the link i live in

Animation Magazine Have you heard that Steve Jobs wanted Aaron Sorkin to write a Pixar movie? It's be more interesting if he wrote a movie about Pixar. How would his sharp sometimes cynical wit mesh with Pixar's self-promoted internal cheer as the happiest workplace on earth?
Towleroad I say a few words about Pedro Almodóvar's latest
IndieWire interviews Elena Anaya on her role in The Skin I Live In. *mild spoiler alert*
New York Times "The Formula of Melodrama" brought on by Almodóvar's gripping The Skin I Live In.
My New Plaid Pants more pics from the set of Steven Soderbergh's flesh fest Magic Mike plus JA's hilarious commentary. 

Gold Derby finds fun elected trivia about Meryl Streep's upcoming nomination for The Iron Lady (what do you mean "if") 
Awards Daily pontificates about Olivia Colman's Oscar chances for Tyrannosaur. I saw the movie much earlier this year and she is brilliant in it. 
Culture Map Austin Kristen O'Brien shares memories of George Harrison, whose back in the cultural ether (not that the Beatles ever leave it) given Martin Scorsese's documentary. Love this bit about Madonna and Shanghai Surprise (which Harrison provided music for) of all things.

On this last visit to Friar Park we met first to view footage from the film Shanghai Surprise. I joined Dad to watch the dailies with Harrison and the principal actors in the film, Madonna and Sean Penn. After the screening, we went back to Friar Park for dinner. However, before dinner was served, we gathered in the TV room so that Madonna could get Harrison’s feedback on her latest as-yet-unreleased video. It was "Live to Tell," and she shyly played it for all of us, looking earnestly to George for his approval. After the video we watched The Muppet Show, and I remember thinking it was funny, but yet perfectly natural, to be sitting here with Madonna laughing over Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog.

CBR has a list of unproduced superhero movie screenplays that might make good comic books. Though I knew that Tim Burton and Michelle Pfeiffer wanted to do a Catwoman movie after Batman Returns... I didn't realize that an actual screenplay was turned in (and rejected). Either that or I've just forgotten to block out the pain. 
Keyframe Nick, Timothy and Kevin (three of my four favorite Chicagoans) are arguing over the Chicago Festival fare in this ongoing conversation including The Kid With a Bike, Miss Bala, My Week With Marilyn, and The Artist, and Melancholia. I'm happy to see Nick appreciated Melancholia as much as I did. Where is my review? Funny you should ask. Why am I procrastinating it so? 

Finally, if you're young musical theater performer type -- I know TFE has readers of that persuasion -- you might want to consider auditioning for The Glee Project Season Two. In the past I've always been violently opposed to reality shows which cast productions of anything. Casting should not be a democracy. It should be left to the experts or the people who have to work with the people that are auditioning. I had NO intention of watching this show but I stumbled on it one day and was surprised at how interesting it was. The audience couldn't vote (yay!) and it became this behind the scenes expose (albeit heavily edited and undoubtedly self-censoring) of how show creators react to talent who would love to work with them, and what does or doesn't factor into their hiring decisions. It reminds you of how true it is that talent will only get you so far (i.e. a foot in the door) but there are so many intangibles in showbiz.

NYFF: "Hugo" A Work in Progress

The surprise screening of The New York Film Festival tonight was Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a 3D adaptation of the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret (a much better title for about a hundred reasons) which is about an orphan boy who inadvertently uncovers rich cinematic history while trying to repair a broken automatron that is his only cherished reminder of his father. Martin Scorsese introduced the film himself and seemed a bit embarrassed by the standing ovation before the screening. Perhaps he was thinking Calm down. What if you don't like it?!? 

Father and Son and Automatron in "Hugo"

Though you'll undoubtedly see several full reviews online tonight, we were given a finger wagging public reminder pre-screening that we weren't to do so. Scorsese warned us that the color correction was not finished, the score was a temporary rendition of the completed score which Howard Shore is currently recording, and some of the effects and the 3D still needed touching up. This was especially true of the opening pre-title segment which had a lot of computer graphics in lieu of actual people and objects. So absent an actual review, let it suffice to say that I was too caught up in it to take ANY notes (the only thing written on my pad is "still needs color cor..." yep, that's it!) and was very pleasantly surprised.  

Ben Kingsley as the mysterious Papa GeorgeI had found the trailer so manic and gimmicky that I assumed the film would be a noisy disaster but the completed -- excuse me, nearly completed -- movie is actually fairly gentle and lovely despite flirting with manic slapstick on a few occassions. Production designer and certain Oscar nominee (again) Dante Ferretti's clock motif on steroids should read garish since Hugo lives inside a train station which seems to house ten thousand of them, all of which he hand winds daily. Instead the sets feel like intricate beauties with tiny hand-crafted parts. The film is still settling in my mind and I heard everything from raves to loud but minor quibbling while briefly chatting with other moviegoers outside. But if you've ever loved France, Books, Fiddling With How Gadgets Work, or The History of Cinema, it's a love letter you'll most definitely want to read when it opens next month.

NYFF: "My Week With Marilyn"

Poor Marilyn. The press hounded her. Fans would tear off pieces of her soul if they could. Co-stars and directors dissed her. Men wouldn't leave her alone (not that she wanted them to). And now Simon Curtis is holding yet another Monroe seance -- her soul will never rest in peace -- with his feature film debut My Week With Marilyn (2011),  a "true" story about the making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).

True must come with quotes. The film is based on the memoirs of Colin Clark, the third assistant director on the "lightest of comedies" directed by and starring Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). Can we trust the awestruck account of a young movie dreamer's version of his friendship and quasi-romance with the world's most famous actress? My Week With Marilyn emphatically does despite the amusingly placcid (if repetitive) moonyness with which the talented Eddie Redmayne portrays him, as if he's just as doped up as Marilyn, but much smarter about his cocktails of choice.

"Surprise!" Marilyn escapes with Colin Clark, lowly third assistant directorClark was 23 going on 24 when he met the immortal bombshell while hustling into the movies, landing his first job on a set through the help of his father's connections, despite the fact that the father did not approve of him 'running off to the circus'. The details of Clark's adventure in the movies are both acted out and explained to us in voiceover in the film's inelegant screenplay, which prefers for the characters to state the obvious or speak their psychologies aloud. Sometimes they even speak Marilyn's aloud; in the great transitive powers of true celebrity, everyone on earth is her psycho-therapist. Sometimes this obviousness of speech has comic payoffs (the film works best as a comedic clash between proper British theatrical training and idiot-savant American stardom) and once it even pays off both dramatically and comedically in a sadly funny scene where Colin Clark tells it like it is, succinctly, to Marilyn. He understands Marilyn and Olivier's mirrored goals and prophesies the failure of the movie.

Thought Balloons as dialogue and Michelle's performance after the jump...

Click to read more ...

NYFF: "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

Her name is Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) but we first know her as Marcy when she slips quietly out of a crowded farmhouse where women much like her sleep in huddles, like a happy litter of puppies. Her absence is quickly noted by one of the men on the farm named Watts (Brady Corbett) and Marcy hides in the forest while her once slumbering sisters and their men search for her, continually calling out "Marcy May." Once Marcy has reached a neighboring town, she makes a trembling entirely inarticulate phone call. An unidentified woman answers:

Martha, is that you?" 

Marcy Doesn't Live Here Anymore

We know instinctively that she is, though we know little else in these first few minutes of writer/director Sean Durkin's feature debut Martha Marcy May Marlene. 

The woman on the phone is Martha's estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) who whisks the young woman away from the mountains to the even more idyllic river side landscape surrounding the far less crowded summer home Lucy shares with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). What's comforting to us in their recognizable domesticity, is obviously alien to Martha. The narrative is all friction between the past (Marcy) and present (Martha) and shifts between them sometimes imperceptibly and other times forcefully. The past scenes become in essence an unlocking of the puzzle of Martha's life on the farm with the father/husband figure and shepherd (John Hawkes, Winter's Bone) and his free love flock (to the movie's credit the word "cult" is never uttered). These revelations about Martha's previous life have the pesky tendency to lead the moviegoer to yet more disturbing questions which will probably not have answers.

Patrick sings an entranced Marcy a song he wrote for her.

Martha... possibly hits a few of its scariest notes too obviously, but mostly it's a model of restraint and cool control. That's particularly true of Elizabeth Olsen's interiority as the title character. She's trusting that her blurry contradictory identity -- an uncomfortable mix of rigid thinking, moral confusion, and open physicality -- will be enough to sell this lost woman. The fine ensemble cast is also a boon: Hawkes brings his Winter's Bone friction of menacing stranger and filial protector and Corbett and the other cult members are a believable mix of old phantom selves fading into shadows of Patrick. In the present tense scenes, which could almost read as a satire of stories about obnovious in-laws if it had anything like a sense of humor, Paulson and Dancy sketch in a realistic background marriage that's challenged by the needy relative in the foreground. But it's the writer/director that's the movie's true star. Durkin's screenplay's rich subtext that neither Martha nor Marcy are anything like their own woman, no matter the surroundings, shines. He also makes several smart choices in the filmmaking, often eschewing the comfort of close-ups and traditional scoring, to build a quiet cumulative menace. The cinematography in particular by Jody Lee Lipes is just right with its diffuse earthy warmth as seductive blanketing for a story that's anything but.

Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson in "Martha Marcy May Marlene""What's in a name?" the doomed Juliet once asked, trying to argue their meaning of Romeo's away. But her efforts were in vain. None of us initially choose the names we're given but as we move through life, plenty of us make small adjustments, concessions, and shifts along the way to shore up our increasing ownership of self.

Before seeing Martha Marcy May Marlene, I liked its "name" a lot. Having now seen the film it's representing, the title vaults over into a thing of pure genius. Film titling is an undersung artform. You could theoretically call this movie about a somewhat nondescript girl haunted by her former life in a cult in New York's Catskills Mountains just about anything. But "Martha Marcy May Marlene" is the perfect, yet far from obvious, choice. It's a riddle, an incantation, a theme. What other name but a series of them could so accurately capture the mystery, simplicity, and loss of self, that's the haunted vacuum center of this stunning debut? A-

Previously on NYFF
The Kid With a Bike races into Kurt's hearts.
George Harrison: Living in the Material World is music to Michael's ears.
A Separation floors Nathaniel. A frontrunner for the Oscar?
The Student makes Nathaniel cram for quizzes that never come.
Carnage raises its voice at Nathaniel but doesn't quite scream.
Miss Bala wins the "must-see crown" from judge Michael.
Tahrir drops Michael right down in the titular Square.
A Dangerous Method excites Kurt... not in that way, perv!
The Loneliest Planet brushes against Nathaniel's skin.
Melancholia shows Michael the end of von Trier's world. 

NYFF: 'The Kid with a Bike'

Kurt here. In The Kid with a Bike, the near-immaculate latest from the Brothers Dardenne, 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret) is constantly on the move, chasing any possible shred of the father (Jérémie Renier) who recently dumped him in a Belgian orphanage and sold the family's belongings (including Cyril's precious bicycle) to pursue his culinary goals. It doesn't take long for Cyril to reclaim the bike, as it makes its way back to him thanks to the efforts of Samantha (Cécile de France) a kindly stranger Cyril literally latches onto during one of many attempts to escape his current guardians. Getting his father back, however, proves much less feasible, and Cyril's aching, at-all-costs need for paternal love and acceptance is what makes this sublime movie hurt so good.

Cyril's fervent drive also provides the film with a surprisingly brisk pace, ultimately aided further by a concise running time of 87 minutes. Even when he starts spending relatively quiet weekends with Samantha (who, without any explanation other than de France's actions and expressions, eagerly steps into a motherly role), the boy is never without telling, tireless propulsion. He and Samantha eventually find his father, and after a tedious attempt to get themselves noticed at the estranged man's workplace (a fortress-like eatery and the setting for a grating game of so-close-yet-so-far-away), Cyril gets a few moments with him that just kill you. Astutely filmed in one uninterrupted take, there's a kitchen scene that sees Cyril insist upon giving his dad a pass for every wrongdoing, and insist even more upon connecting with him in any possible way. He practically forces his dad to jot down a cellphone number, then squeezes in to help stir sauce while the father wants nothing but to get Cyril out of his way.

As they have surely been known to do, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne exhibit an extraordinary grasp of youthful mindsets and sensations, from the thrill of popping a wheelie to the willful romanticizing of adults. The extent of the realism with which they are able to express Cyril's feelings is such that, at one very alarming point, I was brought directly back to a darker stage of my adolescence, specifically a Friday night when I knocked my father halfway down the stairs so I could leave the house. The confused rage of a child is not something easily articulated, but the Dardennes make it look easy. They also bring a youthful, crayon-box palette to the look of the film, effortlessly joining blue walls and yellow hallways and brightly-colored buses and parks with costume design that's defined by single-hued T-shirts (Cyril's red top is practically the movie's emblem). In the subtlest of ways, it's the cinematic equivalent of color-blocking, and it's just effective enough to be thematically supportive without force or pretense.

Amid being repeatedly shunned by his father, and systematically let down by another male authority figure – a local gang leader – whose surrogate approval he blindly seeks to the point of criminal acts, Cyril clings to his bicycle, a symbol of his parental and familial ideals that he must repeatedly retrieve from thieves (yes, Bicycle Thieves is evoked, but surely not for reasons so literal). Much of the story's emotional truth is made to work because of the stellar central performance from first-time actor Doret, who, along with Brad Pitt, Michael Shannon and Michael Fassbender, will likely make my personal Best Actor shortlist. With young skin and old eyes, this ridiculously naturalistic kid puts forth the ideal blend of the unexperienced and the weary, and he shows about as much consciousness of the camera's gaze as Cyril's father does of his son's existence. I won't tell you that The Kid with a Bike rides to a place of improvised-family acceptance, as that would grossly undersell it as something run of the mill. Instead, I'll say it ends on a note as perfect as Cyril could hope for, with an almost magical reassurance that the love he stumbled upon, and not the love he hopelessly pursued, is indeed his salvation.