You might guess most folks flocking to theaters this weekend for Snow White and the Huntsman are the legions of diehard fans of Twilight ‘s Kristen Stewart , who stars in the fantasy adventure as the sword-swinging Snow White. Maybe, even, they’ll come for co-star Chris Hemsworth — he of Thor and Avengers fame. But surprise, surprise — who’d have thought the big draw, at least for folks who hit opening day today, would be neither of SWATH ‘s up-and-coming talent? PMC Studios’ Beyond the Trailer (owned by Movieline’s parent company PMC) caught up with some early Snow White adopters at the AMC E-Walk today, and they told Grace Randolph they were there to see the Evil Queen — Charlize Theron . What’s more: At least one woman says she actually saw the film despite K-Stew. Also: Props to the older lady at 3:50 dropping truth bombs about dead ugly people, who wants to buy presents for Hemsworth’s children (even though they’d most certainly be impossibly beautiful Hems-spawn, but whatevs). Surprised at all the Charlize love? Agree with the consensus that KStew’s performance pales in comparison to Theron’s near-camp extravaganza? Or are you REALLY in it just to see Hemsworth swing that axe around a forest? For more movie news, commentary, and reviews, check out Beyond the Trailer on YouTube.
Don’t worry, no Prometheus spoilers here, just a peek into the brain of Sir Ridley Scott , who opened an interview with press by musing on… tape recorders. And Star Trek . And light speed. Naturally. From Bloody Disgusting : Ridley enters and sees our tape recorders. “Look at this technology. Jesus Christ. 40 years ago when Kirk said ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ we used to think that was fucking ridiculous, remember? Seriously, that’s been 40 years and then when he says the ‘disintegration’ of his matter into the ‘reintegration’ of his matter in the next space, that right there is light speed. So they touched on light speed. I’ve talked to NASA about this and they’ve said that’s light speed. So ‘Can you do it?’ They said ‘Yeah. Have you got seven glasses of water?’ I go ‘Not the seven glasses of water trick, please.’ There were all scientists in the room and he started to explain to me the relativity and the speed of light. ‘Can you do it?’ ‘Yeah.’ He said the only barrier is ‘us.’ He said, I can mathematically explain how, but we haven’t gotten there with that.” Actual Prometheus spoilers and hints , discussion of the film’s evolution from Scott’s idea called Alien: Paradise , and the moment when he forgets Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s name (you know, “the Frenchman”) in the full chat courtesy of Bloody Disgusting, if you dare… [ Bloody Disgusting ]
Movies are by no means the most relevant topic discussed last night on Piers Morgan when Harvey Weinstein filled in as guest host and interviewed former President Bill Clinton about politics, kids drinking soda, and how much ass Hillary is kicking these days, but the parts in which the Hollywood powerhouse and the ex-Prez talked movies were some sort of bizarrely fascinating colliding of worlds. So what is Clinton’s favorite movie? Clinton shared his childhood memories of moviegoing between discussions of more compelling (okay, real) issues. His trip down memory lane included vivid recollections of the good old days. “You could go to the movies for a dime, and I’d get 20 cents — I think you could get a Coke and a candy bar for a nickel.” (Well, he is over a dozen years older than Wilford Brimley was when he was the same age as Tom Cruise shooting Cocoon , or whatever.) Now, the hypothetical Weinstein-produced Clinton biopic — there’s an idea. Meryl Streep as Hillz? If anyone could make that happen, it’d be Weinstein. Better question: Who’d play Ryan Gosling ? [via CNN ] [Photo: President Clinton and Harvey Weinstein at Hillary Clinton’s birthday party circa 2000 via Getty Images]
In 1996, it arrived. Within a few days, it struck box office gold. And on July 3, 2013, it comes back…in 3-D! 20th Century Fox has announced plans to re-release Roland Emmerich ‘s original destructo-blockbuster Independence Day next year in an extra dimension, because America apparently can’t get enough of seeing Will Smith battle aliens . ( Bad Boys in 3-D? Now that I’d pay to see.) Plan your 2013 ’90s sci-fi flashback movie nights accordingly. [ Collider ]
I’d be lying if I said I truly understood the music video for The Black Keys’ “Gold on the Ceiling,” or that it didn’t just give me shades of the stomach-turning willies I’ve been getting from the words “face” and “eating” all week. So please, someone, watch the bizarre VHS-stylings of the latest Harmony Korine joint — an aesthetic cousin to his recent Trash Humpers , with a visual nod to the wheelchair banditry of Umshini Wam — and share in my amused discomfort. Because, yeah. Baby Twinz are my new nightmare. If I see anyone dressed like this on Halloween, I might instinctively punch them in the throat before fleeing in the other direction. You’ve been warned. [via The Playlist ]
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 .
If you could distill essence de chat into a few well-chosen pen strokes, you’d end up with something like Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s superb animated adventure A Cat in Paris , a picture whose modest demeanor only underscores how expressive and imaginative it is. This isn’t the kind of big-budget animation we get from the major studios: It’s richness of another sort, a feat of hand-drawn animation that relies on spare but succinct character design and a dazzling sense of perspective — rather than a volley of cultural in-jokes — to tell its story. The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way — its charms have a noirish gleam. Most of the picture does, in fact, take place at night, beginning and ending with the nocturnal Parisian perambulations of a wily striped cat named Dino. Dino “belongs” to a little girl named Zoe. He pledges his devotion by bringing her little gifts from his nighttime hunting jaunts. Actually, he keeps bringing her the same gift: One dangly, limp dead lizard after another, but Zoe is delighted by them and saves them all in a little box, much to the annoyance of her new nanny. What almost no one knows is that Dino doesn’t go out at night just for fun, or simply out of a feline sense of duty. He’s also a cat burglar, assisting a sneaky but noble local jewel thief, Nico, on his midnight rounds. The plot becomes more complicated — to the extent that it’s complicated at all — by the fact that Zoe’s mother, Jeanne, is a detective with the Paris police. She’s consumed with concern for Zoe, who hasn’t spoken since her father was killed by a square-shouldered, square-headed thug named Victor Costa. She’s also riven with grief, and she’s determined to avenge her husband’s death by catching Costa, who, it turns out, has a new scheme: He plans to steal a precious, valuable and huge antiquity, the Colossus of Nairobi, a hulking totem that’s being brought to the city for an exhibit. Meanwhile, though, Jeanne has peskier problems: Jewels keep disappearing from various households in the city, thanks to Nico and an accomplice with four silent, velvet paws. A Cat in Paris is being released in the states in two versions, an English-language one (in which Marcia Gay Harden, Anjelica Huston and Matthew Modine provide some of the key voices) and a subtitled French one (which features, in the role of the nanny, the voice of actress Bernadette Lafont, who, for those who keep track of such things, played Marie in The Mother and the Whore ). If you’re bringing children and are lucky enough to have bilingual ones, I recommend the French version, since it is simply more French; to hear the English language pouring forth from these characters’ mouths feels just a little wrong. But the visuals of A Cat in Paris resonate in any language, and it doesn’t hurt that the picture features a stunning, stealthy Bernard Hermann-style orchestral score by Serge Bessett. (The music in A Cat in Paris is finer and more resonant than that of any live-action picture I’ve seen this year.) This is Felicioli and Gagnol’s first full-length feature — it was a 2012 Academy Award nominee — and it clocks in at a very trim but visually rich 70 minutes. The filmmakers’ drawings are both meticulous and highly stylized: They render the rooftops of Paris (what is it about city rooftops in general, and Paris rooftops in particular?) as a dusky, velvety patchwork, an invitation to adventure — they take great delight in the city’s highs and lows, in the contrast between tall and short. Their palette features an array of oranges, from muted citrus tones to deep sienna, and lots of deep, nighttime turquoise. And they dot the picture with small but inventive visual touches: When a character dons night goggles, the figures around him are rendered as stark white lines on a flat black surface. And the gargoyles of Notre Dame feature in the climactic chase sequence, a bit of travelogue whimsy that’s nonetheless dramatically gripping, perhaps even a little dizzying for those who are hinky about heights — it doesn’t matter that you can’t really fall off a cartoon building. And then there’s Dino, an utterly bewitching arrangement of orange and chocolate triangles (with a pink one for a nose). Dino isn’t a cute cartoon cat — there’s an element of mystery and devilishness about him, suggesting that Felicioli and Gagnol understand true feline spirit. They also understand feline loyalty, which is a contradiction in terms only to those who don’t understand (to the extent that understanding is possible) these elusive, magnetic creatures. Dino comforts the distressed Zoe by visiting her in bed, sliding under her arms as if he could pretend she’d never notice. And in a way, she doesn’t notice — somehow, suddenly, Dino is simply there , a presence who changes, only ever so slightly, the nature of the room around him. That’s the quiet province of cats everywhere — not just those who are lucky enough to live in the animated city of Paris. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“Even though the media exhibit enormous sophistication and historical perspective in a thousand different ways — not that I can think of a specific example right now — they are far too often bedazzled by the sheer novelty of a story. If you watch cable news, for example, you know all too well that if there are two child kidnappings in the same month, the first one gets far more attention than the second. This same law applies to box-office bombs. With Battleship , the fascination with Hollywood flop sweat had already worn off. When I asked a veteran showbiz reporter why his publication had spent so little time covering the demise of Battleship , he joked: ‘I guess we all had the same reaction — didn’t we just write that story already?'” [LAT]
“Even though the media exhibit enormous sophistication and historical perspective in a thousand different ways — not that I can think of a specific example right now — they are far too often bedazzled by the sheer novelty of a story. If you watch cable news, for example, you know all too well that if there are two child kidnappings in the same month, the first one gets far more attention than the second. This same law applies to box-office bombs. With Battleship , the fascination with Hollywood flop sweat had already worn off. When I asked a veteran showbiz reporter why his publication had spent so little time covering the demise of Battleship , he joked: ‘I guess we all had the same reaction — didn’t we just write that story already?'” [LAT]
