Who is Jessica Chastain?

Here's pretty much all that we know about her: She was raised in North Carolina, she just turned 30, she's in every seventh movie opening in 2011, and though we've only seen three of them thus far (The Tree of Life, The Help and Take Shelter) it takes a minute in each to realize that yes, that's her. Even in photoshoots she seems to be more than one person.

Is she a moldable young starlet?
Is she a Swintonesque Off-Hollywood provocateur?
Is she a Lead Star just waiting for her own vehicles?

Further IMDb and Wikipedia grazing reveals that she graduated from Juillard and that her best friend is the actress Jess Weixler (of Teeth fame. How about that?) but the point is this: we like people we can't pin down immediately.

I don't want to play the same character twice. There's something about the feeling of 'I don't think I can do this.' If you have that moment of doubt, you have to rise up and meet it. I learn from my failures more than my successes."
-Chastain to Michael Musto at the premiere of The Debt 

Hitting a Take Shelter screening last night I tweeted "Okay, Jessica Chastain. Show me what else ya got" Of her three summer performances (her fourth The Debt opens soon) it's the least impressive but it's almost the most telling. 'What I got' was the surest indication yet that she's a future Oscar winner as she embraced their favorite role, the long suffering wind-beneath-her-husband's-wings type, with such unfussy naturalistic ease.

Regarding Oscar...
While she's ethereal and lovely in The Tree of Life it seems less an acting feat than a well judged minimalist act to allow Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki's camera and the rich scoring to fill her Way of Grace with meaning. Auteur vessel performance are rarely nominated. While she's hugely entertaining in The Help she probably has too much internal competition for traction. And her most Oscar-friendly role in Take Shelter is within a film that one suspects will be too under the radar for Oscar. She may have to wait for the Kodak theater but it'll be exciting to watch her work her way there.

Remaking Kurosawa? People Have Been Doing It For Years

Akira Kurosawa's Centennial last spring is still causing ripples. Splendent Media extends the celebration in a potentially controversial way. They have the rights to an enormous part of the Kurosawa catalogue should anyone want to purchase them for a remake. Kneejerk reaction is NOOOOooooooooo. But then you realize that Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress, and The Seven Samurai (and to a lesser extent many of his other films) have already been ripped off hundreds of times for movies and television. Hell, I've even seen an Off Broadway musical based on Rashomon!

So why would a straight up remake be any different? 

Here are the 26 Kurosawa directed pics (of the 32 he made) that they're offering rights to:

Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
The Most Beautiful (1944)
Sanshiro Sugata Part2 (1945)
The Men who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945)
No Regrets For Our Youth (1946)
One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
The Quiet Duel (1949)
Stray Dog (1949)
Scandal (1950)
Rashomon (1950) -- Honorary Oscar Foreign Film
Idiot (1951)
Record of a Living Being (1955)
Throne of Blood (1957)
The Lower Depths (1957)
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Yojimbo (1961)
Sanjuro (1962)
Red Beard (1965)
Dodes’Ka- Den (1970) -- Best Foreign Language Film Oscar Nominee
Dersu Uzala (1975) -- Oscar Winner, Foreign Film
Kagemusha (1980)  -- Best Foreign Language Film Oscar Nominee
Ran (1985)  -- Best Director Oscar Nomination
Dreams (1990)  
Rhapsody in August (1991)
Madadayo (1993)

QUESTION: Wouldn't it be strange to buy the rights to remake Ran or Throne of Blood when you can get their source material (King Lear and Macbeth) for free?

What's your favorite Kurosawa? Sometimes I wish I'd seen them all -- since I've yet to be disappointed -- but it's so daunting given how prolific he was.

Posterized: Marilyn Snapped, Cronenberg Triangulated, Puss Entranced

New(ish) Posters! Let's discuss (aka judge harshly).

It's actually nicely stylized. But note that the big sell is not Michelle Williams but Marilyn Monroe herself, whose font size towers over her pretenders. I wonder what this movie will mean to Michelle Williams career though? If it flops does Hollywood assume she can't carry a film, even though it's less a Michelle movie than another Marilyn nostalgia exercize? 

I swear to god that tagline for Footloose irritates me like little else. It can't be your time, when you're robbing the previous generation of one of their quintessential identifiers. Saying that Footloose represents "our time" (i.e. today's teenagers) is like seventies teenagers pretending that the 1950s (Grease) were their ti... oh wait... uh...

Meanwhile you can't tell it here but the Puss in Boots motion poster is brilliant. You simply must click over if you love cats like I love cats. 

Finally here are two European posters for David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, which each put the three star faces all in each other's headspace -- one of them literally -- as their guiding design principle. You can see what they're going for but don't the faces need to be more level and more obscured by one another to achieve that psychological note. It's a little pedestrian, right? May the movie be anything but.

What are you, some kind of Astronaut?

Your challenge for the day should you choose to accept it is to use the following in conversation at some point:

"Pappy told me about Poon but he never

said anything about Poonanny, Pippy."

Do it! Because today is the 10th anniversary of Bubble Boy of course, and such an occasion demands reverent observation. Where would we be without Bubble Boy? Would the world have ever learned to love all things Gyllenhaalic without it? Oh sure some might say that Jake Gyllenhaal owes his career to the cult of Donnie Darko, a film that flopped in theaters just two months later (perhaps a movie about planes falling out of the sky didn't stand a whole lot of a chance right after 9/11) but eventually went on to coil its little bunny-shaped permanent place in a distant corner of the cultural imagination all the same, but those in the know... well those in the know still credit Donnie Darko with Jake's career. 

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But Bubble Boy is fun! In the world of guilty pleasures I don't rank this one as all that guilty - it's actually funny! Swoosie Kurtz is a riot! It has a young Marley Shelton as the love interest! John Carroll Lynch for god's sake!

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"...and the prince climbed up Rapunzel's hair to the top of the tower and said, 'Come with me, and we'll live happily ever after.' Then Rapunzel left her plastic bubble and died. The end."

And then of course there's Jake, indulging his goofiest side with wild-eyed aplomb. Why he doesn't make more comedies I really don't understand - anyone that's seen him on a talk show can agree, the boy's an endearing goofball. He was a great host on SNL. Love and Other Drugs was a terrible mess but lit up whenever he got to shine that sexy wicked grin (or, okay, any of his other two-thousand body parts).

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Have you seen Bubble Boy?

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Go L*nk Yourself

Gabby Sidibe snapped by Terry Richardson on 08/23/11 at the Our Idiot Brother premiereSome Came Running "The Trouble With Movie Stars" the distraction of stardom in The Tree of Life and other films.
Funny or Die Dave Franco in "Go F*ck Yourself". (I know he's James Franco's brother but he looks to me like the offspring of James Franco f*cking James Marsden.#amiright?)
Awards Daily has some words about Oscar's history with black actresses. This topic is about 200 times as complicated as anyone will ever claim it is but I am horrified to realize that there are still people trying to say that Gabby Sidibe just played herself in Precious. Anyone who has spent more than two seconds watching her on a talk show versus seeing her in Precious would have to be braindead to not notice the difference. Night and day.

Boston Wesley Morris on The Help. I sometimes feel like a fanboy when reading Morris's reviews . He's just great: anecdotal when it benefits the piece, funny without congratulating himself for it, and critical without being mean-spirited; his scalpel is sharp, his hand steady and he never accidentally lops off the joy of movies, while carving a fine point.
New York Times tennis rivalries and Andy Samberg portraying them. Fun!
Form is Void "5 from Dorothy Parker"  
Cineuropa Joachim Trier's Oslo August 31st up for another prize. It seems more and more certain that this will have to be Norway's Oscar submission. 
Film Drunk choice quotes from Ryan Gosling's Esquire profile. 

Look, Helen Mirren arrives at the premiere of The Debt

I'm guessing she makes grown women half her age weep. Look at that bod! She is 66 years old.

Finally... I don't know how I keep missing the big stories but I didn't even know about the eastern Earthquake yesterday until after the fact when people kept asking me if I felt it? Felt what? This is what I tweeted about it.

Speaking of... so then I find it that everyone is talking about Ryan Gosling breaking up a fight here in NYC and I didn't know about that either. I'm in a fog!