"Did you just call us prostitutes?"

Bouncer: All right, down the street."

Regan: Did you just call us prostitutes?"

Katie: Did you just call us prostitutes?"

Posterized: Lars von Trier

Denmark's most important and most self important troublemaker Lars von Trier is back with the two-part Nymphomaniac. Charlotte Gainsbourg stars as the title character and recounts her lifelong sexcapades. Is there really 5 hours of story to tell? Or is it just hard to edit yourself when you're doing something vignette style? And how do we count this in his filmography anyway... as one or two films?

Is it really one film delivered at two separate chunks or two separate films? Not that Von Trier's filmography is easy to parse in the usual way, making posterized a bit more challenging. [more...]

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Hand Jobs To Christian Bale

JA from MNPP here - you've probably heard by now that David Fincher is being lured towards making a movie about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs via a script by Aaron Sorkin; the big news yesterday was that Fincher told Sony that the only way he would make their silly little computer movie is if he could have the actor Christian Bale handed to him on a platter to play the leading role.

They say the film "consists of three long scenes regarding Apple's buzzed-about product launches" - sounds like a jazzy spot for a serious thespian to play around in (DiCaprio certainly relished those sequences in The Wolf of Wall Street) and Bale's nothing if not serious.

Indeed hearing their names together just now I wonder why they have never worked together before - Fincher's hundred-take slogs seem like just the sort of punishment Bale's inclined towards. They'll make the best sado-masochist duo since Dan Ackroyd and Rosie O'Donnell went looking for an Exit To Eden. (I hope that makes the posters.)

And yes Bale's pretty perfect casting looks-wise... but so was Ashton Kutcher, so let's gauge such things via talent, and Bale's surely proven more than enough of that over the years. (Patrick Bateman Forever.) What do you think of this possible movie? Do you think these guys can squeeze more juice from the fruit (groan) of technology, or was the anti-charm of the Zuckerberg clan too much for you already?

Cannes Watch? The "Return" of Gong Li & Zhang Yimou

Speculating about what might be at Cannes is not something I do so as to prevent the envy but the reunion of director Zhang Yimou with his most beloved muse Gong Li is definitely something to consider. Together they made six international hits, four of them Oscar-nominated (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, Curse of the Golden Flower), the first two are among the best Chinese films ever made.

Their seventh collaboration just released first stills and a nearly wordless teaser (embedded below).

The film is planning a May premiere at home so Cannes would make sense. The film is based on the novel "The Criminal Lu Yanshi" by Yan Geling about a long term prisoner (Chen Daoming) who, upon release, returns to his wife (Gong Li) who no longer recognizes him. The film also features Miss Chinese Toronto winner (2009) Candy Chang. There's a whole name for young actresses who break through within Zhang Yimou's filmography "Mou girls" (given the global fame of Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi) so she might be one to watch. 

It sounds like the English movie title is yet to be determined, alternately listed as Coming Home, The Homecoming, or Return, depending on where you read about it. Here's the teaser...

50 Years in the Pink

Tim here, extending our unexpected and unplanned tribute to 50-year-old Peter Sellers movies by one day, following Diana’s lovely tribute to The World of Henry Orient. For today marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. release of The Pink Panther, the arch-‘60s caper film that begat Sellers’ iconic Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the pratfall-prone Frenchman who remains the actor’s most famous character this side of a certain wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi (and Dr. Strangelove ALSO opened in 1964, which was just an all-around great year for Sellers).

The film itself is a fascinating relic, a by-turns hilarious and lumpy encapsulation of what European high society looked like as filtered through the comic sensibilities of Blake Edwards of Tulsa, OK. Scenes of breathless physical comedy rub elbows with elegant caper film machinery and deadening longeurs as Claudia Cardinale rolls around on a tiger skin while suffering from a wobbly case of dubbing. [more...]

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