Tribeca 2017: Chuck

Jason Adams reporting from Tribeca...

Liev Schreiber as "Chuck"

If you just plunked the name “Chuck Wepner” down in front of me and asked me to say what it made me think of I’d say that “Chuck Wepner” sounds like an anagram of vintage TV Personalities – Chuck Woolery from The Love Connection meets Judge Wapner of The People’s Court. And while that might not be the truth so help me god there is a bit of Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” to it – Chuck Wepner is one Vintage Personality...

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Cate Blanchett will be Margo Channing

by Murtada

Fasten your seat belts, 2018 is gonna be a glorious year. At least for London theatergoers. Cate Blanchett will star as Margo Channing in a stage adaption of All About Eve (1950). Eve, which originally starred Bette Davis as Margo, is the ultimate backstage rivalry story. Margo is the big star fighting her huge ego as well as ageism as she tries to survive being upstaged by the young ingenue Eve, who starts as her biggest fan and assistant. Blanchett playing Margo is very meta. Forget that she already played Katharine Hepburn and now gets a chance to play her similarly lauded contemporary's most famous part...

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Posterized: Brie Larson

By Nathaniel R

Last week the directors of Captain Marvel were announced, moving that imaginary Marvel Studios picture, starring Brie Larson, closer to reality. 2019 is still a long way off though we have plenty of Brie to tide us over until then. She's in movie theaters currently as part of Ben Wheatley's crime comedy ensemble picture Free Fire  (reviewed). It's one of two features this spring whichhas featured Brie Larson as the token female amongst a group of adult men fighting for their lives (the other being Kong Skull Island). Which is, if you consider her particular skills as an actress, kind of a waste; to date she's consistently done her most transcendent work opposite other women or child actors.

Though it feels as if Brie Larson only recently exploded into fame having won the Best Actress Oscar for Room (2015), in reality she has been paying her dues for ages, winning her first TV gig at just 9 years of age (a comedy skit on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno) and her first movie gig by 10 (something called Special Delivery in which she played "Little Angel"). She's done a little of everything including an attempted pop career - which goes down really well in a meta sort of way via the satiric prism of her role in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and her role-playing  within "United States of Tara" -- 'Princess Valhalla Hawkwind,' anyone?.

So let's look back on her movie history via POSTERIZED (returning for another season!). We've thrown in all her movies that we could find posters to (a couple others don't seem to have been released) and her three largest TV roles. How many of these 27 Brie Larson projects have you seen?

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Tilda Swinton talks of the nightmares of pigs

by Murtada

Why release a boring old trailer to sell Okja when you can get Tilda Swinton in character as a chilling corporate honcho talking abouts pigs? She’s falsely cheery Lucy Mirando of the Mirando corporation… and she’s trying to sell us something. Organic baking goods, happy pup treats or great tasting tenderloins? Let's find out.

We are definitely sold on Swinton and the movie, even if we want to run away as far as possible from Lucy Mirando. Okja is about a young girl and her best friend, the title character who is a kind big monster pursued by the Mirando Corporation for research, or likely something more sinister. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, its sprawling cast includes, in addition to Swinton,  Ahn Seo-hyun, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, Giancarlo Esposito, Shirley Henderson and Lily Collins. Okja is playing in the main competition at Cannes and will be streaming on Netflix, and perhaps play a few out of the way theaters, on June 28. Are you ready to meet Okja?

Tribeca 2017: Sex Games and Ticking Clocks in "The Exception"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival yet again!

Let me just be clear about his right up front: I like thinking about Black Book. Paul Verhoeven's sexy 2008 Holocaust thriller with Carice Van Houten is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it at least a dozen times by now. And so it turns out that enthusiasm is open to re-interpretations, because a full half of The Exception plays like an off-Broadway re-staging of that earlier movie, and I still liked it plenty. No, director David Leveaux doesn't have nearly the handle on making moral hay of human contradictions so deftly as Verhoeven does, but who does? Leveaux makes a go of it, at least...

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