Posts Tagged ‘Twilight series’

Short Take: Though the supernatural plot can be a bit tedious, the appealing performances from its young stars make it worth the ride.

Director: Richard LaGravenese

Screenwriter: Richard LaGravenese, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (book)

Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum

Runtime: 2 hours 4 minutes

Ethan Wate (Ehrenreich) has spent his whole life in Gatlin, and as he enters his junior year he is desperate for any kind of excitement. It finally arrives in the form of the mysterious Lena Duchannes (Englert), who bears a striking resemblance to the girl who has been haunting his dreams for the last few months. Lena is the youngest in a line of witches, or “casters.” And while she and Ethan quickly fall in love, a family curse threatens to turn her into an agent of evil. Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Gets the atmosphere of the books, but not quite its most important aspect: its female lead.

Director: Bill Condon

Screenwriters: Melissa Rosenberg (screenplay), Stephenie Meyer (novel)

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

Length: 1 hour 57 minutes

Synopsis: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 opens with Bella (Stewart) and her vampire boyfriend Edward (Pattinson) on the cusp of eternal happiness. Their lavish wedding marks the beginning of the end of Bella’s human life. She bids farewell to her parents and friends, knowing that transforming into a vampire means never being able to see them again. The happy couple sets off on their honeymoon to a private island in Brazil to finally consummate their relationship. However, things take a bad turn when the impossible happens and Bella finds herself pregnant with a hybrid vampire-human child. Against the advice of everyone around her, Bella decides to keep the baby. As it drains the life out of Bella, Edward and werewolf Jacob (Lautner) worry that the woman they love won’t survive.

Read the rest of this entry »

Writer/Director Bill Condon

The fourth film in the Summit Entertainment series, Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, has now hired Bill Condon as its director. Condon is perhaps the series’ most respected director to date, helming the Oscar nominated films Dreamgirls (Nom. Best Supp. Actor Eddie Murphy, Won Best Supp. Actress Jennifer Hudson) and Kinsey (Nom. Best Supp. Actress Laura Linney).

Commenting on the opportunity to direct a film that’s part of such a huge franchise, Condon said, “I’m very excited to get the chance to bring the climax of this saga to life onscreen,” said Condon. “As fans of the series know, this is a one-of-a-kind book — and we’re hoping to create an equally unique cinematic experience” -HR.

Summit Entertainment production president Erik Feig expressed his delight with the decision to hire Condon, saying, “Bringing Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn to the screen requires a graceful and intelligent hand, and we believe Bill Condon is exactly the right steward, having shown equal and abundant talents of immense creativity and subtle sensitivity” -HR.

Condon also won an Oscar for writing the adapted screenplay for Gods and Monsters.

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The next installment in the Twilight series, Twilight Saga: Eclipse, is directed by David Slade (Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night) and is set to release June 30th.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Miramax has long been considered a haven for independent financing and distribution, but with it being limited to only a few films per year who will pick up the slack?

Every few months or so, I get into this strange mood where I think the film industry has become all hype and no substance and I feel nostalgic for the movies I used to love.  Typically during these periods, every film I see only seems to confirm that sense and I grow increasingly disappointed until something finally snaps me out of it.

This time last year, I found myself in the midst of one of my film industry doldrums and I walked into Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age film Adventureland expecting yet another gross-out teen comedy like his previous film Superbad.  However, what I encountered was a film that restored my faith in the medium.

I remember the moment exactly.  Kristen Stewart’s character Em and Jesse Eisenberg’s character James are simply driving in a car as the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” plays on the radio.  They have just left a bar after Em’s secret lover and his wife walk in and the couples share an awkward and loaded exchange.  Em is clearly thrown by the encounter and the scene that follows basically shows her reaction to it.  As she drives, Em’s face goes from sad to angry to disappointed to confused in a matter of seconds, displaying all of the complicated emotions she feels.  And it was during that scene that I remembered how much I love film and how powerful film could be.  It wasn’t just Stewart’s incredible performance or the music choice or the way Mottola filmed it, it was the combination of all those things.  It was the realization that I was seeing a truly extraordinary moment of creation happening on the screen and I had suddenly regained that passion for movies I had experienced as a child.

I’ve recently felt myself moving toward another bout of movie despondency so I popped in my Adventureland DVD and prepared to have my faith restored.  On a whim, I watched the previews before the film and one of them happened to be a roundup of Miramax films, the same company that distributed Adventureland.

As the preview rolled, I realized how many Miramax films I’ve enjoyed throughout the years.  I mean, this is the production/distribution company that first sparked my love for movies all the way back in 1996 with the release of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.  I may not have fully understood all the film’s themes at eight years old, but I certainly appreciated the beauty.  The passionate yet tragic love story of the central characters and the gorgeous cinematography are the reasons the film remains one of my favorites even today.  Miramax was the company that sparked my love of musicals too.  Sitting in a half-empty theater in the middle of the day watching Chicago was a positively transformative experience.  The sex appeal and the combination of stage performance and cinema that only film could supply was positively incredible.  Miramax was even the company that taught me about post-modernist referencing: I delighted in the way Wes Craven’s Scream deconstructed the horror genre and was positively astounded by the endless layers of pop culture reference Quentin Tarantino used in the Kill Bill films.  So I began to wonder, what happened to Miramax?

Miramax began some thirty years ago in New York as an independent production and distribution company founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein.  The goal of the company—named for the Weinsteins’ parents Miriam and Max—was to produce and distribute independent films which were often more notable for their artistic value than their potential box office earnings.  Between their opening in 1979 and 1993, Miramax distributed such films as Sex, Lies and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs.  However, it really began to flourish after the Walt Disney Company bought it in 1993.  After the sale, with more financial backing at their disposal, the Weinsteins were able to run the company fairly independently of the rest of the Disney family.

The Weinsteins had always been fairly aggressive in their business practices, from acquiring films to acquiring promising filmmaking talent, and that same style carried over in their Disney period.  Nowhere was this aggressive business style more apparent than the company’s Oscar campaigns.  Perhaps the best example of a successful Miramax campaign came in 1998 when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for a Best Picture Oscar.  According to a New York Magazine article from 1995, Miramax spent an estimated $5 million campaigning for the film and its arguable whether it would have been so fortunate without such significant backing.  Miramax carried on in this manner with one successful Oscar-winning film after another.  And then 2005 rolled around.

The Weinsteins had a tenuous relationship with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner over issues like financing and creative matters and when it came time to renew the brothers’ contracts in 2005, the negotiations went so poorly they ultimately decided to leave to create The Weinstein Company.  Miramax continued relatively unchanged under the direction of Daniel Battsek until this past January when Disney closed the its New York and Los Angeles offices and made it a part of the larger Disney infrastructure, thereby reducing the production output to only a handful of films per year.  Though companies like Summit Entertainment and even The Weinstein Company have showed interest in purchasing Miramax from Disney, it’s likely the $700 million asking price, as reported by The Deal Magazine, will mean the company will stay in Disney’s possession for years to come.  However, the real question in all this madness is what company can audiences expect to take up the creative slack?

Miramax’s most obvious heir is The Weinstein Company.  In it’s few short years, it has already made some impressive films like quite a few of this year’s Oscar nominees including Inglourious Basterds, Nine and A Single Man.  And it has quite a few promising films in the pipeline including two Sundance Favorites, The Company Men starring Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper and Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.  However, another independent company that might give the Weinsteins a run for their money is Summit Entertainment.  Former Paramount Vice Chairman Robert G. Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger established Summit in April 2007, but it’s already shown some promise.  It produced and distributed this year’s Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker and with the cash cow that is The Twilight Saga as one of its properties, Summit shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.

Regardless of what the future may hold, I’m sure there will always be films to help remind me why I fell in love with the medium in the firs place.  And if not, I can always pick something from the Miramax library for a little reminder.