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Oscars 2012: Best Actress First Look

September 16, 2011 By Thelma 1 Comment

Viola Davis,The Help,Bestseller,Kathryn Stockett,Best Actress,Oscars 2012,Best Supporting Actress

Davis has a lot to smile about

Now that Toronto is winding down, and I’ve considered the best actor race, let’s shift to The Women, a competition between older and younger, period and contemporary, dominant and submissive:

1. Viola Davis, The Help

2. Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

3. Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk about Kevin

4. Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

5. Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia

And the rest:

6. Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method

7. Jodie Foster, Carnage

8. Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn

9. Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

10. Mia Wasikowska, Jane Eyre

11. Charlize Theron, Young Adult

12. Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene

Filed Under: Celebrity, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Oscars 2012, TIFF11, Toronto International Film Festival

Oscars 2012: Best Actor First Look

September 15, 2011 By Thelma 1 Comment

OK, we’re just out of Toronto (at least I am). It’s a crap shoot as to who will make the best actor shortlist — but it’s not as much of a crap shoot as it was a week ago. This is going to be one very hot race. So, let’s start off with the shoe-in:

1. George Clooney, The Descendants

2. Brad Pitt, Tree of Life or Moneyball

3. Jean Dujardin, The Artist

4. Woody Harrelson, Rampart

Woody Harrelson,Robin Wright,Cynthia Nixon,Ben Foster,Oren Moverman,James Ellroy,Hot sex,The Messenger

5. Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar

And don’t forget:

6. Michael Fassbender, Shame

7. Gerard Butler, Machine Gun Preacher

8. Dominic Cooper, The Devil’s DoubleDominic Cooper,The Devil's Double,Best Actor,Oscars 2012

9. Paul Giamatti, Win Win

10. Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

11. Ryan Gosling, Drive or The des of March

12. Tom Hardy, Warrior

 

Filed Under: Celebrity, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Brad Pitt, Dominic Cooper, Drive, Gary Oldman, George Clooney, Gerard Butler, J. Edgar, Jean Dujardin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Machine Gun Preacher, Michael Fassbender, Moneyball, Oscar Race, Oscars 2012, Paul Giamatti, Rampart, Ryan Gosling, Shame, Soldier, Spy, Tailor, The Artist, The Descendants, The Devil's Double, The Ides of March, TIFF11, Tinker, Tom Hardy, Toronto International Film Festival, Tree of Life, Warrior, Win Win, Woody Harrelson

TIFF11 REVIEW: RAMPART

September 15, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Woody Harrelson,Robin Wright,Cynthia Nixon,Ben Foster,Oren Moverman,James Ellroy,Hot sex,The Messenger

Harrelson breaks bad in blue

 

I love me some LA noir, whether it’s James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, or TV’s pretty-boy noir, Southland, I grew up on the mean sidewalks of West LA – or at least I went to nursery school there.

That may be one reason that I’m so completely taken with Rampart, a name that refers to one of Los Angeles’ most notoriously corrupt police departments, blue-walled home to scandal and Training Day and Adam-12. Add to that that Ellroy himself created the story and co-wrote the script with director Oren Moverman (The Messenger), and we’ve got a ticket to hard-boiled bloody bliss.

And then there’s Woody Harrelson as Dave Brown, a second generation policeman in the Rampart Division who rides his cop car like a Marlboro man, smoking, drinking, never eating.  For him, Downtown LA is the frontier; he even gets out of his car as if he were climbing off a saddle into the muck. His moniker is “Date Rape.” He doesn’t go gentle through the night with perps, a practice that has now put his position on the force in peril. His jaw juts and his shades cover nearly dead eyes. Yes, he could be a character out of a Jim Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me.

Where does Harrelson stop and Brown begin? This self-made son of a murderer has always had something dangerous he was covering with humor and once-good looks, now funneled into a physique free of body fat. People forget that cigarettes and uppers have always been a successful weight-loss one-two punch. This is an Oscar contender performance because he owns every inch of the screen — he is the movie’s muscle and bone. And, yet, Harrelson never acts alone. He’s always hardwired to the actors with whom he shares his scenes. This is as true of his violence against citizens, as it is of his multiple sex scenes. I can still see him licking the toe of a brown woman he picked up at a bar like it was a chicken wing.

And that’s where the twist comes in. The dirty cop story is conventional in its own way: the times are changing and a violent cop is not changing with them. The frontier is shrinking and there’s no place left for the bigger-than-life cowboy. As for Brown, he’s covered up a killing in the past that always threatens to come unburied. He’s brutalized a man on a tape that went viral, and which he cannot explain away. No context justifies the violence. And yet….

Here’s the magnificent twist: Brown’s strange domestic harem. He lives with two sisters in adjacent small stucco houses: his current wife (Cynthia Nixon) and his ex (Anne Heche) and his two daughters, rebellious Helen (Brie Larson) and pliable Margaret (Sammy Boyarsky). OK, she’s my sister, she’s my cousin, she’s my sister, she’s my cousin. It’s a messy menage, an estrogen den, and all four woman flower as fully-realized characters. Nixon has rarely been better on screen: sharp, sensible and maternal. Heche dishes out her anger in a way that would bring down the cops for domestic violence, if a cop wasn’t already involved. Larson, as Brown’s angry, lesbian teenager, burns through her scenes, so desperately wanting to love her father, so angry with having to deal with the fall-out from his failures. They’re freakish twins, which makes the ending work so completely.

Then there’s Robin Wright not Penn as his boozy, damaged lawyer on the side. She’s an actress who can convey so many things with a face that seems impassive, a mask of beauty now aging gracefully, a princess who’s seen more than Camelot. And Ben Foster reunites with Harrelson and Moverman, in a supporting role as a wheelchair bound street vet that’s gut-wrenching and sly.

For me, beyond Moverman’s confident ability to drive the story along with his sharp-shooting camera, and Ellroy’s sure-footed we-know-men script, is a realization of the complicated messiness of life. While the LA law enforcement landscape is changing, and Brown’s two-fisted cop is no longer welcome, we’ve seen that story before, even if this is a terrific example of the trope. The real frontier that’s changed is the relationship between men and women. Brown is clearly a lover of women, which makes his character so full and flawed. Brown’s personal tragedy is that he’s revealed to be as much a dinosaur in his domestic life as the Marlboro Man has become as a proud symbol of American masculinity.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Anne Heche, Ben Foster, best actor, Cynthia Nixon, Dirty Cops, James Ellroy, LA Noir, Police Corruption, Rampart division, Robin Wright, Southland, The Maltese Falcon, TIFF11, Toronto International Film Festival, Woody Harrelson

TIFF11: Keira Knightley Kornered

September 14, 2011 By Thelma 1 Comment

Keira Knightley,Michael Fassbender,A Dangerous Method,Viggo Morntensen,Vincent Cassel

Knightley hysterical

 Where I jaw with Keira…

Knightley is every bit as intelligent, gorgeous and passionate in person as she is on screen. Many people will be disappointed to discover this. It’s just too damn unfair.

I caught up with her at the intimate Sony Classics dinner at Crème Brasserie, 162 Cumberland Street, in Toronto. Years of experience have taught me that the most interesting intimate conversations take place at the cocktail party before hand, and there was the female star of A Dangerous Method (out November 23rd), talking to associates, waiting for the night to begin. Her hair was in a Julie Christie bob, she wore an Elie Saab sparkly blush frock and she had a positive energy that I instantly connected to when I introduced myself .

Knightley was lovely, the kind of person that looked you in the eye and not over your shoulder. We talked first about the most arresting physical action in the introduction of her Russian Jewish character, Sabina Spielrein, who arrives literally hysterical at the elite Swiss clinic of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Knightley does this thing where her chin, already prominent, juts out in a hideous way that resembles the alien from the Sigourney Weaver movies. It takes someone very secure in her looks to make herself so ugly, like a child pulling faces in a mirror.

It turns out that’s actually what the actress did. She told me that she read in Spielrein’s papers that the faces she made were demonic, or dog-like, and so she set about making faces in her mirror that reflected that demon/dog. In the end, she came up with two alternatives. She then Skyped director David Cronenberg with the options and he selected his preferred grotesque expression. He definitely got what he wanted!

Knightley and I, with interruptions from Vogue’s John Powers asking about her dress (that’s where I got that tidbit, although I had to spell the designer’s name for John), turned to the subject of the vibrant, troubled, masochistic character she plays. Spankings aside – Fassbender’s Jung pleasures Sabina in an unconventional way — we discussed how welcome it was to play a woman with her own narrative arc — and how rare that is in contemporary cinema. Her Sabina begins in jaw-jutting,limb-twitching hysteria, carried bodily into a forbidding clinic; she exits the movie self-possessed, pregnant, a psychoanalyst in her own right, having risen from patient to colleague in the Freud-Jung set.

Keira Knightley,A Dangerous Method,Viggo Mortensen,Michael Fassbender,Vincent Cassel

Knightley, soigne

We were discussing Keira’s historical research for the part, and her consultations with two psychoanalysts, when we were interrupted again. Viggo Mortensen steps up! Dressed formally, he is slenderer than he appears on screen, more boyish, devastatingly attractive. Despite his tux, he’s carrying a wrinkled plastic shopping bag. Like a kid on Christmas morning, he pulls out a present that he has for their director, eager to show it to Knightley. It’s a silly, bulbous knit hat with sparkles and, possibly, a rat nose. It doesn’t take much to urge Mortensen to try it on — preposterous and still handsome.

Keira Knightley,Viggo Mortensen,David Cronenberg,A Dangerous Method,Silly Hat

Knightley (left) and Viggo: Cat in the Hat

Then it’s Keira’s turn: the sparkles add nothing to the sparkles on her dress. But the obvious happiness of friends seeing friends in a sea of work bounces between them. The silly hat is just an external sign of sincere friendship, and a reminder not to take the tux & tiara thing too seriously, because ultimately it’s the work that matters.

And the work? Up next for Knightley, she’ll play Anna Karenina. She’s currently shooting with her Atonement director Joe Wright and co-stars Jude Law, Kelly Macdonald and Aaron Johnson. Ah, Karenina: Now there’s a female character with her own rich character arc and one created by a man: Leo Tolstoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Books, Celebrity, Criticism, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: A Dangerous Method, Best supporting actress, David Cronenberg, Freud, Joe Wright, Jude Law, Jung, Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, TIFF11, Toronto International Film Festival, Viggo Mortensen

Vincent Cassel on A Dangerous Method

September 13, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Vincent Cassel,David Cronenberg,A Dangerous Method,Michael Fassbender,Viggo Mortensen,Keira Knightley

Cassel on Otto-pilot

Cassel is irrepressible as Otto Gross, a Freud-Jung fellow traveler whose motto was: “never repress any thing.”

Last year, in the ramp up for Oscar season, Black Swan star Cassel joined me at NYC’s Mercer Hotel. While discussing his then-current movie, he gave me a preview of coming attractions — and whet my appetite for David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which I finally saw — and loved — at this week at TIFF11. Here’s an excerpt of that interview:

TA Tell me about the David Cronenberg movie. It’s about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, right?

VC Freud, Jung and I’m Otto

TA Who was Otto?

VC He was actually…he would have been the spiritual son of Freud and Jung. He was really really bright except that the guy was insane, more than they were.

TA They were obsessive. Otto Gross was insane?

VC No, he was really like pushing the boundaries in terms of psychotherapy at the time, but the thing was that he was a cocaine addict, a really strong one. He was having sex with, literally every body. He was having kids every where. His motto was to never repress any thing. He was really living it. so at some point freud sent him to Jung, saying to Jung I would like to cure this guy. He knew that Otto would push Jung further

TA Did he, according to the movie, or in actuality?

VC Yes. In the film, Viggo Mortensen is Freud and Michael Fassbender is Jung.

TA That’s an intense group.

VC You know what It’s funny because it was a lot of fun

TA Does Cronenberg take himself pretty seriously, or no?

VC No, no. He’s experienced. He’s very subtle. He’s a lot of fun — a lot of people don’t know that watching the movies. I think he’s very elegant. I don’t think he takes himself seriously. He’s one of the directors who still reinvents himself and he’s sixty.

TA Did you have scenes with Keira Knightley, who plays Sabina Spielrein, who plays Jung’s Russian Jewish patient and lover?

VC I didn’t have any thing to do with her unfortunately. They were really happy with what she was doing. Insane!

Tomorrow I’ll continue my festival coverage with my chat with Keira Knightley at the Sony Pictures Classic dinner in Toronto…

Filed Under: Celebrity, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: A Dangerous Method, Black Swan, Carl Jung, cocaine addiction, David Cronenberg, Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, Oscar Race, Otto Gross, repression, sexualtiy, Sigmund Freud, TIFF11, Toronto International Film Festival, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel

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