The Screengrab : emily blunt

Emily Blunt, Copycat

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ella Taylor checks in with Emily Blunt, the twenty-six-year-old English actress who's covered a remarkable stretch of ground since her attention-getting performance as a seductive, callous rich girl who draws a lonely, working-class girl (Natalie Press) into her silken web in 2004's My Summer of Love. As Taylor points out, those with an aversion to stories of star-crossed adolescent lesbian attachments--they probably hate raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, too--had to wait to discover Blunt when her "tightly wound turn as Meryl Streep’s groveling girl Friday all but stole The Devil Wears Prada from Anne Hathaway." (In this sentence, "all but stole" is apparently a nice way of saying, "Oh, was Anne Hathaway in that movie too?") Taylor applauds the actress for her "taste for the offbeat and a fetching lack of vanity when it comes to playing disagreeable women", though Blunt may just have figured out early that, if you start out with looks and charisma, people already want to watch you, and playing someone disagreeable in an offbeat project is likelier to provide them with a reason than reclining in fluff and cooing to show how nice you are. (Her co-star Anne Hathaway may not have figured that out until Jonathan Demme dropped the script for Rachel Getting Married in her lap.)

Blunt will next be seen co-starring with Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning. She describes her character there as "hopeless, like a bull in a china shop. She has great potential, but she’s stuck, despite yearning for more than her situation. She wants to know what happened in the past, and no one wants to talk about it. She’s funny and heartbreaking, and I love her curiosity. I’m always drawn to people who are a little off the wall.” The movie, which is about sisters who start a business cleaning up crime scenes, also gives her and Amy Adams the chance to suit up in anti-fumigation outfits that make them look like “a couple of blue condoms.” In her next scheduled releases, she faces such scary challenges as John Malkovich as a magician with a stalled career (in The Great Buck Howard, in which she plays his agent), and the fall release The Wolf Man, in which she plays the love interest of a lycanthropic Benecio Del Toro, if that's not redundant. "“Acting became something I grew accustomed to doing rather than something I’d always desired," says Blunt, who brings to the screen an awesome degree of poise for someone who basically made the leap from school plays to professional acting and bypassed formal training. She told Taylor that, instead, she relies on mannerisms she's copied from people she's met: “I’m combining, so it’s not stealing, it’s research."

Related Stories: Screengrab Clip: Sunshine Cleaning

Screengrab Clip: "Sunshine Cleaning"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:30:00 GMT

The forthcoming comedy Sunshine Cleaning, the first American movie directed by the New Zealand filmmaker Christine Jeffs (who made the biopic Sylvia starring Gwynneth Paltrow and the too-little-seen Rain) promises to be one of the bright spots of the spring movie season. (It opens on March 13.) After Junebug, Talladega Nights, and Enchanted, we decided that about all we ask for in a movie is that it feature Amy Adams in a prominent role; after Doubt we amended that to "Amy Adams in a prominent role that does not require her to wear a penguin suit." The film co-stars Adams and the equally covetable Emily Blunt as sisters who start a crime-scene clean-up business, scrubbing blood off the walls and delicately chasing down that last bit of stray brain matter. The cast also includes such dependable backup talent as Steve Zahn and Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar the last time he deigned to appear in a movie with "Sunshine" in the title. His grumpy old man skills have only been honed since then, as he is only too happy to demonstrate in this exclusive clip:

Trailer Review: The Great Buck Howard

Paul Clark — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

For an actor who projects such a reptilian intelligence, it’s sort of amazing how wonderful John Malkovich is at playing oblivious boobs. The Great Buck Howard, which premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, doesn’t look like much of a movie, but Malkovich looks pretty delightful. Combining the puffed-up self-promotion of his Colour Me Kubrick performance with the addled mien of his later scenes in Being John Malkovich, Malkovich comes off quite well in this otherwise mediocre trailer, managing to soar above even a silly double-entendre at the end. Hopefully, there will be more to Buck Howard than a series of celebrity encounters (I’m guessing there will be), but no matter how it turns out, Malkovich should be a hoot. Also, Emily Blunt’s in it (something you wouldn’t know from the trailer), so her presence will help.

Trailer Review: Sunshine Cleaning

Paul Clark — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In many ways, Sunshine Cleaning appears to exemplify the worst characteristics of today’s Sundance-ready movies- a premise that marries the edgy with the cutesy, populated by Hollywood up-and-comers looking for a little indie cred. And I’d be lying if I said this trailer put my misgivings about this movie at rest. Yet I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist seeing this, given the combination of the adorable Amy Adams, the scorching Emily Blunt, and the ever-reliable Alan Arkin. Normally, I don’t see movies just for the cast, but this one just hits too many of my sweet spots for me to dismiss (I’m not proud). I didn’t really care for Little Miss Sunshine, the producers of whom are also responsible for this film, but as long as Sunshine Cleaning is better than its predecessor, I’ll be OK with it.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 8

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

My guess is that a lot of the people reading this have at least one screenplay in progress. Might I make a suggestion? You know that Big Secret you've got lurking somewhere in the third act — the traumatic past incident that retroactively explains your characters' troubling present-day neuroses? Ditch it. Lose it. Nuke it. You don't need it. It doesn't help.

Had I made this plea a year ago, perhaps we might all have been spared the ordeal of Sunshine Cleaning, one of the big-buzz titles in this year's Dramatic Competition. Directed by New Zealand native Christine Jeffs, whose mildly promising debut Rain now seems a distant memory (she also made Sylvia, the inert Plath biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow), it stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, both in reasonably fine form, as hard-luck sisters who start a new business wiping up the blood and viscera that accumulates at crime scenes. The ick factor makes for a few funny moments, but, alas, screenwriter Megan Holley has more serious issues in mind. Both young women seem devoted to their father (Alan Arkin, reprising his labored shtick from that other Sunshine movie), but Mom is nowhere in sight. Might our heroines possibly be working through some personal issues related to the discovery of a bloody, horrific mess? And isn't that conveeeenient. People, this sort of Freudian nonsense is killing narrative fiction. Characters are far more intriguing and memorable when their behavior can't be reduced to the sum of their childhood traumas. Just let them be however screwed up they are; we'll happily speculate about the cause. (Case in point: the underrated Margot at the Wedding.)

Unfortunately, I failed to get into Sugar, which all reports suggest boasts the same impressive degree of relaxed naturalism as Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's previous Sundance triumph, Half Nelson. But it sounds like the antidote to the Sunshine Cleanings that infest this festival.

Sundance Roundup: Day 4

Scott Von Doviak — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Can Sunshine strike twice? Does that even make sense? Sunshine doesn’t actually strike, does it? It more sort of, uh, shines. Shines like gold. Box office gold! (Now I’m getting back on track.) Two years ago, Little Miss Sunshine was the belle of the ball at Sundance, selling for more than $10 million and going on to become a genuine mainstream hit. This year’s festival hasn’t seen any big money sales yet, although as the L.A. Times reports, “buyers were starting to circle several well-received movies available for distribution.”

Among those movies is Sunshine Cleaning, which the AP notes bears some resemblance besides the title to the 2006 breakout hit. “Like its predecessor, Sunshine Cleaning revolves around a quirky family with communication problems, stars Alan Arkin as a grandpa encouraging a cute kid to succeed, and features a sun-drenched Albuquerque, New Mexico setting.” Cleaning also co-stars Emily Blunt; Entertainment Weekly has a Q&A with her here.

We previously noted the preponderance of British films at this year’s festival, but there’s no shortage of American films – or at least, films with American in the title. “American navel-gazing has rarely been deeper or more intense,” says the Globe and Mail. “In the documentary category, we have An American Soldier, a documentary about a talented army recruiter. Then there's American Teen, another documentary about four Indiana teenagers in their senior year of high school; Made in America, Stacy Peralta's documentary about crime-ridden South Central Los Angeles; and I.O.U.S.A. about the American debt crisis. In the features category, there are several dramas, including Birds of America, Anywhere, USA and American Son,” the Canadian newspaper gleefully reports.

Speaking of our neighbors to the north, a documentary about a Canadian heavy metal band has provided a front-runner for our favorite title of the fest. Via Cinematical, it’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Really says it all, doesn’t it?

New Holiday Classics: Wind Chill (2007)

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Although some very good things naturally go together, as we all know from those commercials where some klutz gets his peanut butter on that other guy's chocolate, filmmakers have had a mixed and mostly unhappy time trying to merge Christmas with the horror movie. Sure, it's always kind of fun to stick a psychopathic killer in a Santa Claus suit, but it's seemed anticlimactic whenever anyone has done it since 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night — not a good movie, but its ads got seen by the wrong bunch of tightassed ninnies and inspired a wonderful episode of Donahue where Phil and his legion of overcaffeinated housewives fretted that such films would result in a new generation of demonic hell-spawn hanging out at the Gap. Then there's Bob Clark's 1974 Black Christmas, which was recently revived and remade, just before Clark's death earlier this year. It has earned a reputation as a seminal shocker that established both the holiday-themed horror movie gimmick and the strategy of assigning the killer a trademark tracking shot and an asthma condition before John Carpenter's Halloween, as well as possibly inventing the whole "The calls are coming from inside the house!" wheeze. But some of us have always thought that its ending is kind of a cheat, and besides, so far as tapping the horrific potential of Christmas break goes, Black Christmas kind of misses the point. Because the sorority girls who are its principal victims get murdered in time for school break, they are spared the experience of going home for the holidays, which is when the scary stuff really starts.

The ghost story Wind Chill, which was briefly released to theaters earlier this year and recently came out on DVD, can be seen as a corrective to Clark's error in timing. Directed by Gregory Jacobs, Wind Chill opens in a lonely, eerily depopulated college campus. The heroine, played by the strikingly assured young Emily Blunt (of My Summer of Love and The Devil Wears Prada), appears to be among the last students to get the hell out of Dodge for the holidays. She piles into a car with a guy she doesn't know (Ashton Holmes, Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello's son in A History of Violence) with whom she's agreed to share a ride, and right away a creepy vibe sets in. Holmes, channeling one of Michael Cera's clueless nice guys, keeps trying to charm his new friend, who plainly just wants to get the trip completed as painlessly as possible and then go back to being unaware of his existence. As he keeps trying to make contact, and she begins to respond to his overtures with ever greater displays of contempt and condescension, it may begin to dawn on viewers that they're watching an uncannily well-executed performance of a dance they may recognize from their own college days or, if they're really unlucky, even their more recent lives: the awkward non-mating ritual between the worshipful boy trying too hard to craft a perfect day for himself and the wrong person, and the girl who's only trying to decide whether her unwanted suitor is even worth regarding as a stalker.

One of the nice things about this set-up is that when things switch gears and the supernatural element (which includes Martin Donovan as a hulking, phantom state trooper) comes in, you're kind of relieved; as in a sci-fi story where the arrival of the aliens unites the Earth's superpowers together against a common threat, confusion and fear make it possible for a bitch princess and a geeky dork, trapped together in a stalled car, to actually be civil to each other for minutes at a time. Wind Chill may have just been too small a film to take much away from 300's take at the box office, and it may not be weird or bloody enough to become a cult classic now, but it's a smart little genre flick that ought to be perfect for winter cocooners looking for an excuse to jack up the thermostat, huddle together on the couch, and think about how cold it looks inside that damn car. — Phil Nugent