Inside Movies
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See DiCaprio and Eastwood at work making ‘J. Edgar’
Here is some on-set footage that Warners Bros. has made available that shows Leonardo DiCaprio, Clint Eastwood, Naomi Watts and Arnie Hammer on the set, hard at work making J. Edgar.
Eastwood’s drama about the powerful, long time FBI director had its world premiere days ago at the AFI Fest, It opens in limited release on Wednesday and goes wide Friday.
Because it’s Eastwood, and because DiCaprio plays Hoover from a young man in his 20s to his retirement from the FBI in his 70s, the movie has drawn lots of Oscar buzz, sight unseen. Reviews so far have been mixed.
Hoover, paradoxically, gained much power in Washington, largely because of the leverage he held over other politicians because of the secrets he knew about them. He closely guarded his own private life.
The movie delves into his closest personal relationships - with his over-protective mother, his loyal, longtime secretary and with Clyde Tolson (Hammer), Hoover’s protege and companion.
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‘In Time’ movie trailer
Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried and Cilian Murphy star in In Time, a futuristic thriller in which time is, literally, money.
The movie is set in a time where aging stops at 25. The only way to stay alive is to earn, steal, borrow or inherit more time.
Timberlake plays Will Salas, who comes by a windfall of time that gives him access to a world of wealth. He combines forces with a young heiress (Seyfried) to try to destroy the corrupt system.
In Time is directed by Andrew Niccol, who also wrote and directed Gattaca and Lord of War and wrote The Truman Show.
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The Avengers new movie trailer
Here is the new trailer for Marvel’s The Avengers, one of next year’s big superhero movies. The Avengers opens in theaters May 4.Most of Marvel’s big superhero movies up until now have been origin stories, with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) popping up in the end to recruit the newly minted superhero for his secret organization.
Now it turns out that next year’s The Avenger’s will be an origin tale, also.
Enough with the origin stories already, for cryin’ out loud.
From the studio synopsis: When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins.
The Avengers, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is a super hero team that includes Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye and the Black Widow.
The movie stars Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson. The movie will be directed by Joss Whedon. -
Ides of March review
George Clooney’s support of progressive and humanitarian causes is well-known, so we might expect any movie about politics that comes from him during the thick of a contentious presidential campaign to carry a lot of partisan baggage.
But if we expected Clooney’s Ides of March to be an anti-Republican broadside, it can only be because we haven’t been paying attention.
Clooney is liberal, yes, but his work and his public utterances about political and social issues betray him as a thoughtful man of conscience.
He isn’t one for cheap shots and easy targets. Ides of March is a blistering political indictment, but the movie’s target isn’t Republicanism or even the Tea Party, that easiest of targets. Clooney’s attack is aimed at the political process itself.
Politics is a dirty business, his movie seems to say. It leaves no one untouched.
Clooney, who directed and co-wrote the movie, plays an idealistic Democratic governor who is running for president. In the middle of a bruising battle for the state of Ohio, he refuses to cut deals in order to get endorsements even though his refusal might cost him victory.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the seasoned, loyal campaign manager. The star of the campaign, however, is Hoffman’s assistant, a young hotshot played by Ryan Gosling.
It is evident that self interest is never far from Gosling’s mind, - he is a man in a hurry - but he says (and we believe) that he will do anything for his candidate as long as he believes in him.
The movie’s plot puts all of the character’s convictions and their self-proclaimed ideals to the test.
Evan Rachel Wood plays a pivotal role as an alluring campaign intern. Paul Giamatti is characteristically terrific as the cynical, manipulative campaign manager for the opposing candidate.
The movie takes its time setting everything up. The writing isn’t as sharp as it could be. But it is a searing non-partisan critique of the way politics is played.
It plays as a political thriller with melodramatic flourishes - a Hollywood exercise in polished genre filmmaking, in other words - when, at its heart, it wants to be something purer, something rougher and more low-key.
Hollywood won this tug of war. To my mind, the result is a lesser movie than it could have been. It will be interesting to see how receptive people are to The Ides of March’s message.
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Jessica Chastain discusses Terrence Malick and The Tree of Life
This has been a big year for Jessica Chastain. Most of us hadn’t heard of her when Terrence Malick picked the lithe, red-haired beauty to play the role of Brad Pitt’s wife in The Tree of Life, a stunningly beautiful and ambitious film that, in the current edit, falls somewhere short of greatness.
But Chastain also has gotten lots of notice for her roles in The Debt, Take Shelter and, especially, The Help in which she plays an up-from-white-trash housewife who is far more than comic relief in the period racial drama.
Suddenly it seems Chastain is everywhere (and she’s in more movies on the way).
In this video, she talks about what it was like auditioning for the Malick, the media-shy cinematic visionary who liked Chastain enough to also cast her in his next movie.
The Tree of Life
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Real Oakland A’s former manager doesn’t care much for ‘Moneyball’
Art Howe, the former manager of the Oakland A’s, is portrayed in Moneyball by Philip Seymour Hoffman who is a little “on the heavy side,” says Howe. That’s only one of Howe’s complaints about the movie, which deals with the A’s 2002 season, when the general manager, played in the movie by Brad Pitt, used the team to try to reinvent the game of baseball.
Billy Beane, Pitt’s character, was losing his best players and his team did not have the money to replace them with highly coveted players. He used mathematical formulas to rebuild the team using players that no other team wanted.
In the movie, Howe stands in his way nearly every step of the way.
It is clear from this Houston Chronicle interview that Howe had issues with Beane, whom he says was nearly a constant presence in the field house, but Howe says he looks back on his time in Oakland as “a good experience.”
Howe, who now does the pre- and postgame shows for Fox Sports Houston, lives in Houston, where he once played for and managed the Astros.
Read our Moneyball review.
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You don’t need to be a fan to appreciate ‘Moneyball,’ Brad Pitt’s new ultimate inside-baseball movie
I love baseball about as much as I love mowing the grass. It’s safe to say that I am not the ideal audience for Moneyball, the more-or-less true story of how Billy Beane, the general manager of the cash-strapped Oakland As’s, reinvented his team in the early 2000s in an effort to change the sport to which he had dedicated his life.
Lovers of the sport, I’m sure, will experience this on a whole other level, bou don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate Moneyball.
The A’s had become a farm team for better franchises that were picking off its best players. Faced with rebuilding but lacking the money to buy the most coveted ballplayers, Beane instead hired as his assistant a Yale-educated business grad who used mathematical formulas to help Beane pick players no other team wanted but who possessed the skills necessary to help the A’s win games.
Brad Pitt plays Beane, bringing the sort of low-key Redfordesque charm that has become his trademark. He also invests the character with an emotional depth. We’ve seen him do equal work in films such as Babel and, earlier this year, The Tree of Life. This time, however, his work is front and center, the way it could never be films helmed by ambitious visionaries such as Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu or Terrence Malick.
Moneyball is directed in solid, workmanlike style by Bennett Miller, who made his feature film debut in 2005 with Capote.
Jonah Hill brings humor to his role of a buttoned-down, young assistant director. Philip Seymour Hoffman adds strong support as the strong-willed team manager who thinks Beane’s ideas and his draft picks are loony and who has no intention of playing by Beane’s playbook.
An interesting story about Beane in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine talks about how other teams subsequently adopted many of the innovations that Beane introduced to the game, “thus eliminating whatever stealth advantages he once enjoyed.”
“The Moneyball philosophy ultimately triumphed,” writes Adam Sternbergh, the author of the story, “but Billy Beane never quite did.”
Followers of the sport know that already, so this isn’t really a spoiler except to people like me, who may go to the movie expecting a traditional uplifting sports movie ending. But by the end such moviegoers will already have experienced a film that is anything but a traditional sports movie. It trades on different strengths.
It offers some of the expected sports-movie pleasures - the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and all that - but the grassy diamond isn’t really where Moneyball excels. It’s chosen field of play is the back room, the sports offices, the strategizing and mind games that go on that outsiders never see and that know-it-all sports writers can only guess at.
This is inside baseball made accessible even to baseball doofuses like me.
Written by Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin (Sorkin wrote the wonderful Social Network), Moneyball places the focus squarely on character and on dialogue.
Beane, at 18, had been considered a sure thing, a star in waiting that baseball scouts were certain would excel. He passed up the chance to go to Stanford to play ball. And he failed at it.
The movie, based on a 2003 book by Michael Lewis, presents this as a reason for Beane’s distrust of conventional baseball thinking.
Baseball, and baseball movies, lend themselves to a certain amount of romanticization. Moneyball romanticizes not only the sport but also Beane. It portrays him as an idealist instead of simply a general manager trying to keep his job, a disadvantaged competitor trying to win.
I don’t buy the romance of the game hooey. But, then, I didn’t need to. Look at Moneyball as just a story about a likeable, resourceful guy resisting orthodoxy and fighting against the odds, and it’s still a good movie. -
Warrior review: The family that fights together…wins Oscars?
When Paddy Conlon comes home one night to his house in a working-class section of Pittsburgh and finds his grownup son, Tommy, waiting on his stoop, he can’t contain his shock. They haven’t seen each other in 14 years, not since Tommy, then a youngster, fled with his mother to escape his hard-drinking, abusive dad.
Sober now, and a church goer, Paddy is glad to see him, but wary. Why has Tommy returned?Tommy doesn’t reveal much. A former Marine, his every move and utterance bespeaks explosive, barely contained rage.
This is the opening scene of Warrior, a stirringly well-made family drama opening Friday that is set in the brutal, competitive world of mixed martial arts competition.Tommy is well-played by Tom Hardy, who made such a strong impression in Inception. He moves into his own place nearby and starts working out in a gym. Before long, has reduced the gym’s toughest mixed martial arts hero to rubble and is a contender for a national championship.
He seems driven, and his unfocused rage is only the half of it.
Paddy has a second son. Brendan (Joel Edgerton) lives in Philadelphia, on the other side of the state. Brendan and Tommy are nothing alike. Brendan is a family man, a high school physics teacher much loved by his students. But Brendan, too, wants nothing to do with his father.
Warrior, which mixes the slam-bang excitement of mixed martial arts action with family drama and sets its story in a recognizably real milieu of home foreclosures, economic desperation and wartime conflict, is a powerful movie.
I almost wrote “unexpectedly powerful,” but I came to it without having seen the trailer or read much about it. I urge you to do the same. (I’m attaching a brief clip from the movie but not the trailer, which might reveal more than you care to know about the story going in.)
Like The Wrestler, Warrior’s backdrop is a “sport” that many people don’t take seriously or know much about. Those sensitive to violence may find its fight scenes difficult to watch. But much is at stake here, and I’m not only talking about the huge, potentially life-changing purse.
More than anything this is a tale of redemption. All three men - the father and two very different sons - stand in need of it.
This isn’t a perfect movie. Directed by Gavin O’Connor from a script co-written by O’Connor, Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman, the machinations that move us toward Warrior’s climatic championship are a bit too perfunctory. And while Nolte will almost certainly receive a supporting Oscar nomination for his role repentant, ex-alcoholic dad, the movie too purposefully inflates his role to hedge its bets.
Nolte is great here (I especially like the way he says his lines when he discovers Tommy on his doorstep). Hardy also should get lots of attention. His inarticulate physicality and intensity will remind some of a young Brando.
Joel Edgerton, however, is the one to watch. It’s his movie. The success or failure of the film ultimately rests on his shoulders. He carries it ably. It likely won’t happen, but a best actor nomination should already be printed up with his name on it. -
Movie stills and trailer for Daniel Radcliffe’s first post-Harry Potter role
Daniel Radcliffe, wisely, is moving quickly on from Harry Potter, capitalizing on the role to get choice gigs while swiftly taking on other high-profile roles to shake off the boy wizard persona by which the world knows him.
Here is the trailer and first movie stills from The Woman in Black, a ghost story that opens in early 2012.
Radcliffe plays a young lawyer who travels to a remote village to sort out the papers of a recently deceased client.
While working alone in the remote house, he uncovers tragic secrets while getting glimpses of a mysterious woman clad in black.
I really like the low-key eerie quality of the trailer. I’m looking forward to seeing this.In addition to Radcliffe, The Woman in Black stars Ciaran Hinds, Liza White and Janet McTeer. It’s directed by James Watkins.
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‘World War Z’ slated to December 2012 release
Paramount Pictures announced yesterday that World War Z, it’s big Brad Pitt movie about the coming zombie apocalypse, will be released Dec. 21, 2012.
Paramount is calling the movie a “geo-political thriller,” which makes it sound like either they don’t want to make any money or else they feel a need to add an air of gravitas to what should be a big honking zombie movie. Maybe it’s just their way of making sure we know it’s got a big budget and some big names attaached.
Yeah, sure Brad Pitt has an Oscar nomination under his belt, he’s taken to pompously referring to himself a “citizen of the world” and he and Angelina Jolie have established a United Nations of adopted kids under their roof, but it’s a zombie movie, for crying out loud.
The film is based on the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Warby Max Brooks.
In addition to Pitt, World War Z stars Mireille Enos (AMC’s The Killing), James Badge Dale (The Departed), Matthew Fox (Lost) and, in her feature film debut, Daniella Kertesz.
Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Neverland, Quantum of Solace) directs.
Pitt plays a United Nations employee (natch) who “traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself,” according to the studio synopsis.
