Interview: Julie Delpy on the ideal way to watch the "Before" trilogy

Julie Delpy speaking in West Hollywood in NovemberStargazing sometimes leads us to believe that we really know the faces who act out our human dramas onscreen. Or that we know the characters they portray as if they were neighbors. It’s a false intimacy and a fantasy, fiction being fiction and strangers being strangers, but sometimes the illusion is too perfect to deny. Such is the case with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Celine and Jessie in the “Before…”  trilogy. The actors cowrote and costarred in the decades spanning trilogy under the guidance of Director Richard Linklater and the films, perfectly spaced out every nine years, have allowed audiences to age along with them, which has only added to their ephemeral mystique. The films are grounded in reality through their short single day stories and long takes - real life happens one day at a time and without a lot of fussy crosscutting – and the only fantastical element is that every day conversations are rarely this thrilling and this wide ranging and this funny simultaneously for 90 minutes straight without some dud moment or mundane distraction breaking the spell. For that kind of perfection you need miraculous writing and great acting.

Julie Delpy is not, of course, Celine. And though I know this as I settle into our conversation over the telephone I’m temporarily stunned when she, unasked, repeats her trilogy’s most famous line when I bring up the ending to Before Sunset (2004, for which she won a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination though not, tragically, the Best Actress nod she deserved as its companion). She sounds just like Celine… only somehow not...

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You Must Be My Linky Star

In Contention goodbye to the goodcity. In Contention's head honcho leaves NYC for LA. He tried it for a year. (I'd kind of like to do this in reverse as I could never leave NYC for good.)
EOnline Ethan Hawke regrets his marriage to Uma Thurman, thinks men shouldn't marry before 28 years of age
Buzzfeed the ultimate Mean Girls alphabet is made of rainbows and smiles
Buzzfeed 26 reasons why Grease 2 is better than Grease (I do not agree with the thesis but I heart the argument
Mental Floss 11 things you never see in movie theaters anymore
Animation Mag possible sci-tech awards for Oscar this year. But what I wanna know is which actress will host it people. Guess in the comments! 

How Did You Celebrate Madonna's Birthday Yesterday?
I listed my opinion of her best "acting" and I listened to a million songs by the queen. I also read a few blogposts celebrating her special day my favorite of which by far was this one at Flavorwire which stereotypes you by your favorite Madonna song.

I went straight to my two favorites...

“Like a Prayer”
Potentially lapsed Catholics.
“Erotica”
People who have the “vintage” tab on RedTube bookmarked in their browser. 

...which just made me cackle and those aren't even the funniest ones. I especially LOL'ed at  "La Isla Bonita," "Who's That Girl" and "Express Yourself." It's a must read if you love Her Madgesty.

Finally...
Why don't you vote in more of our polls? I see the stats. There are way more of you than are voting in the polls! Insert Gentle Grumbling At You! Rather than polling you about why you're not joining in on the fun (perhaps your fingertips are too sensitive for clicking?) I'll just remind you that we have polls running like these...

 

Click 2 vote!

Box offices binges on "The Purge"

It's Tim, taking over Monday box office duties for Nathaniel while he's away, so if I've made some little formatting mistake, apologies in advance.

It says all there is to say about the cool state of the box office right now (nobody wants to put something out just in time to have Man of Steel cut its legs off next week) that the big story is a horror movie with toxic word of mouth hugely outperforming expectations. Truthfully, though, $34 million for the Ethan Hawke home invasion thriller The Purge is pretty impressive: it more than doubled the open weekend of Hawke's last horror picture, Sinister, while blasting past pretty much every comparable film in recent memory. That's what a drought in the marketplace will do for you: horror fans will turn out to see new wide releases if it's been a long time, even if the new release in question looks completely awful. I know whereof I speak.

Meanwhile, Wedding Crashers reunion/feature length Google ad The Internship has made exactly the non-splash that could be predicted based on how much nobody in the entire world was talking about the movie, though it's worth pointing out that it's not particularly out of line with the recent films Vince Vaugn and Owen Wilson have made seperately in the past few years. Also, Fast & Furious 6 broke the $200 million mark before Star Trek Into Darkness, which is a statistic that I don't think anybody would have willing to predict at the start of the summer.

BOX OFFICE TOP TEN
01 THE PURGE $34.1 *NEW*
02 FAST & FURIOUS 6  $19.2 (cum. $202.8)
03 NOW YOU SEE ME  $19.0 (cum. $60.9)
04 THE INTERNSHIP $17.3 *NEW*
05 EPIC $11.9 (cum. $83.9)
04 STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS  $11.4 (cum. $199.9) The Dumbing Down of Star Trek
07 AFTER EARTH  $10.7 (cum. $46.1) M Night Shyamalan's Fall
08 THE HANGOVER PART III $7.3 (cum. $102.3)
09 IRON MAN THREE $5.8 (cum. $394.3) Reviewed & Podcasted
10 THE GREAT GATSBY $4.2 (cum. $136.1) Reviewed & Dreamt About

In limited release, Frances Ha and Before Midnight are both purring along nicely (both were up from last weekend, in fact!), though neither they nor anything else came close to breaking into the top 10. The only prominent new film, Joss Whedon's modern-dress version of Much Ado About Nothing, put up a strong but not mind-blowing $34,388 per-screen average at five theaters, and didn't even crack the top 20, though its nationwide expansion on June 21 ought to improve its fortunes considerably, while giving all of us who don't live on the coasts a chance to see what Whedon's post-Avengers palette cleanser plays like.

Did you see anything this weekend? I didn't, taking advantage of the weather to do yardwork, though a friend and I are catching The Purge tonight. Like I said, horror fans are used to seeing things that we know are going to be utterly worthless.

Those Who Have Gone "Before"

Hi all, it’s Tim, here on the eve of what is, by far, my most-anticipated summer release of 2013. Not, shockingly, The Hangover, Part III. Not even Epic. No, like most right-thinking people, 2013 for me is all about Before Midnight, the third film in one of cinema’s most unlikely series, in which we revisit lovers Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) every nine years to see what they’ve been up to. The first time we met them in Before Sunrise, they met by accident on a train into Vienna, then in Before Sunset they had an afternoon to walk around Paris, and in this third entry- I have no idea, I’m on completely spoiler lockdown with this film, to the level where I won’t even look at the poster. But I’m willing to guarantee that whatever they’re up to, it’s going to have some very deep resonance and profound truth to speak about the lifespan of romantic relationships.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t had the chance to see the earlier movies yet – please change that as soon as possible, I beg you – or to get series veterans riled up for its imminent return (like that’s even necessary), I wanted to share five reasons that, for me, the first two Before… movies are some of the finest romantic dramas in the history of cinema. [more...]

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Dear Sundance: You Make Me Want To...

So please stop telling me that Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, which gives us a third precious day in the lives of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) & Celine (Julie Delpy), is perfect. It's like dangling a morsel of deliciousness outside my cage.

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