the bombastic grandeur many of these songs have. Éponine (singer and stage actress Samantha Barks) belts out her anguish about her unrequited love while huddled against a pillar; on the big sequence “One Day More” we cut abruptly between different faces as if everyone’s in their own individual music video. It’s only Russell Crowe in the role of Javert, the police inspector who’s devoted his life to chasing down Valjean, who gets the kind of grandiose staging the material demands in his two big songs, as he wanders along prominent Parisian landmarks and the camera swings out to take in the city. Crowe is, perhaps not coincidentally, the weakest singer, and despite his musical side career looks uncomfortable in the role of Javert, his concentration all seeming to go toward his serviceable warbling rather than acting. But much of the rest of the cast is terrific, particularly not-so-secret theater geeks Jackman and Anne Hathaway , who settle into their roles like they’ve spent their lives waiting for this opportunity. Hathaway’s in fact so good as Fantine, the factory worker forced into prostitution to support her daughter Cosette near the start of the story, that the film staggers a bit after her character departs, her killer rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” one of its emotional highlights. Eddie Redmayne’s a pleasant surprise as Marius, the idealistic student torn between his love for the grown Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) and his desire to join his friends at the barricades for the uprising — the lovers tend to be the two blandest characters in the ensemble, but he finds a genuine gallantry and sweetness to the would-be revolutionary. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter , on the other hand, play designated comic relief couple the Thénardiers even broader than that description would suggest — though “Master of the House” is one of the most dynamically staged of the songs, the tonal difference between their appearances and the rest of the film is jolting. Even at a generous running time that matches this season’s other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it’s in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway’s early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean’s adopting of Cosette, the latter’s first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it’s a non-stop series of death arias. But even if this isn’t a great screen adaptation of the musical, there’s no resisting the ending, which pairs the film’s two brightest stars and then has everyone join in on a reprise of “Do You Hear The People Sing?” Say, do you hear the distant drums? Maybe not, but at that moment the voices coming from the screen and the tune they’re crooning are rousing enough to draw a few tears. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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