Julia's Men: Broken Billy and Brother Eric

A steep box office drop off for Eat Pray Love (which opened well thanks to Julia Roberts and the memoir's popularity) or its generally blah reviews could easily kill it, but Richard Jenkins has a slam dunk Best Supporting Actor Type part, don't you think? Yeah, you know that category has its types.

For me though, the character I keep thinking about is Stephen (Billy Crudup). Crudup made a vivid impression in just a couple of scenes so I wrote him up for my "Best in Show" column at Tribeca Film. He's like a little boy whose heart Julia stomped on till it broke. So sad.

I have to start my spreadsheets for the 2010 Film Bitch Awards now lest I forget something (I've usually started them by now. Eeep). Are than any cameos or limited roles this year that wowed you that you want everyone else to love? If so, share them in the comments. (Here's who I went with last year in those "limited" categories.)

Speaking of men Julia Roberts may or may not have clobbered emotionally, apparently Eric (her older brother) and she have mended their previously tense relationship. The Daily Beast has an interview with Eric Roberts about his career and their relationship. Like his friend Mickey Rourke he isn't one to mince words and I love that in celebrities even if their handlers do not. He just flat out admits that he gave up chasing a certain kind of career after his Oscar loss.

When you hand in great performances in Star 80 and Runaway Train and the Oscar goes to Don Ameche, it kind of bums you out.

Brutal honesty plus shameless self regard. Love it! (To be fair he is just fantastic in Star 80 and should be proud of himself.) I also get bummed out about the Cocoon love. But if anyone but Ameche was going to win that particular Oscar, it would have been Klaus Maria Brandauer in Out of Africa.
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Julia Roberts vs. The World

"Do you know this one girl with hair like this?"
-Scott Pilgrim

"Who MEEEEEEE?!?"
-Julia

Eat Pray Love and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are almost kinda the same movie. Or at least thematically kin. No really. Though I'd grade them differently: B- and B+ respectively at least immediately after viewing.

Double Feature Review @ Towleroad

I'd love to hear what you thought of both or either. You starring in Read Share Like
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Eat Pray Link

eat, pray
<--- Look, it's the new poster for the Julia Roberts flick Eat Pray Love. Julia appears to be eating a little low fat ice cream or substitute product or some such. Two days back, while melting in the hateful sun and picking up more cat medicine -- don't ask, things have been terrible -- I actually bought a cup of this stuff. Eating while praying, I had to cheer up.

The marketing department was always going to be hard pressed to beat the book cover but isn't this a bit... dull? Especially considering how much they have to work with: Different countries, hot co-stars, spiritual awakenings. I mean, there's an elephant in the movie. Elephant! How can you pass up an elephant for a stone bench? Ah well, at least it's not a giant floating movie star head. Which is pretty much all you'd see if I did an episode of posterized with Julia herself.

Are you excited to see this in August? I'm hoping it's good. Seems like the sort of thing that's just right for Julia in the right now. [see also: previous post]

link
Fassinating Fassbender the Michael Fassbender fanblog gets its own interview with the man himself.
Telegraph UK Tim Robey "Why I Love: Juliette Lewis". Ah, I knew I loved Tim for a reason. Well, several of them.
CHUD laments the state of movie posterdom. The only great ones (Buried) are rip offs of classics.

I Need My Fix Quote of the Day Ashton Kutcher on his post Killers body
Cinema Blend a test screening review of the remake Let Me In. It's extremely positive but I'm hoping critics take this down on principle ;) Why remake something if you're only going to copy it? That's living off other people's glory.
Towleroad a couple of notes on Splice. My feelings haven't changed much since Sundance but I suppose the parts that were good have aged well. That "Dren" really is a memorable creation. Good sound design, too. There's more interesting links there, too...

Eat Pray Link. But mostly Link apparently.

Oscar Prediction Discussables, The Actresses!

The first Oscar predictions of the year are complete. Woo-hoo. These are always both fun and aggravating to do. I love being proven both wrong and right. New film years offer so much promise of success, failure, and everything inbetween.


My own excitement for Darren Aronofsky's freaked-out ballerinas picture Black Swan is all intermingled with my fears that no matter how good it is (assuming that it's good), Oscar voters have notorious trouble embracing the visionaries until they really do something middlebrow (case in point: David Fincher and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Black Swan sounds way too weird to be middlebrow... but, then, so did Button come to think of it.

I decided to throw caution to the wind and predict Natalie Portman for Best Actress anyway. Oscar has embraced histrionic ballet stars before (The Turning Point, anyone?) And even if voters are still wary of Aronofsky (how has he not been nominated yet? Argh!) they do recognize his enviable skill with actors, as evidenced by the nominations from Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler.

In the end, these are the dozen performances I (currently) feel we should most keep an eye on for Oscar play

• Hiam Abbas in Miral (though I could also see this as supporting)
  
• Annette Bening for Mother and Child or The Kids Are All Right
  
• Anne Hathaway for Love and Other Drugs
• Nicole Kidman down the Rabbit Hole
• Diane Lane for Secretariat
• Jennifer Lawrence for Winter's Bone
• Lesley Manville has Another Year
• Julianne Moore thinks The Kids Are All Right
  
• Natalie Portman in Black Swan
• Julia Roberts for Eat Pray Love
  
• Robin Wright Penn as The Conspirator

The red highlights are my predicted nominees but visit the Best Actress page for more details as to why I chose who I chose.

I've also posted the Supporting Actress hunches -- which includes Helena Bonham-Carter in The King's Speech -- though in truth I didn't really have any hunches. Ha! That's the way it goes sometimes.

Early Bird Oscar Predictions
Complete!

I'd love to hear your feelings on these two actress categories. Next week, after I've had time to examine and build spreadsheets, I'll share your communal prediction for Best Actress from the "Actress Psychic" contest. It's always interesting to note what Consensus imagines about something so intangible.

Screenplays, Toys, Books

I'm kicking off the Oscar predictions for this new film year. (Have you entered the actress psychic contest yet?) So let's talk about the year's screenplay contenders. Ah, the screenplay... the architectural blueprints of entirely visual buildings. An invisible art to some degree, which is why it's so hard to judge and why films with great dialogue or good dialogue elevated by great acting often get the lions share of the praise in this field. But we can't let that stop us from awards season guesswork. I put up a page with possibilities for both Original and Adapted work.

As per usual there's a few titles that might switch categories eventually whether because of unavailable information, confusing Oscar practices or fluid definitions. I don't remember any sequel not based on a novel or somesuch prior to Before Sunset (2004) claiming itself to be Adapted... but now that seems to be the norm when campaigning films dealing with "pre-existing characters" even when you did write it yourself rather than basing it on material (which seemed to be the case with Jane Campion's Bright Star last year). This year there's a number of True Stories that have been written about already though the screenplays seem to be original. We'll see. The new fluidity probably makes Toy Story 3 this year "adapted" even though it's not adapted from anything and even though the original Toy Story (1999) was campaigned as "original" and some of the characters in it were obviously "pre-existing" (just ask Hasbro). The more you think about it the more confused you can become.

Here's two more confusing ones: The Illusionist, the new animated film from Sylvain Chomet (Triplets of Belleville) is based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati. But obviously Chomet would have had to have rework it (they're both listed as writers) so is it an "original" or an "adapted"... see the fluidity? I've seen other sites mention The King's Speech, a baity sounding thing about a royal with a speech impediment, as an adapted screenplay. Not so concrete. Though conceived as a stage play, at least according to Wikipedia, it headed for the screen first which may mean it has plenty of wiggle room in this day and age of calling yourself whatever it is you'd like to call yourself. So I'm guessing "Original"?

One tangentially related tidbit... last night on twitter I asked followers for some book recommendations. Only one person mentioned a book that's soon to be a movie (Never Let Me Go). Here's some upcoming adapted situations, though not the entire picture of this year's crop.

"Now a Major Motion Picture"

• Eat Pray Love - Ryan Murphy and Jennifer Salt refashion these memoirs around the radiant Julia Roberts for this summer journey. (previous post)
  
• London Boulevard -Ken Bruen's novel about a criminal (Colin Farrell) and the reclusive actress he works for (Keira Knightley) is the directorial debut of The Departed scribe William Monahan.
  
• Rabbit Hole - David Lindsay-Abaire rewrites his own award winning play for a director who knows his way around both stage and screen (John Cameron Mitchell).
  
• Norwegian Wood - Murakami's coming of age story about a group of college students gets visualized by The Scent of Green Papaya's Anh Hung Tran. Should be lovely. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) stars.
  
• The Rum Diary - Actor/writer Bruce Robinson gives Johnny Depp a chance to return to the Hunter S Thompson crazy fountain.
  
• Fair Game - Valerie Plame's memoirs get Naomi Watts' face. Easy casting.
  
• The Tempest - Julie Taymor sets her imagination loose upon William Shakespeare for the second time (she previously attacked Titus).
  
• Never Let Me Go -This sci-fi tinged bestseller by Remains of the Day author gets reworked by Alex Garland for music video director genius Mark Romanek to make his way back to the cinema for the first time since 2002's One Hour Photo.
  

And then we've got more confusing situations where the title has been changed but they are adaptations anyway.

"a rose by any other name..."

• "Prince of Thieves" gets no less generic sounding with its new title The Town. The screenplay is by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and last year's Oscar nominated screenwriter Sheldon Turner (Up in the Air)
  
• "A Very Private Gentlemen" still keeps his name hidden. He's now simply The American in the screenplay by Rowan Joffe.
  
• "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" is a punny title for a book. But punny won't do for eternal Oscar-seeker Edward Zwick who renames this the also clever Love and Other Drugs. Good title. Especially considering how addicted so many of us are to both stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway.
  
• "The Adjustment Team" gets a major reworking as The Adjustment Bureau. Hollywood never tires of adapting Phillip K Dick short stories
  
• "The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom" this true World War II story is retold by the great Peter Weir as The Way Back
  
• "Accidental Billionaires" the screenplay based on this founding of Facebook tale is by Aaron Sorkin and it's now called The Social Network.
  

Have you read any of these books that'll be visualized soon?
Would you recommend others pick them up? And what do you think of the screenplay predictions?
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Yes, No, Maybe So: Eat Pray Love

We try to keep our new movie expectations safely balanced by weighing the possible highs and lows suggested by new trailers. Here's the first peak of the summer drama Eat Pray Love with Julia Roberts.



Eat Pray Love is based on the bestselling memoirs of Elizabeth Gilbert who travelled to Rome, Mumbai and Bali on a journey of self-discovery after her divorce.

yes
Spiritual, romantic or emotional journeys (is this one all three?) can be thrilling to watch if the right actress is playing the right role (provided, of course, that the filmmakers aren't after one of those lame, shallow "you can have it all!" empowerment tales). Julia Roberts might be a perfect fit for this since she's got the outward appearance of someone who has it all but an inner soulfulness that can tilt towards the despairing, troubled or needy. The buttery light and the presence of Javier Bardem makes me think of Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the 'woman opens up in a foreign country' makes me think of EM Forster adaptations and the though of India touching a long-locked white woman makes me think of "Thank U" by Alanis Morrissette. These are all good things to be reminded of.

no
On the other hand, this could be really whiny and insufferable, another entry in the dread genre Pretty Rich White People With Problems.

Since I was fifteen, I've either been with a guy or breaking up with a guy. I have not given myself two weeks of a breather just to deal with myself

So let me get this straight. As soon as Julia is done with dreamboat Billy Crudup, handsome young James Franco pines for her while Spanish lover Javier Bardem waits just around the corner. And she has enough money to quit work for a year on this vacation to find herself? Oh boo hoo! How does she wake up in the morning!?!

We should all have those problems.

This particular subgenre of road movie also has the inherent danger of cultural insensitivity. Quite often the "exotic" people and lands of these stories exist only to aid and fulfill the lives of the Pretty Rich White People and aren't ever given dimension and a point of view of their own (The Darjeeling Limited provides a recent beautifully illustrative example of this dilemma.)

maybe so
But on the other hand, don't we need these stories? Catharsis is one of the great benefits of art and travel is also a reliable eye-opener. And no matter what country you're from when you do travel to another, you are in fact viewing that "exotic" land from your own limited perspective be it Mumbai, Paris, New York, or Kansas City. And even wealthy beautiful people need to find themselves and really live.

And Julia touches an elephant!

Redemptive journey movies can be inspirational if they're not too reductive and if they don't play things too easy. So if the director (Ryan Murphy of Running With Scissors) is careful and the cast (including fine lesser-known actors like Richard Jenkins, Viola Davis and Mary Testa) is on their game, Eat Pray Love could be really good. If it is, lines like

If you could clear out all that space in your mind you'd have a doorway. And you know what the universe would do? Rush in!

won't sound like new age tripe but healing words of wisdom instead.

Are you a Yes, No or Maybe So for this one?
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Eat, Pray, Julia.

Jose here with a confession: few things nowadays get me as happy as the idea of a new Julia Roberts movie (yes, I'm slightly easy to please sometimes). So you can imagine the excitement this month has provided for me! First was the cute, and star studded, trailer for Valentine's Day (what do you mean you haven't seen it? Do so now!).

And today the web is bursting with Julia in saris, flower necklaces and bodyguards as she begins shooting Eat, Pray, Love in the town of Mirzapur in northern India. The movie, directed by Ryan Murphy, is based on the eponymous novel by Elizabeth Gilbert and tells the story of a divorced woman who travels across the world to regain her inner peace.

But back to Julia, The Indian Times reports

Wearing a purple kurta, black salwar and rudraksha beads, she completed her first day's shoot for a Hollywood film in Pataudi on Sunday (Sept 20), living up her role every bit! One scene had her eating rice, chapati, aloo-gobi and muttar-paneer the Indian way - with her bare hands.

She's just like the rest of us...

The Associated Press also commented on Mrs. Moder's Indian visit and how she was all the rage amongst the villagers of Mirzapur where young boys climbed trees and villagers crowded rooftops. Is it me being morbid or does this remind you of Slumdog Millionaire a bit?

Fortunately for Julia the film kicked off with the rightfully blessed foot as Indian priest Swami Dharam Dev offered prayers for the whole cast and crew. He also gave Julia's children the names of Indian gods [he] named her twins Hazel and Phinnaeus as Laxmi and Ganesh, while Henry will be called Krishna Balram.

The movie is set to open in 2011 and also stars Javier Bardem as the man she falls in love with, Billy Crudup as the man she was in love with, Viola Davis as yet another rom-com best friend and Richard Jenkins.

(photographic src)

Eat, Pray, Love...

...and Sulk (apparently).

Why are Julia Roberts and James Franco so glum on set? Is it because Javier Bardem isn't there yet? Speculate about their grumpy moods in the comments!
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