Posts Tagged ‘Steven Spielberg’

Short Take: A harrowing story that's emotional but not sappy. Distinctly Spielbergian.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Screenwriters: Lee Hall and Richard Curtis; Michael Morpurgo (novel)

Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullen, Niels Arestrup, David Thewlis, Tom Hiddleston

Length: 2h 26m

Synopsis: It is the era of World War I. The horse of a poor farmer boy (Irvine), named Joey, is sold to the English cavalry so that his family can pay the debt on their farm. Distraught, the boy offers to enlist in the army but is too young. From then on the horse changes hands from a Captain (Hiddleston), to a grandfather (Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens), and a handful of others. All who find themselves in charge of the horse fall in love with it. In having so many different owners Joey ends up traveling far from his original home, and although he has affections for some of his new owners he ultimately seeks to return to the poor farmer boy who raised him. In the end, as property of the German army, Joey risks everything in a desperate charge towards English forces in the hope that he can finally find his way home. Like the soldiers who surround him, Joey demonstrates the kind of bravery that few look to prove they have. But will it be enough?

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"The Social Network" has gotten very high praise for its writing, but is it the best written movie so far this year?

So far this year we’ve enjoyed the emergence of several very well made movies, such as Toy Story 3, Inception, Shutter Island, How to Train Your Dragon, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Cyrus, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and the recently released The Social Network, among others. Exactly what makes these movies so well made are an innumerable amount of things both big and small, not the least of which are their direction, editing, acting quality, and art direction. But with every film, when you get right down to it, what really makes or breaks everything is the writing. A phenomenal director and editor tandem can sometimes get past a so-so script, such as with Steven Spielberg and Michael Kahn with Jurassic Park, but the vast majority of the time the quality of the writing is what determines how good everything else can potentially be.

So far it would appear that the two movies that are being praised the most for their writing quality are Chris Nolan’s Inception and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network. It seems like every review of the latter has dedicated a whole paragraph to dote upon this particular aspect, crediting both Sorkin and his source material (Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires). The former has received sterling reviews as well, though because of how intentionally ambiguous the film is some critics were hesitant to award it prematurely. In those critics’ defense, it is indeed harder to defend a story’s craftsmanship when its coherence is questionable and the overall theme and thesis lend themselves to expansive debate.

Can the stories of these two movies be compared? Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Beyond its obvious faults it delivers exactly what it advtertises, and then some

Director: Alexandre Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes (2006))

Screenwriters: Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg (Sorority Row)

Cast: Elizabeth Shue (Hamlet 2), Christopher Lloyd (Camp Nowhere), Ving Rhames (Surrogates), Jerry O’Connell (Obsessed), Adam Scott (TV’s Party Down)

Length: 1h 30m

Synopsis: After a subterranean tremor causes a rift that conjoins a mysterious underwater lake with the aboveground Lake Victoria community, a prehistoric predator proceeds to roam free and eat at will. That predator is the very first breed of Piranha, which are thousands strong and eager to feed on fresh meat. It just so happens that these ferocious fish escape during Spring Break, when every virile teenager and college student within fifty miles is congregating to drink, fornicate, and unknowingly serve themselves up as dinner. Gratuitous nudity and violence ensues on a level not seen in American theaters in some time. Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Intriguing, with unsettling cautionary messages

Director: Vincenzo Natali (Cube)

Screenwriter: Vincenzo Natali (Cube), Antionette Terry Bryant, Doug Taylor (They Wait)

Cast: Adrien Brody (King King), Sarah Polley (Dawn of the Dead), Delphine Chaneac

Length: 1h 44m

Synopsis: Elsa (Polley) and Clive (Brody) are a couple who are top-notch geneticists trying to splice the correct combination of DNA strands that will create an organism that produces certain kinds of proteins that can be used to help fight any number of diseases. After enjoying much success with their latest experiments (unique male and female organisms that have the capacity to mate) they are brought down to earth with the news that their company will go bankrupt unless there is a more significant breakthrough sometime soon. Elsa convinces Clive to break the law and try experimenting with human/animal splicing in order to have the resulting organism’s proteins be more readily usable, but from the get-go things don’t go quite as planned. The new organism begins growing like a child, but the older it gets the more dangerous it becomes until eventually the two scientists are forced to fight for their lives.

Warning: This review contains information that might be considered spoiling Read the rest of this entry »

Director/Producer Steven Spielberg

Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox were set to begin production in 2010 on a new adaptation of “Harvey,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mary Chase play that was previously made into a 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart, which Steven Spielberg was going to direct until yesterday when he severed himself from the project.

“Harvey” is about a man who believes in an invisible friend who happens to be a six foot tall rabbit.

Reportedly, Spielberg was having a tough time casting for the main role and is likely one of the main reasons he pulled away. He immediately thought to hire Tom Hanks to play the same role as Stewart, but Hanks supposedly wanted nothing to do with a part the was played by the iconic star. Robert Downey Jr. was next considered for the role, but when offered the part he was hesitated to commit and was insistent on making revisions with the script. When it became clear that Spielberg and Downey Jr. could not get on the same page creatively, the director called it quits.

Spielberg is currently involved with the post-production phase of The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, and has had a handful of scripts on the backburner for years, including an Abraham Lincoln civil war drama which will star Liam Neeson.

Source: Variety

Director/Producer Peter Jackson spoke to the press recently at the London premiere of his newest film The Lovely Bones, where he gave away some new details about two of his other projects, The Hobbit (writing and producing) and the Steven Spielberg directed The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (producing).

The news on both of these films is that Jackson and his writing team have completed the first script of the two-movie hobbit project. Jackson said that he had even more fun than he had anticipated writing the script, and that MGM has stamped it’s sign of approval as well. With Tintin, it appears that filming has completed and Spielberg now enters a two year long period of postproduction (with most of the time being reserved for including the film’s special effects).

Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) will direct The Hobbit, whom Jackson hand picked for the project. The two Hobbit films will release in the Decembers of 2011 and 2012, respectively. Tintin has a tentative release date of December 23, 2011.

Source: ComingSoon.net