Category: Cinema

A Very Long Holiday.


The full trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is now online. Looks solid but tone is everything. Also, it never occurred to me until watching this how much Time Bandits follows this same template.

A Stillness at Appomattox.


“This settles the fate of all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come. Shall we stop this bleeding?” The trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is now online, apparently covering roughly the last month of the president’s life. It definitely looks more than a little Spielberg-y around the edges, but I can’t wait to see Daniel Day-Lewis — love the accurate high-pitched Kentucky voice — and Mr. Lincoln’s army of sterling character actors in this. (Showing Hal Holbrook early on was a touch of class.)

RAAAAAAGE.


By way of my friend Alex of Tropics of Meta, the people in movies losing their s**t supercut, including everything from Charles Foster Kane’s slow burn to Jerry Lundegaard’s impotent ice-scraping rage from Fargo. NSFW if you don’t have earplugs, and highly cathartic if/when you find yourself of similar mind — which, this year, has been all too often.

The Con Is On.

It’s not exactly a new Coen Brothers movie — that would be the forthcoming Inside Llewyn Davis, with Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan, Garret Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham, and, of, course John Goodman. But it is the next best thing — a Coen-scripted movie. Three character posters emerge for Michael Hoffman’s remake of Gambit, with Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Cameron Diaz, Sir Tom Courtenay, Stanley Tucci and Cloris Leachman. “Gambit centers on Harry Deane (Firth), a London art curator who enlists a Texas Rodeo Queen (Diaz) in a scheme to con the richest man in England.” The 1966 original, FWIW, starred Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine, and Herbert Lom.

Cloud Sources.


“In the Wachowskis’ work, the forces of evil are often overwhelmingly powerful, inflicting misery on humans, who maintain their faith until they’re saved by an unexpected miracle. The story of the making of “Cloud Atlas” fits this narrative trajectory pretty well.“

The New Yorker delves into the Wachowskis’ adaptation of Cloud Atlas, soon to be at a theater near you with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Keith David, David Gyasi, and Ben Whishaw. (The extended trailer is above.) “‘The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,’ Lana told me. ‘So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.’ The template for ‘The Matrix,’ the Wachowskis recalled, had been ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’ a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.“

Wonder less full.

Sorry y’all: Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, and Barry Pepper are all left on the cutting room floor of Terence Malick’s To the Wonder, opening soon at the Venice Film Festival. In case you were wondering, that leaves Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem in the story of a “man who reconnects with a woman from his hometown after his marriage to a European woman falls apart.” The economic crisis is also somehow involved, presumably in much the same the dinosaurs were in Tree of Life.

(FWIW, among the men left behind in The Thin Red Line were Viggo Mortensen, Mickey Rourke, Lukas Haas, Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Pullman, Jason Patric, Martin Sheen, Donal Logue, and Randall Duk Kim.)