Day: May 29, 2014

Obviously Liam P. Neeson was cast to play Matt Scudder, a tough guy with a guilty past, in Scott Frank‘s adaptation of A Walk Among The Tombstones (Universal, 9.19) , because of his swaggering middle-aged badass rep. But something about this trailer is telling me not to use the word “paycheck.” I may be naive to presume this, but this one seems a tad less opportunistic than the others.

The N.Y. Post‘s Emily Smith is reporting that the below poster for the Weinstein/Dimension’s Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (8.22) was “disapproved by the MPAA ‘for nudity — curve of under breast and dark nipple/areola circle visible through sheer gown.’ Dimension declined to comment but it is believed execs are working on a compromise with the MPAA.”

I’m not approaching Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer with an attitude. Seething class warfare on Runaway Train sounds like a great concept. But Joon-Ho’s Mother struck me as a little too Brian DePalma-esque, and I’m a bit afraid of that flourishy, operatic style. “There’s no doubting that Bong Joon Ho is a DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote five years ago. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” Joon-ho himself has proudly declared that DePalma is a major inspiration. In my book that means “caveat emptor.”

Where will Ukranian celebrity prankster-masher Vitalii Sediuk, who accosted Brad Pitt Wednesday night at the Malificent premiere, end up in life? What’s the difference between guys like Sediuk and Travis Bickel? Obsessive celebrity stalkers who want nothing more than to brush up against the famous, and in so doing perhaps acquire a little fame for themselves? We’re talking about a culture of instant ADD pestilence that’s manifesting more and more. Sediuk, 25, is reportedly the guy who attempted to kiss Will Smith at the Russian premiere of Men in Black III and hid under America Ferrera‘s dress at the How to Train Your Dragon 2 premiere in Cannes.

“I should be clear that I know and like Ann Hornaday. But this isn’t about having a friend’s back; Ann can definitely take care of herself. This is about the idea that the images and stories we consume matter, that they affect us profoundly, although not always in ways we can see and rarely or never in some clear cause-and-effect fashion. That idea is what Hornaday is struggling with here, and it’s an idea we confront over and over again, in slightly different forms, after every one of these mass shootings that seems to have been deliberately designed by its perpetrator as a media spectacle.

“For Seth Rogen to boil all that down, for his 2 million-plus Twitter followers, to ‘@AnnHornaday how dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage?’ is a black-comic example of movie-star narcissism. (I originally wrote that Rogen’s phrase about ‘getting girls’ sent an unfortunate signal, and it rubbed a lot of other people the wrong way too. Various commenters have correctly observed that Hornaday put it exactly the same way, so let’s chalk that one up to the endless game of Telephone that is the Internet.)” — from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 5.27 Salon piece titled “How Seth Rogen proved Ann Hornaday’s point about Elliot Rodger.”

The idea behind Maleficent (Disney, 5.30) is to re-imagine Sleeping Beauty along feminist lines so as to reach a female audience that has no use for the old fairy-tale mythology about put-upon female characters finding happiness by hooking up with a gentle dashing prince at the finale….and who can blame them? Malificent is about commanding woman power in the form of Angelina Jolie‘s vengeful sorceress of the flaming cheekbones, no longer a wicked fairy godmother and Mistress of All Evil but a girl who was betrayed and mutilated by a loathsome turncoat (Sharlto Copley, who always plays scurvy creeps) so who can blame her for wanting a little revenge? She’s never entirely sincere about being evil, in short, and even if she seems wicked-ish at times she certainly has her reasons so calm down and give the girl a break.

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