Monthly Archives: August 2014

A fractured married tale: Mark Duplass & Charlie McDowell on THE ONE I LOVE

22 Friday Aug 2014

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the-one-i-love-In The One I Love, Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) have reached a rough patch in their marriage. Their therapist (Ted Danson) suggests they try to reconnect during a weekend retreat at a gorgeous country house. There is much more to this wildly inventive romantic comedy than that, but the challenge in writing or talking about director Charlie McDowell’s sublime feature debut is to not give too much away.

“It’s certainly tricky,” says Duplass. “It is such a good conversation piece, but at the end of the day, we have just discovered that you do better as a viewer of this movie when you don’t know what’s in there…We did this really cool test screening where we put 100 people in one theater on the left and 100 people on one theater on the right. People on the left knew everything about the movie that you would know from an average Hollywood trailer, lots of spoilers. People on the right went in blind, just with, ‘It’s a romantic comedy with Mark Duplass and Lizzie Moss. They go on a couples’ retreat to try to save their relationship.

“Everybody loved the movie. It was great, but the way that people would talk about it when they didn’t know what was there, there was like an electricity in their eyes and in their voice. In particular, they would just arrest people, ‘You have to see this movie! You have to see this movie! Oh my God!’”

The One I Love was born out of Duplass and McDowell’s friendship and desire to make a movie together. Duplass furnished his pal with the kernel of an idea that McDowell and his writing partner (and the film’s eventual screenwriter) Justin Lader transformed into a 10-page outline fleshing out the story and characters.

“Then we picked this location to set it in and reverse-engineered the movie to take place inside this location and wrote for all the things in there,” says Duplass. “It’s kind of following along in the thing I’ve always described as ‘the available materials school of filmmaking.’ Don’t write a script and figure out how you’re going to make it. Write a script for what you have at your disposal, so you know you can make it.”

Moss, another friend of Duplass, was quickly recruited to play Sophie, and added her input into her character. Producer Mel Eslyn also contributed notes to the story. The project came together quickly. It was only six months from the time that McDowell and Duplass started talking about the movie until they were actually shooting it.

“There’s something about the energy that happens when you do that,” says Duplass. “Everyone’s still excited about the movie. It still feels fresh. It’s like the difference between getting married when you’ve been dating for six months and getting married after you’ve been dating for five years. When you’re standing there on the altar and you’ve just been together, you’re like, ‘This is so exciting! This is so exciting!’ After five years, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I suppose it’s about time we do this.’”

McDowell says he is often asked what The One I Love‘s ending means, but the ending relates to everything that comes before it. With or without that which makes the film so unusual, it is the story of a relationship. McDowell points out that it is a romantic comedy that focuses on real people with real problems rather than the usual rom-com stereotypes and conventions. Still, Duplass notes, what the film is actually about only emerged in the making of it.

“The theme that came out sort of posthumously, after the first draft of the outline, is that we tend to when we’re first dating people, to put forth this perfect version of ourselves where we try to be more sensitive and more loving and more intelligent,” he says. “They bring up a book and you’ve never read it and you say, ‘Oh, I love that book!’ Then the shine comes off and how do you deal with that disparity between who you said you are and who you really are? That seemed fun and playful, but also meaningful, and we were like, ‘This is a good theme to explore through this magically real plot machination that we employ in the movie.’”

Adds McDowell, “They’re in this place a lot of us get into where you’re in a rut and it’s like, how do you get out of it and should you get out of it? A lot of times it’s, ‘Should we cut our losses and should we move on?’ We kind of came to a place in their relationship where Ethan had cheated on Sophie and so he’s kind of created this separation between them. Now, they’re stuck. A lot of times something needs to happen for a couple to get out of that rut.” —Pam Grady

New Trailer: U.K.-set labor/LGBT dramedy PRIDE

11 Monday Aug 2014

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A little-known moment from contemporary British history steps into the spotlight with Pride. In 1984, as U.K. coal miners strike in a showdown with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, they receive support from an unexpected quarter: gay and lesbian activists. Director Matthew Warchus’ comedy drama limns this unusual alliance in a film that stars Bill Nighy (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Pirate Radio), Dominic West (The Wire), Paddy Considine (Submarine, The World’s End), Andrew Scott (Locke), Sherlock‘s Moriarty), and Imelda Staunton (Maleficent, Another Year. This CBS Films release opens stateside on September 19.

CALVARY’s father and son reunion

07 Thursday Aug 2014

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CalvaryWriter/director John Michael McDonagh admits he hesitated before casting Domhnall Gleeson in the small but pivotal role of serial killer Freddie Joyce in his latest film, the blackly humorous drama Calvary. For Gleeson—whose credits include both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, True Grit, Anna Karenina, the upcoming comedy Frank, and a Tony-nominated turn in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore—it would be casting again type, but that wasn’t what concerned McDonagh. It was just that in this single scene, Domhnall would be acting against Calvary‘s star, Domhnall’s dad, Brendan, playing a priest whose week starts with a death threat and doesn’t get any better with his jailhouse visit with Joyce.

“I was a bit worried about it, because I thought it would bring the audience out of it. They’re going, ‘Oh, that’s Brendan Gleeson. That’s his son,” McDonagh says.

“It’s a very intense scene obviously,” he adds. “There were a lot of things being said that unnerved people in the crew as they were listening to it. And we go from a very big wide into really close. It’s very intense … It’s deliberately a kind of black hole right in the middle of the film. I think it’s about 50 minutes, so it’s right dead center.”

For Brendan Gleeson, sharing the scene with his eldest child was a revelation. They have acted together before on a number of occasions, including a 2006 Irish football comedy Studs and Ian Fitzgibbon’s 2009 comic thriller Perrier’s Bounty, and Domhnall directed his old man in his 2010 short Noreen.

But Calvary is different. Brendan Gleeson remembers reading through the scene with Domhnall in rehearsal, and then the younger Gleeson went away until it was time to shoot it, adopting radio silence with his dad as he worked to find the character. On the day, Domhnall was not only in character, but McDonagh had directed hair and makeup to make him as unrecognizable as possible.

“It was very difficult in a sense. It was a harrowing day,” says Brendan Gleeson.

“We had kind of retreated to our separate corners and we just came out fighting on the day. Then we sat down at this table in this vast room and we didn’t really talk to each other very much. My analogy for it afterward was we were two sparring partners who were great friends or brothers or something, but when you do it in the ring for real, you have to park all that stuff and just fight your corner, basically, and that’s what we did.”

The scene between Freddie and Father Michael is an arresting one, one of the darkest in the movie, and one that McDonagh discovered, from Calvary‘s first screenings at the Sundance Film Festival where the movie premiered, has a curious effect on audiences.

“After that scene, I thought, ‘That’s going to turn the film into a really dark, somber place,” says McDonagh. “What I found … was that we would still get laughs after that sequence and they would be bigger laughs than what I was expecting. I think it’s because that scene is so dark and somber that the audience wanted relief from it. They’re looking for any kind of relief and so they laugh a bit more than probably they should.”

For Brendan Gleeson, it was just a relief to finish the scene.

“It was fantastic to work with Domhnall, but in retrospect, it was nice to get him back at the end of the day,” he says.

Gleeson starts to say that in that scene he saw in his son something that he’d never seen before, but then he corrects himself. That face, the expression on Freddie Joyce’s face, that was familiar.

“When I tried to get him out of bed too early maybe over the years, I’ve seen that look before,” Gleeson laughs.

“I think Domhnall did extraordinarily well,” he adds more seriously. “He’s quite chilling. I’d be proud of him, anyway, but I was particularly so after that.”—Pam Grady

For more of my Brendan Gleeson interview, click here.

Trailer: Stephen Hawking biopic THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Twenty-six years ago, book lovers and science geeks everywhere bought Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, his attempt to make cosmology understandable for the layman. The book made the astrophysicist a rock star among scientists, a legend that continues to fascinate not just for his big brain, but also for his very survival. Diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease) when he was only 21, Hawking was given two years to live. He’s now 72.

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7th and in theaters on November 7th, The Theory of Everything relates Hawking’s story as a young man who does not let a horrible disease prevent him from working on his theories or stop him from falling in love with fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde. Directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire, Shadow Dancer), the film stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones.

GOTG’s secret sauce: Rocket Raccoon

04 Monday Aug 2014

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rocket_bradleyRacoons are funny creatures. Some people regard them as vermin and you don’t want them messing with the house pets, but they’re cute and they’re clever. Sure, they’re bandits, hence the furry masks. Now, there’s a new raccoon in town. He’s genetically modified, he talks, he walks upright, he’s whip-smart, and he’s even more larcenous than the average garden pest. He’s Rocket. He’s voiced by Bradley Cooper and he is one of the reasons Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most entertaining movies of the year. All of the Guardians—Chris Pratt’s goofy Star-Lord, Zoe Saldana’s intense Gamora, Vin Diesel’s sweet, sweet Groot, and Dave Bautista’s vengeful Drax—are pretty special, but the wise-cracking raccoon is GOTG‘s secret sauce.

People‘s 2001 Sexiest Man Alive made his big screen debut in Wet Hot American Summer, mixed it up with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers, and was a key player in the Hangover franchise. But lately Cooper’s had a more serious career: two Oscar nominations in a row for his work with director David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle; upcoming are yet another collaboration with Jennifer Lawrence, Susanne Bier’s dark drama Serena, and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, in which he plays Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. In November, Cooper will fulfill a long cherished dream when he steps on a Broadway stage to play deformed 19th-century legend John Merrick in a revival of The Elephant Man. It is becoming a truly serious career, but Cooper is a gifted goofball and so it is a delight to hear him embrace that so fully as Rocket.

Cooper has likened the pint-sized bounty hunter to Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. And, yes, Rocket is a motormouth with anger issues, which may relate to his small stature. Plus, Rocket has reason to be furious, thanks to his very nature. “I didn’t ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over and turned into some little monster!” is how the little raccoon puts it. But with Pesci’s Tommy DeVito, there are a lot of laughs until that rage surfaces in a violent eruption. In contrast, Rocket has a big heart beneath the bluster, expressed most profoundly in his friendship with the tree being Groot, but also emerging in the way he bonds with the other Guardians.

Rocket is also chaotic and unpredictable and snarky, but he’s ultimately a good guy and that snark makes him hilarious. Like his real-world counterparts, Rocket is maddeningly mischievous and can be truly annoying and is also ultimately disarming in his clownish charm. Guardians of the Galaxy wouldn’t be the same without him. Well cast, well rendered, and well served by director James Gunn and Nicole Perlman’s screenplay, Rocket is one of the keys to GOTG‘s success.—Pam Grady

Review: Chadwick Boseman channels James Brown in GET ON UP

01 Friday Aug 2014

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Get On UpNo wonder Mick Jagger came on board as a producer to the James Brown biopic Get On Up. Fifty years ago, he and the Rolling Stones were the closing act, coming on after The Godfather of Soul and his Famous Flames’ 18-minute set at 1964’s T.A.M.I. Show. Brown’s performance is transcendent, otherworldly. Pity the fool that had to follow that. After 50 years, Jagger is still in awe and now he pays homage to the man with this kaleidoscopic drama. Anchored by 42 star Chadwick Boseman’s incandescent performance in the central role and directed by Tate Taylor (The Help), Get On Up is a magnificent mess, overlong and its various parts never quite gelling. But whenever Boseman steps on stage (which is often), like Brown at that long ago T.A.M.I. Show, the film is electrifying.

The approach that screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth take to Brown is nonlinear. They begin with a particularly low point in his life with his glory days seemingly behind him before heading backward, weaving back and forth in time. Here he is a little boy (Jamarion and Jordan Scott), caught between an indifferent mother (Viola Davis) and an abusive father (Lennie James), and eventually abandoned to live in a brothel with his Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer). There he is a young adult honing his act with the Flames. There is again and now he’s a superstar.

In some ways, Get On Up takes a greatest hits approach to Brown’s life, as the film tries to cram in all of the highlights: the beginning of his collaboration and friendship with singer and musician Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), the most sustained relationship of his life; a meeting with Little Richard (Brandon Smith in a scene-stealing cameo) that changes the course of his career; his first meeting with agent Ben Bart (Dan Akroyd); the T.A.M.I. Show; the Apollo; Ski Party; 1968 Boston Garden, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; Paris 1971, etc. All of Brown’s funk and soul classics are represented as well: “Please, Please, Please,” “I Got You,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and so much more.

At the same time, the drama contrasts Brown’s dazzling onstage persona with the fractious personality offstage. He could be petty, abusive to his wives and disrespectful to his bands. There is too much of the offstage melodrama, which becomes repetitive after a while. Like a lot of great artists, James Brown wasn’t necessarily a great guy. Establish that and move on. And moments where Boseman breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly just don’t work. Spaced at odd intervals, those scenes don’t just break that fourth wall, they break the movie’s spell. The offstage scenes that work best are those with Little Richard, one of the few scenes where Brown is not fully in charge, and with Byrd and Bart, the two people who seem to most fully see past the bluff and into Brown’s heart.

All is forgiven every time James Brown steps on stage. Boseman’s performance overall is magnificent, but not for nothing was Brown often called “the hardest working man in show business.” No one could touch him on stage: not his voice, not his charisma, not his dance moves, or his boundless energy. Boseman has to put those last three things together while credibly lip-synching Brown’s voice. He’s flawless. Like the man he’s portraying, the actor seems to exist on a whole, other higher plane from mere mortals in Get On Up. Whatever the movie’s flaws, Boseman erases them in every musical scene. Or put it this way: Mick Jagger wouldn’t want to have to follow him, either.—Pam Grady