“Her and I have this witty banter thing,” single-mom Kim (Krysten Ritter) blurts out to her date as a way of explaining a little verbal snit-fit she’s shared with gal-pal Deena (Kate Bosworth. “It’s nothing serious.”
There’s fact and fiction in that bit from the preciously titled single-mom rom-com “L!fe Happens.”
No, the banter isn’t very witty. But yes, this is “nothing serious.”
The leading man’s too short, barely suggesting the height that his contemporaries said made him “tower o’er other men.” And his voice, researched and accurate as it may be, is not the Abe Lincoln that’s been inside our head for generations.
The actress they cast to play his wife is decades older than the woman she’s portraying.
U.S. Grant is a sharp-dressed redhead, and like Lincoln himself, played by a Brit.
We don’t get the whole of his life and career, the hardscrabble childhood, the hard-won election, or even much of the civil war that election led to.
But Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is an elegiac turn from a filmmaker we thought was out of new tricks, a vivid, melancholy and meditative look at one of America’s most revered presidents. Daniel Day-Lewis gives us a very human flesh-and-blood Lincoln, weighed down by events but never at a loss for a funny story, rightfully lionized by history, but flawed and willing to take political shortcuts to secure his place in history.
Chatting with Brian Fritz this AM on the Open Mike radio show on 740 The Game, and we’ll talk up the new Matt Damon/John Krasinski/Hal Holbrooke Rosemarie DeWitt drama about fracking — “Promised Land,” and a couple of vintage films playing this weekend at the Enzian, “Django” and “Rashomon.”
So you didn’t go to film school. Maybe you’re a little put-off by film snobs. If you can’t beat’em, the best way to join’em is to see the essentials — the greatest films ever made, the ones that serious and semi-serious film buffs have to have seen to be in the movie conversation.
Maitland’s Enzian Theater is a lot cheaper than film school. If you hit the art cinema on Saturday=, January 12, at noon, you can see “Rashomon,” by Akira Kurosawa, the film that launched his career in the West and one of the greatest movies ever made.
Not so much a samurai picture as a samuri-era whodunnit, the plot and theme were borrowed in scores of other films — different versions of a story, which is the truth?
Toshiro Mifune stars.
The Enzian is showing the original “Django,” a spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero as a pistolero who drags a coffin with him from town to town, stirring up trouble. In the movie, he sets the KKK against Mexican banditos and plays both sides — kind of caught in the middle — kind of manipulating things, “Yojimbo” style.
Classic? Maybe not. But funky and it inspired Tarantino, who uses that theme song.
Midnight Friday and Saturday. Worth a look.
As anybody who’s watched The Discovery Channel knows, if you’re looking for moonshine, the place to start is in the foothills of south central and southwest Virginia. As the new movie “Lawless” makes clear, ‘shine was never a passing fancy amongv the folk there. It’s a tradition that goes back generations.
“Lawless” is based on Matt Bondurant’s “The Wettest County in the World,” a historical novel spun out of Bondurant’s Franklin County, Virginia moonshiner-ancestors. Bondurant whipped up a war between the local off-the-books distillers and the Prohibition Era Chicago mob, which aimed to take over the lucrative illegal liquor trade, from production to distribution.
The Bondurants are led by Forrest (Tom Hardy), the tough-minded World War I vet who formed the family legend that the Bondurants are “indestructible.” His wild-eyed brother Howard (Jason Clarke) seems to second that notion.
It’s only younger brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) who seems vulnerable. He reads the newspapers and idolizes gangsters. He has a taste for fancy clothes and fancy convertible roadsters. It’s just that he’s not tough enough to get them.
So he sets out to change that. He’ll hook up with a mobster (Gary Oldman) laying low nearby. He’ll make his own deals.
And when Forrest is put out of commission by one of his many battles with the other unsavories, Jack has his chance.
A dapper, sadistic Chicago mobster (Guy Pearce) has arrived to help the Real Mob take control of the business, with the aid of the local prosecutor. Charlie Rakes wears bow ties and gloves and a little too much cologne. But don’t call him “Nancy.” He takes such aspersions personally.
A dance hall girl (Jessica Chastain) has taken a job in the Bondurants’ Black Water Station roadhouse, and she’s taken a shine to Forrest. And a local Mennonite preacher’s daughter (Mia Wasikowska) has poor Jack trying to figure out how to be a rich, hard-drinking crook and still get her attention.
The proper ingredients are here to cook up a fine backwoods liquor war tale. The archetypes are broad and obvious, the violence is shocking, unflinching and in your face. Amazingly, people are sliced and shot to beat the band, but 1930s era Franklin County emergency rooms were up to the challenge. Mostly.
But Aussie director John Hillcoat (“The Road”) and rocker turned screenwriter Nick Cave deliver a movie that never finds the right tone. It’s alternately grim and bemused. Too many tough guys tell other tough guys “LOOK at me” too many times. There are too many characters to juggle for any of them to truly get their due. Oldman has a glorified cameo, LaBeouf was the bigger star when production began and turning Hardy into the lead in the editing booth doesn’t quite work out.
By Pixar’s own standards, “Cars,” the scenic animated amble on the backroads of the Roadrunner’s desert southwest, was the company’s worst film. Laugh-starved, lacking much in the line of action, it was a triumph of toy sales and product tie-in (NASCAR) over motion picture.
“Cars 2″ over-compensates for those “Get off the fast track” mid-life crisis musings, but does so in an often funny and action-packed “James Bond goes Racing” comedy. They turn more of the story over to the comic relief, the dopey tow truck Tow Mater, and get a sillier, more kid-friendly movie out of it. Yes, “Cars 2″ is better than “Cars.”
“Dangerous Minds,” “Stand and Deliver,” “Lean on Me” — movies about heroic teachers changing students’ lives, and all movies shown in Miss Elizabeth Halsey’s seventh grade English class at John Adams Middle School.
It’s been thirty years since Alfred Hitchcock died, and more than fifty years since his most famous film — “Psycho.” So while his name, reputation and image remain in the public consciousness, generations have grown up not knowing much more than that about him.
And if casual film fans don’t know Alfred well, they certainly know even less about his wife, Alma Reville. His one-time boss, his editor, confidante and sounding board, Alma steps into the spotlight in the glamorous form of Dame Helen Mirren in “Hitchcock,” the new film about Hitch (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and the making of “Psycho.”
“She’s not been forgotten by those who study Hitchcock intently,” Mirren says. “But the general public never knew of her role in his work, his career. They didn’t know her enough to make her the ‘forgotten heroine’ of his career.”
Stephen Rebello, in his book, “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Psycho,'” calls her “the exacting Mrs. Hitchcock,” the first person Alfred had to impress and please with any film idea, the sharp-eyed editor who spied Janet Leigh taking a “gulp” when she was supposed to be dead in the shower scene in “Psycho.”
“She worked side by side with him for his whole career,” says screenwriter John J,. McLaughlin (“Black Swan”), who used Rebello’s book as the basis for the “Hitchcock” script. “It’s very common in this business to, if you have a spouse, you run your work or work you plan to do by them. You let them read the script before it goes out, you ask them questions as you’re editing. You want their feedback.”
Mirren, 67 and married to a famous filmmaker (Taylor Hackford) herself, knew “nothing of Alma’s importance to his creative process. Hitchcock undoubtedly was that brilliant auteur-ish filmmaker everyone says he was. But it would be interesting, don’t you think, to see what Hitchcock’s movies would have been like WITHOUT Alma. They might still have been wonderful, but certainly they wouldn’t have been quite as tight and smart as they were.”
McLaughlin can’t recall ever “seeing this sort of creative relationship before” on the screen. But Mirren can.
“I played Sofia Tolstoy (in ‘The Last Station’) and even in that art form, where the novelist is a singular voice, you can see that he benefited from that editor, that consistent editing voice who keeps the artist on message. Sofia did for for Leo and was incredibly influencial on his work And again, she’s been written out of history, like Alma.”
McLaughlin built Alma’s role up in the script for “Hitchcock” once Mirren was floated as a possible co-star, “and you’ve got to give someone of her stature something interesting to play.” Though the film takes liberties with Hitchcock’s battle with the flu during the filming of ‘Psycho’ and puts Alma on the set, directing in his stead, and invents a possible romantic dalliance of her own to match her husband’s fetishizing his blonde leading ladies, McLaughlin didn’t have to invent much to put the director’s “toughest audience” front and center in the film. And the relationship he captures can’t have been an easy one in real life.
“If I was a director, and I was constantly working with beautiful women, I think I know how my wife would respond — ‘Maybe you should do a film with an ugly little old man,'” McLaughlin laughs. “But Alma let him do his thing, even if it was hard for her to be two-steps back, out of the limelight. That’s to her credit, and why she deserves credit, too.”
A muse, Mirren says, “is person outside who inspires you. Alma was this hands-on partner in the work, an editor. Having done two films with women as the editors behind great men, I think that women, plainly, make very good editors — film editors and book editors. And since the success of a book or a film often comes down to judicial editing, that’s another endorsement.”
Mirren met the real Alfred Hitchcock back when he was casting one of his last films, “Frenzy,” a brief audition that did not go well thanks to Hitch’s pre-conceived casting notions and what Mirren describes as her young “arrogant and ignorant” attitudes about who constituted a great director – Fellini, Bertolucci, et al.
f the film sends people out to rent “Psycho” to try and recall what all the fuss was about with this ground-breaking/censorship shattering horror film was about, that’s to be expected, McLaughlin says. And if Mirren’s performance in it sends film buffs back to their Hitchcock libraries, maybe to re-read this biography or that one, that’s a good thing, too — Mirren adds.
“An awful lot of film critics ought to know more about Alma, I think. ”
A Palm Beach Post cops reporter who typed her bucket-list styled memoir on her iPhone with the one finger she still had command of in the later stages of ALS (Loud Gehrig’s Disease) has gone Hollywood before the book even comes out.
“Until I Say Goodbye” publishes, with a bang, in March. Universal has the film rights. Susan Spencer-Wendel’s story will be all over book stores, published in 25 languages — Harper is that confident in it.
She looks to be in her 50s. No, the profile of her in the Palm Beach Post leaves that detail out. With Universal shelling out $2 million for screen rights, who could play her? Sarandon and Streep, if they go older. Tomei or Bullock if they think “40s,” Jessica Chastain if they go younger.
