Breaking: Oh Jimmy! Daniel Craig Returns as 007 in "Spectre"

It wouldn't be accurate to call James Bond the mother the father of all franchises since serialized storytelling was with us since the very beginning of the recorded image. Nevertheless it does sometimes feel like James Bond pioneered the art of staying in the game. It maybe even influenced the rebooting craze long before it had a name with its continual cosmetic surgery; can you imagine how expensive it is to make Timothy Dalton look like Pierce Brosnan and then like Daniel Craig?

Daniel Craig is among the sexiest mofos on the planet but perhaps this is why he looks so beat up all the time? Either that or because people have been torturing him onscreen from the very beginning.

Case in point: This is not an image from the new Bond film but from the Cate Blanchett film Elizabeth (1998)

The new Bond film which begins production in 4 days and arrives in theaters on November 2015 is the 24th official entry in the series (though there are a two apocryphal films as well) and will be called Spectre. It's worth noting that this is, like Skyfall, a very short title. The shortest Bond titles (though not running times) since Dr. No (1962) which kicked off the whole series! Sam Smith will be doing the theme song.

Sadly, the casting doesn't seem very imaginative since Christoph Waltz is among the villians (i'm sorry but I'm done with him post Big Eyes. His range is shrinking which is quite an overachievement since he already won two Oscars for the same performance!) 

The cast in order of TFE's current levels of fandom...
Daniel Craig as Bond, James Bond (returning)
Ralph Fiennes as M (returning)
Lea Seydoux as Madeleine Swann (new)
Ben Whishaw as Q (returning)
Naomie Harris as Moneypenny (returning)
Andrew Scott as Denbigh (new)
Monica Bellucci as Lucia Sciarra (new)
David Bautista as Mr Hinx (new)
Rory Kinnear as Tanner (recurring)
Christoph Waltz as Oberhauser (new)

Do you think Lea's AMAZING entrance in Ghost Protocol inspired her future Bond Girl femme fatale role (say yes, that's rhetorical)

Do you see every Bond film or wait for the general cultural response?  Given Skyfall's historic gross and Oscar over-performance (doubling the entire franchises's Oscar tally!) do you think they're in for another zeitgeist hit and awards contender. Or do you think this one is bound to be a bit of a letdown?

Thoughts I Had... The "Big Eyes" Poster

We finally have a poster for Tim Burton's Big Eyes. Herewith some thoughts as they came to me.

• "Visionary Director" would be so much more impressive as a description if it weren't so overused.
• "Big Eyes" could well describe lots of celebrities: Emma Stone, Amanda Seyfried, Marty Feldman*, Heather Graham, Jake Gyllenhaal, Susan Sarandon, Anne Hathaway, Sailor Moon.
• Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams have Normal-Sized Eyes but that will never be a film title. The only person in this cast with gargantuan eyeballs is Krysten Ritter
• The tag line is basic but it does cleverly have a double meaning with the last bit "... and everyone bought it" 
• A lot of people seem to be sure that this one won't be a major Oscar player but apart from test screenings (a notoriously unreliable source of info) no one has seen it so it's one of our mystery movies when it comes to the competition this year.
• The Big Eyes team, cast and crew, has been nominated for 37 Oscars and won 7 (most of those for Waltz & Colleen Atwood). 
• Why do they always make ginger movie stars blondes when the movies take place in the 1950s? There were actually more gingers back then statistically. (And I don't want any "Amy Adams isn't a natural ginger!" backtalk in the comments -don't be literal!)
• It's fun that the screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski get such prominent yellow billing at the bottom. We'll pretend it's a retroactive thank you for Ed Wood (1994) rather than a contractual negotiation! 

*Just wanted to see if you were paying attention

Yes, No, Maybe So: Big Eyes

abstew here. Well, it must be Oscar-movie season because no sooner did we receive a teaser trailer and release date for A Most Violent Year, but mere hours later, the first trailer for the Tim Burton-directed Oscar hopeful Big Eyes popped up as well. Big Eyes is the biopic of kitschy painter Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) and her husband Walter (two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz), who falsely claimed to be the paintings' creator. The screenplay from Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski reunites them with Burton (who actually collects Keane paintings) for the first time since the Oscar-winning Ed Wood 20 years ago. But, I know y'all really just wanna know, does the film have what it takes for the quintuple Oscar-less Amy Adams to finally be crowned the winner? Let's examine with the trademarked Yes, No, Maybe So...

Click to read more ...

Review: The Zero Theorem

Michael Cusumano here with the latest dispatch from the bizarre world of Terry Gilliam.

Terry Gilliam is an artist one can’t help but root for. The image of Gilliam that comes most readily to mind is one from the great behind-the-scenes disaster documentary Lost in La Mancha. It’s early, before his production has imploded, and the director reviews one of the few shots he managed to get on film for his doomed Don Quixote project. The image of the three men cast as giants lumbering toward the camera delights Gilliam to no end. His childlike glee at the sight of their rolls of fat jiggling in grotesque slow-mo is an image of an artist in touch with the pure, silly thrill of filmmaking. A man who lives for the experience of seeing his cracked visions transferred to the big screen. 

On the other hand, the subtler, less flattering image of Gilliam I took from that documentary is that of a filmmaker capable of being swept up in the joy of the process to the point of being blithely indifferent to the needs of the audience. I remember leaving La Mancha with the guilty suspicion that maybe it was for the best that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote crashed and burned on take off. Better to live with the unrealized ideal than to see one’s dream project fail to live up to expectations. What little footage we see in the film suggests it would have been of a piece with his 21st Century output, which is to say fanciful bordering on incoherent, fascinating to look at but too messy to inspire emotionally investment.

More...

Click to read more ...

New Photos from "Theory of Everything" & "Big Eyes"

Three new stills for movies about complicated marriages among brilliant people. Expect trailers very shortly. First up is Theory of Everything coming November 7th and based on Jane Hawking's autobiography "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen"

A few thoughts I had... uncensored as they come to me. 

• Felicity Jones always makes me think of Like Crazy & The Tempest. I did not fall. Unless you mean like crazy annoyed with her. Can she suddenly be fascinating in this?
• This might easily fall into the stock "supportive wife" role syndrome (not that Oscar will mind. But we might) even if it is from her perspective?
• Is Eddie Redmayne the best-looking gawky nerdstar ever? There's something about him that shouldn't really work as a leading man onscreen and yet he sure does... work it. You know?
• ♥ Marius 
• I'm glad this isn't named after the book... people might be expecting a sci-fi time travel flick
• Golden light is shorthand for romantic aura / nostalgia

The other new stills are from Tim Burton's Big Eyes, coming Christmas Day starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as the Keanes. The wife did the big eye paintings and the husband got credit for them. 

 • Whenever they show actors painting or drawing onscreen I am INSTANTLY looking to see if they're actually doing anything... kind of the way when an actor plays piano I stare intensely at the hands and dread the cut to closeup of their hands when the actor is replaced by a person who can do that thing. It annoys me that I do this, trust, but I can't help it.
• Closeups of actors hands...it's never them! Remember when Robin Bartlett told me she didn't scribble that note to Leo in Shutter Island.
• There's almost nothing I dislike more aesthetically (from disappointment rather than unattractiveness) than when redheads go blonde for movies. I want them ALWAYS ginger.

• Love the red light in this picture. The cinematography is by 4 time Oscar nominee Bruno Delbonnel in case you were wondering.
• I want this to be good so badly. But the odds... I'm just going to whisper Ed Wood over and over to myself and hope for the best
• Big Eyes would also be a good name for a documentary exploring the physiogonomy of actors since so many of them have unnaturally ginormous orbs. All the better to expose the inner humanity of their characters.
• I got a new computer! *

My new computer is so big I could trap Jeff Bridges in it for decades

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) August 4, 2014

What does this have to do with Big Eyes, you ask? Well, I'm slightly traumatized because even though it's gorgeously super-sized most of my old programs don't work anymore because it's so new, so I'm trying to come up with solutions so i can manipulate images and the Oscar charts again. IF photoshop was working I would be manipulating this image right now so that it showed them fighting over Christoph Waltz's two Oscars instead of a painting. He only deserved one of them, so surely he should give ONE to Amy who has way more range.

It's only right! 

* I know I already said this this morning but the excitement overfloweth. It's been like seven years since I got a new desktop!