A Splash of Sexy

 ...Murtada here with a very important question: Is this the sexiest family vacation photo of all time? 

It must be. Matthias Schoenaerts in all his manly glory, Ralph Fiennes giving us foxy intellectual older gentleman, Dakota Johnson lovely as a blond. And of course no words needed for Tilda Swinton (as they never do her justice). In their new film Tilda and Matthias are a famous married couple on vacation in Italy when Ralph and his screen daughter Dakota arrive to visit them unexpectedly. Trouble follows. 

A Bigger Splash is one of our most anticipated 2015 movies, and this newly released photo is a “GIMME NOW”. No wonder it looks so much more enthralling than the usual publicity still -  it was shot by Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi. The four pairs of blue eyes staring at us, invoke David Hockney’s same titled 1967 painting, that we assume has inspired the filmmakers.

For a change of pace let's talk about the guys and not the actresses. If you’ve seen Rust and Bone (2012) or Bullhead (2011) you know that Schoenaerts is sexy trouble on screen. However in his English language movies, he hasn’t fired up the screen quite as boldly despite an alluring duet with Carey Mulligan earlier this year in Far From the Madding Crowd. Schoenaerts also gives good quote.

"I’m also an animal. I can also be a beast. I know about sex”.

So the idea of him playing a rock star in a thriller about sexual intrigue has us captivated beyond words.

For a while Fiennes lost his sexy mojo. That glistening beauty in turmoil that made us fall in love when The English Patient (1996) came out had vanished. However with his delectable, funny and oh so sexy M. Gustave last year he got it back. And from the looks of this, he kept it.

This quartet might win awards at Venice, where A Bigger Splash is in competition, but they’ve already won our anticipation and impatience. That red carpet will be on fire.

Can you think of other cinematic quartets this sexy?  

Women's Pictures - Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days

On April 29th, 1992, the Rodney King verdict set Los Angeles on fire. Over 6 days, crowds rioted in South Central LA, protesting the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been videotaped beating a black man. This was not LA's first race riot, but it came at a fraught time for the city, when the skyscrapers that were supposed to signal the start of a new era of prosperity loomed over widening economic and social gaps. By May 4th, it was clear that though the riots had "officially" ended, they had left a scar on the psyche of the city. Over the next few years, that scar would surface in one of Los Angeles's most prominent exports: film. After the Rodney King riots ended, a series of scifi blockbusters - including Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days - took to the streets of LA to predict the worst for the city's future.

Strange Days (another collaboration between Kathryn Bigelow and ex-husband James Cameron) is part of a group of dystopian action thrillers that cropped up in the wake of the Rodney King Riots. Escape from LA, Demolition Man, and Strange Days used their futuristic settings to do what science fiction does best: they created an allegory for contemporary fears about violence, inequity, and police brutality. 

Los Angeles is a good setting for a dystopia. Unlike New York City, America's Melting Pot, where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds intermingle on the street, Los Angeles is more a series of villages connected by highways. In LA, communities whose names are synonymous with wealth and prestige set their gates a handful of miles from infamously poor neighborhoods. But the two worlds never meet.

According to the movies, only three groups travel between these separate-but-unequal islands: cops, criminals, and entertainers. Lenny Nero, the protagonist of Strange Days, is all three: an ex-cop turned con-man who sells recorded memories and emotions via a "SQUID" machine - data discs that play directly in your cerebral cortex. When an anonymous donor leaves Nero a clip of his friend's rape and murder on New Year's Eve 1999, Nero and his friend Mace (Angela Bassett) get pulled into a plot that involves murdered rappers, police coverups, music producers, and Nero's lost love (Juliette Lewis). But bubbling under this detective story is a growing sense of unrest between police and the populace.

James Cameron's screenplay sets up a lot of ideas - drug allegory, the nature of memory, police militarization, the right to riot, institutional racism - and it is Kathryn Bigelow's very heavy duty to sort through these themes while also keeping the film on track. Miraculously, she is mostly successful. Though the structure of the script sometimes lags under the weight of its own ideas, Bigelow keeps the film moving at a clipped pace. Her fascination with point of view also becomes literal in Strange Days. the SQUID machines record from first person POV, which Bigelow uses to occasionally comic, often thrilling, and (in one incredibly intense murder scene) chilling effect. By virtue of its technical difficulties, First Person POV can look gimmicky on film, but Bigelow overcomes the difficulties to instead stage a series of fantastic action pieces.

The only failure of the film is not in its setup or its action, but in its conclusion. The complex problems of racism and violence which had occasionally bubbled to the surface - mostly in a B plot surrounding Angela Bassett's character - are neatly solved at the end of the film, though this denoument does give one intense image: a SWAT team beating an unarmed woman. It's probably too much to ask for moral complexity from an action thriller. Though insipred by riots that had proved there were still no easy answers in reality, Strange Days is still a product of its genre; commodified violence for the sake of box office. 

This month on Women's Pictures...

7/23 - K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) - Hands down the most requested film after Point Break, this film follows Harrison Ford racing to prevent a nuclear holocaust via submarine. (Amazon Prime) (Netflix)

7/30 - The Hurt Locker (2008) - The film that put Bigelow's name down in history as the first female director to win the Academy Award is a thriller about a bomb squad in the Iraq War. (Amazon Prime)

"Because I'm a Nurse"

We didn't get a proper theme week celebration off the ground for National Nurse's Week but it comes to an end today. Here's Andrew Kendall, who can't let the moment pass without shining a light on his favorite movie nurse. - Editor

Sure, The English Patient is really the story of the (not English), László Almásy, Hungarian explorer, but Binoche’s Hana is central to the story. She opens and closes the film, after all. After its wordless desert prelude the film really opens with her on duty towards the end of World War II.

Her first nursely duty, giving a kiss to an ill soldier, is perhaps not very auspicious. It’s a sweet moment, though...

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April Foolish Oscar Predix - Supporting Actors

As is the case every year the supporting categories are incredibly foggy early on. One rarely knows which supporting players have big roles (unless they're co-leads campaigning fraudulently which we should always expect). And then there's the matter of who will steal scenes and who will be reduced to glorified cameos even if their roles sound good on paper.

Will Poulter and Tom Hardy heading to shoot scenes for The Revenant

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about this Foolish early punditry: Supporting players, unlike leads, almost never win traction unless their film is also well liked. That adds yet another layer of clouds blocking future vision.

All of which makes April Foolish supporting pictures an exercize in fantasy. But it's fun! The chart is now up for  Best Supporting Actor and to start things off I'm predicting an all newbie lineup. But looking over the general foggy field one could have genuine with high hopes for a couple of respected actors who've never had a real Oscar shot like Tom Hardy and Kyle Chandler, actors who have been mistreated by Oscar like Ralph Fiennes (future cinephiles will be driven mad puzzling how he missed for Grand Budapest Hotel) and Kurt Russell (tell me again how he missed for Silkwood?) and actors who fit right into Things Oscar Does like Seth Rogen (comic gone serious), Bradley Cooper (you like me you really like me) and so on. The chart is big and extensive because it's silly to rule anyone out before most films have begun screening.

Among films with large casts that we suspect are teeming with possibly eventful supporting players but who can really say are Warren Beatty's Untitled Howard Hughes Project, Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight, and the press expose of the Catholic Church scandal drama known as Spotlight

Some of "Spotlight"s key cast members: Keaton, Schreiber, Ruffalo, McAdams, Slattery, James

And that's not all. There's also the head-injury medical sports drama Concussion led by Will Smith, an FBI drama led by Emily Blunt called Sicario, and the all star period literary drama Genius which features Jude Law, Guy Pearce, Dominic West, and others as famous authors. There's also the Hollywood Blacklist drama Trumbo which is headlined by Bryan Cranston but features a lot of other actors as famous showbiz figures

Do you have any suspicions about this field or any wild card predictions?

Wes Anderson on 'Budapest', Fellini and Revisiting Max Fisher.

Jose here. Last week I attended a screening of The Grand Budapest Hotel followed by a Q&A with director Wes Anderson. Self-aware and adorably humorous he shared anecdotes about the making of the film, and also discussed his influences. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits.

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