Jane Got A Gun might have a happy ending

Here's Murtada telling the tale of Jane. 

       

Say you are Natalie Portman. You just won an Oscar then took some time off to raise your young family. You are ready to come back to work. You decide to take charge of your career and produce a movie. You find a hot script by a young talented writer. It’s a revisionist western, a genre you haven’t tried before. You choose to work with an acclaimed female director because you want to tell more stories about women and employ more women. To co-star you choose one of the most respected actors of your generation. Great intentions all around. Then everything falls apart just as filming is supposed to start.

That’s the saga of Jane Got a Gun. On the first day of shooting director Lynne Ramsay left. Despite a now settled lawsuit no one knows why but differences with producers and financiers are suspected. The leading man, Michael Fassbender, leaves too as Ramsay was the main reason he signed on. He’s replaced by Bradley Cooper. Then Jude Law. Then Joel Edgerton who was supposed to play the “baddie” is promoted to the lead. Ewan McGregor is hired for Edgerton’s part. Producers scramble to find a director while the cast and crew are waiting on set in New Mexico. Finally Gavin O’Connor (Warriors) is hired. He brings with him his writer (Anthony Tambakis ) and they do a major re-write alienating the original writer (Brian Duffield). Somehow everyone gets to work, the movie is shot while PR experts are in damage control mode.

Months later the movie is set for release for February 2015. Then it’s delayed to September 2015. And a month before release the studio behind Jane goes bankrupt. The film is one of many caught in the crosshairs of Relativity’s recent Chapter 11 filing. Others include the Nicholas Hoult- Felicity Jones starrer Collide and Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture with Rooney Mara and Vanessa Redgrave.

But it looks like there’s a happy ending for Jane after all. The Weinstein Company has picked it up for distribution and will release in Europe this November and in the US next February.

And it’s also nice to see Natalie Portman continue creating opportunities for women behind the camera. She directed her first movie A Tale of Love and Darkness based on Amos Oz's autobiographical book. The movie played Cannes and Toronto to mixed reviews. One of her upcoming projects is On the Basis of Sex, a biography of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be directed by Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl).

Are you glad to finally see Jane get a break?

TIFF: Embrace of the Serpent (and Oscar Foreign Film Updates)

TIFF tends to be the best opportunity all year to see several Foreign Film Oscar submissions in quick succession. The trick is you don't often know which ones they well be and sometimes,  due to release dates in their home countries, they end up as submissions the following year. Last September, at this same festival for example I saw Labyrinth of Lies and Sand Dollars which are now the Oscar submissions for this year's race from Germany and The Dominican Republic.

Two days before Embrace of the Serpent was proclaimed Colombia's official submission, I attended the screening. Good luck for me and good choice for them: it's mesmerizing.

Ciro Guerra's third film wraps itself all around you with otherworldly danger. And this is not just a word choice via subliminal suggestion from the slimy encircling imagery of an enormous snake giving birth that occurs before the title. This journey film's stunning black and white photography by David Gallego (a relative newcomer!) only adds to the dreamlike visuals of the Colombian Amazon, totally transporting you into a rickety boat on the water, on two different journeys 40 years apart. The film was inspired by real life journals of explorers and both trips involve a white scientist searching for a mystical plant called Yakruna, which is said to have great healing power. Each of them take as their guide the same Amazonian shaman Karamakate who is played by as a younger man by Niblio Torres and and older man by Antonio Bolivar, neither have acted for cameras before but Karamakate in both forms has real screen presence.

The dangerous stops along the river's way angrily condemn the decimation of indigenous cultures by colonized rubber plantations and missionaries. We also get a taste of religious insanity on par with The Devils, and the jungle madness of Apocalypse Now and Aguirre the Wrath of God. And the films it recalls don't stop there. The snake birth is just one of three spectacularly trippy off-narrative sequences, the final one daring to invoke 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its psychedelic mysteries. If Embrace of the Serpent never feels wholly original as a result and only Karamakate registers as a three dimensional character, it's still an intense journey and very rewarding visual feast. This Colombian wonder won the top award at Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes earlier this summer, and could well impress Oscar voters who love a visual epic. Oscilloscope will distribute it in the States. Cross your fingers that it'll play on the biggest possible arthouse screen near you. B+/A- 

Related: There have been several foreign film submissions announced while I've been festivaling it up in Toronto. So make sure to check out the updated foreign film charts.

• Current Predictions plus all time stats/trivia
• Afghanistan through Estonia  11 official
• Ethiopia through The Netherlands 20 official
• New Zealand through Vietnam 16 official 

We now have 47 official titles, with probably 20-25 more yet to be named with the biggest missing links (i.e. countries that Oscar is fond of) being Denmark, France, Israel, Poland and Spain.

TIFF: French Sexy Time Movies

Nathaniel, reporting from TIFF, where the French still love la petite mort. Due to the graphic nature of these films the reviews of Gaspar Noé's 3D explicit sex movie Love and the French teens-gone-wild Bang Gang: a modern love story (which is about exactly what it sounds like it's about) are both hidden after the jump where naughty things must go... Think of the children!

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1963 Look Back: Liz Taylor's 10 Best Looks From "Cleopatra"

Abstew kicks off our celebration of 1963 as we countdown to the next Smackdown (date TBA but probably early October)...

There's epic film making and then there's Cleopatra. Certainly in a class all of its own, the film spanned different countries, directors, stars, budgets, an original run time that clocked in at over six hours, and one legendary love affair far more interesting than the one being portrayed in the final film. Thanks to audiences wanting to see if La Liz and Richard Burton's explosive relationship off screen was able to be captured on the 70 mm Todd-AO celluloid, Cleopatra ended up being the #1 box office champion of 1963...and still ended up nearly bankrupting 20th Century Fox. Originally budgeted at $2 million, the final budget ballooned into an unprecedented amount of $44 million (roughly over $300 million when judged for inflation today) including a million dollar contract for star Elizabeth Taylor, making her the highest paid performer at the time. (She ended up walking away with over $7 million due to delays and a percentage of the box office.)

And it feels like at least half of that inflated budget went toward Taylor's costumes alone. Setting a Guinness Book of World Record at the time, Taylor goes through 65 costume changes in the film and earned all 3 (yes, 3) of its Costume Designers the Oscar for their efforts. Renié was responsible for the women's costumes, Vittorio Nino Novarese created the men's, and thanks to Irene Sharaff, who was in charge of all of Elizabeth Taylor's looks, we have a sumptuous treasure trove of couture fit for a queen (or at least Hollywood royalty). Deciding on a more modern look and color palette than what would have actually been found in ancient Egypt at the time of the film's setting, Taylor's looks influenced early '60s fashion with an influx in Egyptian like jewelry and even inspired a Revlon "Syphinx" line of make-up. So in honor of the film's sartorial contributions to cinema, let's take a look at 10 of Elizabeth Taylor's best looks as the legendary Queen of the Nile...

10. Travel Rug Chic

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Women's Pictures - Amy Heckerling's Clueless

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a teen movie made after 1995 owes a debt to Clueless. Since its release 20 years ago, Amy Heckerling's classic has had surprising longevity: it revitalized teen fashion in the wake of grunge, resuscitated a genre (while also spawning a new subgenre), spawned a platinum soundtrack, launched a new generation of acting careers, like way altered the teenage lexicon, and inspired a rap video as late as 2014. We at Team Experience reference it at least once a year. And though Clueless landed at #3 on our recent Back To School Team Top 10, the two films that topped it were both direct beneficiaries of Clueless's wit and satire. Clueless redefined the teen film genre, divorcing it from the darkness of the 80s, while maintaining the social satire and serious observation that gave the totally quotable dialog resonance for an optimistic, clueless new generation of 90s teens. 

When Amy Heckerling was refining her Austen-inspired idea at Paramount, the genre she had helped create a decade previous with Fast Times At Ridgemont High was faltering. [More...]

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