So far, the scheduled Oscar show presenters are Alan Arkin, Jennifer Hudson, Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Amy Adams, Jessica Alba, Cate Blanchett, Josh Brolin, Steve Carell, George Clooney, Penelope Cruz, Miley Cyrus, Patrick Dempsey, Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell, Harrison Ford, Jennifer Garner, Tom Hanks, Anne Hathaway, Katherine Heigl, Jonah Hill, Dwayne Johnson, Nicole Kidman, James McAvoy, Queen Latifah, Seth Rogen, Martin Scorsese, Hilary Swank, John Travolta, Denzel Washington and Renee Zellweger.
Variety‘s Leslie Felperin reviewed Elegy out of the Berlin Film Festival two nights ago, but I somehow missed it until this morning. It isn’t a rave — I can feel a certain hesitancy — but it’s definitely a thumbs-up response. Key passage: “Scenes unfold in a series of near-musical dialogue duets, with Ben Kingsley offering finely-phrased arias of self-deprecation and despair. Despite the age difference, he and Penelope Cruz (who’s never been better in English) look somehow chemically balanced and credible as a couple in a way Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins never did in The Human Stain.”
got it wrong Sunday morning when I wrote that the drama (which also stars Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard) was being called The Dying Animal, after the Phillip Roth book that the script is based upon. It’s a shame that it’s not. Elegy means nothing — it’s an all-but-meaningless, watered-down wimp title. I’ll bet they went with Elegy because Craig Lucas‘s The Dying Gaul was still-born at the box office when it opened in ’06. Any title with the word “dying”…forget it.
Isabel Coixet‘s The Dying Animal, which is apparently screening today in Berlin Film Festival, is an erotic drama about a university professor (Ben Kingsley) having a scorching affair with a much younger Cuban student (Penelope Cruz), and the mad possessiveness (stemming from a fear of death) that this alliance brings out in him.
Unreviewed so far (later tonight?), The Dying Animal is based on a Phillip Roth novel of the same name; the title comes from something (a line, a poem… whatever) written by William Butler Yeats, who had a thing for younger women as well.
For the average moviegoer, of course, The Dying Animal is going to be seen as another film about Kingsley doing his wackjob thing — i.e., playing characters who either embody or succumb to an intense but arresting eccentricity bordering on madness. This is what he’s principally become known for since his great seminal performance as Don Logan in Sexy Beast, which came out seven and a half years ago.
Kingsley has played many different sorts, but his nutters attract the most attention. The irresponsible, pot-smoking therapist in The Wackness. The alcoholic hitman in You Kill Me. The nutter criminal type in Lucky Number Slevin. The deranged Herman Tarnower in Mrs. Harris. Is it fair to say that the saner and more rational his characters are, the less engaging Kingsley’s performances are?
The Weinstein Company will distribute Woody Allen‘s atrociously-titled Vicky Cristina Barcelona sometime later this year. Figure late summer/early fall. The romantic roundelay costars Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson, Penelope Cruz, Kevin Dunn, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Messina.
In the Jan. 14 issue of Maclean’s, the Canadian news magazine, Allen says this the following during a three-page interview: “I finished a film in Barcelona this summer that’s a romance. It’s serious in the sense of like Hannah and Her Sisters, [but] it’s not heavy at all, there’s no killing or life-and-death issues in it. It’s a relationship picture.”
The only way that the National Board of Review awards, to be decided upon and then announced on Wednesday, would have any effect on award-season thinking would be if they made some kind of radical Best Picture choice…which isn’t likely. The NBR did the right thing last year in giving Letters From Iwo Jima their Best Picture prize, but their generally conservative tendencies indicates a vote for one of the comfort-blanket films over the less-soothing darkhearts — Sweeney Todd, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, etc. A big surprise would obviously be welcome.
NBR president Annie Schulhof, Volver star Penelope Cruz at last year’s NBR award presentation ceremony at Manhattan’s Cipriani
I was hoping that Fox 411’s Roger Friedman, who’s passed along some tough judgments about the inside doings of the NBR over the years, would have posted predictions today, but nope. He says he may have something along these lines up tomorrow, including his own calls.
Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley has posted a link to some In Contenton predictions by the Klaus Kinski-admiring “Aguirre” that went up yesterday. Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner for Best Picture, he says. That sounds about right for the NBR. It’s an intelligent, well made heart-tugger about an adult looking for healing and redemption for a bad thing that happened in childhood. It’s also struck chords with over-40 audiences. But a voice is telling me that Joe Wright‘s Atonement, which has a somewhat similar story and theme, will take it.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God says the NPR’s Best Documentary will either be Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro‘s Body of War or Charles Ferguson‘s No End in Sight.
And La Vie en Rose‘s Marion Cotilliard is said to be a locked call for Best Actress.
This 10.19 Hollywood Reporter story about the title of Woody Allen‘s next film is, I’m sure, a mistake. Allen would never call anything Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even for a film that described as a “love letter to Barcelona,” it’s just too awful sounding. Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem costar.
Profound sadness about the passing last night of 42 West publicist Robert Garlock, who’d “been sick for a while,” I was told this morning. A longtime PMK (and then PMK/HBH) veteran, Garlock joined 42 West in May 2005 as a partner and chief of the talent division. He’d personally repped Penelope Cruz, Uma Thurman, Clive Owen, Hilary Swank, Hugh Grant, Sigourney Weaver and Kate Winslet. He also helped guide campaigns on more than 40 feature films, including Pulp Fiction, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The English Patient and The Hours.
Robert Garlock, Uma Thurman
The official poster for the 60th Cannes Film Festival is up. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Wong Kar Wai, Penelope Cruz, Pedro Almodovar….who is that, Ken Loach in the middle? I almost recognize the other three. If this image is too small, a bigger version is at the Cannes Film Festival website.
As biopics about self-destructive artists go, Oliver Dahan‘s La Vie en Rose — the sad story of French songbird Edith Piaf — is above-average. It screams “passion” from every pore, and delivers in the way a movie like this should — superb period atmosphere (World War I to early 1960s), handsome production values, fine ensemble acting, skillful editing and, for a film about a very intense and event-filled life, appropriately longish (140 minutes). But it is essential viewing for one reason and one reason only — Marion Cotillard‘s bracingly vivid, wholly convincing, almost mind-blowingly hardcore performance as Piaf.
Marion Cotillard in A Good Year; as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose
A large-eyed, dark-haired hottie last seen in Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year, the 31 year-old Cotillard so physically resembles the diminutive Piaf — a frail, sparrow-like woman who stood only 4 foot seven inches — and so burrows inside this legendary singer’s aura of hurt in nearly every stage of her life that she blows you away in almost every scene. I’m making it sound like an overbearing performance but it’s not, trust me.
Matthew Smith‘s prosthetic makeup is certainly part of the effect, but Cotillard’s performance would be nothing without her capturing Piaf’s spiritual essence (or at least, what I’ve always believed that spiritual essence amounted to) . The result is one of those amazing-transformation, De Niro-as-Jake La Motta performan- ces that automatically gets Oscar attention. 2007 isn’t quite one-third gone, but there’s no way in hell Cotillard won’t be Best Actress-nominated.
La Vie en Rose (called La Mome in France) won’t open in this country until June 8. (Bob Berney‘s Picturehouse is distributing.) Nonetheless, the L.A. press junket happens tomorrow and its L.A. premiere tomorrow night.
Dahan, who co-wrote the script with Isabelle Sobelman, adopts a here-and-there, back-and-forth approach to Piaf’s relatively brief life (1915 to 1963), which didn’t quite span 48 years. He takes paintbrush stabs at her life with a kind of mosaic- pointillist technique.
There’s no way to deliver the kind of upbeat-ending finales that Ray and Walk The Line had when your subject winds up dead from morphine addiction and other lifelong abuses (and looking like death itself at the end), but the spirit of this enterprise is so fierce and trembling that using the word “downer” would be grossly off-the-mark.
I could pass along the plot particulars and describe the numerous secondary characters and raise a glass to each and every performer, but I’m not going to. Everything significant in Piaf’s Wikipedia biography has been rendered on the screen, and if you want to know the story before seeing the film, go for it.
Suffice that all the performances have a finely rendered, steeped-in-conviction quality. Gerard Depardieu‘s Louis Leplee, the Parisian nightclub owner who discovered Piaf, and Jean-Pierre Marin‘s Marcel Cerdan, the great love of Piaf’s life, are the best of the lot.
I was also taken with Catherine Allegret‘s performance as Louise, a Normandy brothel-runner who helped raise Piaf as a very young girl. (My first thought was how much Allegret resembles Simone Signoret; it was quite a mind-bender to read that she’s her daughter.)
Here’s a video clip of a scratchy old concert film clip of Piaf in the late 1950s. And here’s another one.
“La vie en rose” (i.e., “life through rose-colored glasses”) is said to be Piaf’s signature song, although I’ve always thought that “Non, je ne regrette rien” was a much fuller, on-target summation of who she was and how she dealt with the ups and downs.
Picturehouse acquired U.S . distrib rights o La Vie in Rose in Cannes last year, and will be pushing it for Best Foreign Language Feature, no question.
Cotillard “delivers one of the best female performance of the past decade,” a guy who wrote me from the Berlin Film Festival insisted last February. “She’s the Penelope Cruz-in-Volver of this calendar year, except she could have a serious shot at winning.” I don’t agree. At this stage of the game, Cotiilard seems like this year’s Helen Mirren. Is that overstating things? I’m not so sure that it is.
It’s not in the least bit significant that Cotillard is 5′ 6 and 1/2 inches, or nearly a full foot taller than Piaf, since almost no one watching this film is likely to know this or be aware of any height discrepancy anyway. But it is significant that everything she says and does as Piaf is a complete immersion, an exceptional revisiting…an absolute knockout.
L.A. Times staffer Glenn Bunting got his hands on detailed budget documents for Sahara, a poor man’s Indiana Jones adventure flick with Matthew McConaughey, Penelope Cruz and Steve Zahn that came out in 2005 and lost at least $78 million despite having earned $122 million. That’s because it cost $160 million to make and racked up $81.1 million in distribution expenses. This makes it “one of the biggest financial flops in Hollywood history,” Bunting writes.
A story based on tangible black-and-white data and the usual verifying and follow-up calls, and Movie City News is calling Bunting’s story “gossip.”
The second I saw the above one-sheet with McConaughey trying to affect a brawny man-of-adventure vibe with his arms folded (i.e., to hide the fact that his arms are disproportionately short — three or four inches shorter and he would almost have Thalidomide-baby flipper arms) and flashing that second-rate-macho, cock-of-the- walk, men’s-cologne-commercial smile, I knew right away I wouldn’t go to the free screening and that I wouldn’t rent it on DVD. I decided that instantly. But now I want to see it because of Bunting’s piece.
“Movie budgets are one of the last remaining secrets in the entertainment business,” Bunting writes, “typically known to only high-level executives, senior producers and accountants. ‘The studios guard that information very, very carefully,’ said Phil Hacker, a senior partner in a Century City accounting firm that audits motion pictures. ‘It is a gossip industry. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is getting paid.'”
Among the tidbits and line items…..
(a) the fact that Sahara has technically lost about $105 million to date, according to a finance executive assigned to the movie, [although] records show the film losing $78.3 million based on Hollywood accounting methods that count projected revenue ($202.9 million in this case) over a 10-year period”;
(b) That among the 1,000 cast and crew members who worked on Sahara, “the highest-paid was McConaughey, who received an $8 million fee, or $615,385 for each week of filming, not including bonuses and other compensation. Cruz earned $1.6 million. Rainn Wilson, who since has raised his profile through roles in “Six Feet Under” and “The Office,” was paid $45,000 for 10 weeks of work.” Hey….what did Zahn make?
(c) a 46-second scene showing the crash of a vintage airplane, shot in London in 2003, cost more than $2 million but was never used in the final film. “In the context of the movie, it didn’t work,” said director Breck Eisner.
I thought it was generally understood that Scarlett Johansson hurt herself pretty badly by starring in the triple black-spot whammy last year that was Scoop, The Black Dahlia and The Prestige, and that further alliances with Woody Allen feel like thin-ice excursions given the close-to-shocking atrociousness of Scoop. (Didn’t Joe Queenan write a Guardian column last fall about how Johansson is just about over? Scoop was so bad it made me think that perhaps Allen himself had lost it. He could never have made anything that bad in the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s.)
Hence, Johansson’s decision to costar in Allen’s next film, which will mainly shoot in Barcelona this summer, may be something she lives to regret. (Or the opposite. After all, Allen made one of his all-time best, Match Point, only two years ago.) Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz will also star. The Spain-set film will be Allen’s fourth in a row outside the U.S. The last three were shot in London — Match Point, Scoop and the upcoming Cassandra√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Dream, a dark, Jules and Jim-ish romantic drama that costars Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell and Hayley Atwell.
And while we’re on the topic of Americans (and American filmmakers) shooting in Spain, remember Whit Stillman‘s Barcelona! A little too dry and reserved here and there, but overall a penetrating, almost haunting work that I only caught up with last year (at the suggestion of Mike Binder, a friend of Stillman’s).
A sophisticated film chum who’s currently trolling the Berlin Film Festival (and who weirdly asked for anonymity) insists that “Olivier Dahan‘s La Mome (a.k.a., La Vie en Rose) — a hurricane dramatic ride into the tumultuous life of Edith Piaf — is the first great film of 2007.”
strong>Bob Berney’s Picturehouse acquired U.S . distrib rights in Cannes last year, and is now pushing what Berlin guy feels will be the #1 contender for the Best Foreign Language Feature race of this year.”
Marion Cotillard “delivers one of the best female performance of the past decade,” he insists. “She’s the Penelope Cruz (in Volver) of this calendar year except she could have a serious shot at winning it all.’
No Variety review yet, but the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt is calling it “a messy triumph…showy and scattered, sometimes corny and other times outrageous, focused intensely on emotions, in love with its heroine and to hell with anything else.
“Dahan, who co-wrote the script with Isabelle Sobelman, pulls apart Piaf’s improbable, melodramatic life and puts it back together in a mosaic that suits his idea of the singer. Dahan sees Piaf’s life as a fantasia where nothing separates life from art, where miracles dwell alongside tragedy and grief and a saint can drop by for a visit.
“The film is messy the way Piaf’s life was messy: It’s unafraid of extravagant gestures even when they fail to come off.
“La Vie en Rose aims at a broad international audience with a mix of Piaf standards, doomed romance and a larger-than-life, self-destructive heroine.
“Thanks to an extraordinarily brave performance by Marion Cotillard, whose every gesture and singing performance channels not only Piaf but perhaps a bit of Judy Garland, the film should have wide adult appeal,” Honeycutt declares. “Critics will be divided about the filmmaking, especially its more self-conscious aspects, but Cotillard’s performance and the film’s fervent, romantic belief that misery can be turned into art will connect with many age groups, especially among women.”
Marion Cotillard on the carpet
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »