Julia Roberts and Ryan Reynolds star in ‘Fireflies in the Garden’, a movie that believe it or not, actually hit the film festivals in 2008! So what took so long to get the movie released?
The film, written and directed by Dennis Lee, saw its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. While it later hit theaters in most parts of the world, financial difficulties shelved its US distribution for nearly three years, until it was announced last week that it will finally hit theaters in select cities on October 14th.
And so, American theatergoers will at last get to see the story in which Julia Roberts, in mostly flashback footage, plays mother to a boy that will become Ryan Reynolds, who appears in the film’s present-day shots. A sweet woman and caring mom, she’s plagued by her abusive husband, played by Willem Dafoe, who leaves the boy on the side of the road one rainy day.
Seventeen years later, now fully grown and portrayed by Reynolds, he is heading home for a family reunion when a car accident kills Roberts, who is aged up with heavy makeup (at 43-years old, to Reynolds’ 34, it’s a necessity). From there, the story is a test of blood and forgiveness, trust and anger, with three generations of one family doing their best to co-exist in the wake of so much damage.
Looks like it could be pretty good, but I’m always apprehensive about movies that get shelved. Usually great movies aren’t shelved for three years before they’re released.
“Now all of this may look like some crazed hallucination,” Johnny Depp, as Hunter S. Thompson stand-in Paul Kemp, says, “but it’s all true… I think.”
And so it goes in this long-awaited big screen version of “The Rum Diary,” Depp’s latest film adaptation of a Hunter S. Thompson novel. The film, which sat on the shelf for a while, has a roundabout history that, in a very minor way, resembles that of the book; the semi-fictional story about Thompson’s time in Puerto Rico as a young journalist began being written in 1958, but went unpublished until 1998.
Depp, as Kemp, plays an alcoholic journalist who starts kicking around San Juan, Puerto Rico, writing for a failing local paper and taking LSD. It was a fearful, doomsday description of what Thompson worried he may become in the early stages of his career, though, obviously, his real life success far exceeded that of his nervous projection.
The film also stars Amber Heard, Aaron Eckhart, Giovanni Ribisi and Richard Jenkins, and hits theaters October 28th.
Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy lead an all-star cast in Tower Heist, a comedy caper about working stiffs who seek revenge on the Wall Street swindler who stiffed them. After the workers at a luxury Central Park condominium discover the penthouse billionaire has stolen their retirement, they plot the ultimate revenge: a heist to reclaim what he took from them.
Queens native Josh Kovacs (Stiller) has managed one of the most luxurious and well-secured residences in New York City for more than a decade. Under his watchful eye, nothing goes undetected. In the swankiest unit atop Josh’s building, Wall Street titan Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is under house arrest after being caught stealing two billion from his investors. The hardest hit among those he defrauded? The tower staffers whose pensions he was entrusted to manage.
With only days before Arthur gets away with the perfect crime, Josh’s crew turns to petty crook Slide (Murphy) to plan the nearly impossible…to steal what they are sure is hidden in Arthur’s guarded condo. Though amateurs, these rookie thieves know the building better than anyone. Turns out they’ve been casing the place for years, they just didn’t know it.
I love both these guys – hope the movie is good! This is Eddie Murphy’s first “grown-up” movie since 2006′s ‘Dreamgirls’. Since then he’s been in Shrek and other various childrens movies. I think he’s hilarious, so it’ll be nice to see him in something more like his ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ roles.
Seems like an odd movie for Matthew Broderick, no?
The rape of Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is the one incident that gives Lisbeth her quest for revenge. In David Fincher’s new movie, he admits he stuck as close to the disturbing events that Stieg Larsson laid out in his best selling novel.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Rooney Mara, who completely transforms to play the role of Lisbeth, described the difficulty — and importance — of making the rape scene as true to the book as possible.
“It was incredibly intense. We did it all in a week — the week of Valentine’s Day, oddly enough,” she remembered. “We were working 16 hours a day, and it was really, really challenging, not just emotionally but physically. But it’s such an important scene. We wanted to do everything we could to get that right.”
Director David Fincher hinted that the scene — and the subsequent revenge payoff — would be visually unforgiving in an interview earlier in the year with W Magazine.
“Sony and Scott Rudin [producer] told me they wanted to be in the adult-film-franchise business,” Fincher said. “And they said, ‘We want you to kick the A in adult.’ They already had a release date–December 2011–but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do another movie about a serial killer [following "Zodiac"]. Then I read the script, and I called Scott and said, ‘I can’t imagine why you thought of me.’”
Of course, about that last part, he was joking — Fincher is known, through films such as “Fight Club,” to be a director willing to brush up against boundaries of violence and brutality. Daniel Craig, who stars in the film as Mikael Blomkvist, confirmed as much in a recent cover story for Esquire.
“This is adult drama. I grew up, as we f*cking all did, watching ‘The Godfather’ and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie,” he said. “Nobody makes those anymore. And Fincher, he’s not holding back. They’ve given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, Are you f*cking serious?”
I cannot wait to see this movie! I watched the foreign versions (which I loved) and I absolutely adore David Fincher. It’s going to be hard to watch and dark like some of his past movies (Se7en, Fight Club).
Here we have ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, a new movie based upon the book by Lionel Shriver. The film stars Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as the parents of Kevin, played by Ezra Miller.
The film was nominated at Cannes for the Palme d’Or, and is receiving rave reviews.
The story revolves around a mother of a psychopath teenage mass murderer. The movie looks absolutely terrifying. Tilda is so creepy – and that kid! Whoever Ezra Miller is – yikes, that stare is going to give me nightmares!
