Confirmed: Sacha Baron Cohen will play Freddie Mercury in Queen biopic
Sep 17
Now this is some exciting casting news: Deadline Hollywood reports Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) has closed a deal to play Queen front man Freddie Mercury in a film that’s being scripted by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Last King Of Scotland, The Queen) for a 2011 production start.
The film is still untitled, but is said to follow Queen’s years as a band leading up to their appearance at Live Aid in 1985, widely considered one of the rock’s all-time greatest performances.
Despite not being a fan of his comedy films Borat and Bruno, there’s no doubting Sacha Baron Cohen is capable of turning in a character performance, and with the right hair, make-up and wardrobe behind him, he’ll definitely look like the famous Queen front man. I have complete faith he’ll nail the mannerisms and voice of Mercury.
The only question will be his ability to sing (less he mime?), but I don’t see that as a major issue. Yes, Mercury was one of the greatest front men of all time with an unquestionably unique and brilliant voice, but there are ways to get around or replicate the singing performance for a feature film. The appearance and performance of Sacha Baron Cohen need to be top-notch before we can even begin to be convinced of a singing voice.
This news was rumoured quite some time ago, and I remember thinking at the time that it would be some brilliantly perfect casting. I’m glad it has come to fruition. Now, we wait patiently for a some pictures, a trailer and a release date!
Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale mix it up in THE FIGHTER trailer
Sep 17
Mark Wahlberg gets to flex his muscles and Christan Bale seems to have turned in a possible Oscar-winning performance as revealed by the trailer for The Fighter, released online (via Apple) by Paramout Pictures.
Directed by David O. Russell (Three Kings) and co-starring Amy Adams, The Fighter tells the incredible true story of Boston fighter “Irish” Mickey Ward (Wahlberg) and how he was helped to the world lightweight championship by half-brother Dicky Eklund (Bale). Eklund once decked Sugar Ray Leonard and went the distance against the boxing legend before forfeiting his career to drugs and crime. He redeemed himself by training Ward through his Rocky-like run to the title.
Seriously, I was expecting a trailer for just another boxing movie. Seems this one delves into brotherhood, family and struggle in which boxing just happens to be the setting. A surprisingly good trailer that has me anticipating good things from the film. Too early to pencil Bale in for Best Supporting Actor? No, really– check out the trailer and see what I mean.
The Fighter is release 10 December 2010 in the States.
Australian release date? Not yet, no.
First trailer for THE TOURIST, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp
Sep 16
Columbia Pictures have released the first trailer from their highly anticipated suspense film The Tourist, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. The film is directed by Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) is about an American tourist (Depp) whose playful dalliance with a stranger (Jolie) leads to a web of intrigue, romance and danger during an impromptu trip to Europe.
I had figured this film to be a little more cut-and-dry than the trailer suggests it might be. Instead of being just a straight-laced suspense thriller, I was treated to some surprising dry comedy that improves the premise a great deal. Depp has kept the beard on for this one (Jack Sparrow commitments while filming??) and Jolie looks elegantly stunning, as always.
The Tourist opens 10 December in the States.
No Australian dates have been announced yet.
Al Pacino and Joe Pesci might co-star with Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN
Sep 14
We deliberately steer away from posting rumour news headlines that end in question marks. (This guy might star with this chick in That Movie??) Often variations of the same rumour will leak and dribble over movie blogs for a week or two before a publicist or a studio gets around to denying or confirming it. This particular rumour news, however, is far too exciting to leave alone…
The almost always trusty Deadline Hollywood blog reported today that Oscar winners Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are ‘circling’ The Irishman, a project that already has Martin Scorsese attached to direct and Robert De Niro attached to star. The film is based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses, a fascinating account of a dark side of American history. The book’s title comes from the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors.
The mere fact that there will be another Scorsese-De Niro film collaboration is exciting enough, but add long-time collaborator Joe Pesci and Al Pacino into the mix and expectations become extraordinarily high.
Scorsese has directed De Niro on eight occasions, producing some of the most impactful and memorable films of all time, including Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. The last time they worked together was 1995′s Casino. Joe Pesci co-starred with De Niro in Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino.
Al Pacino first appeared with De Niro in 1977′s The Godfather Part II, though they didn’t share any scenes together until the critically acclaimed Heat in 1995. They have since appeared in some stinkers together (Righteous Kill, for instance) clearly needing the guidance of proven mobster story master Martin Scorsese to bring out their best. In my opinion, anyway.
Hopefully this casting gets locked in and the project gets under way soon. Everyone has full schedules and timing will be everything. We may not hear about this one again for a while.
In the meantime, I’m going watch Goodfellas yet again while I wait for Scorsese’s HBO series Boardwalk Empire to start.
Reel Short: NUIT BLANCHE
Sep 14
Shot independently and resulting in many lucrative industry offers for Director/Producer/Cinematographer Arev Manoukian, short film Nuit Blanche explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy.
It’s a gorgeous example of taking early film inspirations and blending them with modern-day technology, a style that needs to be handled carefully. The visuals in Nuit Blanche (French translated ‘Sleepless Night‘) are incredibly stunning and took Manoukian and his team at Spy Films over a year to complete.
Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.
TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN review
Sep 08
Ostensibly aimed at a relatively young audience, John Marsden’s Tomorrow novels were nevertheless dark, complex, and breathlessly intense – and spoke home truths about human nature to an audience struggling to come to grips with the dark, complex and stressful responsibilities of growing up.
The movie adaptation, penned and helmed by Stuart Beattie (one of those Aussies-in-Hollywood who’s scripted such mixed projects as Pirates Of The Caribbean [the first one], Collateral, 30 Days Of Night, and Australia), doesn’t nail all of the elements that made the books so special, but gets enough of them right to warrant lukewarm encouragement, if not outright praise.
Much effort is invested (in the film) in lending the characters and situation a sense of realism and sympathy. Many of these efforts just don’t play right. Protagonist Ellie’s disembodied voiceover is intrusive and superfluous; the talking-to-the-camera bookends feel like a failed attempt to carry some of the novel’s first person perspective over into the film; and a lot of the character-based jokes and gags hit the screen with all the pomp and circumstance of wet cardboard.
Even worse, the performances are mixed. Where the actors playing protag Ellie, anti-hero Homer, and beauty-queen Fiona (Caitlin Stasy, Deniz Akdeniz and Phoebe Tonkin respectively) are solid as a rock, the others (played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis, Chris Pang, Ashleigh Cummings and Andy Ryan) are clearly struggling to inject life into flat line-readings, and get no help from debut director Beattie.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that we’ve (that is, Australians) all grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood fluff, and have come to equate American accents with seriousness – or, at least, a veneer of seriousness (kind of like the way professional wrestlers are stacked like bodybuilders, but would go down after two seconds in the ring with a tae kwon do black belt) – and we read local, familiar, reassuring accents as calming and laid-back.
In an Aussie production like this, it’s hard to tell whether the source of a performance’s weakness is the actor, the director, or the accent itself. I don’t know what the way out of this predicament is, and neither does Tomorrow. As Ellie says in the film (about something completely different), it ultimately boils down to instinct. Do the performances feel real? In this case the answer is ‘yes, but not often enough.’
Action scenes aren’t something Australian filmmakers are generally known for, but in Tomorrow the action scenes work just fine. The explosions are big and cathartic, the chase scenes are loud and intelligible, the stakes are all laid out in impressive scope – and all this working with a budget a quarter the size of the average American equivalent.
The production is watertight. While some scenes are too desaturated, and much of the soundtrack’s pop music is naff, the sound design, cinematography, stunts and production design are world class.
The same can’t be said for the film’s pacing. The first hour trickles by at a snail’s pace, and so much slack piles up that the climactic third act struggles to pull it taut in time. This is a fairly big departure from the novel’s whiplash pace and mounting sense of escalation. While the film has a lot of expository ground to cover, it should have covered it more efficiently, leaving the final act with more room to breathe.
Another gripe I have with the film is the schizophrenic way it treats the audience. Some things – specifically, the characters’ individual emotional journeys – are treated with suitable subtlety, and play extremely well. Other things are repeated and enlarged and underlined and bashed over the audience’s head for no reason – “hey, look, a bridge. I bet that bridge is important. Look at them using that bridge! What can we do with that bridge, I wonder?” – and it all comes to a head in a handful of nauseating dialogue scenes complete with lines like “We thought we were safe. That turned out to be the BIGGEST FAIRYTALE OF ALL!” and “[being shot feels] like someone’s pulling barbed wire through you.” Nobody talks like that, Australian or otherwise, and for every line of dialogue Beattie gets right, there are two that fall flat.
Professional dollar priests have predicted that Tomorrow will rake in around US$15 million when it’s released over there. Put that together with its current takings here (AU$4m and climbing) and it’ll probably make its budget back – just. But why should the reception be so lukewarm over there? Do American audiences scoff as much at Aussie accents in serious situations as we do?
A big blow against the film’s financial prospects is the characters. The main character’s a girl – ew! – and she falls in love with an Asiatic bloke – gross! There are too many girls in the main cast (4 out of 7? They’ll want the vote next!), and none of the characters fit into the cookie-cutter stereotypes we’ve spent our entire lives cultivating in our minds (the pretty one is also the smart one? The greasy Mediterranean chap is the heroic one? The jock is a coward? What?).
Tomorrow, When The War Began (the film) is merely competent. Its source material, however, burns so bright that its light glows through the film’s mediocrity. The slack pace, the awkward performances, the superfluous voiceover – the film has its flaws. But the bits it gets right – the ethical arguments, the character beats, and the ever-escalating set-pieces – makes it a damn sight better than the average Hollywood explode-a-thon playing in the adjacent cinema.
A flawed beginning, then, to a promising franchise.
OPINIONS COUNT