Unlikely Couple: Robert Pattinson and Claire Denis

Here's Murtada with the week's most interesting casting news.

Robert Pattinson is starring in Claire Denis’ next movie. Are we being punked? No. Actually to judge from his last few choices it's just another day, another auteur. He’s becoming a top director magnet and has been using his bankability to make interesting choices. He’s confirmed as the lead of Denis’ untitled first English language film. The story is set in space in a “future that seems like the present” with Pattinson reportedly playing an astronaut.

 This particular project is intriguing beyond Pattinson. Denis of course is reason enough to be excited. Her last movie Bastards (2013) may have been less heralded than usual but it was a provocative visceral experience. Collaborating with her on the screenplay is novelist Zadie Smith (On Beauty, White Teeth) whose books have always been cinematic and full of fallible compelling characters. Smith writing her first screenplay? Now that’s exciting!

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NYFF: Seeing Isn't Believing in 'Maps to the Stars'

The New York Film Festival has begun. Here's Glenn taking an alternative look at David Cronenberg's divisive Cannes winner 'Maps to the Stars', now a confirmed 2014 contender.

Digital filmmaking has a lot to answer for – much of it good, but a lot of it bad. Its biggest crime, however, may be eradicating David Cronenberg of style. It’s as if the transition of celluloid to digital, which coincided with his swing away from merely a cult name-brand director to one whose films, at least briefly, appeared to be targeting a somewhat more acceptingly mainstream audience (A History of Violence and Eastern Promises certainly), weakened his eye for visual storytelling. Not only is Maps to the Stars a surprisingly ugly film in terms of its garish lighting, messy blocking, and lethargic, bulky transitions, but it’s a distressingly amateur in one in terms of simple camera placement and editing.

Much was made of Matt Zoller Seitz’s plea for film writers to discuss form in more detail. “Form is not just an academic side dish to the main course of content”, he said last year, and while I am not sure what Seitz’s opinion is on Maps to the Stars I can’t imagine he would be too thrilled.

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NYFF: Maps to the Stars, Or: Julianne Moore is God, Again

The New York Film Festival has begun. Here's Nathaniel on the latest from David Cronenberg which won Julianne Moore the Best Actress prize at Cannes earlier this year.

Let's not bury the lede. At a key moment in Maps to the Stars when the actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) gets some bad news that she's more or less been expecting/dreading, she is in a Buddha pose in yoga pants. Her eyes struggle to hold back tears and her body struggles to pretend it's relaxing when she lets out a sudden wail. You think the wail will descend into Julianne Moore's familiar crying jag (You know how she loves to do). Instead the wail abruptly stops. Fans of Julianne Moore won't be able to silence their own screaming so quickly. I, for one, felt euphoric watching her. For those of us whom we have famously dubbed "actressexuals" - the word originated at this blog though it's now escaped our small pfeiff fiefdom and entered the greater internet -- major achievements from our favorite stars can feel, however absurdly, like personal triumphs. Or at least like just rewards for enduring loyalty. Especially if you've worried that the magic has dissipated with familiarity, poor career decisions, lesser roles and/or medicore films.

This year, with Maps to the Stars and Still Alice (previously reviewed), the Julianne Moore I first fell for, the actress who inspired my whole career path (newbies might not know that this site emerged from a zine I started in the 1990s with issue #1 dubbed "Julianne Moore is God," pictured left) came roaring back into full power.

Pity, then, that the movie can't quite keep up with her or harness her brilliant satirical embodiment of all that is self-absorbed, self-loathing, self-medicated, and self-serving in modern Hollywood celebrity. [More...]

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I'm Just A Girl Who Can't Say No (To Links)

HAPPY OKLAHOMA DAY! For serious that's what it is today so any of you reading from the Sooner state enjoy yourselves just a little bit more for the rest of us today

I'm just a girl who cain't say no,
I'm in a turrible fix I always say "come on, let's go"
Just when I outta say nix!

It's also Earth Day today and we'll celebrate when we look at Pocahontas for "Best Shot" tonight. Have you rescreened in yet to choose your shot. You've only got 6 more hours to get your link in. We'll post at 10 tonight

And now, the linkage...

Rope of Silicon David Cronenberg apparently wrote a book due out this fall and Viggo Mortensen loves it and the mad director also made a trailer for it involving a plastic surgeon and a naked woman
Allure's Nude Issue" has 4 actresses talking about their bodies while naked (Nia Long, Minnie Driver, Mrs Channing Tatum, and Kristen Bell). Shameless click-bait sure but also interesting interviews
The Black Brick Road of Oz a complex webcomic with partially animated visuals that seems to be retelling The Wizard of Oz through a twisted Alice in Wonderland kind of lens
New York Theater the Outer Critics Circle nominations are in which means the Tony nods are ever closer. Of the musicals that are Tony Eligible, they seem to like “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”, "Rocky" and Disney's “Aladdin” best. Their Off Broadway favorite is clearly "Fun Home" with Michael Cerveris

Coming Soon Rachel Weisz and Toni Collette to star in Miss You Already a British drama about friends falling out. Interesting combo of actresses, right?
Awards Daily Foxcatcher gets a release date of November 14th. Great choice, SPC
Pajiba wonders what happened to Alison Lohman. She hasn't made a movie in a long time
The Wire Archer will return to its spying roots next season after an experimental latest season
Vulture Whoa, I hadn't heard about this (because I don't watch ESPN) but on Monday's they're reairing those Battle of the Network Stars specials that were so popular in the 70s and 80s - a precursor to modern shows like Dancing With the Stars only populated with less has-beens and more stars that were actually popular at that moment showing off their athleticism
Empire pics from Denzel Washington as The Equalizer. Funny that his great actor cred can remain so intact when he keeps pissing away the years in all these C grade projects, right? I guess one Flight every few years or so we'll keep you in critical good graces. That's a lesson other male stars with Denzel's bad taste (and there are so many of them!) should have probably learned

Directors Fortnight at Cannes
In Contention Sundance hits Whiplash and Cold in July have been accepted
Playbill this is the first we're hearing of a movie called Pride but its set to debut at Cannes and has a pretty stellar cast Bill Nighy, Imedla Staunton, Paddy Considine and Dominic West among them. It's a true story about gay activists raising funds for striking miners in the UK in the 1980s.

Today's Watch
Nicole Kidman gets sassy with an ABC news reporter. Be prepared for your interview, kids

William S Burroughs Centennial

Today is the centennial of the infamous Beat era writer William S Burroughs and I've been thinking about him lately due to Philip Seymour Hoffman's death via heroin (why is it that I always start stringing the celebrity junkies together when they die? Is it because there are so damn tragic many of them?) but mostly because I was really gripped by Ben Foster's portrayal of him in Kill Your Darlings, a problematic movie about guys that weren't nearly as palatable in real life (despite the movie being about murder) that had a great moment here and there. Of course the movie wasn't really about Burroughs but about Lucien Carr's (Dane Dehaan) murder of his lover (Michael C Hall). From time to time I have wondered why we've had no straight up biopic about Burroughs (Keifer Sutherland is the only other actor I can think of that's played him), given that he's a very famous white guy genius and that's the kind of biopic Hollywood likes best. But I guess it couldn't be done; The MPAA and most moviegoers and possibly even myself would just never be able to deal what with the sex, the drugs, the finger-chopping, the wife-shooting, and what not.

So let's move over to actual movies. Burroughs appeared in a small role in Gus Van Sant's terrific Drugstore Cowboy (1989) which I highly recommend to any of you wondering why Matt Dillon was a "you owe him" Oscar nominee for Crash (2005) and then of course there was David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), a film version of Burrough's, ummmm, unfilmable novel. (Incidentally our friend Nick, who you know from Nick's Flick Picks and the podcast, writes extensively on this film in his first book "The Desiring Image") Whether or not any cinematic interpretation of Naked Lunch could be considered definitive if we didn't have it we would never have seen Julian Sands buggered by a towering insect monster or Judy Davis injecting bug powder into her breasts.

Have you seen Naked Lunch or read any of Burroughs work?

Burroughs with Cronenberg during the filming of Naked Lunch

Some Centennial Celebrations
Time Magazine "Rebel, Junkie, Exile, Genius"
NPR "Possessed by Genius"
The New Statesman "To say it country simple, most folks enjoy junk” - Burroughs in 1966 on kicking his heroin addiction 
Dreg Studios Brandt Hardin celebrates the history of Burroughs with a portrait