The A.V. Club - Film

Film: Newswire: The BAFTA Awards give everything to The Artist, proving that British people are aware it's a silent film

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:11:00 -0600

Still mortified by the actions of certain Liverpool ruffians, the BAFTA Awards went out of their way to celebrate The Artist last night, allowing the film to sweep more than half of the dozen categories in which it was nominated, even when it faced exceedingly British competitors such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Iron Lady. Through pursed lips and punctuated by plenty of embarrassed harrumphing, the red-faced presenters awarded Michel Hazanavicius’ ode to silent films best picture, director, actor, screenplay, music, cinematography, and costume design—thus proving that one is well aware that The Artist is a silent ...

Film: Newswire: Weekend Box Office: Valentine's Day belongs to the hunks

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:05:00 -0600

Apparently, mid-February is the new summer. There was enough audience to go around for all four of the week’s top openers, despite a spate of negative reviews for each of them. Having already coughed up $30.5 million to boost the opening weekend of his last big romantic drama, the Nicholas Sparks adaptation Dear John, viewers were powerless to resist the leaden charms of Channing “The Big Brisket” Tatum in The Vow, as he wrapped his beefy arms around Rachel McAdams and $41.7 million. And with a modest $30 million budget, massive profits are assured, especially in the ...

Film: Inventory: Landmark films: 13 newly constructed buildings prominently featured in film

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. Burj Khalifa (built in 2010), Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011) Big, ambitious buildings have a way of capturing the world’s attention, especially in Hollywood, where a cool new one can provide the perfect backdrop for a movie—giving the film a timely hook and the building a profile boost, especially if the building is only a few years old. The Mission: Impossible films rely on exotic destinations, perhaps none more so than Ghost Protocol, which shifts from Budapest to Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai to, um, Seattle. The third leg of that journey is basically just an excuse ...

Film: Newswire: Syfy-caliber movie Legion to become actual Syfy series

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:52:00 -0600

Finding inspiration, like so many networks seem to be doing these days, in its Netflix queue, Syfy has begun developing a TV adaptation of 2010’s Legion—a series that would potentially join the channel’s adaptation of The Adjustment Bureau, as well as the dozen other movie-to-TV shows pitched this development season that were most recently compiled here, because we’re tired of digging up the links to all of them over and over again. So just go look at that list. According to Deadline, Legion’s writer-director Scott Stewart is set to direct and executive produce the small-screen ...

Film: Newswire: Yet another version of Beauty And The Beast in the works

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:52:00 -0600

Because the best stories are those that can be told again and again, preferably in competing versions and all at once, Beauty And The Beast is making inroads toward becoming the next Snow White in terms of fairy tales that producers believe in their heart can sustain multiple simultaneous updates, if only they clap loudly enough. Joining that growing chorus today is Christophe Gans, with the Silent Hill director now shopping his own version of the story with Vincent Cassel as the Beast and Lea Seydoux as the woman who loves him. Did Gans have an appropriately grandiose statement to ...

Film: Newswire: New version of Rebecca to be haunted by the memory of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:18:00 -0600

Alfred Hitchcock won his only Best Picture Oscar for 1940’s Rebecca, suggesting that anyone who would attempt their own adaptation of Daphne du Marier’s novel—as DreamWorks and Working Title are now planning—would be haunted by the lingering spirit of their predecessor, with everyone cruelly comparing this would-be replacement to the original Rebecca and forever finding it wanting. And then cinephilia's various housekeepers, who have preserved Hitchcock's room in their hearts just as he left it, would encourage this new film to commit suicide, and other referential metaphors. But this younger, updated version of Rebecca ...

Film: Movie Review: The Vow

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:40:00 -0600

If you’re going to make an unapologetically cheesy romantic melodrama, why not cast Channing Tatum as the male lead? A former model, dancer, and stripper before he transitioned into acting, Tatum has the good looks and cut-granite physique of the sort of men encountered most often in daydreams, and the puppy-dog earnestness of a boyfriend who secretly worries he isn’t worth your time. The looks come from nature. The latter quality comes from Tatum’s acting, which always seems to be striving not to disappoint. He may not be a natural actor, but he’s trying so hard ...

Film: Newswire: George Lucas says Han never shot first, you were just confused

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:29:00 -0600

Last month George Lucas, emboldened by his impending retirement from the business of blockbusters, opened up about his weariness with the complaints of Star Wars fans who have long griped about his many changes to the saga over the years—for instance, making it so that Han shoots first, to correct what was once a glaring “violation of his own naïve style.” And while that’s more explanation than George Lucas believes you deserve—and it’s already out there for public consumption, and everyone is now familiar with it—there is, of course, no reason why that explanation ...

Film: Newswire: Here's who's been cast so far in Jason Reitman's "all-black Reservoir Dogs" reading

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:08:00 -0600

Director Jason Reitman has been entertaining audiences with movies that are not his own for a while now, gathering diverse and inspired groups of actors for live readings of films such as The Breakfast Club, The Princess Bride, and The Apartment that you could have seen if only you lived in Los Angeles and weren’t broke. His next one-night-only, already-sold-out performance on February 16 is his most dramatic reinterpretation yet: Reitman will take the (fittingly, very talky) script for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and completely overhaul the cast with all black actors, a decision that he and co-curator ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Jean-Ralphio is the new Spider-Man; Entertainment 720 now superhero base of operations

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:05:00 -0600

The trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man hit the Internet recently, and it was only a matter of time before someone spliced in footage of Jean-Ralphio instead of Andrew Garfield. (And by "a matter of time," I mean "I'm extremely grateful College Humor made the time.") I mean, the hair's pretty much the same, and Spider-Man does look good getting run over by a Lexus while daggering Donna on the dance floor. With great power comes great responsibility, and a preowned Acura Legend. Deleted scenes include Peter Parker applying for a job as an accountant and showing himself the ...

Film: Newswire: And lo, Legendary Pictures did cast its 3-D Paradise Lost movie into the abyss

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:30:00 -0600

As foretold by the oracle God and Variety, Legendary Pictures has scrapped all plans to adapt John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem Paradise Lost into a 3-D movie about angels and demons engaged in “aerial warfare,” hurling the project headlong flaming from the ethereal sky into eternal darkness, which would have looked super cool when rendered with a bunch of CGI volcanoes and stuff. The Alex Proyas-directed film had previously been banished to development Purgatory for the sin of costing a shitload of money, and although Proyas offered repentance and bargained with the devil (the metaphorical one, not the Bradley ...

Film: Newswire: The addition of Billy Connolly finally brings an end to Hobbit casting news

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:41:00 -0600

It has been a long and unexpected journey fraught with assorted perils and YouTube tributes set to Enya songs, but at last Peter Jackson’s quest is at an end: With the addition of Billy Connolly, the director has announced that he has finally finished casting for The Hobbit, bringing to a close a far-reaching search that most people thought was over, like, months ago. But anyway, now it definitely is, with Connolly—the man who makes Scottish people laugh and briefly pause from kicking each other’s teeth in—joining the sprawling Hobbit ensemble as Dain Ironfoot, dwarf warrior ...

Film: Primer: Robert Bresson

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This installment: the work of French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Robert Bresson 101 The films of Robert Bresson are daunting, no doubt. His standing as one of cinema’s “patron saints” marks his work as genuinely intimidating. “Bluntly put,” J. Hoberman wrote in Village Voice, “To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers ...

Film: Newswire: Today in movies not starring Jessica Chastain: Naomi Watts, not Jessica Chastain, will play Princess Diana

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:34:00 -0600

In an increasingly rare instance of a role not going to Jessica Chastain, Deadline reports that Naomi Watts has taken the lead in the Princess Diana movie Caught In Flight, a part which had initially been attached to Chastain in accordance with modern American movie regulations. Instead, Watts will play the Princess of Wales during the last two years of her life, a time during which she, according to the official description, found “true personal happiness for the first time” until our society’s relentless need to gawk at and criticize that personal happiness ended in her in death. Director ...

Film: Newswire: Don't worry, Lars Von Trier's next movie will feature an abused woman

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:14:00 -0600

As Lars Von Trier remains under a self-imposed code of silence until the world is finally ready to talk about Nazis, much of the information regarding his next film, Nymphomaniac, has been secondhand. What we do know so far: It will definitely feature Stellan Skarsgard’s “floppy penis”—and should you for some reason need to know more than that, it will, as its title suggests, concern a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac, specifically a woman who details her “erotic journey from birth to the age of 50” (the “Milan to Minsk” of one’s life, as it were). But since this is ...

Film: Newswire: There's "absolutely" going to be another Wet Hot American Summer

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:41:00 -0600

Amid all the excitement surrounding the very almost-reality of returns for Arrested Development and Party Down, you may have forgotten that you were also supposed to be getting your hopes up for a Wet Hot American Summer reunion. Fortunately, Michael Showalter stopped by Bravo’s Watch What Happens When You Combine Vanity With The Journalistic Equivalent Of A Slumber Party last night and did just that, affirming “yes, absolutely—100 percent” into Andy Cohen’s veneered Mouth of Truth. And since Showalter didn’t come away with a ravaged stump for a hand, we guess you should go ahead and ...

Film: Movie Review: Safe House

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:08:00 -0600

In 1987, Denzel Washington picked up the first of five Oscar nominations—he went on to win two, for Glory and Training Day—playing anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko in Cry Freedom. A quarter century later, in Safe House, the ageless Washington (a Safe House document-forger played by Rubén Blades admiringly calls him a black Dorian Gray) returns to South Africa to play another legend. This time, though, it’s a fictional character, and the circumstances are vastly different. Still, Washington brings the full weight of his iconic presence and history to the initially juicy role of a brilliant CIA ...

Film: Movie Review: Rampart

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:07:00 -0600

Anyone familiar with the TV series The Shield already knows the basic premise of the James Ellroy-penned, Oren Moverman-directed Rampart, a movie that—like The Shield—is based on the real-life case of a corrupt division of the LAPD. Woody Harrelson plays one of those dirty cops: a pill-popping, self-proclaimed fascist who won’t let public shaming, federal investigations, or alienation from his family stop him from using excessive force on suspects, or from orchestrating his own crimes. In Shield terms, Harrelson is an unrepentant Vic Mackey, imagining himself as imposing a higher order on the chaos of the city ...

Film: Movie Review: Chico & Rita

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:06:00 -0600

“I’d kiss the ground you walked on if you lived in a cleaner neighborhood,” a pianist named Chico tells a singer named Rita midway through Chico & Rita, a Spanish film in contention for 2011’s Best Animated Feature Oscar. He’s flirting with her, but he’s also pleading with her, and simultaneously chiding her, reminding that her talent could bring her better things in life if she let it. In his eyes, those better things include him, if only the two of them could get in sync. But it never seems to be the right time for the ...

Film: Movie Review: Return

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:05:00 -0600

From the title to the subject matter, everything about Return, from writer-director Liza Johnson, at least superficially feels familiar. Freaks And Geeks’ Linda Cardellini stars as a National Guard soldier who comes back from overseas to her family in Ohio and has a difficult time readjusting. She’s excited about seeing her kids again, and her husband Michael Shannon, and she appreciates the small pleasures, such as the smell of freshly laundered towels. But after a tour of duty in which everything seemed bigger and more intense, the slow pace and piddling concerns of her small town drive her to ...