Fingers are crossed that Pixar bounces back from the uncharacteristic critical disappointment that was Cars 2 with their next effort, Brave — a foray into Disney princess territory about a headstrong young Scottish lass (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) who defies tradition in her parents’ kingdom. A new trailer for the animated adventure promises no small measure of spunky girl power as our heroine Merida upends an archery contest where doofus candidates are vying for her hand in marriage. It’s not a traditional trailer so much as it is a scene from the film, but it conveys a sense of what to expect, tonally. (Watch the first full trailer here .) From what’s been released so far it seems Brave ‘s story will be its strength; the round, cartoony CG-animated character design doesn’t appeal much to me, but Merida’s spirit is infectious in this twist on the familiar medieval archery scenario. (That’s Billy Connolly voicing her father and Emma Thompson as her mom, in case you were curious.) Brave hits theaters June 22; leave your impressions below!
Maybe you’re the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and says, “What can I learn today about the psychological effects of blood feuds in contemporary Albania?” But I doubt it. Who even thinks about these things, or cares about them? The strange miracle of Joshua Marston’s modest, well-constructed drama The Forgiveness of Blood — which really is about blood feuds in contemporary Albania — is that once you’ve watched it, you might find that you actually do care. It’s the kind of movie that makes the world feel like a smaller place, suggesting that the similarities connecting us across continents and cultures are more resonant than the things that divide us. The Forgiveness of Blood is set in northern Albania — it was also filmed there, using local, nonprofessional actors. Eighteen-year-old Nik (Tristan Halilaj) is a senior in high school, with his eye on the prettiest classmate and ambitions to open his own Internet café. But one day his father, Mark (Refet Abazi), becomes involved in a land dispute: Mark makes a living for himself and his family by delivering bread to local homes and businesses — his mode of transport is a horse-drawn cart — and he habitually takes a shortcut across land that used to belong to his grandfather. The current owners take umbrage, and an altercation breaks out in which one of them is stabbed to death; implicated in the murder, Mark immediately goes into hiding. But according to codes of law that have been in place for centuries, the aggrieved family is entitled to take the life of a male from the aggressor’s family. Nik is forced into a kind of house arrest, along with his younger brother and two sisters. But because the female members of the household aren’t in danger, Nik’s younger sister, Rudina (Sindi Laçej), must leave school and temporarily take over her father’s business, just to keep the family afloat. This is a vivid, tough little story that enfolds lots of dramatic subthreads: Nik and Rudina live, as most of us do, in a world of cell phones and satellite TV, yet they find themselves bound by antiquated rules of conduct. Nik is just learning his way around the adult world — he preens in front of the mirror, Tony Manero-style, hoping to look good for the girl he’s set his sights on — only to be imprisoned at home, as if grounded by an especially strict parent. It’s a particularly painful kind of cultural emasculation, and he lashes out. And Rudina, a bright girl who seems to enjoy school (it’s hinted that she may have a future outside this rather restrictive community), suddenly has to play the role of the male breadwinner. She’d rather go shoe-shopping with her friends, of course, but the point is that her very sex both protects her and makes her life harder: Her life is of lesser value under the arcane rules governing the blood feud, which means that when the males in her family are compromised, she has to step up to the plate and act like a man. She seems to have the worst of both worlds. Marston’s gift as a filmmaker — he also co-wrote the script with Albanian screenwriter Andamion Murataj — is that he makes us care about these characters without forcing us to eat the knobby, dirt-encrusted root vegetables of cross-cultural awareness. You know what I’m talking about: The world of independent filmmaking is full of movies designed to congratulate well-informed, literate liberals on how well-informed and literate they are — we watch as peasants and otherwise “compromised” people, who live in countries outside North America (or even the poorer communities within it), suffer through their daily lives. Then we’re allowed to pat ourselves on the back for allowing our eyes to be opened to their plight. Marston doesn’t play that game here, and he didn’t play it in his first feature, Maria Full of Grace , either: That picture told the story of a young Colombian woman who becomes a drug mule to raise money for her family. The picture could have been a pile-up of the most tense horrors imaginable, but Marston has the rare gift of knowing when to ease up on the clutch: He focuses on individuals, on their faces and their feelings, sometimes at the expense of your garden-variety dramatic buildup. His movies have their own kind of narrative intensity, but they’re not thrillers masquerading as human-interest stories. With Marston, the interest is all human. That’s especially true in The Forgiveness of Blood . In the movie’s early moments, when I saw that horse-drawn bread cart rambling across a scrubby-yet-beautiful semi-rural landscape, I groaned. Was this going to be one of those good-for-you movies that’s pure punishment to watch? The picture does have its unnerving moments, points at which you find yourself inside the head of a particular character and you’re not sure you want to be there. But Marston doesn’t overreach dramatically. Mostly, he simply trusts the faces of his actors: Halilaj’s Nik has a gawky-charming teen-scarecrow look — he’s all long limbs and awkward pauses, particularly when he’s in the presence of that pretty classmate. And even though Rudina isn’t really the movie’s main character, as Laçej plays her, she’s its quiet, somber soul. Rudina observes the proceedings around her with resigned exasperation: Just when her life should be moving forward, it’s being pulled backward through hundreds of years of tradition. That tension is gentle but potent, and it’s what keeps The Forgiveness of Blood coursing along. By the end, you’ll care more about Albanian blood feuds than you ever thought you could. Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The title of David Wain’s latest directorial effort suggests more direction than its urbanite couple George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) really have. ” Wanderlust ” indicates feeling an urge to seek out new pastures, but when the pair end up on the road it’s only because they’ve been forced there, unemployment sending them plummeting out of their Manhattan lifestyle like satellites knocked from their orbits. George works in an office and Linda has so far just bounced from whim to whim — her most recent unsuccessful venture is a documentary about penguins with cancer — and the two have scraped together the cash to buy what their real-estate agent euphemistically calls a “microloft” in the West Village. They can’t sell the tiny apartment, and they can’t afford to keep it when George loses his job and HBO turns down Linda’s film for being depressing (and not sexy depressing), and so they end up slinking down to Atlanta in defeat to stay with George’s bullying brother (Ken Marino) and stumbling across bed and breakfast/commune Elysium on the way. When you try your hardest to carve out a life for yourself somewhere, only to abruptly end up with nothing to show for it years later, the desire to just drop out of the whole race makes a lot more sense. Wanderlust is an agreeable comedy that peters out halfway through, but it presents a believable case for why two people with no innate hippie impulses would become infatuated with and join life in a rural collective or, as its charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux) insists on calling it, an “intentional community.” Wain’s film, which he wrote with Marino, presents a pair of dimensional, empathetically drawn characters in George and Linda, two people who when finally made to take time for introspection realize how many grievances and unhappinesses they’ve been burying inside themselves. None of the other characters are close to as fully realized, whether they be patchouli-wafting free-love advocates or depressed, alcoholic suburban housewives, and the film tends to abruptly downshift whenever its focus moves from George and Linda to something else, like a late, perfunctory plotline in which Elysium is threatened by local developers who want to bulldoze it in order to build a casino. It’s funny and sweet when it’s about a couple trying to figure out their place in the world, and for the most part broad and too easy when looking for laughs in Elysium’s day-to-day philosophy. As a director, Wain has earned his place on the cult comedy pantheon with 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer , which built a following after bellyflopping into theaters over a decade ago. Wanderlust is more standard issue than that one, lacking its abrasive elements but also seeming unlikely to improve with repeated viewings. It’s initially George’s idea to return to Elysium and give life there a two-week test drive, but it’s Linda who really takes to it, and the midsection of the film is episodic and hit-or-miss as Linda embraces life as a poncho-wearing flower child and catches Seth’s eye while George grows disillusioned with truth circles and sharing everything. Some of the scenes — a hallucinogenic trip on ayahuasca tea or strategic displays of wine-making nudist Wayne’s (Joe Lo Truglio) prodigious penis — are funny, but others, including many with Theroux’s bloviating New Age guru whose knowledge of the outside world drops off after the ’90s, fall flat. Wanderlust ‘s comedic interest in Elysium and its inhabitants seems to go as far as George’s attachment to the place. It’s great to visit, but it’s not long before you want to leave. Wanderlust has the ease of a film that’s reuniting people who’ve worked together before: Besides the presence of aforementioned The State alums Lo Truglio and Marino, it also has Kerri Kenney-Silver as flaky Elysium matriarch Kathy and small appearances from Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, who form a mini Stella reunion with Wain as news anchors whose banter is less than TV-appropriate. Rudd and Aniston, who co-starred in 1998’s The Object of My Affection and shared the small screen on Friends , also have a comfortable chemistry, seeming feasibly like two people who love each other but who’ve never before had to subject their relationship to any kind of stress test. Rudd’s particularly good when playing someone aware of but unable to remedy how out of his element he is — in the midst of a hilariously glazed-eyed high, he plays the didgeridoo and bonds with fellow pot-smoker Rodney (Jordan Peele) and his pregnant girlfriend Almond (Lauren Ambrose), but in the bright light of day has trouble dealing with his inability to fit in. He has a guitar duel with Seth over who’s better at playing “Two Princes,” he can’t poop when everyone keeps coming into the doorless bathroom to talk to him, and he’s unsure how to deal with the open- relationship advances of Eva (Malin Akerman) — “No way!” he responds when she describes her particular bedroom skill. It’s Rudd who provides the tenuous through-line that holds together this scattered ramble of a film, by realizing that there’s a middle ground between high-rise living and a cooperative farm, and that it’s where most people end up.
*: As determined by Movieline’s Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics after crunching 23 weeks of data from the awards cognoscenti and beyond. Thank you for reading; our work here is done. The Final 9: 1. The Artist 2. The Help 3. The Descendants 4. Moneyball 5. Hugo 6. The Tree of Life 7. Midnight in Paris 8. The Daldry 9. War Horse What’s to say? The die was cast long ago, and unless all those old-ass , inactive white dudes who apparently make the Academy magic happen suddenly decide they want to recognize The Help (or come around on Moneyball a la some latecoming pundits or at least one old-ass, distaff counterpart ), then you might as well just plan to go out on Sunday night to take advantage of the quiet restaurants and/or grocery stores. (And maybe follow our livetweeting here if/when the urge strikes.) The Final 5: 1. Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist 2. Alexander Payne, The Descendants 3. Martin Scorsese, Hugo 4. Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life 5. Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris Did we ever settle on how many of these guys are actually going to show up to lose to Hazanavicius in person? The Final 5: 1. Viola Davis, The Help 1. Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady 3. Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn 4. Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 5. Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs Sasha Stone wrote a few days ago about the “general consensus” solidifying around some shakier frontrunners; Davis seems the most locked-in of that class. Anything could still happen this weekend, which is fine by me as long as it happens fast and we can get on with our lives. The Final 5: 1. Jean Dujardin, The Artist 2. George Clooney, The Descendants 3. Brad Pitt, Moneyball 4. Demi
Remember Shame ? The NC-17 one featuring Michael Fassbender as a sex addict, Carey Mulligan as his off-kilter sister, a couple of notorious ” late-night lovers ” and a thriving awards-season profile that imploded a month ago like a dying star, seemingly having taken the film with it? Right, that one. Now, as per the rules of the cosmos and/or art-house schemes in Columbia, S.C., that star has finally exploded back into consciousness in perhaps the best way possible. The flier pictured above was spotted in and around Columbia over the holiday weekend, urging local moviegoers to avoid the “den of sin” known as the Nickelodeon Theater. The 75-seat venue had finally booked Shame for a run, and without the benefit of a sustained Oscar campaign for erstwhile front-runner Fassbender , the fliers seemed to play right into the hands of Nickelodeon management. Too good to be true? WLTX Channel 19 is on the scene ! (Sorry in advance about the commercial.) The Onion would be proud. Sort of. Anyway, nicely played, Andy Smith! [ WLTX via Pullquote ]
It was indeed a very happy President’s Day Weekend in Hollywood, where studios enjoyed the rare treat of five wide February releases raking in $20 million or more. The bad news? The two newest ones brought up the rear. Sorry, Nicolas Cage and Reese Witherspoon — your Holiday Weekend Receipts are here. [All figures are four-day weekend estimates.] 1. Safe House Gross: $28,40,000 ($82,600,000) Screens: 3,121 (PSA $9,100) Weeks: 2 (Change: -29.3%) There are a few big winners among this weekend’s successes, but I’ll go with Ryan Reynolds as the biggest: On the one hand, the guy can’t open anything no matter how desperately his agents or producers want him to be able to. On the other, there is no better box-office second fiddle alive short of maybe Jeremy Renner, who wouldn’t hold that distinction for long anyway with both The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy on deck to refine both his blockbuster ensemble and leading-man creds. So go on, Hollywood! Let Reynolds back up your 57-year-old action star today! 2. The Vow Gross: $26,600,000 ($88,527,000) Screens: 2,958 (PSA $8,993) Weeks: 2 (Change: -35.4%) Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams aren’t shabby performers, either, both en route to their leading their first non-franchise $100 million grosser. Unless The Vow 2 is en route starring a certain rat and a churro , which I’m not sure counts, but you tell me. 3. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island Gross: $26,400,000 ($59,516,000) Screens: 3,500 Weeks: 2 (Change: -3.4%) There’s no doubt that just scraping below $60 million in 10 days of release is a let-down for all involved (except for Michael Caine, I guess, as long as the check cleared), but a 3.4 percent drop? Yowza . Not bad at all, especially opposite… 4. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Gross: $25,700,000 (new) Screens: 3,174 (PSA $6,397) Weeks: 1 I don’t know where this creative development lands Nicolas Cage on his quest to become screen acting’s version of Led Zeppelin . Maybe it would be easier to break it down to Zeppelin song-title analogues, like, “What Is and What Should Never Be” or “Sick Again.” Any others? 5. This Means War Gross: $20,400,000 (new) Screens: 3,189 (PSA: $6,397) Weeks: 1 Needs less Pine , more pudding . [Figures via Box Office Mojo ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Of course, everyone remembers the 2009 blockbuster Terror at Blood Fart Lake , which cost roughly $20 to make and drew such accolades as “You can watch the ‘trailer’ but I sincerely recommend that you don’t” and “It looks like a few goth boys and girls made it while they were drunk and high.” Pretty spellbinding, to be sure — thus the sequel Return to Blood Fart Lake , new today on DVD. Who’s pumped? I said, WHO’S… enh, never mind. I’m just throwing it out there as a counterpoint to this week’s encroaching Oscar saturation. After all, why succumb to Hollywood’s self-congratulatory pap when you can luxuriate in the no-budget pleasures of… this : The “Scarecrow Killer” Jimmy Van Brunt is back and out for revenge in Return to Blood Fart Lake , the high octane, action packed, blood & corn filled sequel to the smash hit Terror at Blood Fart Lake ! Many years have passed since the tragic events at Blood Fart Lake, where Jimmy dispatched a bunch of party going, cabin dwelling kids before he could be stopped by Ben Scrivens & his red neck pal, Leo Dechamp. Now Jimmy has returned, this time preying on a group of “Spirit Hunters” searching for the truth to his killings, & Ben must track down Leo before they’re added to his list of victims! Right? Anyway, it’s bound to be better than The Daldry . I’ll even get you started: Here’s Terror at Blood Fart Lake in its entirety. Happy Tuesday! And wait, what ? It can’t be: Return to Blood Fart Lake is on YouTube as well? But how will I get any work done today? Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The latest in a series : “The Oscars have become the golden fig leaves that the industry wears to pretend it’s as committed to being in the quality business as it was in the past.” [ NYT ]
Minutes ago came this terrible reminder from Moviefone: “Good news and bad news: awards season only lasts another five days — which means you’ve only got five more days to bask in the glow of Uggie the dog. He’s the dog you love to love; after all, despite Martin Scorsese’s campaigning, you don’t see Blackie from Hugo with a Facebook fan page numbering nearly 12,000 members .” Or with his own cookies! Anyway, this calls for a slideshow. Bring Kleenex. [ Moviefone ]
Poor Robert Pattinson: The weight of proving himself, in a movie that doesn’t have the words “Twilight” and “Saga” in the title, is shaping up to be heavier than a vampire’s curse. In last year’s Water for Elephants, he had a charming naivete, a seemingly natural shyness that was wholly inoffensive, if not exactly memorable. And as social schemer Georges Duroy in Bel Ami, playing here at the Berlinale out of competition on the festival’s next-to-last day, he works harder to redeem himself than any actor should have to: He applies a scowl from Column A with an eyebrow furrow from Column B to express displeasure; Smirk No. 4 denotes a moment of extreme hubris. The effect is like watching an athlete trying not to break a sweat – you might want to root for him, but there’s a part of you that just wants him to let it all out already. What is it about the guy? Under the direction of first-time filmmakers Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, who have directed mostly for the London stage, Pattinson isn’t half-bad. He doesn’t overreach, which perhaps saves him from embarrassment. But he expends so much energy in his desire to be subtle that he’s the exact opposite of subtle — yet he doesn’t just go all the way and take the performance over the top. Duroy is a fellow of modest means, rattling around Paris bedding the women of influential men to increase his own wealth and power. (The movie was adapted, by Rachel Bennette, from Guy de Maupaussant’s second novel, and it’s a foamy — if somewhat snoozy — bit of picturesque entertainment.) The problem may be that the women around Pattinson run circles around him. They’re the ones you remember, from Uma Thurman’s politically astute Madeleine Forestier, to Kristin Scott Thomas’s mouselike, aging skinny-minny Virginie Walters, to Christina Ricci’s Belle Époch sexpot Clotilde de Marelle. Pattinson, despite the fact that his character is trying to dominate these women, looks a little afraid of them: Perhaps paradoxically, he has more erotic wattage when he’s playing wan Victorian valentine Edward Cullen, his character in the Twilight movies. Here, in his stiff collars and glossy top-hats, he looks like a very lean bird dressed up for dinner, only he’s the one on the plate. I’m wondering how an actor like Pattinson, a guy who’s had so much teenage longing projected onto him he’s practically a walking piece of fan fiction, can ever unravel the tight knots of his own self-consciousness. Or if he can. Watching him in Bel Ami, I found myself hoping he’d rally, looking for subtle glimmers of awareness that might suggest he knows he’s supposed to make us believe he’s a cad, not just act like one. He’s trying so hard — why can’t he use those lizardlike eyes, that cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, in the service of making us forget who he is? Maybe it’s because he can’t forget who he is. And that’s the stiffest, tightest collar any young actor can wear. * * * This is my last post from Berlinale 2012, and here at the tail end of my 10 days here, I’m looking back on all the pictures I wanted to see and didn’t: Bunches of critics were shut out of the crowd-funded Nazis-in-space spoof Iron Sky when it screened late last week; I also missed the much-lauded Marley, directed by Kevin MacDonald, which I hear is an elaborate and involving portrait of the late singer and musician’s life. But there’s no use lamenting the ones that got away. If I can rally for a 10:30 p.m. screening tonight, I might be able to catch Tsui Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. Saying good-bye to Berlin with a bit of 3-D craziness doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. Read all of Movieline’s coverage of Berlinale 2012 here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
