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Interview: Jason Schwartzman
Filed under: Fox Searchlight, Interviews
Personally speaking, I've been a fan of Jason Schwartzman since he and writer-director Wes Anderson collaborated on Rushmore and created what I still think is a definitive portrait of the beautiful torment of teenage life. While of course Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson conceived the ideas, Schwartzman fleshed them out both literally and emotionally, offering a character that was weird and idiosyncratic but also remarkably relatable, not the least of which because it seemed like the actor was going through many of the same things as his on screen counterpart.
Eleven years later, Schwartzman has matured into one of the most versatile and interesting actors in Hollywood, even if, as he himself puts it, he isn't yet able to "get a part like someone can order a pizza." His latest film reunites him with Anderson for the fourth time, playing another kid who's growing up way too fast in Fantastic Mr. Fox. In addition to talking about tackling another coming of age story, Schwartzman discusses his own Hollywood story, and offers a few insights about the interesting filmmakers with whom he works so frequently, and so closely.
Cinematical: You've worked with a number of filmmakers, such as Sofia Coppola and David O. Russell, who have very specific visions for their films. How is Wes different, whether it was just on Fantastic Mr. Fox or in general, that makes your collaboration more satisfying?
A Peek at George Clooney Voicing 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
Filed under: Action, Animation, Comedy, Fox Searchlight, Family Films, George Clooney, Trailers and Clips
Yahoo! has posted an incredibly cool video of George Clooney acting out his role as Mr. Fox in the freakin' adorable Fantastic Mr. Fox. The video shows cool side-by-side comparisons of Clooney acting out different scenes on a farm with costar Wallace Wolodarsky, who voices loopy sidekick Kylie, as well as just running around pretending to be Mr. Fox, down to rolling around on the ground and doing his super cool whistle. This behind-the-scenes peek at Mr. Fox also offers mini-interviews with director Wes Anderson, producer Allison Abbate, and Bill Murray (Badger) about working with Clooney on the film. The funniest part shows an argument between Mr. Fox and Badger, which involves growling and swiping, split-screened against the actors themselves doing the voices in an office.
As Abbate notes, "There couldn't be a more perfect Mr. Fox, because he has the Cary Grant suave, debonair sparkle where he can talk his way out of any situation, which is so our Mr. Fox character. He's just got a great voice."
Clooney's got a rather full docket this season, with The Men Who Stare at Goats coming out this week, Fantastic Mr. Fox coming out at the end of November, and Up in the Air out on Christmas day.
Click through to see the video itself, then let us know which Clooney feature you're going to be lining up for at the theaters this season, by cuss!
Danny Boyle Knows Where He'll Spend '127 Hours'
Filed under: Action, Drama, Independent, Sports, Deals, Scripts, Fox Searchlight, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand
After a year of speculation (Will it be James Bond? Will it be Maximum City? Trainspotting 2?), Danny Boyle has finally settled on his next project. Variety reports that it will be 127 Hours, the tale of mountain climber Aron Ralston. Boyle has been loosely attached to the project since June when the LA Times reported that Boyle and Fox Searchlight had signed a long term, best friends forever deal. Boyle has already penned a treatment, and Simon Beaufoy is in talks to write the script. In this age of flashmob media stories, you might have forgotten the tale of Ralston. Like your humble authoress and Balloon Boy, Ralston hails from Colorado. He became famous for a Utah climbing accident in 2003, when an 800 lb boulder shifted and crushed his hand. Ralston was forced to choose between life and limb, and in a stomach-turning story heard around the world, he amputated his own hand with a pocketknife. In the media frenzy that followed, Ralston was hailed as a hero and as an idiot, because he had chosen to go climbing alone and without notifying anyone. It was particularly intense locally, and I still remember the heroism debate Ralston sparked in my American Culture class. (It even inspired one student's final project!) Since those heady days of early fame, Ralston has enjoyed success with his autobiography, continues to climb, and is a motivational speaker.
The director is already on the casting hunt for the part of Ralston, which Variety declares will be "a plum job" because it will force an actor to work solo for most of the shoot. Below the jump, I've embedded a video of Ralston describing his amputation. Watch it to prepare for two hours of unflinching detail, and sound off on who you think should be lucky enough to act out a very painful 127 Hours.
What's the State of Fox Searchlight?
Filed under: Animation, Comedy, Drama, Independent, Romance, Awards, RumorMonger, Distribution, Fox Searchlight, Family Films, Oscar Watch
In the 2007 awards season, Fox Searchlight had two strong films in the mix with Juno and The Savages, and then in 2008, they dominated with Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler. As many other indie arms were folding (Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent, Picturehouse), Searchlight managed to keep things up on their end.2009, however, hasn't been so kind to them. January's Notorious didn't do bad actually, though March's Miss March was indeed D.O.A. June's My Life in Ruins similarly underperformed, while July's Adam failed to catch on as that same month's (500) Days of Summer had. Post Grad was dumped in the doldrums of August, while Whip It failed to find a crowd in October.
Cut to now: Amelia has been effectively neutered as a ready-made Oscar contender, while Gentlemen Broncos (from the director of Napoleon Dynamite, which did particularly well for the same studio) is being pulled from wider release after this weekend after posting modest numbers on two screens and earning savage reviews for the most part.
With Miramax also facing tough times, it's a shame to see studios like these have an off-year, though there's time for a turn-around yet so far as Searchlight is concerned. Summer's summer release means the timing could work out to earn a push for Original Screenplay as a happy-go-lucky alternate to many dour contenders. This month's similarly light Fantastic Mr. Fox is an Animated Feature candidate at the very least, and -- according to THR -- the Jeff Bridges drama Crazy Heart is getting a last-minute test run of sorts at the moment to see if it can merit a move to be positioned for this year's race instead of next year's.
AFI Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Filed under: Animation, Comedy, Festival Reports, Fox Searchlight, George Clooney, Other Festivals
It's not hard to like any movie that uses the Beach Boys' music, but Wes Anderson makes it especially easy. As Hollywood's foremost purveyor of hipster drama, his pedigree as a reliable selector of appropriately wistful, poignant and all-around unforgettable songs is virtually unrivaled, but Fantastic Mr. Fox exceeds even the work of his earlier films, using "Heroes and Villains," and later, "I Get Around" as populist punctuation that manages to be both specifically relevant and substantively rousing.
As an animated opus, the film is by necessity his most controlled to date, a painstakingly-designed dollhouse where he no longer controls just the music, sets, and costumes, but the performers themselves. Ironically, however, it feels like his loosest as well - a gloriously unwieldy comedy of manners submerged in the minutiae of Anderson's madcap creativity. All of which makes Fantastic Mr. Fox a celebration both of its stop-motion medium and Anderson's aesthetic, while still managing to fully document the spectacular fun in original author Roald Dahl's daffy, distinctive imagination.
Review: Gentlemen Broncos
Filed under: Comedy, Theatrical Reviews, Fox Searchlight
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By Peter Hall (reprinted from 9/28/09 -- Fantastic Fest review)
Quirkiness only carries so far. Napoleon Dynamite, the film that ushered in the career of Gentlemen Broncos director Jared Hess, is enjoyable because it cherishes the nervous twitches of puberty, identity crisis, and the weird kind of people who worship at Walmart strip malls. The director embraced his small-town roots to assemble a film in love with those who don't have any station in life, who have no big conflict in their mundane lives, and who have no particularly interesting story to tell, either. Hess' latest film, on the other hand, does have an interesting story to tell and it does have a three-act conventional conflict, but it barrels past being quirky into the weird-for-weird's-sake hinterland of comedy where subtlety is abolished in favor of broad, hit-and-miss gags.
Gentlemen Broncos could have been great. It's about a teenage boy (Michael Angarano) whose fantasy novel featuring an underdog hero on a nonsensical planet (Sam Rockwell) is stolen by not only his washed-up hero author (Jemaine Clement) at a crash-course writing camp, but two insufferable "friends" who want to turn the story into their cinematic gateway to Hollywood. The film often wanders out of the real-world of poor Benjamin's unenviable life and into the entertaining fantasy world of his childish writings, but for the most part it feels as directionless as the confused boy we're supposed to be rooting for.
Review: Amelia
Filed under: Drama, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Fox Searchlight
The new biopic about Amelia Earhart, Amelia, succeeds in portraying the famous aviatrix in a whole new light ... as a mundane soap-opera character with relationship issues. The movie looks beautiful and is obviously being released now with Oscar hopes, but it is a dull, uninspired recounting of the less interesting parts of Earhart's life.
The plot is structured around Earhart's final attempt at flying around the world, then flashes back to tell her story starting from her first meeting with George P. Putnam (Richard Gere) in 1927 about a transatlantic flight, and looping back to that final flight and the mystery surrounding it, in 1937. It's a standard structure for biographical films, but is confusing at times. For one thing, I couldn't tell you whether the round-the-world attempt that the film flashes forward to periodically is her first one, or her last one. Near the end, they start to blend confusingly. The film also includes a lot of voice-over from Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), which I presume is probably taken from her real-life letters and diaries.
Did Wes Anderson Direct 'Fox' by E-Mail?
Filed under: Animation, Comedy, Drama, New Releases, Fox Searchlight, Family Films
I know that directors sometimes must direct scenes from a room separate and sometimes distant from the actors, but directing from another country? By e-mail? That's the story filtering out of England, where Fantastic Mr. Fox, the new adult-skewing animated movie from Wes Anderson featuring voice work by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray, is set to have its world premiere at the London Film Festival on Wednesday. According to Chris Lee, reporting in Los Angeles Times, Anderson had no desire to spend a year at Three Mills Studio in London during the physical production of the stop-motion animated project. Instead, the director 'holed up' in Paris for most of the time. His move and his exacting requirements did not endear him to all of his crew. "He has made our lives miserable," Mark Gustafson, the film's director of animation, said. Anderson asserts that he was trying to make something different. "The movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody's ever seen before." And not everyone was upset about Anderson's absence. Producer Allison Abbate said absent directors aren't unusual in the field: "Making stop-motion is like watching paint dry."
After sending digital files of what they were working on, the animators received "detailed e-mail instructions about what to change" from Anderson, who also acted out certain scenes for them as reference material. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and we'll get to see for ourselves soon enough. After London, the film will have its North American premiere at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on October 30, before Fox Searchlight opens it on November 13.
'Arrested Development' Inches Closer to the Big Screen
Filed under: Comedy, RumorMonger, Scripts, Fox Searchlight, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Remakes and Sequels
We've run numerous Arrested Development stories since the series was canceled in 2006, and you can probably file this one in the same land of "Yes, sometime soon!" But it never hurts to keep fueling the fan fire, and remind Fox that we'd really really like the Bluths to return. It might be closer than we all think as according to The Hollywood Reporter, Mitch Hurwitz and James Vallely are actively working on a script for an Arrested Development movie. Hurwitz will direct the film. Hurwitz has said in the past that he wouldn't even begin to write a script unless all of the actors were committed, and THR notes that schedule conflicts remain one of the biggest hurdles of a big-screen Bluth reunion. But perhaps this is a sign that Hurwitz and Vallely know something we don't, and that the super careers the show spawned (notably Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, and Will Arnett) will leave enough of a gap for a movie.
When Cinematical caught up with Arnett in New Orleans, he confirmed there wasn't a script, but was optimistic that the film would begin shooting by the end of the year. "It's really just a matter of getting a script. I know that the studio is ready to go and everyone's kind of ready, but there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of people in the cast, a lot of schedules and stuff, but we're in that process now of figuring it all out, actively." Let's be optimistic and hope we see them start filming Arrested Development: The Movie by December or January. I just want my Bluths back!
Review: Whip It
Filed under: Comedy, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Fox Searchlight
It's no Citizen Kane. It's not meant to win awards. I watch movies to enjoy them. These standbys are frequently trotted out before us fuddy-duddy critics whenever we decide that a movie ostensibly meant to be two hours of pure mindless fun simply isn't very good at doing just that. More often than not, it seems that films are championed for their laziness, their relentless adherence to formula, and rarely do these formulas serve a story that's worth more than the sum of its beats. School of Rock managed to work wonders with its wholly predictable plot; I'd vouch for Fever Pitch in much the same way. And joining their ranks of surprisingly satisfying comedies is Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, Whip It, a coming-of-age tale fused with an underdog sports story that hits all the expected developments with unexpected personality and grace.
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