Thoughts I Had... While Looking at "Jane Got a Gun" Images

You know how this goes. New images from the troubled production of Jane Got a Gun starring Natalie Portman. Thoughts as they occur to me. No editing.

• Bad Girls (1994)
• The Quick and the Dead (1995)
• The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)
• Why did I instantly doubt that Natalie Portman knew how to use that thing when this is The Professional (1994) we're talking about. She was deadly as early as 14!
• We've travelled back in time. And not because it's a period piece. Apologies. But it's a fact: western girls with guns was a thing briefly in the mid 90s
• Those look like big girl gloves for such a petit thing.
• OMG someone should remake Bad Girls but with less earnestness and more of a sense of humor 

• This is a weird still to release. They both look tremendously bored. Free advice: Do not suggest boredom when trying to sell a movie.
• I also had to lighten this up and increase the saturation so you could even make out who they are... so I'm not sure what's going on the stills department (Mandy Walker - who shot Australia - is behind the camera)
• Ewan McGregor is in this so I personally feel ripped off that he's not in the stills 
• I can't remember who was supposed to be in this but they've had trouble with shifting stars and replacing directors. 

• I don't know who this is but I'm going to pretend that it's Joel Edgerton
• Bet you Joel would rather redo this scene without a stunt double than relive those Exodus reviews

You can see yet more images over at The Film Stage.

The "Knight of Cups" Pastiche Tease

I understand that people are talking about the Malick teaser today? I feel stymied by this one (shockingly I'm a "no" at first glance so I'm skipping the traditional YNMS) but I shall share a few thoughts. Mostly, though, I feel Cate Blanchett sums it all up for me in her early teaser line-reading. So long as you pretend that she's me and I'm talking to Terrence Malick instead of Wandering Bale Sun-Logged in the Egyptian Desert Hollywood Wilderness...  

You're so different these days. What's going on with you?

Between the club music and what looks like a mash-up of several very familiar -- though I can't quite place them -- films, I just don't get it. Something about this Knight of Cups teaser smells like selling out. By which I mean there's a strong whiff that that is also happening thematically as Christian Bale goes Hollywood and loses himself in decadence and luxury and money and La-La land. But perhaps the love of a good one can savzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Splash with me cold water. I rise!

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It's a Linky Monday

Manuel here to offer you a news link roundup to kick off this week.

ComingSoon Is it really possible all press materials (save this offical photo) for Thomas Vinterberg's adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd starring Carey Mulligan & Matthias Schoenaerts have gone unremarked here at TFE? Let's fix that by staring at this gorgeous poster.
Marvel In case you missed it last week, Marvel offered some more casting news for their ever-expanding universe, including Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones in its upcoming Netflix series and Benedict Cumberbatch (officially!) as Doctor Strange in the eponymous film due November 2016.
SlashFilm In other franchise news, Roberto Orci will no longer be directing Star Trek 3 which I'm sure is good news for some other first time white male director looking to make his big break. I kid! But only sort of.
The Guardian “My whole career is always a roller-coaster. I’m so random and spontaneous and unusual in my choices – I never expect anything.” - Nicole Kidman, Queen of understatements at the Australian Paddington premiere.
Screen Crush writes up a list of The Highest Grossing Actors of 2014 though, as they note they used "an extremely liberal definition of 'actor' and 'appearance'" which explains its rather silly #1 spot.
The Hollywood Reporter Natalie Portman's troubled Jane Got a Gun got a new release date. No longer will the western be released next February; we'll have to wait until September to see it. I can't decide whether that's an improvement or not.
Dwayne Johnson We were just talking about Disney's upcoming Moana and it now seems the erstwhile Rock will lend its voice to the animated film. 

The Season Continues

BIFA It was a great day for TFE favorite Pride over at the BIFAs (the British Independent Film Awards) which nabbed the top prize while Imelda Staunton and Andrew Scott picked up supporting acting prizes for it as well. 
Mother Jones If you caught Jean-Marc Vallée's newest film ths weekend, check out this interview with Cheryl Strayed on having Reese Witherspoon play her in Wild. 
InContention David Oyelowo and the cast of The Imitation Game have been added to the increasingly exhaustive list of names to be feted by the Palm Springs Film Festival.
Time names its Top 10 Best Films (topped by The Grand Budapest Hotel but including some interesting titles like Lucy and Jodorowsky's Dune). 
EW meanwhile singles out Whiplash as the year's best. 

Videos of the Day

Check out A Most Violent Year co-stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain chat about acting while looking ridiculously pretty (of course), and below, find a video by yours truly focused on the way gay men are represented on screen, featuring clips from Brokeback Mountain, Angels in America, Skyfall, Rope and over 80 other films/tv shows.

Gay Men on Screen: A Place for Us (Supercut) from Manuel Betancourt on Vimeo.

Beauty Vs Beast: Him Freud, Her Jane

JA from MNPP here - The Film Experience is taking a look back at 1964 all this month and so it's the perfect time for our "Beauty Vs Beast" series to take a look at a movie that's turning 50 next month (it was released on July 22nd, 1964) and wades so deep into morally murky waters you're never quite sure which end of the screen you're rooting for (if any), making it perfect for this poll - I speak of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie.

Starring Tippi Hedren as the titular troubled girl turned to theivery and Sean Connery as the businessman alternately turned on and repelled by that rascally blonde's baser instincts, Marnie's awash in dream symbols (so many snapping purses!) and psychiatry talk - too much of the latter by my count; like Hitch's film Spellbound I  always find his movie's at their least interesting when they're explicitly spelling out his psychological obsessions. Give me the fluid illogic of Vertigo over it any day. But like the keys and key-holes that clutter every other frame of Marnie, the film is most interesting as far as the clues it further offers us towards an understanding of Alfred Hitchcock and his never not fascinating psychological profile. It shuffles some not-before-seen puzzle pieces into place.

Hitch was always putting the audience into morally compromising situations, getting us to side with bullies and lunatics - even his most well-intentioned heroes found themselves doing terrible things (think of the scene in the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much where Jimmy Stewart drugs Doris Day without telling her so he can calm her down). But Marnie for me is the tipping point in Hitch's filmography where his characters become almost uniformly unlikeable; there's an angriness (or worse, an indfference) to the last decade and a half of his work (yes even in the so-called comedy of The Trouble With Harry) - it reaches its apex with Frenzy, a film I find exceedingly unpleasant to watch with its cast of shrewish women and sweaty men (it works as a horror film, but it makes me extraneously sad all the same), but the seeds are planted with Mark and Marnie, two people just a little too damaged and bizarre for me to ever find myself rooting for them in any way.

So why not force us to pick?!

poll by twiigs.com

You've got one week to vote and to sell us in the comments on the frigid blonde or the manly man that's come to beat some sanity into her. Choices, oh choices.

PREVIOUSLY And speaking of choices, with last week's poll pitting Natalie Portman's White Swan against Mila Kunis' Black Swan? Y'all couldn't make one! IT'S A TIE, YOU GUYS. 428 votes, split perfectly at 50/50. I can't even tell you how giddy that makes me - the movie about doubling and dopplegangers split us right down the middle. We look in the mirror and we see all of the faces. We are legion. I'll share to two quotes from y'all since we went both ways:

"Nina only cause I don't think Lily would take the loss as hard." -- SVG

"Team Lily because that fierce little Russki NEVER would have fallen flat on her ass on opening night. Get your shit together Nina!" -- TB

Beauty Vs. Beast: Swan Against Swan

JA from MNPP here - it's time for some "Beauty Vs. Beast" yo! We're getting our Aronofsky on this week - I chose to take us back to 2010 for a Black Swan face-off for the specific reason that today is Natalie Portman's 33rd birthday (Happy birthday, Nat!), and it was only after that I mentally connected it to last week's Girl Interrupted face-off - only now, seeing them side by side like this, do the paralells seem striking - two crazy gals feeding off each other's craziness, Winona Ryder talking about oral sex... it's a real double-feature. And I suppose "double" is the operative word...

poll by twiigs.com

So pirouette yourself to one side or the other between now and next Monday, folks!

PREVIOUSLY And as for last week's Winona versus Angie showdown, y'all made like the Oscars and gave your love to the big show on the sidelines of Girl Interrupted - Jolie took the title with 62% of your votes. Said David:

"She drove poor, fried-chicken-hording Brittany Murphy to suicide in the first 45 minutes and she was just getting started.... Angelina Jolie wins this by a mile."

Review: Thor: The Dark World

Anne Marie here with a look at Marvel's latest blockbuster.

And so the Great Marvel Experiment continues with the studio's latest film, Thor: The Dark World. Marvel can be credited with doing something virtually unprecedented in Hollywood: creating an extended cinematic universe with many different intersecting films, characters, and plotlines. Unlike a universe built by sequels and trilogies (like Star Wars) or subtle Easter eggs (like Quentin Tarantino's films), the universe created by Marvel built on a decade-long-ish Three Phase plan. The Avengers ended Phase One rather spectacularly.

Phase Two got off to a rocky-if-enjoyable start with Iron Man 3. However, as a Marvel character licensed to a different studio once said, "With great power comes great responsibility." Marvel doesn't get a free pass to make an inferior movie just because they're breaking new ground. Unfortunately, Thor: The Dark World, the second installment in Phase Two, might be just that inferior movie. [more...]

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