Time for another batch.
1. The new trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire rocks. (FWIW, I blogged the earlier trailer — or teaser? — here.)
2. Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of Ron and star of The Village (2004), talks to CanWest News Service about Manderlay, the upcoming sequel to Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) — in which Howard plays the role originated by Nicole Kidman. Along the way, she confirms von Trier’s reputation as a provocateur:
Working with Danish director Lars von Trier pushed every button in Bryce Dallas Howard’s being. Yet by the time the young actress wrapped Von Trier’s new movie Manderlay — a minimalist meditation on slavery in the United States — she began to see herself, and the whole concept of America, in a whole new light.
“He threw water on me — literally. The first day, he wanted to see me mad and he started to say things that were hurtful. I didn’t lose it, and he eventually threw water all over me,” says Howard. . . .
3. FilmStew.com profiles Winnipeg director Guy Maddin and movie star Isabella Rossellini, who have teamed up on a film about Rossellini’s famous father Roberto, who was born in 1906:
Their collaboration, My Dad is 100 Years Old, is a short, only 16 minutes long, but it is one of the best movies to come out of this year’s festival. . . .
Paired at the festival with his seminal work, 1945’s Roma, Citta Aperta (Rome, Open City), the short pays tribute to the neorealist auteur through his daughter’s memories and her imagined conversations with her mother, actress Ingrid Bergman, and some of his contemporaries, including Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, producer David O. Selznick, and Roberto Rossellini’s one time assistant Federico Fellini. . . .
Much of the movie is framed as a debate pitting her dad’s instincts to make his films as realistic as possible (‘Probable films,’ he calls them, because he is documenting things as they probably happened) against the Hollywood filmmakers’ more commercial instincts and Fellini’s erotic dreamscapes. It is an often hilarious and always affectionate portrait of a rigorous artist, but also sad, as Isabella wonders nearly 30 years after Roberto’s death how well he is remembered and where his legacy stands. Is there anyone left to follow his rigorous example?
At first glance, Maddin – whose own movies are willfully archaic and whose expressionistic, often hallucinatory style Roberto Rossellini would no doubt disapprove of – seems like an odd choice to direct this project. Isabella first met him when she played an embittered, legless beer baroness in his Depression-era musical, 2003’s The Saddest Music in the World. She was already casting about for some way to commemorate her dad’s 2006 centenary and to renew interest in his work, particularly among the young who may not have even heard of him. She knew their would be a retrospective film series, but she wanted to do something different, as well, and hit on the idea of a movie.
Certainly, she was aware how different Maddin’s style is from her father’s, but through all her years in the business, she has grown used to that. “I remember always that working later on as an actress or being married to film directors that I would always get slightly nervous when a camera moved or went above the eye level, because I remember my father was so rigid about it,” she laughingly tells FilmStew, adding that ex-husband Martin Scorsese was a particularly flagrant violator of Roberto Rossellini’s precepts. “‘Oh Marty,’ I thought, ‘Oh that camera movement is totally immoral.'”
But Maddin seemed like the logical director for the project for reasons that went beyond style. “There is a such a nostalgia in his films, in his images. In his films, there is a nostalgia of cinema, and so I thought it was a good marriage,” she explains.
Fascinating to think of a camera movement as “immoral”. Also interesting to consider that her father and one-time husband both directed movies about the life of Christ — namely The Messiah (1975; my comments) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), respectively. Anyway, this film is coming to the Vancouver film festival as well in a few weeks, so I hope to catch it there.
4. FilmStew.com reports that Constantine director Francis Lawrence will direct the third film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. The earlier versions were The Last Man on Earth (1964), with Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971), with Charlton Heston. No word yet on who will star this time.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In