I’m starting to think the execs over at Syfy may be a bunch of secret geniuses. When I first read Forbes ‘ report that the NBC Universal -owned cable network is considering giving the lifeguard’s kiss to Waterworld as either a film for its new theatrical division or, more likely, a TV series for its prime-time schedule, I almost choked on my coffee. Just hearing the title of the $235-million 1995 stink bomb — until Titanic , reportedly the most expensive movie made — makes me simultaneously think of mildew and bacon. The first, because of the movie’s stagnant, waterlogged plot; the second, because Dennis Hopper’s performance is so damn hammy. The late actor, who played Deacon, the leader of the pirates known as Smokers, actually says at one point in the movie: “Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny!” And the more I think about it, a Waterworld reboot is Syfy’s destiny. As the Forbes post notes, the movie does well every time it runs on the network, but with a little Syfy-style goosing, a TV series could become destination programming for B-movie nerds everywhere. Waterworld is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the polar icecaps have melted and land is sparse. First of all, in a post-Katrina-Irene-Sandy world, the concept doesn’t seem all that farfetched anymore. Better yet, that extremely moist setting makes an ideal universe for Syfy to populate with all of the mutated monsters that have starred in its cheese-tastic original TV movies. The movie’s protagonist, the Mariner — who was played by Kevin Costner — is, after all, a mutant, too. He sports gills and webbed feet. So, as long as we’re suspending disbelief for him, why not have him face down such inspired Syfy abominations as Sharktopus , Mega-Python, Mega-Piranha, Piranhaconda — and, from above, Mansquito! — on a weekly basis. I see parts for Barry Williams, Tiffany , Debbie Gibson and Kevin Sorbo. And if Universal hasn’t settled its suit with mockbuster production house The Asylum , which produced some of the most successful and preposterous creature films to air on Syfy, maybe they can make nice and make waves. (Ba-dum-bump!) Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
With the post-Thanksgiving and post–Black Friday hangover still lingering, it’s a pretty slow week for new DVD releases. Since we’re entering the Christmas season, however, there’s no better time to find Highs and Lows among holiday films (while also sneakily reminding you of my film guide Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas , which makes a great stocking stuffer). So if you’re feeling worldly, spend Noel with some extremely unhappy French folks. Otherwise, pop some Ro-Tel and Velveeta in the crock pot and enjoy the holiday hi-jinks of America’s favorite rubber-faced redneck. HIGH: A Christmas Tale (The Criterion Collection; DVD/Blu-Ray, $39.95) WHO’S RESPONSIBLE: Written by Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu; directed by Desplechin; starring Catherine Deneuve , Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT: Matriarch Junon (Deneuve) needs a bone marrow transplant, and while this is usually a procedure where parents donate to children, Junon figures that she gave her kids life and now it’s time for them to repay the debt. The search for a donor means that black-sheep son Henri (Amalric) is coming home for Christmas for the first time in years, where he clashes with sister Elizabeth (Consigny), who essentially had him banished from the family for his shady financial machinations. WHY IT’S SCHMANCY: The “mommy dies at Christmas” genre is an ever-more-crowded one, but there’s no easy sentimentality from Desplechin. Junon is haughty and prickly — her barbed exchanges with Henri are classic — and this family tapestry is woven with such care and intelligence that you may find your allegiances shifting from viewing to viewing. I also admire a movie that casually drops cultural references to everything from Nietzsche to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments . WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT: This 2008 import (original title: Un conte de Noël ) has become one of my annual screening rituals. It’s funny, moving, thought-provoking and endlessly fascinating. And since this is a Criterion release, there are some great extras, including L’aimee , a short film by Desplechin (in which he and his father go through their old family home) that inspired the feature. LOW: Ernest Saves Christmas (Touchstone Home Entertainment; DVD $9.99) WHO’S RESPONSIBLE: Written by B. Kline and Ed Turner; directed by John Cherry; starring Jim Varney, Douglas Seale, Oliver Clark, Noelle Parker. WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT: Cab driver Ernest P. Worrell (Varney) gets involved when Santa (Seale) travels to Orlando to hand the keys to his workshop over to kids-show host Joe Carruthers (Clark) — who thinks the old man is a lunatic. Besides, Joe’s more concerned about making the leap to the big screen, even though what he thinks is a family film called Santa’s Sleigh winds up being something far darker. Can Ernest and plucky orphan Harmony (Parker) appeal to Joe’s better nature and save the holiday? WHY IT’S FUN: From local TV spots to stardom on the big and small screens, the character of Ernest is something of an acquired taste. But it’s hard not to be won over by Ernest Saves Christmas , which features some of Varney’s most inspired shtick, from destroying the always-unseen Vern’s house to dressing in drag as the mother of Joe’s agent. There are also appearances by legendary comic second bananas Bille Bird and Gailard Sartain. Before you scoff too much, see the movie. WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT: Hey, Disney! What’s with Ernest Scared Stupid getting a Blu-Ray release and not Ernest Saves Christmas ? Someone at the Mouse House should be getting coal in their stocking for this one. Alonso Duralde has written about film for Salon and MSNBC.com. He also co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast and regularly appears on What the Flick?! (The Young Turks Network) . He is a senior programmer for the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles and a pre-screener for the Sundance Film Festival. He also the author of two books: Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas (Limelight Editions) and 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men (Advocate Books). Follow Alonso Duralde on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Prepare for a double dose of mutant powers: The X-Men of the past and future will collide in Bryan Singer ‘s forthcoming sequel X-Men: Days of Future Past , which will bring Patrick Stewart ‘s Professor X and Ian McKellen ‘s Magneto together with their X-Men: First Class counterparts James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender in the same film, Singer announced today. I’d like to officially welcome back James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, & Nicholas Hoult to #XMEN for #DaysOfFuturePast — Bryan Singer (@BryanSinger) November 27, 2012 Thrilled to announce @ ianmckellen118 & @ sirpatstew are joining the cast of #XMEN #DaysOfFuturePast #magneto #professorX More to come… — Bryan Singer (@BryanSinger) November 27, 2012 This should be exciting for X-Men fans, who’ve seen the comic book franchise flit around timelines and younger/older versions of the same characters since Singer’s X-Men spawned a film universe of spin-offs and standalone superhero pics. This synopsis for X-Men: Days of Future Past explains how two Professor Xs and Magnetos can co-exist in the same film (via The Film Stage ): The storyline alternates between present day, in which the X-Men fight Mystique’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and a future timeline caused by the X-Men’s failure to prevent the Brotherhood from assassinating Senator Robert Kelly. In this future universe, Sentinels rule the United States, and mutants live in internment camps. The present-day X-Men are forewarned of the possible future by a future version of their teammate Kitty Pryde, whose mind traveled back in time and possessed her younger self to warn the X-Men. It’s a familiar tale to fans of the X-Men comic; the dystopian alternate future saga of Days of Future Past was a hugely popular storyline, adapted memorably in the animated X-Men series in episodes featuring the time-traveling Bishop. The original comic storyline featured Kitty Pryde in the pivotal time-traveling role; is it too much to hope for Ellen Page reprising her X3 character to bring the entire X-Men film franchise full circle? (Probably.) X-Men: Days of Future Past is being scripted by Simon Kinberg, aiming for a July 18, 2014 release — excited, X-fans? Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Kathryn Bigelow ’s ambitious Oscar contender Zero Dark Thirty started out as a film about the 2001 siege of Tora Bora hunting down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden , but as the Academy Award-winner told a rapt audience at the picture’s buzz-building debut in Beverly Hills on Sunday, it changed direction in one quick, fateful instant. “At about 10 o’clock at night on May 1, 2011 we realized we no longer had a project about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” Bigelow said at a packed post-screening Q&A at the Pacific Design Center, “because he was no longer living.” Bin Laden’s death sent Bigelow and her Hurt Locker collaborator, screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal , scrambling to incorporate the update into Zero Dark Thirty , a tense semi-fictionalization of the intelligence efforts, and subsequent nighttime raid, that led to the death of bin Laden. Folding actual events and real-life figures into a decade-spanning account, Boal’s script relives the dogged, desperate, and often brutal search for bin Laden through the eyes of a female agent named Maya ( Jessica Chastain ), a fictional composite based on real women who played key roles in the circuitous, years-long operations that sniffed out bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout. Chastain, who was a lock for an Oscar nomination before Zero Dark Thirty even debuted, owns the screen as the driven workaholic agent whose tireless fixation on a needle-in-a-haystack lead ultimately proves vital to finding bin Laden. She looks a little too great doing it, too — a pillow-lipped, flame-haired beauty who manages to look luminous even when other characters are helpfully commenting that she’s rundown and haggard. (Offscreen, as in her new GQ UK cover spread, Chastain still has to play the glamour game , as most actresses do in order to vie for awards gold.) The men around Maya describe her as a “killer,” and though she struggles at first to stomach the sight of a detainee being waterboarded for intel, within a few years she’s adopted the torture tactics that made headlines out of Guantanamo. Boal’s script goes heavy on the gender politics and too light on character development, portraying Maya as a woman so devoted to her mission that she has no time for silly things like friends, love, life balance. She’s a lone strong woman in a man’s world, an awards-season narrative that pundits will predictably tether to Bigelow as they did when The Hurt Locker made its Oscar run. Still, the girl power moments are utterly satisfying; when the overlooked Maya makes her presence and contribution known in a roomful of male colleagues by barking an expletive at Tony Soprano himself (James Gandolfini as CIA head Leon Panetta), who can care that she has virtually no back story of her own?
While the makers of the forthcoming live-action Captain Planet movie piece together the remnants of your childhood, the folks at Funny or Die are owning the Planeteer game with yet another video featuring Don Cheadle as the terrifying enviro-hero gone mad with green power. Since we last saw him shooting magical nature lasers out of his junk, Captain Planet has turned all of the Planeteers into trees save for poor Ma-Ti (Efren Ramirez), who now lives a life of indentured servitude to the Captain as the blue-skinned superbeing continues his quest to replace the humans of Earth with plants and bunny rabbits. Captain Planet 2 from Don Cheadle At this rate when the actual official Captain Planet movie comes along I’ll never be able to take it seriously. How many internet views do we need to make Cartoon Network and the guys who made Transformers cast Cheadle and go full Planet Terror ? [ Funny or Die ] Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
When he wasn’t rooting out Communists, cracking down on the mob and spying on civil rights leaders, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover toiled as a one-man culture warrior battling Hollywood decadence. He prevented Charlie Chaplin from reentering the U.S. because of his leftist political views, and he condemned Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life for its “rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.” So what did he have to say about Alfred Hitchcock , who gave American moviegoers new and strange things to fear? Not a bad word. The only questions anyone’s asking about Hitchcock these days are just how much and what kind of a creeper was he? The famed director’s wandering eye, his sexual obsessions, and less-than-decorous urges roil at the center of Hitchcock , the just-released biopic starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren , as well as last month’s The Girl , the HBO film with Toby Jones and Naomi Watts . As The Birds actress Tippi Hedren claimed earlier this fall , the Master of Suspense could be masterfully cruel and unforgiving. But as far as his popular image as an artiste-provocateur goes, there’s probably more than a little self-mythologizing — or branding, if you’d prefer — in that ironic Englishman persona, the casually sadistic remarks about actors, the pretensions to finding truth in nightmares. It’s that last detail that fuels Hitchcock , a tempting portrait of “Hitch” as a crowd-pleasing, truth-telling anti-hero — not unlike Howard Stern and Larry Flynt in their respective biopics — who shows moviegoers the dark things they didn’t know they wanted to see. But was his threat to the American psyche all smoke and mirrors? That’s certainly what Hitchcock’s FBI file, obtained via MuckRock.com , suggests. Hitchcock’s file doesn’t begin until October of 1960, four months after the successful release of Psycho , which casts serious doubt on Hitch’s claim that the FBI followed him for three months in 1945 after he discussed uranium with a Caltech professor as research for his next film, Notorious . (Donald Spoto, a four-time biographer of Hitchcock, also concluded in The Dark Side of Genius that the FBI investigation was likely apocryphal, declaring that the “extremely sensitive” director would have been “emotionally incapable” of making a film under government surveillance.) In fact, the contents of the FBI file have much more to do with Hoover’s obsessions than with Hitchcock’s. Whatever paranoia and “extreme sensitivities” Hitchcock suffered, Hoover suffered doubly so. The bulk of the file has to do with a seven-month surveillance on a single episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that illustrates the acute obsessiveness of the FBI’s fearsome but fearful director. Through unrelenting pressure and undeserved authority, the Bureau convinced Revue Studios, which produced A.H. Presents, to eliminate a minor character, an FBI agent who instructs a would-be kidnapper that abduction is illegal, from the episode “Coming, Mama.”
Ang Lee ‘s Life of Pi is a doubled-edged argument for the transcendent capabilities of film. Its central section uses the latest technological achievements to transform the fantastical, fable-like tale of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel into some of the most innovative and wondrous images to flicker across the big screen this year. And in its framing story, one it returns to periodically as if needing to keep the audience from getting too caught up in the gorgeous abstraction of its narrative at sea, it provides a reminder of why we should trust more in those images, as it ploddingly trots out its source material’s heavy-handed and unnecessary delineation of its own themes. Those themes include faith and what fuels it. And in case anyone watching is in danger of not picking that up, Rafe Spall, in the role of a fictionalized version of Martel coming to interview the title character (played by Irrfan Khan as an adult) at his home in Canada, announces that he’s been promised a story that will make him believe in God. The nature of that God is a general one — Martel, and David Magee, who wrote the screenplay, are more interested in the idea of religion rather than one in particular. As a young boy, played by Ayush Tandon, Pi Patel becomes enchanted by Hinduism, then Christianity, then Islam, practicing them all with no sense that they need clash. As a grown man sharing his extraordinary tale of survival with a stranger who has come his way by chance, Pi remains a figure of strong but vague spirituality, though the film’s ultimate assessment of why people choose to believe in a higher power seems unlikely to please the devout. Life of Pi is also, more compellingly, about storytelling: the way we choose to present and frame the events that happen to us. Long before he’s stranded at sea with a tiger for company, Pi’s life is one that’s filled with strands of magical realism. Born in Pondicherry in French India, he’s named after a swimming pool in Paris that his uncle once visited. Its clear water is presented by the film as looking like air until swimmers ripple its surface as they dart across the screen. He and his brother Ravi (Vibish Sivakumar) spend their soft-focus childhood growing up on a zoo run by their reason-loving father (Adil Hussain) and their softer, more nurturing mother (Tabu). The animal inhabitants are showcased in a delightful opening credits sequence — all except the newest arrival, a Bengal tiger with the unlikely name of Richard Parker. The tragedy that strands a teenage Pi (played by perfectly adequate first-timer Suraj Sharma) in a lifeboat with Richard Parker in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a terrifyingly realized storm that takes down the freighter transporting the Patel family and their menagerie to a new life in Canada. Water, whether in the form of a remembered pool or an angry sea swamping the deck of a ship, is the element that buoys the film along. Lee uses it as the medium for some unparalleled instances of 3-D, first in how our protagonist is thrown onto his tiny boat with a few panicked animals, riding giant waves that bring the larger vessel down to a resting place of haunting and tragic beauty. Later, as Pi and his dangerous companion struggle to reach some kind of accord that will allow for their mutual coexistence on a very limited space, the ocean stretches endlessly around them as a force of mystical capriciousness — sometimes it’s a mirror-still reflection of the sky, another time it offers up sustenance via a school of flying fish or takes it away in a dreamily alarming brush with a whale. The sea dwarfs the odd pair of travelers, the camera sometimes swinging out above the lifeboat to show it as a small blip in a vast body of water that resembles the cosmos. Pi’s continued existence and trials may be thanks to the whims of the universe — “I give myself to you!” he yells to whatever deity might be listening, “I am your vessel! Whatever comes, I want to know!” — but it’s his relationship with Richard Parker that provides the human side to this existential crisis. A seamless blend of real tiger and CGI, Richard Parker is a fully believable creation, and while Pi searches him for some sign of a soul, of some connection between living things, Life of Pi is careful not to anthropomorphize him. He’s a formidable beast, a potential killer, and the film’s best representation of its central question of whether there’s some design to existence or if it’s just a collection of chaotic and sometimes awful events. Unfortunately, Life of Pi also prods at this question during periodic returns to the present day with the grown Pi and Martel, and the scenes create the sensation of an author leaning over your shoulder as you read to point out all of the symbolism he doesn’t want you to miss. The story of Pi and Richard Parker already has the clean simplicity of a myth and really doesn’t require significant elaboration, but following in the footsteps of the source material, the film provides elaboration anyway, demonstrating a condescension to the audience that dulls the spectacle it punctuates. The past and the present day become an example of not just the contrast between the classic poles of showing and telling but of the fundamentally cinematic and the not. Pi’s reliability as a narrator is one of the key aspects of the story, but the heightened sensibility of his account is contrasted not with some underlying sense of another reality but of a framing story that’s only there as a vehicle for authorial exposition. Lee’s movie is a grand gesture of filmmaking pushed to its furthest technical edges, but hemmed in and confined by its fidelity to words on a page. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Although Disney and LucasFilm remain officially mum, The Hollywood Reporter says Empire Strikes Back / Return of the Jedi screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan and X-Men: The Last Stand / Sherlock Holmes scribe Simon Kinsberg have signed on to write Star Wars sequels following Michael Arndt ‘s Star Wars Episode VII . Deadline first posted the rumor of Kasdan and Kinsberg’s involvement, but THR confirms with more from unnamed “sources.” Per THR , “the pair will write either Episode VIII or Episode IX — their exact division of responsibilities is yet to be determined — and they will also come aboard to produce the films.” One of these two hires gives me great confidence in the future of the Star Wars franchise; the other one is more of a question mark. (Guess which is which?) Not only did Kasdan co-write Episodes V and VI , he also nabbed sole screenwriting credit on Raiders of the Lost Ark , went on to write and direct Body Heat , The Big Chill , and Wyatt Earp , and gave us the gift that was The Bodyguard script, for which we should all be forever grateful. Kinsberg, in a ten-year career so far, has earned sole screenwriting credits for Mr. and Mrs. Smith and xXx: State of the Union , and his most recently produced project was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — a decent-enough resume by Hollywood standards, but we’re talking Star Wars here. There’s a legacy at stake. That said, if Kinsberg can get Tom Hardy, Chris Pine, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie to don Jedi robes, I’ll consider the slate wiped clean for This Means War . [via THR ]
” Elmo is bigger than any one person,” the producers of Sesame Street declared last week when Kevin Clash, who was the voice of the furry and very famous red muppet, was first accused of having sex with a minor. That statement is about to be tested in the wake of Clash’s resignation from the venerable children’s show after a second allegation, this time, in a lawsuit, was reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday. Although Clash’s first accuser recanted his claims, a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York charges Clash with sexual abuse of a second youth, Cecil Singleton, then 15 and now an adult. According to the AP (via Yahoo!) , the lawsuit, which seeks damages in excess of $5 million, alleges that Singleton was persuaded by Clash to meet for sexual encounters. A statement posted on the Sesame Workshop blog, also on Tuesday, noted that “the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want.” The statement additionally read that Clash had resigned after 28 years at Sesame Street , because he’d concluded that “that he can no longer be effective in his job.” “It’s a sad day for Sesame Street ,” concluded the statement. It’s also a thorny public-relations problem for Sesame Workshop. But while Clash’s career won’t likely bounce back from this scandal any time soon, the reality is that Elmo is going to be fine. Movieline ‘s offices are located in the Times Square and even as news of these new allegations were breaking, there were two people dressed as Elmo circulating among the tourists and making a few bucks by taking pictures with children. They did not seem to be having trouble attracting business and no one was taunting them about the Clash story. In fact, when I approached one of the Elmos, who identified himself as Jose Segarro — that’s him in the picture with Hello Kitty — he was unaware of Clash’s resignation and told me that business was “the same.” In a recent piece on the growing scandal, The Grio.com interviewed Jim Silver, Editor in Chief of the online family site, Time to Play.com, who pointed out that while a small group of parents may be hesitant to buy an Elmo-related product for their kids in light of Clash’s problems, the brand remains strong. (He estimates that Elmo generates more than 50 percent of the $75 million in sales that Sesame Stree t toys generate each year. ) “Kevin [Clash] is the voice and is not Elmo the same way James Earl Jones is not Darth Vader.” Exactly. Despite this scandal’s great potential as a media story, my experience as a father tells me that kids, who are in the Elmo-loving age bracket, aren’t going to spend a lot of time thinking about what the voice of Elmo does in his personal life, even if they’re savvy enough to understand that Elmo is a puppet voiced by an actor. And even if there are a few preternaturally aware youngsters who watch a lot of cable news and grasp what’s happening here, they’re probably going to grow up to be the kind of knowing pop-culture savants who will convert this unfortunate chapter in Sesame Street history into some form of art or journalism, whether it be a documentary, book or comedy routine. That may be cold comfort, but, at this stage in the story, the silver linings don’t look all that plentiful. Related Stories: TALKBACK: Can ‘Elmo’ Puppeteer Kevin Clash Bounce Back From Abuse Allegations? INTERVIEW: Kevin Clash, the Man Behind Elmo, on Jim Henson, Puppetry, and Jason Segel’s The Muppets [AP via Yahoo! The Grio.com] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Quick, name your favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie and scene. With the Master of Suspense getting a lot of attention this fall, thanks to the HBO movie, The Girl , and the theatrical feature Hitchcock , which opens in limited release on Friday, Movieline decided these would be good questions to ask of the celebrity contingent that showed up for the New York premiere of the latter film on Sunday. Hitchcock , which stars Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Helen Mirren as his better half Alma Reville, is set during the making of Psycho and depicts the filmmaker in a more cuddly light than the manipulative misogynist he’s made out to be in The Girl . The comic drama is built around Hitchcock’s relationship with wife and the helpful role she played in his career. And though Hopkins didn’t attend the premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater, I spoke to him via satellite on Saturday. Based on his answers, he’s clearly spent some time with Vertigo. Movieline: What is your favorite Hitchcock film and your favorite scene? Anthony Hopkins , the star of Hitchcock . Movie: “ Vertigo is one of my all-time favorites. I think it’s the haunting music of Bernard Hermann and James Stewart’s romantic obsession for this young woman who is a mystery. She’s beautiful, blonde, inaccessible. He falls madly in love with her, and she’s killed halfway through or a quarter way through the film. She just falls out of the window or commits suicide. Then she reappears on the street in San Francisco.” Scene: “That scene particularly, when he follows her across the street to her hotel. That late afternoon light in the San Francisco street, 54 years ago when it was made. And the moment when he leaves her room, he says, “Can I take you for dinner,” and Kim Novak, as he goes out, turns towards the camera and you see the whole plot. You’re let in on the secret that this was a setup and James Stewart is the victim of an appalling tragedy—a woman’s murder. Then, he sees her on the street and becomes obsessed with repossessing Madeleine. He makes her have her hair done and the skirts and the shoes and everything. He’s obsessed, as Hitchcock was about the costuming, about the dressing of his female stars. He’s waiting in her hotel room and she’s finally persuaded to have her hair done the way Madeleine had it. She comes out and she’s come back from the dead. I mean, that’s the kind of mystical genius of Hitchcock. I think that has now become the top, number one film of all time. The critics destroyed it when it came out. They just said it was rubbish. Now, it’s number one. Top movie, above Casablanca and all those. So, the guy’s genius lives on, many years after his death.” Sacha Gervasi , the director of Hitchcock Movie: “Hel-lo, Psycho . With many filmmakers there’s perhaps two or three masterworks, but with Hitchcock there’s ten or twelve. That’s very rare. I also love Vertigo , because it’s so romantic. I think it’s sort of unintentionally revealing of the man himself.” Scene: “How could I not say the shower scene? It’s so revolutionary and so shocking and surprising.” Scarlett Johansson , Janet Leigh in Hitchcock Movie: “ Strangers on a Train . As a kid, I liked the look of it. I liked the cinematography. I liked the suspense. I liked everything about it.” Danny Huston , Strangers on a Train screenwriter Whitfield Cook in Hitchcock Movie: “ Strangers on a Train — only because I wrote it. [Laughs] I suppose Psycho because of those memorable moments; because it all came together in such a terrifying way and it’s just such a deeply psychological film.” Scene: “I don’t know whether it’s my favorite, but the one I just can’t shake, especially when I get soap in my eyes in the shower is the Psycho shower sequence. It’s just something that stays with me. And, if you’re somewhere around birds and the birds get a little too close to you, then you have that memory, too. It’s a subconscious thing.” Toni Collette , Peggy Robertson in Hitchcock : Movie: “It’s too hard. I mean, do you know how many movies he made? Jesus. I always go for Rear Window . Psycho is probably the most famous, which is why [Hitchcock] is so enlightening. He’s the master.” Scene: “I’m too jetlagged to recall.” Michael Stuhlbarg , Lew Wasserman in Hitchcock : Movie: “It’s impossible to choose between them. Each one accomplishes a different feat. I am particularly taken by Rope , especially because of the technical achievement of shooting the story so that it appeared to be a single continuous shot and how he creatively found ways to hide that.” Scene: “When that biplane comes after Cary Grant in North By Northwest and how close it gets to him — that’s an iconic scene that has stayed with me.” Jessica Biel , Vera Miles in Hitchcock : Movie : “I actually just saw Dial M for Murder , which I quite loved a lot. That and The Birds , of course.” James D’Arcy , Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock Movie: “I think the best one is the last one I watched, because the minute you see it you’re struck by his genius and you forget the other ones. Then, you watch the next one. The last one I saw was Foreign Correspondent , which is a 1940 piece of war propaganda. It’s utterly mesmeric. It’s got one of the best plane crashes I’ve ever seen. That wasn’t even on my radar before I’d seen it. Now it’s my favorite Hitchcock film.” Scene: “Wow. That is a difficult question. That shower scene in Psycho . That had people running out of cinemas when it was first screened. It’s just so iconic.” Jon Voight , actor: Movie: “I don’t have any favorites. I liked what he did for cinema, you know? And everybody who makes a film has learned something from Hitchcock and the way he made films. So, every film I see reminds me. ‘They took that from Hitchcock, they took that from Hitchcock.’ The things he employed became ingested by everybody in filmmaking.” Amanda Setton , actress, Gossip Girl Movie: “I don’t want to be cliché, but I have to say Psycho . We shoot on the Universal lot in L.A. and the Bates Motel and the Psycho house are on our back lot, so I kind of feel a very personal relationship to the ‘epicness,’ if you will, of that space. Ralph Macchio , actor: Movie: “Right now, it’s Rear Window . I just wrote a short film that I’m going to direct this December and there’s a voyeur-esque element to it. Scene: “Certainly the shower scene in Psycho . There’s a zillion of ’em.” Steve “Lips” Kudlow, frontman, Anvil Movie: “It would probably be Dial M for Murder . It was really brilliant that there was virtually nothing but one room. That and Rear Window . Those two movies. Wow.” Nell Alk is an arts and entertainment writer and reporter based in New York City. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Magazine, Z!NK Magazine and on InterviewMagazine.com, PaperMag.com and RollingStone.com, among others. Learn more about her here. Follow Nell Alk on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
