Yes, No, Maybe So Double: "Hanna" and "The Other Woman"

It's a double dip for Yes No Maybe So as we're way behind. Can't the movie world just stop for a little bit during the holidays so that we can all enjoy the movies we have right in front of us? Too many things. Too many things. Here's a girlish double and we'll get more manly in the next installment.

Let's start with The Other Woman which used to be called Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (better less generic title) starring the ubiquitous Natalie Portman. And that's ubiquitous with a capital U because, really, she's only going to get more inescapable from here on out.

The Other Woman

First there's this movie, then there's that Ashton Kuchner romcom, then Your Highness, then there's Thor (yes, 4 releases in 2011) plus the next two months of awards shows and then the wedding and the baby and so on. Is she aiming for Jolie/Pitt levels of über celebrity status? You won't be able to get away from her. You're going to look in the mirror and see Natalie Portman.


Don Roos's key successes (The Opposite of Sex and Happy Endings) were told in a unique voice (always a plus) and revealed a deft hand with actors. His frequent collaborator Lisa Kudrow (yay!) plays the first wife and I think everyone wants to know if Natalie, post-Swan even though this was shot earlier, is going to be able to up her game as she moves into her thirties.

On the other hand this looks soft, overly happy and above all unfocused (child rearing, adultery, infant death, custody battles, family bonds, the kitchen sink). It also displays this other woman and asks you to root for her to win the married man which is...unnngh. Really? But it's a trailer, and maybe this isn't at all easy to summarize. Roos, particularly in Happy Endings, was able to balance a lot of flawed characters and emotional arcs. So maybe the marketing department just doesn't know what to do with it?

Despite what seems like far too many plot points (especially for a trailer) you have to admit there's a certain amount of 'wow... this could go in all sorts of interesting emotional directions.' That is if, and it's a big if, the trailer is a false witness to the actual tone.

It doesn't look promising to me but I am curious. You?

This trailer and discussion has presumed spoilers.

Hanna

Next we have Saoirse Ronan training for kills in the woods, with the dissonant mix of modern music and fairy tale titles. Little Saoirse's eventual target: Cate Blanchett.

You can't say that Joe Wright skimps on acting talent lining up Queen Blanchett to square off against Eric Bana (daddy?) and Saoirse Ronan (baby girl?). You also can't say that he didn't earn a couple films worth of experimentation and possible failure after his first two terrific pictures (Pride & Prejudice and Atonement).

I know that the deady little girl thing is a rite of passage for all underage startlets (just ask Natalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst, Dakota Fanning and Chloe Moretz and whoever gets cast in Hunger Games) but I can't say that the child soldier thing is for me. Rooting for trained assassins is so ... unpleasant. Child assassins? Even worse. Why is it such a popular genre? And isn't the trailer giving away a huge twist. [SPOILER?] Isn't it basically saying that Saoirse is Cate's daughter and that Cate is the villain rather than the victim/target? [/SPOILER?]

Visually there are a handful of hooky images and many trailers don't succeed at that even though they all try. Maybe Joe Wright and team could provide real chills (acting) and thrills (action).

So I guess that's two Maybe Sos for me. How are you feeling about seeing either of these pictures?
*

Angela Lansbury and Other Oscar Record Holders

Slow and steady tortoises may win races but sometimes we have to stop to celebrate the hares that sprint. In the case of Angela Lansbury, who celebrates her 85th birthday today, we can do both.

<--- Angela in her Tony nominated role from A Little Night Music last season on Broadway. She's won 6 Golden Globes and 5 Tony Awards. Emmy (18 nominations) and Oscar (3 nominations) have eluded her. 


Slow and Steady. She's been acting for 66 years and her longterm success is such that she means different things to different generations and may even mean different things to you at different times in your life. For example, when I was a wee lad I thought exclusively of Bedknobs and Broomsticks and as an adult, say "Lansbury" to me and it's like a switch has been flipped and I'll start talking about how great she is as Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. Other people will think of Murder She Wrote or her stage work or something else entirely.

Sprint. Lansbury wasn't always 85 and she was no late bloomer either. She actually holds the acting record of Youngest Actor (either sex) to become a Two-Time Oscar nominee. To make that record yet more impressive and an example of "sprinting" she had achieved that within her first three movies!

 Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

We've been in a trivia / statistical mood for days now so here's some more "got there first!" Oscar sprinters. We're limiting it to the Actresses today. But more stat posts are coming. Wheeeee

OSCAR RECORDS
"Youngest" Actress to Become...

• a winner: Tatum O'Neal for Paper Moon when she was 10.
  runner up: Anna Paquin, The Piano at 11.
• a 2 time Oscar winner: OOPS. I said it was Jodie Foster who won her second for Silence of the Lambs at 29. But Luise Rainer actually still holds this record. She won her two Oscars back to back at the ages of 27 (The Great Ziegfeld) and 28 (The Good Earth). Jodie, then, is runner up.
  
• a 3 time Oscar winner: Ingrid Bergman won her third for Murder on the Orient Express at 60.
  runner up: Katharine Hepburn won her third for Lion in Winter at 61.
• a 4 time Oscar winner: Katherine Hepburn won her last for On Golden Pond at 74.
  runner up: aint no such thing.
  
  

youngest winner & the second youngest double winner

• a nominee: Tatum O'Neal for Paper Moon by the time she was 10.
  runner up: Mary Badham for To Kill a Mockingbird was also 10 but a month older.
• a 2 time nominee: Angela Lansbury for Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray by 20.
  runner up: Kate Winslet for Sense & Sensibility and Titanic by 22.
• a 3 time nominee: Teresa Wright for Little Foxes, Pride of Yankees and Mrs Miniver by 24. runner up: Natalie Wood for Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass and Love with the Proper Stranger by 25. Neither Teresa nor Natalie were ever nominated again. Too much too soon?
• a 4 time nominee: Jennifer Jones hit #4 with Duel in the Sun by 27.
  runner up: Elizabeth Taylor for Butterfield 8 when she was just turning 29. (Kate Winslet also won her 4th nomination at 29)
  
• a 5 time nominee: Kate Winslet for Little Children at 31.
  runner up: Olivia DeHavilland for The Heiress at 33.
• a 6 time nominee: Kate Winslet for The Reader at 33.
  runner up: Meryl Streep for Out of Africa at 36
  
  from this number on...
  It's all about Oscar's three all-time favorite women. There are a few other women with 7 nods or more but aside from Streep only Jane Fonda is still with us.
  
  
  
• a 7 time nominee: Bette Davis for Mrs Skeffington at 36.
  runner up: Meryl Streep for Ironweed at 38.
• a 8 time nominee: Meryl Streep for A Cry in the Dark at 39.
  runner up: Bette Davis for All About Eve at 42.
• a 9 time nominee: Meryl Streep for Postcards from the Edge at 41.
  runner up: Bette Davis for The Star at 44.
• a 10 time nominee: Meryl Streep for The Bridges of Madison County at 46.
  runner up: Bette Davis for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? at 54. This Letter to Daddy was the last she wrote with Oscar.
• an 11 time nominee: Meryl Streep for One True Thing at 49
  runner up: Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter at  61.
• a 12 time nominee: Meryl Streep for Music of the Heart at 50
  runner up: Katharine Hepburn for On Golden Pond at 74.
• a 13,14,15 and then 16 time nominee?
  It's only MERYL STREEP from there on out.

<--- Saoirse Ronan is 16. She's already been nominated once for Atonement. She'll need a second nomination by January 2014 to beat Angela's record. Can she do it?

All of this is a long way of saying... Winslet better get back to feature work if she wants to truly challenge Meryl Streep. And Saoirse Ronan, Dakota Fanning and the other teen drama queens of Hollywood had better work fast if they want to steal Angela Lansbury's "fastest to two noms!" crown away from her. She's held that record for an incredible 65 years.

So, um, happy birthday Angela Lansbury!?
I get distracted, I do.

10 Links for 10/10/10

Since we won't have another repetitive day like this until 3010 and since I will be well into my 1000somethings when that day arrives (yes, I plan to live as long as Gandalf... though without the scraggly beard) and possibly too senile to blog, I was going to post this great picture of a certain actress in a t-shirt that read "10" that I screencapped a year ago and I cannot find it. Sadness. You get a link roundup instead.

Film School Rejects funny list of "10" themed movies.
Kino London today in film history. 10/10 means both Ed Wood and Orson Welles.
TOH I don't wanna say 'told ya so' given what I wrote a few days ago when I changed my Best Picture charts and bitched about people bitching about The Social Network's box office but a 30% drop only in the second weekend... told ya so! Add a few 10s of millions to your final box office projections.
New York Daily News the 10 guest stars to watch in this TV season. Gwyneth Paltrow on Glee among them.
Show Tracker 10 best moments of the TV year thus far.
LA Times 10 best movies of the year that you might have missed. Go Animal Kingdom!
New York Press 'Top 10 Latin American Movies of the Aughts' to screen in NYC. I've seen 6 of them (all good) but I've always meant to see La Cineaga so I should go. What do you think shoulda been on this list that's not?

 /Film Perfect 10 Tom Hardy should find a big movie quick. The way I see star ascendance trajectories, Bronson was the perfect 'look at me!' move, Inception was the ideal 'gotcha' for the mainstream moviegoers who hadn't been paying attention and the next picture is supposed to be the slam dunk 'I'm a superstar' move. It's no time to vanish from screens! But Mad Max: Fury Road has halted production until maybe 2012? Poor Tommy.
Empire David O. Russell's 10th directorial project (if you include the continually troubled Nailed and his short films) will either be Old St. Louis with Vince Vaughn or Drake's Fortune, a video game adaptation.
Cinematical Reasons why you should be excited for Saoirse Ronan as Hanna. But wait, this list only goes up to 7, not 10. Call the blog police!
*

The Somewhat Lovely Bones?

You probably caught on Awards Daily that some early reviews of The Lovely Bones are out. Lots more to come presumably. But did you see this tweet from British actor/novelist/funny man Stephen Fry

Variety is significantly less riveted than Fry, calling it an "artistic disappointment". Todd McCarthy also crushes my dreams by starting the review talking about Heavenly Creatures, a film which he seems to hold in as high regard as I do (One of the three best films of the 1990s, if you ask me).

The "disappointment" seems to stem from Jackson's infatuation with visual f/x. As for its actors, this bit is interesting...

With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs...

McCarthy is less impressed with the parental units, Wahlberg and Weisz. Are you still counting down the days until dem bones arrive?

Exclusive Buzz: Pfeiffer with Pfangs

Rumor Alert!
Or, rather, 'Possiblity Alert'! And one you haven't heard yet. The other evening at a dinner party, I chatted briefly with writer/director Amy Heckerling (of Clueless fame). Since her very last feature I Could Never Be Your Woman starred Michelle Pfeiffer, you know I couldn't resist gushing about my favorite actress. The conversation quickly drifted to Saoirse Ronan, who played Pfeiffer's daughter in that film. Heckerling was very proud to have discovered her (...Woman preceeding Atonement, production-wise) and wouldn't you be?

Leaving the party later, I wished Heckerling well on her new comedy Vamps which should go before cameras in the spring. Remembering me as that weirdly obsessed pfan-guy, Heckerling clasped her hands together in supplication and said 'I hope I get Pfeiffer for it.'

[Collective Pfan Gasp!]

Has an offer gone out? Could Pfeiffer finally have a vampiric role? The movie is still in preproduction with only Kristen Ritter signed. IMDB describes the comedy like so...

Two female vampires in modern-day New York City are faced with daunting romantic possibilities

One assumes with Ritter in the lead that the two vamps are young women... but perhaps Pfeiffer could be a ruling bloodsucker? A vampire queen? Pfeiffer has been leaning towards the wicked and showy supporting bits since her comeback (Hairspray, Stardust) and I know one or one-hundred pfans* who have long fantasized about Michelle sinking her teeth into that sort of role. There's just something about her ferocity. The closest we ever got was her lupine beauty in Wolf.
*
*

If you are new to The Film Experience, please check out some favorite posts from the year or subscribe





*This post is dedicated to my pfellow uber-pfans on the net: Fran, Noelle, and Morrissey
*

Saoirse and the Dakotas

When someone in Hollywood needs a 15 year old blonde with dramatic chops to headline or co-star in their movie, I imagine that Saoirse Ronan and Dakota Fanning are getting the scripts first. Can we get a few mailed to Dakota Blue Richards, too?

Dakota Blue Richards in Five Miles Out (2009)

She's exactly 1 day older than Saoirse Ronan (weird trivia!) but I fear she may get lost in the shuffle. Fanning has two months on both of the Dakotas and many more years of experience and celebrity. But Saoirse already has an Oscar nomination and a primo gig with Peter Jackson. Richards, on the other hand, is only known for headlining The Golden Compass, the blockbuster that didn't bust blocks. Since Compass she's made 1 TV film, 1 short and 1 feature.

<-- Saoirse and Dakota the First

In that stack of shorts I saw whilst in Nashville, Richards had the lead in a beautifully shot miniature called Five Miles Out. She played a morose and preoccupied girl, trying to shake off the heavy weight of a family crisis during a trip to the seaside. That 18 minutes was enough to remind me that she holds the screen really well. You look at her face and you must know what's going on inside her head. It's the same feeling I get when I watch someone like Samantha Morton... albeit on a much smaller scale in this case.

Did you think Richards was strong in The Golden Compass? Any other mid-teen actresses you think are worth watching? It won't be long before they're all fighting it out for what we now think of as the Keira Knightley, Amanda Seyfried, Scarlet Johannson parts.
*

Stanley Tucci as "George Harvey"

The first still for Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones.

USA Today has the first shot.

A fine first choice for a reveal it is. It's both sad and sinister and, if you haven't read the novel, probably intriguing too. (I currently have Tucci predicted for Supporting Actor but the Oscar race is neither here nor there at this point). The question that hovers over this movie is this: can Jackson marry his 00s era facility with epic f/x grandeur to his tinier idiosyncratic 90s artistic impulses? And,, if he can, will that union live peacefully with Alice Sebold's gripping yet sentimental novel?

The other image which you can see at Empire I shan't show you in detail because it functions as an advertisement for that website rather than this movie. It's a fairly simple reflective sky shot, Saoirse Ronan in Heaven (she plays the lead character who is murdered at the beginning of the story, hence the title). The image is so blank that your mind wishes to project the movie's title over the clouds, creating a forthcoming poster. But this is where Empire places their gigantic watermark, sending an odd message. This isn't "Peter Jackson's Empire Online". It's Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. But then again, Peter Jackson's Empire Online could be a fun curio. What would he do to the magazine if he were in charge?
*

Red Carpet Rendezvous

A brief glimpse at this week's movie star fashions on the carpet for those cinephiles among you who don't troll gossip blogs or who might if they weren't littered with so many worthless celebrities who aren't famous for anything cinematic or encumbered by talent --there's so many these days. Why do people care about the talentless? It remains a mystery to me. But not the type of mystery you can't put down for hoping to solve, the kind that makes your eyelids very heavy.

Kate Beckinsale is a midget! No offense to midgets: she pretty
[image sources mostly]

from left to right: Brad Pitt, Brad's lucky left hand & Angelina Jolie at NYFF's Changeling premiere. For Oscar-Watchers: I wouldn't worry so much about the sudden influx of mixed/negative reviews from NYFF for this Eastwood pic. Once the mainstream critics get to it, it'll be raves. That's how it goes. Some of them even called Flags of Our Fathers a 'masterpiece'... and this movie is better than that. Expect its RT percentile to move up when it opens proper. Jennifer Lopez and Kate Beckinsale pretty in white at Elle's "Women in Hollywood" event. FYI: JLo is ending her strange and rather sudden 3 year break from acting. (Oh right, infants) She has two movies in pre-production.

Tangent Gripe: Jane Fonda and Kerry Washington were also there and if I could've found a photo of them full length (at the time I prepared this photo - I've seen one now), I would've included them in this red carpet mashup in order to declare my love for the 188th and 41st time respectively. But, as it turns out, photo services and gossip blogs have 3,000,000 photos of a certain heiress and various reality TV stars to every 1 photo of Kerry f'ing Washington and sometimes this just makes me want to die. What a world if Kerry be not prioritized?!

Maggie G favors black for the "Fashionably Natural" Gen Art and SoyJoy show. Kristin Scott Thomas, having quite a year, at the Seagull opening on Broadway. My BFF who saw Dianne Wiest onstage in the same role earlier this year gives the thumbs down in comparison. Actually he does the cat poo scratch but that seems awfully harsh --I've seen neither performance so I can't say. But it is what it is. Kristin is on Broadway run and Dianne wasn't. This Broadway gig will raise her acclaim and profile for that Oscar run for the upcoming I've Loved You So Long. TONY run to follow for The Seagull? Campaign synergy!

And finally we get to Saoirse Ronan and Nicole Kidman since we needed a little color with everyone leaning heavily on black & white. Saoirse was promoting City of Ember (now open) and Nicole was also at that starry Elle event. Isn't her increasingly strawberry hair begging to darken? Take back that head o' hair: Come Back to the Red or Ginger Nicki Kidman Nicki Kidman.
*

We Can't Wait #11 The Lovely Bones

Directed by some unknown ...goes by "Peter Jackson" (name?)
Starring Briony from Atonement, Sgt Dignam from The Departed and Mrs. Darren Aronofsky
Synopsis A murder victim watches her killer and family from heaven
Brought to you by Dreamworks, Paramount and Wingnut Films
Expected Release Date Post-production is apparently going to go long on this one. We're hearing March 2009. Damn. Defeats the point of it being on this list. sigh

Nathaniel: For those who lived under a rock back when The Lovely Bones was a bestseller it's about a girl (Saoirse Ronan) who is murdered --no spoiler, just the plot setup --and watches her parents (Mark Wahlberg & Rachel Weisz) and the murderer from her afterlife as the murder investigation unfolds and her family deals with their substantial grief. Though the novel teeters close to gooey sentiment here and there, I really enjoyed it when I read it.

When I heard that Peter Jackson was taking the reigns I thought "ooh, great. something small. something young girl focused --something to remind me of how great Heavenly Creatures was" and then I thought. Er... King Kong was so bloated as if The Lord of the Rings (which I loved) had ruined his notions of scale and dramatic precision... and couldn't The Lovely Bones go really overboard with its visualization of heaven. And then I began to worry...

Glenn: I have not read the book - perhaps I will this year - so I don't really know what to expect. To be honest, the idea of a girl looking down from heaven sounds a bit like a kooky comedy that would have starred Whoopi Goldberg in that period of the '90s where she made a lot of movies like Eddie and The Associate. Perhaps her character had lost a lot of money on wall street and decided she didn't want to live so Heaven sent somebody down to SWAP with her so she could experience what it was like only to learn that if she ended her life she would never be able to meet the love of her life or hold her grandchild!

...wait. I got off track there. I'm looking forward to The Lovely Bones mostly for Jackson's return to (hopefully, natch) intimate filmmaking. And maybe Saiorse Ronan can continue to prove she's actually a 75-year-old woman in a child's body! That gives me another idea for a wacky comedy..

MaryAnn: Haven't read the book, but I'm onboard for *anything* Peter Jackson does. And after Atonement, I can't wait to see if Saoirse Ronan was a one-hit wonder or if she's got real staying power.

Gabriel: Glenn, I've been laughing for five minutes at your Whoopi Goldberg career summation. :-) However, my guess is that this movie will try to mix magic into its murder story, rather than comedy...it's a fragile story with delicate story points, and too much humor would probably kill it. I personally am intrigued to see Mark Wahlberg, who hopped into the film at the last minute when Ryan Gosling dropped out. But if there's anyone who thinks this isn't going to be successful, I offer this formula: Peter Jackson + Bestselling Book + Likeable Stars + Oscar Contender=Box Office Hit.

Nathaniel: Joe sat this discussion out. Perhaps he knew not to expect this until 2009? It's filming now. Have you read the book? Are you ready for a Jackson drama after all these fantasy epics?

<-- Sister Aloysius prays for your wicked soul if you haven't been reading the "we can't wait" countdown #1 Synecdoche, New York / #2 Burn After Reading / #3 Australia / #4 Milk / #5 Blindness / # 6 Doubt / #7 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / #8 Revolutionary Road / #9 The Dark Knight / #10 Sex & The City: The Movie / #11 The Lovely Bones / #12 Wall-E / #13 Stop-Loss / #14 The Women / #15 Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince / Introduction / Orphans
*