The Screengrab : maria bello

Morning Deal Report: Keira Knightley Never Lets Me Go

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Are the Jonas Brothers already over? Hey, I'm not hatin' on them, I’m just pointing out that Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience failed to knock Tyler Perry off the top box office perch. Madea Goes to Jail took in $16.5 million, while the brothers had to settle for $12.7 million, a far cry from their expected box office domination. On the strength of its Best Picture win, Slumdog Millionaire jumped up to the third spot, taking in $12.2 million over the weekend.

One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek (whose finest work remains the video for Johnny Cash’s Hurt) will next tackle the sci-fi thriller Never Let Me Go, starring Keira Knightley. “Story revolves around a trio who grew up in a boarding school with no contact or knowledge of the outside world until they discover they are clones grown for the sole purpose of organ donation,” Variety reports. This movie used to be called The Island, and no one asked to see it again.

Can I interest you in a movie called Rape: A Love Story? Not so much? What if I were to tell you it stars Maria Bello, Abigail Breslin and Samuel L. Jackson? Still no takers? “Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novella published in 2003, story centers on a mother (Bello) recovering from a brutal gang rape who is stalked by the perpetrators but is protected by a sympathetic cop (Jackson). Breslin will play the woman’s12-year-old daughter, who witnesses the attack.”

Related:
Keira Knightley's Last Night
Sam Mendes Meets the Preacher

Trailer Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I’m still a little surprised by how popular Universal’s Mummy franchise has turned out to be- beginning as a goofy big-budget ripoff of Indiana Jones and generating two sequels and one spinoff film for The Rock. But maybe I shouldn’t be- at a time when even a theatrical washout like Hulk can get sequel-ized, it makes sense that a moneymaking (albeit hardly beloved) property like The Mummy would be revisited by its studio. The high concept of this installment- Mummy goes to China- is actually decent, if for no other reason than to show people that mummification wasn’t only done in ancient Egypt. But if this doesn’t look as cheesy as I’d originally anticipated, that’s only because I was expecting a big stinky brick of Limburger and this is more like a package of Velveeta. Also, it’s a little jarring at first to see Maria Bello in the trailer, but upon further reflection it makes sense- after failing to get Oscar attention for her acclaimed work in The Cooler and A History of Violence, she probably figured she needed a blockbuster on her resume to get the Academy’s attention. After all, it worked for Rachel Weisz, right?

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

As the festival winds down, some quick notes on movies I didn't have time to address earlier. (I'm gonna include the walk-outs here, despite the wrath of one reader who believes that saying anything at all about a movie you didn't see from start to finish constitutes dereliction of duty. Obviously, you should take such judgments with a grain or two of salt — and maybe an entire shakerful in the case of Ballast, which I'll very likely see again, and in full, at some point. But at the same time, you can get a mighty strong sense of a film in thirty-five to forty minutes.)

Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North (Documentary Competition): Painfully earnest young woman with unbearably whiny voice — she narrates, alas — discovers that her esteemed ancestors were slave traders, corrals nine relatives for self-indulgent journey to sore spots from the family's past. For hardcore aficionados of liberal white guilt only. (W/O)

Time Crimes (Park City at Midnight): I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, but even I had trouble warming to this Spanish gloss on 2004 Sundance prizewinner Primer, in which a middle-aged schlub travels ninety minutes into the past and finds himself engaged in unwitting battle with other versions of himself who've developed wildly divergent agendas. Ineptly directed, for the most part, and the concluding twist is singularly unsatisfying. Come back, Shane (Carruth).

The Wave (World Cinema Dramatic Competition): German filmmaker Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony? One can't help but be riveted by the spectacle of ordinary teenagers willingly submitting to autocratic rule — their überhip teacher is attempting to demonstrate that the Nazis weren't anomalous monsters — but earmarking one kid as emotionally unstable from the get-go means that we're just twiddling our thumbs as we await the inevitable moment when he finally snaps.

What Just Happened? (Premieres): Hollywood made yet another mildly lacerating self-portrait, that's what. Loosely based on the memoirs of producer Art Linson (Fight Club, Into the Wild, several Mamet films), it boasts the most relaxed De Niro performance in ages and a smattering of truly hilarious jokes, most of them involving out-of-control entitlement. Too bad Bruce Willis, sporting a Grizzly Adams beard that he refuses to shave prior to the start of filming on a new picture, isn't nearly as funny as Alec Baldwin must have been in real life. (Read Linson's equally diverting book for the lowdown; it happened on 1997's The Edge.)

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Dramatic Competition): Michael Chabon's complicated first novel has been reduced (by Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thurber) to a simple bisexual love triangle, with two major characters — Arthur and Cleveland — melded into one, and another, the improbably named Phlox, distorted almost beyond recognition. And yet the movie still almost kinda works, mostly because Peter Sarsgaard commits himself so fully to his ludicrous bad-boy manipulator that we, like the dazed young protagonist, are completely taken in.

Downloading Nancy (Dramatic Competition): I'd had about enough of this repugnant exercise in nihilism at the point when Maria Bello, playing a masochistic housewife who's hired a stranger she found on the Internet (Jason Patric) to torture and kill her, walks barefoot into a mouse trap, over and over and over, shrieking with laughter each time it snaps on her toes. By all accounts from those who stuck it out, it gets much, much worse thereafter. At least the "revelation" that she was sexually abused as a child isn't saved for the final reel. (W/O)

Sundance Roundup: Day 8

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:31:00 GMT

This thing has been going on for a week now and people are ready to get the hell out of Park City. As Aaron Barnhart writes, “tempers are wearing thin. People are getting tired of waiting out in the cold. Volunteers have had it with annoying moviegoers.” So let’s say you’re some hot shot celebrity or big time acquisitions executive on the scene at Sundance. You’ve already filled two suitcases full of swag, and you can’t bring yourself to sit through one more movie today, so now what?

How about taking a ride in an algae-powered Mercedes? As a tie-in to the Sundance documentary Fields of Fuel, biotech firm Solazyme is introducing their product by “tooling around Park City, Utah in a Mercedes Benz C320 diesel,” according to Wired.

Driving around thinking about algae is sure to make you hungry, and that’s where the celebrity chefs of the Food Network come in. We’re not sure if algae is on the menu, but the Salt Lake Tribune can fill you in on all the big names who’ve been feasting on Giada De Laurentiis' “classic Italian comfort food, including tagliatelle pasta with short-rib ragu and a mocha semifreddo ice-cream dessert.”

And yes, there are still movies being shown. Causing one of the biggest commotions is Downloading Nancy, starring Maria Bello as a married woman who meets another man (Jason Patric) on the Internet. That’s about the most innocuous description possible, judging from the first round of reviews. Here are some pull-quotes to whet your appetite:

“An excruciating experience.” – Film Threat

“A film that's beyond difficult to watch.” - Filter

“A low-grade snuff film. It was like the film was raping my face.” – Cinema Blend

On second thought, maybe it’s time for another ride in that algae car.

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