Review: King of Staten Island

by Tony Ruggio

The King of Staten Island is both typical Judd Apatow and a pretty subtle departure from the world he knows and has often depicted on screen. Make no mistake, it’s an overlong, meandering coming-of-story about a slacker who can’t get his head on straight until he does (very familiar), but it also features a deeper psychological profile than we’re used to seeing in Apatow's films. 

Much like many of Apatow’s big-screen efforts, his latest uses the particular talents of a gifted comedian and crafts around them a semi-autobiographical tale of love and loss. Pete Davidson’s father was a fireman who tragically perished in the ashes of 9/11, and so it goes that Davidson is portraying a wayward 24 year-old named Scott who lives with an exhausted mother (Marisa Tomei) and his college-bound sister (Maude Apatow), and is still dealing with the loss of a fireman dad he knew only as a saint... 

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Marielle Heller at Tribeca

by Murtada Elfadl

Marielle Heller has built quite a reputation as a director based on two films; Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018). We attended a talk at the Tribeca Film Festival in which she was interviewed by the writer Jo Piazza. They talked about how she started as an actor and her transition to writing and directing. Of course she mentioned her next project, scheduled to come out later this year, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers in the film, but Heller was adamant that it’s not a biopic. She said it's a story about fathers and sons and based on journalist Tom Junod (Matthew Rhys) profile of Mr. Rogers. 

“Mr. Rogers is not the lead character. You can’t create a narrative around Mr. Rogers because he’s too good...”

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Red Carpet Lineup: 26 Venice Lewks

Having previously covered those pink pink pink first days in Venice, on to some other memorable looks (and a few actresses included just because we like to look at them...)

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Review: Mary Shelley

by Jason Adams

In the summer of 1816 one of the most legendary of literary happenings occurred - the poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary went to stay at the poet Lord Byron's house near Lake Geneva for the summer. Mary's step-sister Claire wrangled them an invite (or so she said) since she was having an affair with the spitefully torrid Lord himself. Also joining them at the house was the Lord's physician John Polidori, who also fancied himself somewhat of a writer. And birthed from those weeks of most gothic merrymaking was basically the entirety of the horror genre to come: Mary Shelley would come up with her lovely little monster Frankenstein, while Polidori would write "The Vampyre," the inspiration for a certain Bram Stoker a swift generation later.

The story of that time and place has been well-trod by fiction before...

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TIFF: Elle Fanning is "Mary Shelley"

Our ongoing adventures at TIFF

In the summer of 1816 legendary Romantic literary figures Mary Shelley (and stepsister Claire Clairmont), Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori were holed up in a Swiss estate and challenged each other to write scary ghost stories. From that fateful contest two famous works of horror emerged ("Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus" in 1818 and "The Vampyre" in 1819 -- neither of them actual ghost stories!). Ken Russell attacked this collision of authors with his trademark sexual abandon and visual insanity in Gothic (1986) and his wasn't the first or last film to stare with fascination at that morbid contest 201 years ago. We return to that summer for a good chunk of Haifaa al-Mansour's Mary Shelley but with far different intent.

Haifaa al-Mansour, the first Saudi female film director (she previously directed Wadjda) is more interested in the trailblazing of Mary Shelley (née Godwin) as a female author -- and the unique challenges that came with her gender in the literary world of 1818 -- than in the creation of Frankenstein...

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