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Senin, 24 Januari 2011

Tutorial: Flex for the BlackBerry PlayBook in 90 Minutes

Tutorial: Flex for the BlackBerry PlayBook in 90 Minutes: "

My new “Flex for the BlackBerry PlayBook in 90 Minutes” tutorial is now live on the BlackBerry Developer Site."

Sam Rockwell On Cowboys & Aliens

Sam Rockwell On Cowboys & Aliens: "And he'd like to play a superhero

Alex Gibney Making WikiLeaks Documentary; Separate Julian Assange Biopic Also Planned

One of the first big pieces of news out of Sundance is that Universal will fund a documentary about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, directed by Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Casino Jack and the United States of Money). Together with the biopic of Mr. Assange that is about to go into development at a different company, that would make him quite the man of the moment — if he hadn’t already been the man of the moment thanks to the actions of WikiLeaks over the past months.

[UPDATE: Deadline says that HBO is also developing a film about Mr. Assange. This one would be a co-production with the BBC based on Raffi Khatchadourian's June 7, 2010 New Yorker article called No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency.]

More detail on each film after the break.

Deadline confirms the deal with Universal but isn’t able to say whether Julian Assange will participate in the film. Regardless, the movie could be a firebrand that surpasses the interest generated by Mr. Gibney’s last few films.

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks and therefore responsible for the release of thousands of confidential government documents, is a figure that people tend to either love or hate. To some he’s a hero and a champion of free speech and democracy; others see him as an enemy and someone who endangers our freedom by compromising the inner workings of government. (And there are probably many who see him as a troublesome, egocentric kid.)

All that being the case I’d say that Alex Gibney is the perfect man for this job, and I’m eagerly awaiting the results of his work.

In addition, producers at Josephson Entertainment and Michelle Krumm Prods have optioned Andrew Fowler‘s forthoming biography of Mr. Assange, called The Most Dangerous Man in the World. They plan a ‘suspenceful drama thriller’ based on the bio. The book follows the WikiLeaks founder from childhood to the present day. Producers compare the story they want to tell to All the President’s Men.

No word on a screenwriter, director or cast for the biopic at this point. Too bad Steven Soderbergh likely won’t have any interest in this; he’d be great for it. [Variety]

‘Margin Call’ – A Movie About The Financial Disaster That’s a Cinematic Disaster [Sundance Review]

It is safe to say that Margin Call was my most anticipated film of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Having scored a spot on the buzzed-about 2010 Black List, Margin Call has an all-star cast featuring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Zachary Quinto. It is also topical, purporting to be based on true events and chronicling the actions of an investment banking firm at the epicenter of the 2008 financial disaster.

Sadly, Margin Call is an unfortunate lesson in what happens when you make a movie that, like The Social Network, features dozens of characters talking intensely at each other for 2 hours, only with none of the skill that Sorkin or Fincher brought to their particular film. Hit the jump for some further thoughts, plus an audio blog I recorded with Laremy discussing the film. (He loved it. I hated it.)

Margin Call begins with a scene that’s so good, it makes the punishingly mediocre material that follows all the more disappointing. There’s a round of layoffs happening at an investment banking firm and risk management specialist Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is among them. The scene in which Tucci is fired masterfully captures all the nuance of such an uncomfortable situation: the robotic nature of the woman’s voice as she delivers the news, the subtle, almost imperceptible way she checks his dossier when reciting how many years he’s worked at the firm, the awkwardness experienced by Dale right afterwards. (Picture the opening scene of Up in the Air, where Clooney fires a hapless worker, only more raw and brutal).

Dale goes to pack up his office, but in a case of bad timing, it turns out he was right in the middle of putting together a report that portended the entire firm’s downfall. Before he leaves, he hands his work off to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), a lower-level analyst who happens to be brilliant with numbers. Sullivan finishes what Dale started and realizes that, not only is the entire economy is headed down the toilet, but their century-old firm may not survive.

What follows over the course of the next hour that comprises the second act of the film is the information in my paragraph above being reiterated over and over again. No joke: that exact same information (including how Sullivan got his hands on the numbers) is passed up the chain of command in explicit detail several times, making this nearly-2-hour long film feel frustratingly padded. But don’t worry, each time the film makes sure to spell it out for the laypeople in the audience by having a character state something along the lines of “Tell me this like I don’t know anything about finance or accounting!” Thanks, Margin Call! Seriously though, we get that it’s a bad situation. Tell us something new or move it along, please.

[In the film, there is a dialogue exchange where one character says that the situation will get ugly, and the other responds 'How ugly?' His rejoinder: 'Really, really, really fucking ugly.' Picture this scene repeated 5-8x and you will start to get an idea of what it was like to watch this film]

When you create a film that deals with a hopelessly complex issue such as the housing crash, you can choose to either capture the complexity of the issue using a strong sense of verisimilitude and/or focus on the human drama behind the scenes. (We’ve seen films that have done both. Hell, we’ve seen films starring Kevin Spacey that have done both. Recount, anyone?) The very cursory financial information provided in Margin Call hardly qualifies it for the former. I have literally heard finance-centered episodes of NPR’s Fresh Air that were more informative, more exciting, and more emotionally loaded than the entirety of Margin Call.

More unforgivably, all the characters in this film are complete ciphers. Several of them are given subplots that go nowhere, but with only paper-thin details about each one, we have no reason to care about whether X’s dog survives, or whether Y gets blamed for this whole mess, or whether Z gets fired. As both a dramatized document of one of the worst crashes in our history AND as a riveting drama, Margin Call fails completely.

There are moments when Margin Call springs to life and demonstrates exactly why it was a candidate for the vaunted Black List. Every now and then, a character delivers an interesting monologue with a clever turn of phrase or an eternal truth wrapped inside it, and we wonder what might have been if the film had maintained this level of consistency throughout. Instead, most of the film features pointless, clunky dialogue about how much money the characters make, with a large dose of heavy-handed expounding on “What It All Means, This Whole Investment Banking Thing.”

This is writer/director J. C. Chandor’s first feature-length film and it shows. The performances are excellent throughout (Spacey and Irons are great, and Quinto continues to impress as a dramatic big-screen actor) and the film looks great, but almost all the other choices are nearly disastrous. Scenes that could be easily edited to be more tight instead chug along sluggishly. Entire characters that contribute nothing to the plot could have been combined with others or excised entirely. There is nothing in Margin Call that is not illustrated far better by other observers and artists, even those using other forms of media. For example, John Wells The Company Men and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air provide more intimate portraits on the agony of job loss. And those looking for something more exciting and/or profound on this subject would also be better served reading the works of Michael Lewis.

I can’t imagine anyone I know who would want to watch this film. I can’t imagine any studio that would want to buy or distribute this film, seeing as how there is no scenario I could envision in which it would perform well at the box office. Sure, it centers on a hot button issue, but the level of filmmaking skill on display in Margin Call unintentionally reveals the unfortunate truth that in movies, topicality isn’t everything.

Here’s my discussion about this film with Laremy from film.com.

Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo and Noah Segan Cast in Rian Johnson’s ‘Looper’

Around these parts, Rian Johnson‘s third feature film Looper is one of the most anticipated films of 2011/2012. The sci-fi / time-travel thriller is ready to roll cameras, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano and Xu Qing leading the cast in a story about “a group of killers who send bodies of their victims back in time, with China as the centerpiece of the storyline.”

Now Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo and Noah Segan have signed on as well.

Fans of Rian Johnson’s previous two films, Brick and The Brothers Bloom, will be familiar with Noah Segan, as he played Dode in the former and had a small part as The Duke in the latter. I’d expect that Jeff Daniels and Piper Perabo need no introduction.

We’ve had a couple other Looper updates this week: we saw a photo of Primer writer/director/producer/star Shane Carruth as he prepared to work on the film. (He’ll be doing some effects work.) And we saw a bunch of props from the movie as well. There was also the detail that the script was tweaked a bit late in the game to include China as a location and a plot point — that what happens when a Chinese backer comes on board. France was previously the country that played a big role in the script, and which was swapped for China.

The film will first shoot in Louisiana (that starts next week) and then move on to China. I don’t care where it shoots, really (though the use of China is potentially great from a visual perspective, and from a business one) because we get a new time-travel film from a very promising young director. Maybe that Chinese company can also finance Shane Carruth’s A Topiary? Dare to dream. [Variety]

Follow the Looper tumblr for more behind the scenes info and photos as the film goes into production.

And here’s more plot info, some of which could be considered spoilerish if you haven’t been following previous updates on the development of the film:

Looper is about “a killer who works for the mob of the future. He, along with other so-called Loopers, dispose of people sent from the future. When he recognizes one victim as his future self, he hesitates, letting the man escape.” Joesph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis are the younger and older version of the main character; Paul Dano is another Looper and Xu Qing is the wife of the Bruce Willis incarnation of the main character.

Jeremy Piven, Thomas Jane, Christian McKay and Sasha Grey in Teaser Clips From ‘I Melt With You’

On Monday we showed you a brief character clip of Rob Lowe from I Melt With You, the new film from Mark Pellington (Arlington Road, Henry Poole is Here). Four more were released this week, and now that the final clip is out (a NSFW one featuring Sasha Grey) we’ve collected the latter four for your perusal. See ‘em all after the break.

Here, once again, is the recap of the film from the Sundance website:

Richard, Ron, Tim, and Jonathan are friends from college who gather for a weekend each year to celebrate their friendship and catch up with each other. On the surface, they look like other men going through life: they have careers and families and responsibilities. But as with many people, there is more to them than meets the eye. As the weekend progresses, they go down the rabbit hole of excess. Fueled by sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, their bacchanalian reunion drives them to an unexpected place where they are forced to confront themselves and the choices they’ve made.

In order, the clips below feature Jeremy Piven, Thomas Jane, Christian McKay and Sasha Grey. Those familiar with Ms. Grey won’t be surprised to find that her clip is not safe for work. (Or it wasn’t. Shocker: that one was pulled. I’ve replaced it with the new Sasha Grey clip, which skips the nudity.)

‘Silent House’ – ’24′ In A Haunted House, In One Shot [Sundance Review]

For their sophomore film, the team that brought us the original Open Water, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, chose a senior thesis to unveil at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Silent House, a remake of a Uruguayan film by the same name, sounds simple enough: a girl, her father and uncle are terrorized in their old, creepy house. What makes the film unique though is that it’s told in, mostly, one continuous shot. All the scares happen in real time and with an urgency that would be difficult to duplicate through traditional editing. Starring Elizabeth Olsen, who looks like a mix between the Olsen Twins (probably because she’s their sister) and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film provides a bunch of legitimate scares and extreme tension despite story cliches and weak acting that’s almost definitely the result of not being able to say “Cut.” Read more about the film after the jump.

Sarah (Olsen) along with her father John (Adam Trese) and uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) are visiting their old family summer house, attempting to fix it up and sell it. It’s light outside but, because the house has sat more or less abandoned for several years, all the windows are boarded up, making the interior feel like it’s night time. Eventually, Sarah begins to hear some noises and she and her father investigate. From there, the fun begins.

Watching a film without cuts can be both simultaneously impressive and exhausting. It’s impressive for obvious reasons – the movement of the camera, the lighting, the commitment to perfection of everyone on set – but without giving us any establishing or master shots to relax, the audience is always present. This tactic certainly works for a horror movie, but a good chunk of the film is used to establish the style. (Side note: There are cuts in this movie, they’re just hidden and very sparse.)

Because the directors hypothetically were so focused on that blocking, focus and lighting, at points the performances – specifically by Trese and Sheffer Stevens – suffer. You never quite believe these three people form a family. And while that awkward dynamic does have motivation, it doesn’t help the movie in its early stages. On the other hand, Olsen gives as dynamic a performance as possible under the film’s conditions. It’s hard to take your eyes off her, and not just because the camera is always following her. She has a pretty, girl-next-door quality that assuredly would only get more rich if she was given additional takes to hone her character.

You don’t go into a movie like Silent House for performances though. You go in for the scares. And while several will feel highly telegraphed to any self-respecting horror fan, the intense style of the film still provides plenty of tension. Then, as the film progresses, the scares get bigger and bigger.

Even with these scares though, the film is not without a slew of horror movie cliches. Many are played back at us with a winking eye – don’t go upstairs, don’t go in the basement, just leave, etc. – but by the climax, Kentis and Lau have built up such an abundance of them, the ending feels telegraphed. Plus, without spoiling anything, I wish the film had the guts to stand up on its own.

Silent House is almost assuredly going to get a US release. It’s too technically impressive and scary to be ignored. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t quite live up to its full potential.