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1-20 of 58 articles from 2009 « Prev | Next »
Diamond of Hollywood
7 December 2009 2:46 AM, PST
| The Guardian - Film News
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Precious, the story of an obese and abused black teenager, is the year's most reviled as well as praised film in America. But director Lee Daniels is used to trouble, he tells Gaby Wood. He grew up gay on the streets of Philadelphia, after all, and is drawn to the most disturbing truths. That'll be why he's heading to America's Deep South for his next film…
For the past month, one particular actress has filled American movie screens and visited American minds. She is obese and very dark-skinned, and the character she plays – a 16-year-old illiterate girl from Harlem who is abused by her mother and pregnant by her father for the second time – has been dealt one of the worst hands society has to offer. Yet what's most often said about Gabourey Sidibe – in this Aniston-adoring, holiday-spirited culture – is none of those things. It's that she is completely wonderful,
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- Gaby Wood
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Berry Blasts Violent Dad, Thanks Teacher At Gala
4 December 2009 5:31 PM, PST
| WENN
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Oscar winner Halle Berry ripped into her father at the Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment breakfast in Los Angeles on Friday, revealing his violent acts left an "indelible" mark on her life.
The actress was among those being honoured at the early-morning gala and she chose to bring up a painful part of her past as she accepted her latest accolade.
Taking to the podium at the Beverly Hills event, the Monster's Ball star said, "My father was a very abusive, very violent alcoholic and he left an indelible scar on my life, on my childhood.
"When a young girl watches her mother be beaten and kicked down the steps and stabbed and punched in the face, not only do you feel a sense of fear but you too feel a sense of worthlessness."
Berry paid tribute to a former teacher, who helped her overcome her violent upbringing: "She saw in me the need to feel valued and to feel loved and to feel I was worth it."
Hilary Swank and Eva Longoria-Parker were also among those named to the Power 100 Women in Entertainment at the gala.
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The Naughts: The Actress of the '00s
4 December 2009 10:17 AM, PST
| ifc.com
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If time is an avenger, then the Naughts have had it both ways with Nicole Kidman. In the span of a decade, Kidman was transformed from arm candy into an artist -- the rare movie star who made genuinely interesting choices -- eclipsing her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who filed for divorce in 2000, with an Oscar win and the embrace, finally, of her peers on her own terms.
However, as the '00s limp to a close, Kidman seems to be succumbing to a personal vendetta against time: by manipulating her face into a mask -- a waxworks ideal of "Nicole Kidman" -- rather than continuing to deploy it as a functional instrument, an artist's tool, Kidman is taking perhaps the most surprising risk of her career: she has chosen to age into glacial iconicity. In this, she exemplifies a decade that treated actresses with ambivalence, waving all the flags of
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- Michelle Orange
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Birthday Suits, Well Directed
30 November 2009 6:05 AM, PST
| FilmExperience
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Lights. Cameras. Birthday Action (for this, the 30th of November). Only one month left to go and it's 2010. How crazy is that?
Ridley, Terrence (in the 70s) and Marc
1835 Mark Twain's books have been adapted into movies ever since the movies began. Most notably The Prince and the Pauper and any tale of Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer
1920 Virginia Mayo 40s and 50s star, frequent Danny Kaye foil
1926 Richard Crenna, character actor
1927 Robert Guillaume, "Benson"
1929 Dick Clark, seemingly immortal creature who may finally be destroyed by the rise of his spiritual offspring Ryan Seacrest. It's all very Cronos vs. Zeus, only without the thunderbolts
1937 Ridley Scott, manly director whose movies are usually way better when they're shot through with a strong female presence. Consider the three classics: Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Alien. The rest of the filmography surely has its moments but that's the trinity right there.
1943 Terence Malick,
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- NATHANIEL R
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Precious and Painful
23 November 2009 10:29 AM, PST
| Huffington Post
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In the films of Lee Daniels, horror is expressed through a claustrophobic Black pain that Hollywood finds absolutely compelling. In Precious, the fifth film that Daniels has either produced or directed, he returns to the formula that won him acclaim and won Halle Berry an Oscar for her role in Monster's Ball -- poor Black women are pathetic, sick and incapable of caring for themselves or their children.
Not so much buzz came to Daniels for his second, third and fourth films. The third, "Shadow Boxer," was also an odious tale of death and quasi-incest, and rated high on the gag-with-a-spoon meter but it involved a beyond middle-aged White woman played by Helen Mirren. So now, even after declaring to one reporter that he is no longer going to make movies for "Black people" (as if Monster's Ball was for us!),
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- Esther Iverem
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Berry: 'I used to be drawn to abusive men'
13 November 2009 12:49 AM, PST
| digitalspy
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Halle Berry has revealed that she used to be attracted to abusive men. The Monster's Ball star, who used to regularly witness her father attacking her mother during childhood, said that her upbringing had an effect on the men she later chose as partners. Berry told NBC Nightly News: "My mother was a battered woman and that was my childhood for a good chunk of it. (more)
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- By Rebecca Davies
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Director Marc Forster on the Importance of Failure in Filmmaking
12 November 2009 1:09 PM, PST
| firstshowing.net
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I've been waiting and waiting to feature a video interview from Making Of for a long time. If you haven't ever heard of Making Of, it's an incredible new website that focuses on the filmmaking process. They post new interviews daily with some of the most talented and brilliant filmmakers out there talking about their own process and some techniques and tips. I finally found a video today that I wanted to feature and it has Marc Forster in it talking about how important failure is in filmmaking. That may sound odd at first (how can failure help?), but if that title gets you to watch this video, then all the better. Anyway, check this out.
Marc Forster previously directed Quantum of Solace as well as The Kite Runner, Stranger Than Fiction, Stay, Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball, and Everything Put Together. He's attached to a number of upcoming projects, including
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- Alex Billington
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Sony Letting Quebec Teach Us About Fathers And Guns
11 November 2009 8:11 AM, PST
| cinemablend.com
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When you've got a father and a son who can't stand each other plus a firearm, you've got a Marvin Gaye situation on your hands, or Heath Ledger's fate in Monster's Ball, or at the very least a really, really tense Thanksgiving. Apparently, though, it can all turn out Ok, as it does in Fathers and Guns, the French-Canadian action-comedy that's about to get an English-language remake at Sony.
According to Variety, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy will produce the remake alongside the original film's producers Denise Robert and Emile Gaudreault. The film is about a father-and-son cop team who are assigned to investigate an outdoor camp for fathers and sons to grow closer together through adventure therapy. You can probably see where this is going.
With the right pair of actors-- please, please do not hire John Travolta, Robin Williams, or anyone associated with Wild Hogs-- this
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Precious is an extraordinary film about race
11 November 2009 2:35 AM, PST
| The Guardian - Film News
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Who'd have thought a film about a sexually abused black teenager would make whole cinemas stand and cheer?
This week, as you have no doubt been kept well informed, marked the first anniversary of Barack Obama's election victory. Yet the most telling and inadvertently damning verdict about what – if anything – has happened to Us race relations since then has come, not from HBO, but from the cinema.
As chance would have it, two movies out this month in America have as their protagonist a poor, overweight black teenager, a coincidence that would once have been unthinkable. Yet this is not quite the modern triumph of post-racial America that it might seem.
Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire came out on Friday and, fortunately, it is a lot better than that clunking subtitle would suggest. In two weeks' time, The Blind Side will be inflicted on the American public,
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- Hadley Freeman
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Your Holiday Indie Film Preview
4 November 2009 8:26 AM, PST
| ifc.com
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2009 is about to end with a bang, though probably not the apocalyptic kind predicted in the long-awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" or Chris Smith's terrifying doc "Collapse," though those will both be playing at your local arthouse. Instead, audiences will be able to enjoy a winter of wildly different indie film offerings to reflect the wildly different tastes of moviegoers as we leave one decade and move into another. (There are also many different ways to watch them, as you can tell from our Anywhere But a Movie Theater section.)
From November through January, there will be musicals ("Nine"), comedies (Broken Lizard's "The Slammin' Salmon") and stop-motion animated wonderments ("A Town Called Panic") to entertain and new films from Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar, Richard Linklater, Terry Gilliam and Werner Herzog to ponder. And if new movies aren't necessarily doing the trick, you can always cozy
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- Stephen Saito
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Bond director opens the files on Quantum of Solace
29 October 2009 3:01 PM, PDT
| The Geek Files
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Bond star Daniel Craig recently revealed that filming on the next James Bond movie will start at the end of 2010.
In the meantime, director Marc Forster has been spilling the beans on Craig's previous 007 adventure, Quantum of Solace.
Forster who has already said he doesn't want to do the next Bond flick, had his breakthrough with Monster's Ball, for which Halle Berry won a best actress Oscar.
His next film, Finding Neverland, was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards and seven Academy Awards.
The filmmaker, who had left Switzerland for the USA at the age of 20 to pursue his dream, continued his directorial success with films including Stranger than Fiction, The Kite Runner, and then last year's Quantum of Solace.
In an interview with MakingOf, Forster explains that the Bond flick was, for him, "a very different experience."
He had a budget five times the amount he normally worked with plus,
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- David Bentley
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Halle and Marc, Stop Reading Now
21 October 2009 6:00 PM, PDT
| Movieline
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· The Nyt just put up its amaaaazing new profile of Precious director Lee Daniels, and while writer Lynn Hirschberg provides a couple weirdo passages (I particularly enjoyed her random reference to "a white actor named Wes Bentley"), this is the Lee Daniels show, and it's glorious. Go read it, but enjoy this little preview: "After producing two films, Daniels quickly became frustrated with not having complete control of his movies. 'I kind of co-directed Monster's Ball,' Daniels told me as he ordered another drink (the actual director was Marc Forster). 'I gave Halle her line readings. I knew how to do that: you tap into people's souls.'"
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New book examines black women's film stardom
17 October 2009 12:45 PM, PDT
| Filmicafe
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Dorothy Dandridge was the first black woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Almost a half century passed before another black woman . Halle Berry . won the award.They and three others . Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey . are subjects of the new book "Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film.""These women have pushed the racial boundaries for audiences, setting new standards for beauty and body type," said author Mia Mask.She took on the book because, while black male stars are now enjoying huge success, little has been written about their female counterparts . as performers who can headline a film, said Mask, who teaches film and drama at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.Dandridge was nominated for her lead role as the hedonistic factory worker in the 1954 classic "Carmen Jones," alongside Harry Belafonte.Berry won an Oscar in 2000 for playing
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Zebediah de Soto Explains His Vision for Night of the Living Dead: Origins
14 October 2009 9:02 PM, PDT
| MovieWeb
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The CGI wizard/director explains how he won't tarnish the image of the original George A. Romero film
For fans of classic filmdom, remakes can be a tough pill to swallow, and there likely can't be harder fans to please than fans of the 1968 George A. Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead. Director Zebediah de Soto knows full well the fears fans of the Romero zombie film may have towards his new origin story film, Night of the Living Dead: Origins 3D, largely because he is a horror fanboy himself, even commenting on our story on Danielle Harris' casting of Barbara. He wants the fans to know that he is not trying to tarnish the legacy of this great horror film, but merely expand upon it with his new Night of the Living Dead: Origins 3D that will give us a new 3-D/CGI look at parts of
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Find Interview: Director & Producer Lee Daniels on his latest film, Precious
13 October 2009 10:32 AM, PDT
| Film Independent
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As a director and producer, Lee Daniels
has never shied away from addressing abuse and racism (Monster's Ball), pedophilia (The Woodsman), abuse and
incest (Shadowboxer). With his latest film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire,
he takes incest on again. Daniels says the film helped him purge some of the
demons from his difficult childhood. The film, which won the Audience Award and
Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, has been critically acclaimed
for its rawness but also its ability to inspire and uplift. Daniels hopes that
this film will allow him to move on to brighter topics and genres, including a
musical.
By
Lorenza Muñoz
How did you come across the novel?
A friend of mine gave me the book. It takes
a lot to shock me. I remember feeling so sad and yet so elevated and uplifted.
I was frightened and yet happy. But
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- maint
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'Monster's Ball' writer pens 'Dante's Inferno'
12 October 2009 4:23 AM, PDT
| digitalspy
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Visceral Games has revealed that Monster's Ball writer Will Rokos will provide the storyline for upcoming action title Dante's Inferno. Rokos, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Monster's Ball, spoke of the challenge facing him when adapting the epic poem for a video game. "I really got into re-imagining Dante as a flawed hero with a dark past, and his determination to save the love of his life from a terrible fate. It was a truly unique experience to re-create one man’s hell, one circle at a time," he said. Executive producer Jonathan (more)
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- By Liam Martin
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The Heat Is On For EA's Dante's Inferno
9 October 2009 6:51 AM, PDT
| HollywoodNorthReport.com
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Electronic Arts' Visceral Games division has confirmed that Oscar-nominated writer Will "Monster's Ball" Rokos will script the story line for Dante's Inferno, a new video game adaptation, based on 'Part 1' of author Dante Alighieri's poem The Divine Comedy.
"The task of adapting a revered and classic piece of literature for the gaming medium was a tremendous challenge,' said Jonathan Knight, executive producer Dante's Inferno.
"Dante Alighieri's masterpiece forms the foundation of the game's plot, but Will's take on the 'Beatrice' story brought the necessary conflict and action that made the material really work dramatically."
"Taking such a naturally rich and deep universe and adapting for the video game has been one of the most interesting and challenging projects I've worked on," said Rokos.
"I really got into re-imagining Dante as a flawed hero with a dark past, and his determination to save the love
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Monsters Ball Scribe Adapting Dante's Inferno
9 October 2009
| shocktillyoudrop.com
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Visceral Games, the developers behind the critically-acclaimed Dead Space franchise and a studio of Electronic Arts Inc., today announced that Academy Award-nominated writer Will Rokos is writing the story line for Dante's Inferno , the adaptation of part one of Dante Alighieri's epic poem "The Divine Comedy" from Visceral Games.
Rokos is best known for his Best Original Screenplay nomination for Monster's Ball in 2001, and is collaborating with the game's creative team to craft an all new narrative that parallels the original poem.
"Taking such a naturally rich and deep universe and adapting for the video game has been one of the most interesting and challenging projects I've worked on," says Rokos. "I really got into re-imagining Dante as a flawed
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The Auteurs Daily: Nyff. Precious
7 October 2009 1:56 PM, PDT
| The Auteurs
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Updated through 10/7.
"As in Monster's Ball, which he produced, and his first feature, the equally odious Shadowboxer, [Lee] Daniels emphasizes only the worst in human nature, and does so in a way that flatters rather than confronts the prejudices of his liberal audience." Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "One for the Stuff White People Like canon, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is an impeccably acted piece of trash - an exploitation film that shamelessly strokes its audience's sense of righteous indignation."
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Halle Berry: "I feel like a man in drag"
5 October 2009 12:54 AM, PDT
| digitalspy
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Halle Berry has revealed that she feels like a "man in drag" if she wears too much make-up. The Monster's Ball actress, who has 18-month-old daughter Nahla with boyfriend Gabriel Aubry, said that she prefers to go for the natural look rather than spend lots of time applying cosmetics to her face. Berry told InStyle magazine: "Less is more. When I wear too much make-up, I feel like a man in drag. I prefer to be low maintenance." She continued: (more)
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- By Rebecca Davies
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