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Entries in Melancholia (27)

Friday
Nov182011

From the Archives: Kirsten Dunst Interviewed

I've been racing around this week from interview to interview. You'll start seeing them as soon as I can catch my breath. For numerous reasons my mind kept leaping back to last year's precursor season when I met with Kirsten Dunst while she was on the promotional circuit for the true crime romantic drama All Good Things. Her name popped up Wednesday while I was talking with Ben Foster (Rampart) -- he's a past co-star and endearingly describes himself as "a silly fan of Kirsten" -- and Melancholia is never far from my mind as one of the most provocative and essential films of 2011. Her mysterious bewitching lead role as a severely depressed bride has, at this point, not garnered as much Best Actress traction as the performance merits, but there's little doubt that her career is most decidedly back on track. I read yesterday that she'd just joined the cast of Red Light Winter which will reunite her with Mark Ruffalo. This interview was already on my mind, and that sealed it since she had such happy memories of working with him.

So let's travel back in time a year to a pivotal re-energizing moment in her career when neither we nor Kirsten knew what to expect from Melancholia and the rollercoaster of the film's Cannes debut, controversial press conference, and Best Actress win was still future tense.

The Return of Kirsten Dunst (A Very Good Thing)
***Originally Published in December 2010***

It might sound silly to say, but seeing her in the flesh is something of a shock. Kirsten Dunst has been in the movies for many years, and she's made an indelible mark in them, whether as a child vampire, an unknowable teen dream, a disciplined cheerleader, a superhero's better half and so on; one half expects her to flicker when one meets her, as if she's being projected still. But there she was earlier this month at a New York City luncheon honoring her heartbreaking work in All Good Things. Her image did not fade or dissolve but remained steady in medium shot. She ate, she sipped, she walked around the room talking with reporters, friends and peers.

There was, however, a close-up. We shook hands and exchanged a few pleasantries. Then she was whisked off, not by a sharp edit, jump cut or a quick pan, but by her people taking her to the next reporter. Imagine it!

I reminded her of the busy luncheon a few days later over the phone. She's already thousands of miles away.  This time, she's a disembodied voice which is surprisingly more familiar, like a movie image. "You were so in demand," I say, reminding her of the crowd and well-wishers.

"You know...," she says, and I do having been there, "A lot of babies to kiss. A lot of hands to shake."

It's good to hear the smile in her voice and remember her amiable presence in the room that day. Especially considering the sadness that lingers from her fine work in All Good Things. People have won Oscar nominations for giving much less to their films than she does here, in one of her finest performances. She starts out sunny and delightful, the girlish woman we sort of recognize from numerous other films but she's soon torn apart by her husband's (Ryan Gosling) dark almost alien soul.  The film is based on a true story, the unsolved mystery of the disappearance of Katie Marks (Kirsten), the bride of the heir to a wealthy New York family.  I've followed her career enthusiastically for many years, once even referring to her as "the future of the movies" but naturally we start with the present and the subject at hand.

It's not the first time she's played a real life character but how did she tackle someone who isn't easy to research, someone who went missing? Here Kirsten cedes most of the credit to her director, who knew the case inside and out.

KIRSTEN: Everything that we knew about [Katie] is in the script. She's not a public figure. Yes, she's a real person but not someone that we know her mannerisms. It was really about making her feel like a whole person that was unravelling, as he was in a way, someone with her own strong motives so it wouldn't just be The Victim of this crime.

Nathaniel: You have to have the full range of their romance.

KIRSTEN: That was so important. You have to believe these people were completely in love with each other in order for her to stay and to excuse the behavior

Did anything change a lot from filming to the finished movie?  You're acting piecemeal and the movie takes place over a really long span. Did anything surprise you about the finished product?

KIRSTEN: With every movie you kind of never know how exactly it's going to come together. I had an idea but obviously I wasn't there for the last half of the movie. [She pauses briefly, considering] ...I only saw Ryan in drag once on the set so I wasn't sure how all that was going to come together.

While we were working we played things very differently; we improvised a lot. The scene where he asked me to marry him was very different in the script. We got to play around a lot which was exciting. But you never know what it's going to end up being.

I thought it was interesting that this movie  opened so close to Blue Valentine, another unravelling Ryan Gosling marriage, and then I remembered that you've worked with Michelle Williams before on Dick. Hollywood is a small world.

KIRSTEN: It is a small world. I'm friendly with Michelle. That's funny. [Pauses considering the two movies]  Ryan... he loves a good love story, that one! [laughs].

With some movie stars chemistry is a hit-and-miss thing but I've always felt from your films that you have a dependable connection to your co-stars/scene partners. What do you attribute that to? 

[Kiki's answer and her favorite films after the jump]

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Nov132011

The Amazing Linker-Man

Vanity Fairy Paul Mazursky, who made one of my favorite pictures (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) recalls its critical reception and then starts his own film reviewing for VF:  J. Edgar and Melancholia.
Wall Street Journal  Baseball legend Yogi Berra sees Moneyball and reminisces about his own history with the movies. Fun piece.
Coming Soon Emma Stone's opening monologue on SNL last night. Andy Samberg's Spider-Man arrives to interrupt her with a new script. Love this bit.

Emma: Ok, Andy, aren't you just redoing the same monologue that Kirsten Dunst did like 10 years ago?
Andy: Uhhh, yeah. Aren't you just redoing the exact same Spider-Man movie from 10 years ago?

Hee.

Awards Daily on the unshakeable charms of The Artist.
Thelma Adams falls for Kirsten Dunst's beautiful bitterness in Melancholia.
Playlist multihyphante showbiz woman Rie Rasmussen is gaga for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained which will "revolutionize Hollywood."
In Contention looks back at early Charlize Theron, pre Oscar Charlize in fact.
Funny or Die Ryan Gosling, the strong and very silent type. 
Serious Film on the makeup in J. Edgar
MNPP while looking at the new EW cover of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo this is what your eyes did.
Towleroad I had a brief chat with Dustin Lance Black about his screenwriting work on Milk and J. Edgar

stagey
NYT Hugh Jackman on Broadway review
La Daily Musto Hugh Jackman on Broadway review

Finally...
Let's end with this tribute to the title design of Saul Bass from Art of the Title...

The Title Design of Saul Bass from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

There are few things we enjoy more than a good title sequence. Which have been your favorite this year? FYC me for those Film Bitch Awards which begin sooner than you think.

Saturday
Nov052011

European Award Noms (Shades of Oscar, 2011 AND 2010)

Our Oscar chart updates are underway (much more coming at you tomorrow) and now The European Film Award nominations are out. The Film Experience always enjoys their attempt at boiling down so many countries into one group of "best of"s. The American and British Film Academies don't have it so hard, you know, each generally only dealing with the best of Hollywood and London with the occasional embassy outreach to a hot foreigner. (That'd be The Artist this year).

Melancholia vs. The Artist at the EFAs

For our Oscar discussion purposes the most amusing thing about this year's lineup is that two Oscar winners from 2010 (the UK's The Kings Speech and Denmark's In a Better World) are competing against one of the presumed frontrunners of 2011 (France's The Artist) with a few arthouse madman (The Melancholia) and French language side dishes (The Kid With a Bike -- not submitted for this year's Oscar race -- and Le Havre, which is an Oscar submission for in Best Foreign Film).

FILM

  • The Artist
  • Le Havre
  • In a Better World
  • The Kid With a Bike
  • The King's Speech 
  • Melancholia

Sigh. The King's Speech. At this point it's like an unstaked British vampire, sucking the life from Gallic beauties and crazy Danes. 

DIRECTOR

  • Susanne Bier, In a Better World
  • The Dardenne Brothers, The Kid With a Bike
  • Aki Kaurismäki, Le Havre
  • Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse
  • Lars von Trier, Melancholia

It seems absolutlely bizarre to snub Michael Hazanavicius for direction (The Artist, more than most movies, would've been a disaster without its careful but exuberant guiding hand). Meanwhile Tom Hooper probably won't lose sleep over his snubbing here. Once you've won the Oscar...

ACTRESS

  • Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
  • Cécile de France, The Kid With a Bike
  • Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia
  • Nadezdha Markina, Elena
  • Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin

Melancholia's sisters (Dunst & Gainsbourg) each get half the movie. They also share the EFA nom.

We're literally revisiting Cannes jury deliberations for this lineup since all of the women were there. Remember when everyone was all: will it be Kiki or Tilda in "Best Actress"? I wish the EFA had a higher profile just to give Dunst another boost and get back into the Oscar conversation.

More after the jump including actors, composers, and dreamy unsettling production design.

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Nov022011

Kiki, the Runway Bride

Here comes the bride, all dressed depressed in white ♬

Should the Apocalypse ever need to take wife, it couldn't do better than to kneel before one Kirsten Dunst and beg for her hand in unholy matrimony. Isn't she aesthetically effective and spectacularly depressing in a wedding gown?! Two of her signature characters, Justine in Melancholia and Marie Antoinette in Marie Antoinette march toward certain doom in their white and ivory splendor. 

I was thinking about Dunst for four reasons today. 

 

  1. It's Marie Antoinette's 256th birthday today. Eat cake.
  2. I was just reading that she'll reteam with Orlando Bloom, her Elizabethtown co-star for, sort of in the Roger Donaldson's new interlocking stories thriller Cities. I believe she'll be involved with Clive Owen's character in the film, a NYC hedge fund manager. But the Elizabethtown connection is worrisome only in that that film seemed to lead to the sudden downward spiral of her career, Bloom's career, and director Cameron Crowe's career who disappeared thereafter. (But he'll be back soon with We Bought a Zoo.)
  3. That coincidentally nervous-making news aside, she's been making all the right moves career-wise lately and I couldn't be more pleased. She's such a fine actress.
  4. Melancholia opens on the 11th, expands on the 18th and I have something special planned for it that I think you'll enjoy. Something more interactive than you're accustomed to in movie reviews. My review will arrive late next week... and I hope you'll see the movie first chance you get. It's very very sticky.

 

So... Kirsten Dunst: Does she make you hear wedding bells? 

Friday
Sep302011

Persona Non Linka

Thank you to Glenn for drawing our attention to this Melancholia poster starring Lars von Trier (one of a series). When was the last time you saw a director on his own movie poster?


I mean apart from Hitchcock's Psycho -- the one where he warns you about not entering the theater late -- I can't think of one (unless the director is also the lead actor of course). It's impish fun to use von Trier this way in marketing since anyone buying a ticket to Melancholia is going to know who he is. But the "persona non grata" Cannes seal in the upper left corner is the real design coup here. Well done, whoever thought of it.

Links!
My New Plaid Pants chooses five fav Gwyneth Paltrow performances. Where the hell is Flesh and Bone? That'd make mine.
Thelma Adams recruits female pundits and critics to talk Best Supporting Actress
EW is eager to meet all of your Avengers needs 
Flickr More Drive art. See also this week's Curio column
i09 selects the ten best sci-fi death scenes. Number 2 should be number 1, duh!
Shakesville offers up Princess Bride Monopoly (click image to view larger). Well done.  

Source

Awards Daily new pics of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe 
Form is Void Have you ever seen Jim Henson's Time Piece (1966)? It gave him his first and only Oscar nomination (Best Live Action Short Film). It's "surprisingly spicy."

Finally, it seems that Bennett Miller will follow up Moneyball with Foxcatcher which is the story of crazy rich person / killer John DuPont, the heir to the DuPont fortune who killed an Olympic wrestler on the massive DuPont estate. His defense claimed paranoid schizophrenia but he was still found guilty. Steve Carell will play the challenging role. And, given what Carell has been able to do in Little Miss Sunshine and even Crazy, Stupid, Love. is there any reason to believe this couldn't be an Oscar nominated  next career step? This project is so fresh it doesn't even have an IMDb page yet (though I suspect that will change today given that this news is all over the 'net)

I guess Bennett Miller is only going to do true stories that are essentially tiny- window biopics of famous or somehow notorious men: Capote, Moneyball, Foxcatcher? It's a niche but at least everyone agrees that he's good at it. As for tiny-window biopics -- they're the best kind! The only good kind.