Yes, No, Maybe So: "Dangerous Method"

In the series Yes No Maybe So we parse out movie trailers to determine just how excited we are about an upcoming movie. Today... David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method in which two very infamous doctors of psychiatry (Freud and Jung) find a perfect guinea pig in unstable Russian woman Sabina Spielrein;  Psychoanalysis is born, though it hasn't quite worked out its doctor/patient boundaries just yet.

YES
Viggo Mortensen, David Cronenberg's chief muse these days, plays Sigmund Freud and their second reunion after the masterpiece A History of Violence (followed by the compelling Eastern Promises) would be enough for a sober grunted "yes" on its own. Stir the Crazy of Freud/Jung into the mix with justifiably Most-Wanted Michael Fassbender in the lead role of Carl Jung and the yes becomes as hysteric as Jung's patient Sabina played by Keira Knightley (who is obviously out to raise her game as an actress lately).

NO
On the other hand, sexual repression and experimental psychiatry aren't the easiest topics to portray without the possibility of unintentional laughs or hindsight ridicule in these arguably more enlightened times. The trailer does have a weird fallback mode in which someone says something we're to register as Shocking or Telling and... cut to: Fassbender immediately shifting his intense glance to the side.

MAYBE SO..
Though Cronenberg is one of the world's most fascinating auteurs and Viggo and Fassy two of its most genius actors, the trailer gives off the distinct aroma of Keira...

As in... this will all live or die or, rather, doze off with boredom or leap off the psychiatrists couch with abandon if she's up to her central role. I worry that they refer to her as Russian and Keira doesn't sound Russian at all in the trailer? And given that her role is extreme with the theatrics, will she be Oscar beloved or sliced up with the critics knives?

Keira The MadwomanKeira Oscar-Clipping It.Keira the Masochist "PUNISH ME!"

Will this feel like a stage play with the all the talking and observing in offices and bedrooms?
Will the trio of famous faces invest the heady mind games with heart, body and soul?
Will Cronenberg finally have an Oscar hit on his hands what with the true story, biographical figures and period detailing?

So many questions... so much worth analyzing.

Watch the trailer at the film's official site!

Are you a Yes, No or a Maybe So...?

True Blood in Five Minutes

When I polled y'all about whether or not we should review True Blood Season 4 as it airs, and though the response was tepid in terms of button clicking it was "yay" in terms of coverage so we'll try it out. If response is good we'll keep going. If not, we dump. Every other film site seems to cover more and more TV [TANGENT: the worlds continue to converge though not, I should add, as they should: put the franchises on TV where no beginnings, middle and ends are appropriate and not in the cinema where you're supposed to tell a full story, damnit! [/TANGENT] and we gotta keep up or lose market share.

So before Season 4 begins next week, a quick recap of the first three seasons courtesy of HBO

For those who care about existing predispositions my favorite human is Jason (Ryan Kwanten being the show's acting MVP... and the least likely to ever be nominated for it), my favorite vampire is Pam (Kristin Bauer), my favorite eye candy is Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) and my favorite CGI creation is Joe Manganiello (as "Alcides) who cannot possibly be a real human actor considering that superhero body that makes Ryan Reynolds look like a gym slacker. I go back and forth on the quality of virtually everyone and everything in this show but I find it addictive and admire its looney commitment to all caps acting and total trashiness.

"Character" Poll - 1991-2000

Saturday I asked you to vote on Best Actress Character Polls. This is not about the performances per se but the movie characters themselves.

It's to help me with brainstorming a secret project or two -- plus to get a general consensus on which characters you wonderful people out there in the dark obsess over most. So while we're discussing it, let's make the poll an even two decades.

Here's part 3 & 4 1991-1995 | 1996-2000. VOTE ON BOTH. Please choose up to but no more than 5 characters. Be honest about which characters you think of the most (which is not the same as who you think deserved to win.)

poll by twiigs.com

Here's part 4. 1991-1995. Same thing.

poll by twiigs.com

Thanks for voting.

And make sure to hit the other two polls if you haven't already. Thanks!

Baby Magneto and Other Links

Flickr the set of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows is growing.
IndieWire seems there are two Jeff Buckley biopics in the works and the Penn Badgley version is not the one with the Buckley estate blessing.
Austin Translation "The Iron Grill" funny illustration to celebrate yesterday's finale of Game of Thrones (did you watch?)
I Need My Fix new Jason Statham movie The Killer Elite looks like every other Jason Statham movie.
Awards Daily just days after we covered that Dick Tracy event, in which Beatty said a sequel is in the works, comes news that the legend has another film nearly ready to start production. I'll believe these two films when I see them. But I loooooove my Beatty so I'm hoping both pan out.
vitorugo "Erik's first..." HAHA!

Illustration by Victor Hugo

Classic! (There's too much iron in his diaper.). Don't you now wish that Pixar had made X-Men First Class Mutant Babies instead of Matthew Vaughn?

OffCinema
Diesel Sweeties "The Herald of Deliciousness" one for you cat owners out there.
AV Club Meredith Blake is reviewing the first season of The Real World. you know back when it was trailblazing, experimental and "real" feeling ...and kind of awesome. MTV immediately fucked it up the following season but there's always season 1. It's kind of random that this review is happening but also awesome.
Raja "Diamond Crowned Queen" for you RuPaul's Drag Race fans

Overheard at "The Tree of Life"

This weekend I was collecting tweets about things people have overheard at their screenings of Terrence Malick's mysterious artful epic The Tree of Life.

I kicked things off with two stories from my screening. The first was two very old ladies teetering out of the theater arm-in-arm.

Some of that was very moving... but most of it was very boring.

Next came a bored middle aged husband and his angry loud wife...

Wife: I couldn't wait for that to be over.
Husband: It was...long.
Wife: It was a DAY long. I couldn't take one more symbol, metaphor or paradox.

Mikhael joined my "overheard" enthusiasm, submitting the following from his screening:

Woody Allen look-a-like to his wife: So tell me what that was all about?

Will Holston heard this:

Old Lady Yelling: CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS ABOUT?

Jake Cole saw a hipster in a fedora with a Che t-shirt who was above it all.

It's not as smart as it thinks it is.

And finally Erin had a very boisterous crowd so I think she wins. She heard the following random snippets, all of them utterly hilarious if you've seen the movie.

There's no acting!

Are we in the right film?

Are those sunflowers?

[during last ten minutes] Is that SEAN PENN?!

None of these comments surprise me and all of them delight me because The Tree of Life is so meditative and personal and open to interpretation that anyone can probably feel anything while they're watching it. I imagine that people who don't like their mind to wander, to fill in, to have associative adventures both scary and peaceful and god-knows-what-else during a screening probably become utterly unhinged. I like that feeling in a movie theater but I was unnerved a couple of times by the barrage of things I was feeling and the distinct impression that the film wasn't trying to make me feel them exactly and maybe the film wasn't even responsible for me feeling them... which was both exciting and annoying.

I haven't talked about the movie at all here because i missed the first wave or critical discussion (I have yet to read even one review) and was totally shy thereafter. I mostly enjoyed it but for its repetitive preciousness about prayers to God and the Sean Penn sequences. But I think in some key ways it's the most inaccessible thing I've seen in theaters since Matthew Barney's 10 hour Cremaster cycle (which I was gaga for) so I'm perversely enjoying that some unsuspecting moviegoers are tricked into seeing it by Malick's reputation and the twin towers of stardom that are PITT and PENN.

To be frank I adamantly believe that Sean Penn was a financial compromise the movie shouldn't have made. This part, which should only be a vessel to provide the visual passing of time, needed a complete unknown. His star presence kept taking me out of the movie --  'Why is this big star Brad Pitt's angry son all grown up?' -- because Penn didn't have enough of a character to play to justify an "actor" playing it.  Every other cast member seemed to have been utterly absorbed into the film like they were just appendages or organs powered by its brain, blood and nervous system. Brad Pitt in particular was fantastically convincing and period specific as the frustrated father. Unlike Penn I never felt like I was seeing "Brad Pitt". I'll assume you've read a hundred times by now that the child performances were sensational examples of the kind of "naturalism" that most movies don't ever attempt. One scene in particular with the two eldest boys in tall grass, one of them crying, totally unnerved and upset me and it's my strongest memory of the movie. Well, aside from the bravura creation sequence. Those briefly glimpsed dinosaurs had more soul than any screen dinosaurs ever, yes?

YOUR TURN. Sorry it took me so long to say anything. How unruly was your audience and how conflicted was your own response to the year's most challenging movie to see regular release thus far?