The Screengrab : robin hood

Morning Deal Report: Aaron Eckhart Hits the Rum

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Aaron Eckhart and Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins are the latest to join the cast of Rum Diary, adapted from the novel by Hunter S. Thompson. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are already aboard. Diary “is the tale of a washed-up, hard-drinking journalist named Paul Kemp (Depp) in 1950s Puerto Rico. Eckhart would play Sanderson, a wealthy landowner who believes everything has a price and introduces Kemp to a different standard of living,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood may have a new Maid Marian. Liz Smith reports in Variety that “Cate Blanchett (she can play anything!) will take over the Maid Marian role in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood movie titled Nottingham. They decided Sienna Miller was too young for their Robin, the somewhat rotund, weighty and contentious Russell Crowe.” So Crowe is both rotund and weighty, which means Miller is too young for him. Makes sense.

Queen of mumblecore Greta Gerwig “has landed the lead role opposite Ben Stiller in the latest Noah Baumbach relationship dramedy,” per THR. The plot of the film, entitled Greenberg, is “under wraps, but it is expected to be set in L.A. and center on relationship intimacies in the manner of past Baumbach pictures.”

Related:
Russell Crowe Will Not Wear Tights
Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

Russell Crowe Will Not Wear Tights

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

As Body of Lies opens in Britain, The Independent interviews the always genial Russell Crowe, who opens up about his deeply introspective acting process. “ ‘Preparation? I picked up a bag, I put a pair of underwear in it and I got on a plane. There you go – preparation done,’ he says, slapping his hands together. ‘How many times have you seen me do it in the last 20 years? A lot. Whatever the character needs, I'll get to that point. It's no big deal. I was at 88 kilos when Ridley called and asked if I'd mind putting on a load of weight. I was at 117 kilos when the movie started, and I've been coming down slowly. I'm at about 95 kilos at the moment, maybe a little less.’”

Crowe remained bulky for his role in the upcoming State of Play, a big screen remake of the BBC miniseries. Crowe signed up when Brad Pitt abandoned the project. (Pitt does that a lot, doesn’t he?) He’ll shed the pounds for his dual role as the Sheriff and Robin Hood in Ridley Scott’s upcoming Nottingham. “The world doesn't need a mundane version of Robin Hood. If we're gonna do it, we've got to kick some serious butt. I've loved Robin Hood since I was a kid, but when the idea came up and they gave me this script, I said, 'Look, I don't like this. This doesn't work. It's not good enough.' But the idea of Robin Hood? For sure. I spent 10 months just reading Robin Hood books – the history, the mythology, the original ballads, the legend – and then you've got 100 years of cinematic history as well. So this has got to be the best one ever done, otherwise I should be doing something else."

Crowe adds: "I will not wear tights because according to our research they weren't invented for another 300 years. I apologise to you all – and to Sienna Miller."

If the whole “dual role” thing strikes you as a little odd, you aren’t alone. Writing in The Guardian, James Anthony express some concern: “I'm all for actors playing dual roles. It has worked in several films where it has thematic relevance. But Crowe's ego precedes him, and it's tempting to believe he just wants to share screen time with himself.”

Related:
Sienna Miller in the Hood
When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott)

Morning Deal Report: Dueling Sherlocks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As if Guy Ritchie didn’t have enough problems, what with the gossip sheets running wild with rumors that A-Rod is shtupping his wife. Now it turns out that his Sherlock Holmes feature will face competition from Borat himself. Per Variety, Columbia Pictures has announced “an untitled comedy that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as master detective Sherlock Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson, his crime-solving partner.” According to Columbia president Matt Tolmach, this re-teaming of the Talladega Nights stars is a sure-fire knee-slapper. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh…having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious." Thank you for speaking frankly, Mr. Tolmach. Of course, this is not the first time rival productions involving the same iconic character have gone head-to-head, as we recall from the great Robin Hood war of the '90s. But then, that was a war nobody won.

The cast of Roland Emmerich’s latest rendition of the end of the world is coming together. Triple threat Thomas McCarthy, who most recently wrote and directed The Visitor, will join John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Danny Glover in Emmerich’s 2012. “As an actor, I've never worked on anything with this scale before, and I always go see these movies,” McCarthy tells the Hollywood Reporter. “This does have a big budget and I do make more money, which is nice, but I know if you take a job like this just for the money, you'll be miserable.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to Nicolas Cage.

Meanwhile, the French hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks) is being remade not only in America (Will Smith will star for Warner Bros.) but in Italy. Variety describes it as a “heart-warmer about a postal worker forced to relocate to a small town in the north where he can't understand the patois, the food or the many quirks.” We’ll wait for the Portuguese version.

Related:

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

Morning Deal Report: Sienna Miller in the Hood

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Add Sienna Miller’s name to a list that already includes Audrey Hepburn, Uma Thurman and Rich Little. That would be the list of people who have played Maid Marian in one version or another of Robin Hood. Ridley Scott’s “revisionist take” called Nottingham already has Russell Crowe on board, but not in the role you might think. According to Variety, Scott’s version “focuses on the Sheriff of Nottingham (Crowe) as a noble and brave lawman who labors for a corrupt king and engages in a love triangle with Marion and Robin Hood.” Miller is currently shooting G.I. Joe, so she should have action figures aplenty in stores by this time next year.

Insert your own “offer they can’t refuse” joke here. The estate of Mario Puzo “has filed suit against Paramount Pictures, claiming the studio owes it at least $1 million in revenues from the series of video games based on the Oscar-winning film The Godfather,” per the Hollywood Reporter. The author’s son Anthony is behind the lawsuit, which states: “Despite the vast wealth Puzo created for Paramount, it has refused to pay his children their agreed share of the revenue from that audio-visual product.” No truth to the rumors that Puzo’s lawyers are responsible for the horse’s head found in the Paramount CEO’s bed.

Finally, you’ll be delighted to know that the appropriately named Film Movement has acquired the U.S. distribution rights to The Pope’s Toilet. The Cannes favorite “is set in 1988, as a small Uruguayan town, Melo, gears up for the arrival of Pope John Paul II. One local resident, trying to profit from the visit, decides to build a portable pay toilet for the event, setting in motion a chain of unforeseen complications,” Variety reports. I guess that answers Steve Martin’s old question, “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

Related:
How Bad Will "G.I. Joe" Be?
American Lawsuit

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.) As Dave Kehr notes, "Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s." In the fifties, working with a succession of independent producers, the studio had greenlit movies that defied censorship codes and conventional attitudes such as The Manchurian Candidate, Sweet Smell of Success, and Kiss Me Deadly. In the 1960s, they produced Midnight Cowboy, the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after having been given an X rating by the MPAA. (They also developed a lucrative sideline in English-speaking imports, such as the British films Tom Jones — another Oscar winner for Best Picture — A Hard Day's Night, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, as well as the dubbed versions of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

In the 1970s, UA's faith in risk-taking filmmakers made possible such Renaissance-era classics as Last Tango in Paris, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us, and Annie Hall, but this approach, led them grief: at a precarious time in the company's fortune, around the time that Krim, Benjamin, and CEO Eric Pleskow noisily broke away to form their own company, Orion, Michael Cimino showed up at UA's door with a script called Heaven's Gate and a request for enough rope, and the confused, inexperienced new UA bosses gave him enough to hang half the directors in Los Angeles. Cimino's baby, which premiered in the same season that produced the studio's last proud moment, Raging Bull, sank United Artists, which wound up being picked up by MGM, which coveted its distribution apparatus. For much of the time since then, UA has amounted to a handful of franchise rights (mainly to the Pink Panther and James Bond) in search of a studio, but last year it became a play toy for Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. Starting today and running through May 1, Film Forum honors the good old days with a mammoth retrospective that includes all the films listed above — well, except for Heaven's Gate; I mean, would you invite the guy who killed your kids to your wedding anniversary? — including other delights, including key films by the original big four: Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, Way Down East, and Broken Blossoms; Chaplin's City Lights and Modern Times; Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, The Mask of Zorro, and Robin Hood; and Mary Pickford's Sparrows and My Best Girl.

Face/Off: Children of Men

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, permit me to bore you with one of my very earliest movie memories. My mom took me to the 1973 animated Disney version of Robin Hood, in which the title character was played, if memory serves, by a small red fox. And when this fox was asked to express his feelings towards Maid Marian, he sang out, "I love her more than life itself!" The line was, I now suspect, not wholly original, but at the time it was new to me, and it stirred me deeply. I think that from that moment on, I have lived my life in hopes of finding someone, or something, I loved more than life itself. So far, the results have been mixed, but I can truly say of Children of Men that I love it more than life itself and that the movie has in turn accepted my love gracefully and never punishing me for it by using it to make me feel stupid, small, or unworthy, which is more than I can say for certain redheads of my acquaintance.

Since there are no bad scenes in the picture, and in fact precious few that could not be pointed to as jaw-dropping evidence of its stature, it is not easy to single out one, but I will settle on the chase scene from around the middle of the movie, with Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey and Pam Ferris fleeing the farmhouse in a car that won't start, with the goonish "revolutionaries" in hot pursuit. Coming after the much-remarked earlier car-chase-shootout that the director, Alfonso Cuaron, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, labored so hard to capture in a single shot, it's hard not to see this scene as a statement on Cuaron's part: "Technology is great that I could do that, huh? Oh by the way, I can do this, too!" The terrible suspense of the scene, accomplished over what ought to be the handicap of our knowing that Owen isn't going to check out this early in the story (but wait — didn't we know that about Julianne Moore, too? For Christ's sake, push harder, Clive!), is nerve-racking testimony both to Cuaron's sheer skill and the effortless way that Owen, with his unforced audience rapport, has quietly laid claim to the viewer's emotions. It just goes on and on, a moment of horror stuck in the mire, like a nightmare that you start hating yourself for not waking up from. It's so simple it's dumbfounding that it should be so powerful — but then not everybody who ever got his hands on a camera, a car, and a half-dozen actors is in Cuaron's league. Most of them don't deserve to be regarded as being in the same profession.

Leonard, since I know you are an intelligent and honest man, I imagine that about this point you'll want to just chime in, "Yup, he's right, no way to argue with any of that," and then we can both sign off for the day.

LEONARD PIERCE: As tempting as it is to just type "you're right" and collect my fee for two-words'-worth of effort, I feel that would be a disservice to our readers, as well as to my reputation as a combative jerk. I am glad that, in Children of Men, you have found the unconditional love that is the object of all human striving. Perhaps I am a cynic, but I have given up hope of ever discovering such purity of feeling in any human endeavor outside of a bottle of gin; it is, I fear, beyond the capacity of any woman, stuffed animal or movie — and, I say with some regret, especially beyond the capacity of Children of Men. Like the cliché about political outrage, I fear that if you can't find anything to dislike in Cuarón's crowning achievement — and particularly in the car-chase-that-isn't — you just aren't looking hard enough.

On a certain level, I almost want to agree with you; there are hardly any bad scenes in the picture, provided you define 'scenes' as the big, impressive set pieces that stick in the mind after viewing it, and not the tedious and often eye-roll-inducing moments that hold those scenes together. My initial reaction on seeing the film was that it was a dozen or so individual scenes ranging from very good to absolutely brilliant, but all held together by a rickety, nonsensical plot that was amounted to little more than a series of hokey chase scenes. Six set pieces in search of a movie, you might say. And nothing seemed, on subsequent viewings, to affirm that first reaction than the farmhouse chase scene. There were scenes in Children of Men that left me breathless with their virtuosity and emotional power, but so sorely did the chase scene test the sacred principle of suspension of disbelief that if I was out of breath, it was only from heavy sighing. Having already established the later-to-be-beaten-into-the-muddy-earth point that people are often so blinded by their own interests that they will behave selfishly under the worst of circumstances, Cuarón's script now asks us to believe that the revolutionaries (I certainly can't dispute your characterization of them as goonish, though I mean it more in a Peter Sellers way than a Benito Mussolini way) are not only asinine, but supremely incompetent. The director even seems to anticipate the objection to this outlandish chase scene, establishing by a clunky bit of exposition that the armed rebels can't just open fire on the car lest they injure the pregnant Kee, a.k.a. the most important MacGuffin in the world. We're not made privy to what the disastrous consequences would be if they just shot Clive Owen, or the car tires, or just found someone who could run faster than an aging, out-of-shape reporter pushing a car through the mud, but one assumes they would be equally intolerable.

This isn't just a case of not being able to accept a film's internal logic. I'm perfectly willing to go along with the entire scenario of the movie, nebulous as it might be. But this scene is purely a case of a filmmaker having a neat idea and pushing ahead with it no matter how nonsensical it plays out on screen, just to show that he can do it. It's called shredding, and it can surely be impressive, but it's rarely noble.

At this point, my friend, there is no shame in a one-word surrender, though I sense it might take the form of "Nuts."

PHIL NUGENT: I could say that Children of Men is, like many great movies, a dream, a nightmare vision of how bad things could be based on where we are now, then leap aboard that "internal logic" qualifier and ride the sucker like Seabiscuit. But as it is, the scene in question is one that I think makes perfect sense in human terms. If it looks a little odd at first glance, I would submit that this is because even sophisticated filmgoers are so used to action scenes that derive their full measure of believable human behavior based on what happens in other movies' action scenes that they may at first be confused by seeing one in which the characters onscreen act like people. Three of them are scared out of their wits and the rest of them just discovered, at an ungodly hour, that their world is collapsing. It makes sense that the atmosphere would be a little different than in the planned murder that precedes it or confused in a different way than in the full-blown firefight that will come, when a killing fever that spreads across several city blocks inflames and emboldens the people caught up in it. Nor do I find it unlikely that the guys with the guns might not want to just blow Clive Owen's head off in front of the little mother. None of them want to do anything that might jeopardize that pregnancy, and since none of them has been on hand for one before — and had already concluded that they'd never get the chance — why is improbable or contrived that they'd choose to err on the side of caution and not subject her to a bloody trauma? It's not as if Owens's escape isn't on the order of a miracle. (Am I conceding that the happy conclusion of the scene, if not the elements that go into it, counts as an implausibility? I suppose I might be. Certain implausibilities one learns to accept, as a filmgoer, as the price of getting the movie on to the next scene.)

And I must object to your referring to Kee as a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated definition of a MacGuffin is "what the spies are after but the audience don't care." Love it or hate it, surely we can at least agree that Children of Men would not be the same movie, in either its intentions or its actual achievement, if it had been possible for the casting director to have ever said to Cuaron, "We're having trouble finding the right person to play the only pregnant woman in the world; how about we just change her to a roll of microfilm?" On the other hand, I applaud your description of the revolutionaries as being more of the Peter Sellers than the Baader-Meinhof variety. But then, I have a sneaking hunch that this might be true of most "real" self-styled revolutionary terrorists, maybe even including the real Baader-Meinhof gang.

LEONARD PIERCE: One of the reasons the chase-scene revolutionaries in Children of Men don't make sense in human terms, to me, is precisely because they (like many real-world terrorists, which is presumably a big reason why they're terrorists instead of, say, accountants) don't tend to err on the side of caution. Of course their world is collapsing — and faced with a world on the verge of collapse, people don't often react with thoughtfulness and circumspection. With the most important thing on the face of the planet slipping with painful slowness through their grasp, it's very hard to believe that the revolutionaries, especially the furious dreadlocked blond who's been looking for an excuse to blow Clive Owen's head off for half the movie, would suddenly get all overwhelmed with softness lest they upset the little mother. If they let Kee escape, the baby is as gone as if she lost it from trauma, so why take the chance? (Incidentally, the point you raise about the goons being unfamiliar with the mysteries of childbirth, to me, exacerbates the unreality of the scene rather than mitigates it; if they don't know how pregnancy works, why would they know they'd be endangering it by taking Clive out at the kneecaps?)

Beyond that, the scene seems to contradict the film's own message: it is a lamentable aspect of selfish human nature that people will behave in harmful and destructive ways even when everything around them is falling apart. This is certainly the message conveyed by the mass social unrest depicted in the rest of the film — faced with a world that may cease to exist in fifty years, people behave in the most appallingly short-sighted ways. And yet in the farm chase, shown in microcosm, the revolutionaries behave in just the opposite way. It's not the first or the last time these mixed messages appear (the presence of the baby in the movie's final quarter has a magical pacifying effect on the violent mind of man, except when it doesn't), but it's one of the most egregious, and it's frustrating — almost maddening — for those in the audience who desperately want the movie not to screw up the good will it creates with its often stunning and brilliant set pieces.

I suppose that, in the end, we have to resort back to the old cliche about the suspension of disbelief — if you really buy into the premise of a film and find yourself enjoying it, you're much more likely to forgive or even embrace the implausibilities it may throw at you. From your perspective — from the perspective of someone who loves Children of Men more than life itself — the scene is a perfect example of the sort of miracle its director can pull off, a moment that in lesser hands could have been an embarrassment, but instead works perfectly and serves to reveal some of the movie's greatest strengths and deepest truths. From my perspective — from that of someone for whom Children of Men is an ambitious failure, a collection of great scenes that never quite manage to cohere — it's just something that stays with you as a reminder of why the movie wasn't all that it should have been.