Yes, No, Maybe So: "My Week With Marilyn"

Visual information was a long time coming with My Week With Marilyn, but now at last the trailer for the film has arrived giving us a peek at Michelle Williams as Hollywood's most famous blonde bombshell and the story of a diversion with a reporter during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl.

Dougray Scott and Michelle Williams as Mr & Mrs Arthur Miller

In the trailer we see lots of Michelle as Marilyn and a pissy Sir Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier. Judi Dench seems starstruck, Dominic Cooper annoyed, and Eddie Redmayne appropriately in over his head as the young man she takes up with.  Let's break it down. Do we wanna see it and why?

Breakdown and full trailer after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Posterized: Marilyn Snapped, Cronenberg Triangulated, Puss Entranced

New(ish) Posters! Let's discuss (aka judge harshly).

It's actually nicely stylized. But note that the big sell is not Michelle Williams but Marilyn Monroe herself, whose font size towers over her pretenders. I wonder what this movie will mean to Michelle Williams career though? If it flops does Hollywood assume she can't carry a film, even though it's less a Michelle movie than another Marilyn nostalgia exercize? 

I swear to god that tagline for Footloose irritates me like little else. It can't be your time, when you're robbing the previous generation of one of their quintessential identifiers. Saying that Footloose represents "our time" (i.e. today's teenagers) is like seventies teenagers pretending that the 1950s (Grease) were their ti... oh wait... uh...

Meanwhile you can't tell it here but the Puss in Boots motion poster is brilliant. You simply must click over if you love cats like I love cats. 

Finally here are two European posters for David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, which each put the three star faces all in each other's headspace -- one of them literally -- as their guiding design principle. You can see what they're going for but don't the faces need to be more level and more obscured by one another to achieve that psychological note. It's a little pedestrian, right? May the movie be anything but.

This & That: Pop Songs, Oscar Campaigns, Carnage Poster

Bill Pullman's new roleAV Club is success spoiling AMC? More rumors and commentary on the increasingly troubled network of Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
Macleans also reacts to this 'blame Mad Men' meme going around
i09 expresses shock that Bill Pullman is so amazing as a creepy motivational speaker/murderer on Torchwood: Miracle Day. I haven't seen it yet because we don't get Starz but Bill Pullman can do anything. Why are people surprised? Oh, right. Nobody goes to the theater. Pullman's performance on Broadway in The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia? is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen, I kid you not. (pun!) The movie roles obviously didn't challenge him enough.

The Hairpin has an interview with Kate Beaton who writes what may be my favorite webcomic "Hark, A Vagrant!"
Cinema Blend I was just talking about Patrick Wilson to a friend last night and bingo: today there's news that he's joined the cast of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. I should talk about actors who don't get enough good parts every night before I sleep so they'll be cast the next morning.
Inside Movies A story that the web will undoubtedly love: Andrew Garfield on the size of Spider-Man's package.

Oooh, lookie. It's the first poster for Roman Polanski's Carnage.

That's a weird loud poster but at least it's interesting. The moody faces are kind of an interesting way to get at the play's rollercoaster tonal shifts and convey that it's an actor's piece.

The Campaigning Begins
Gold Derby is already claiming the Best Actor Oscar for Leonardo DiCaprio in J Edgar. We'll see. Believe it or not he's still kind of young to win an Oscar. They make the men wait, you know. Different rules for men. Although I suppose it helps that he didn't turn out as elfin gorgeous as he looked like he might back in the days of his youth. Oscar likes his women drop dead gorgeous but doesn't like his men too purty. Just ask Paul Newman how long he had to wait. Or Brad Pitt who still hasn't won.
IndieWire Glenn Close to receive the lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Festival honors of the career variety are a standard stop on the way to would be Oscar glory. 
Just Jared just posted this promotional pic of Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn but labelled it a "still". If it's really a still in the proper sense than the movie is taking some adventurous chances with its look. 

For Laughs... Movie|Line is listing four reimaginings of princess movies that it never wants to see.

And in other news... True Blood has been renewed for a fifth season. Yay! Get caught up on The Film Experience commentary. 

Best Song of the 1980s?

Music makes the people come together.... yeah  ♪
Critical Condition's Ultimate Pop Song Tournament has come down to the final four: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" (89), Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" (84), Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (82) and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" (81) This has been such fun for the past few weeks and it also just goes to show you how classic the 1980s are in the cultural canon since songs from other decades were eligible. You already know who I voted for, duh. Go and vote yourselves. May your favorite win... unless it's different than mine.
Boy Culture conjecture about Madonna's upcoming schedule
Examiner DC This is a good piece on the music industry's ability to keep the public interested in the classics, and the film industry's inability to do the same. A provocative mystery, that, right?

NYFF "My Week With Marilyn" as Centerfold. Er.... Centerpiece!

News continues to trickle in about this year's New York Film Festival, the 49th (September 30th through October 16th). So, yes, expect 2012's festival to pull out all the stops to honor its own 50th birthday. We always cover this festival since its the easiest for The Film Experience, being NYC based, but this year we're aiming to do thrice the amount of our usual coverage. Stay tuned.

Here's what we know so far.

Opening Night ~ Roman Polanski's CARNAGE
Centerpiece ~ Simon Curtis's  MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (World Premiere)
Closing Night & Lineup In General ~ TBA... though it's usually selections that previously debuted at Cannes or Toronto. THE SKIN I LIVE IN is frequently rumored.

The Burmese Harp (1956)Masterworks ~ This is the section where they show old films, rare prints and retrospectives.

This year they'll be screening a restored and aspect-ratio corrected print of William Wyler's much-Oscar'ed Epic BEN-HUR (1959) which is a MUST for big screen viewing. I've had the opportunity once and the chariot race has to be seen blown up for maximum effect. There will be a rare screening of Nicholas Ray's experimental WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973) which he tinkered with until his death in 1979. And the bulk of this section is a Centennial celebration of Japan's chameleonic Nikkatsu Corporation. They're showing over 30 of their films including the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film nominees THE BURMESE HARP (1956). More on that sidebar event here.

Tickets go on sale on September 12th unless you're a Film Society member in which case you can purchase early. Among the older films, I'm definitely taking in The Burmese Harp which I've never seen.

Oscar Whispers: Marilyn & Madonna

I've recently had two brief conversations with people who have seen My Week With Marilyn and Madonna's W.E. respectively. I was happy to have the conversations so closely together because it's always fun to pair Madonna with Marilyn and one doesn't get the opportunity so much anymore. Plus, aren't we all just itchy to see some real Oscar players emerge?

Left to Right: Michelle as Marilyn, Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark (lead), Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller, and Dominic Cooper as Milton Greene

Bear in mind that these are singular tossed off opinions and the only opinions that matter in the Oscar race are the ones from the Opinion Makers within the voting ranks (the Julias, the Beattys, the Spielbergs you know the type), and any opinons marked "General Consensus" which take their time to form. The films are also far from release so they probably saw cuts that weren't final.

The friend who saw My Week With Marilyn was pretty cool on it, finding Michelle Williams difficult to adjust to as the blonde bombshell at first but eventually just fine. The film itself was judged to be lightweight. (Though one man's lightweight is another man's "frothy and charming", don'cha know? See: billions of examples through history... and Oscar history) Kenneth Branagh was singled out for praise for a showy spin as Sir Laurence Olivier. That may be worth noting since we all know that Branagh is a big ham and who better to receive that honey-glazed THESPIAN treatment than pompous Olivier?

But what of Judi Dench, I asked? "Better in Jane Eyre" was the only opinion I wrangled there.

Madonna is hands on with Andrea Riseborough's look on "W.E."The reader who saw Madonna's W.E., which looks at the famous affair of Wallis Simpson and Prince through the eyes of a modern woman in an unhappy marriage, really liked the film but she hopes it gets a new ending. High praise went to the costumes (which we'd already suspected would happen since Arianne Phillips is involved), William Orbit's score (interesting! You'll remember that the composer worked on Madonna's greatest CD "Ray of Light"), and Andrea Riseborough as Wallis Simpson who was deemed 'award-worthy' without any qualifiers.

To my surprise she referred to Riseborough as "supporting". I think I had assumed that like Julie & Julia, the obvious recent predecessor in 'two time frames at once, joined by the modern woman's obsession' that it would essentially be a two-hander with Abbie Cornish (in the present) and Riseborough (in the past) both having lead roles. Maybe it is. Everyone seems to have very different ideas these days about what "lead" and "supporting" means.

It's not much. Just some whispering but it's fun to fantasize about future Oscar players while we wait... and wait... and wait. Only 215 days until nominations! Hee.