Day: August 27, 2013

It’s a little bit ballsy, I think, of Focus Features to approve this one-sheet for Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyers Club (11.1) as the blurry image of what I presume is Matthew McConaughey‘s face obviously flirts with the macabre. The film is a true-life tale about a guy (Ron Woodruff) who saved himself from an AIDS death for years by smuggling non-approved medications into the U.S. McConaughey is wearing black shades, of course, but he looks like the man who’s found dead in his pajamas in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds with his eyes pecked out. Big black sockets. The poster is clearly saying “whoever and whatever this cowboy-hatted guy is, he’s got one foot on the gallows and the other on a banana peel.”

I’m told it’s not going, but this would also be a good choice for the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, which kicks off the day after tomorrow. An obvious Best Actor push for Matthew McConaughey could obviously use Telluride buzz to start things off. The Jean-Marc Vallee-directed drama will play the Toronto Film Festival for sure, and then Focus Features will release it on 11.1.

A friend has just passed along talk about Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin playing the 2013 Telluride Film Festival. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows? The film will definitely play at the Venice Film Festival on 9.3, or a day after Telluride wraps.

Scarlet Johansson plays a dark-haired alien who dresses like Bayonne mall trash circa 1983. If you want to talk superficials Johansson’s character — Isserley is her alien name, Laura her earth name — has more kinship to the Kanamits in the famous Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man” than to David Bowie‘s character in The Man Who Fell To Earth. But the themes, derived from Michael Faber’s 13-year-old novel, are allegedly more complex than just “alien hottie looking to scoop up hitchhikers so they can fattened up and eaten by her employers.”

In a 5.2.12 Variety interview, Johansson told Stephen Schaefer that “I’ve never been in a movie where the logline of the movie, where the plot has been so twisted. It’s crazy. ‘Are you eating people on the side of the road?’ I’m like, ‘No, no!’ Okay, yes, I do play an alien who is wearing my own skin. But it’s actually not a science-fiction film. It’s sort of a film that asks existential questions and much more complex than the logline.”

Closed Circuit (Focus Features, 8.28) is an intelligent, moderately suspenseful, British-made melodrama (and not really a “courtroom drama”, despite what some reviewers are saying) about domestic terrorism and morally derelict higher-ups. The latter prove their dastardly mettle in Act Three by pursuing the once-romantically-linked barristers (Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall) who are onto the Big Secret that no one can know about…all right, no spoilers. But the fact that these two get chased down some dark streets underscores the basic movie maxim that (a) if you stumble onto some Really Shocking Information and (b) indicate that you may spill it, the bad guys will definitely try and ice your ass.

We all know the name of that tune, don’t we?

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