Film Comment News Digest: 4/11/14
Lead item: Belgian horror and giallo fetishists Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the couple behind Amer and the mind-melting The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears are striking out in a new direction. Their next project will be Laissez bronzer les cadavres (roughly translated as “Let the corpses get suntanned”). It’s an adaptation of a 1971 novel by cult Seventies neo-polar writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose Nada became an underrated 1974 film by Claude Chabrol, and whose 1981 novel The Prone Gunman has just been adapted by Taken director Pierre Morel with Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, and Mark Rylance under the rather uninspiring truncated title The Gunman. Forzani describes the novel as “a mix of anarchy and spaghetti Western” in which “a group of violent criminals who have stolen 250kg of gold hide out in an abandoned village in the South of France where an eccentric female artist spends her summers each year. Soon the village is turned into a warfield during the course of a long, long day.” …
And it’s finally all systems go on former Film Comment contributor Guy Maddin’s adaptation of enigmatic Los Angeles pop duo Sparks’ 2009 radio-drama album The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman. The musical fantasy imagines what would have happened if the Swedish director (apparently to be played by Swedish actor Peter Franzén) had gone to Hollywood after the splash made by his 1956 Smiles of a Summer Night. “Bergman is confronted by the lure of a mythological Hollywood seemingly at odds with all he stands for—a Hollywood that tempts him and ultimately tries to control him. What starts as an exploration by Bergman of the possible mutual benefits of his working in Hollywood turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare, a nightmare ended with the aid of a most unlikely savior.” And yes, there’s a Facebook page and an Official Site for the film if you want more … French indie Damien Odoul, director of the Le Souffle, is readying La peur, a WWI war drama, based on an autobiographical novel by Gabriel Chevallier, about a young soldier’s experience of trench warfare. Promising that the film will be as hyperreal and hallucinatory as his earlier work, Odoul sees the film as “following a subjective point of view and a trajectory, crossing a landscape rather than giving us a broad canvas or attempting to depict the battlefield.” …
Most improbable but probably great idea: Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best-selling book about the buildup to the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short. Did I mention Brad Pitt is producing? But we’ll have to wait and see if Will Ferrell will star … A movie version of John le Carré’s 2010 novel Our Kind of Traitor has just started shooting, helmed by veteran British TV and Nanny McPhee Returns director Susanna White, hot off HBO and the BBC’s Parade’s End, not to mention four episodes of Generation Kill. The action centers on an English couple (Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris) vacationing in Spain who become caught up in the machinations of a Russian oligarch (Stellan Skarsgard) planning to defect. Enter representatives of the Russian mafia and the British secret service and you get the picture—plus, somewhere in all this Damian Lewis plays a character called “Hector” … Also currently in production is Good Kill, and it’s a hot topic: Ethan Hawke is a Las Vegas–based drone pilot bringing down death from above on Taliban insurgents when he starts to have doubts about his day job. Hawke, who co-stars with Zoë Kravitz, January Jones, and Bruce Greenwood is reteaming with writer-director Andrew Niccol so this may not be a sure thing, but it sure sounds like one … And returning to biopic territory, Control director Anton Corbijn is making Life, about the relationship between James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock. Cast includes Dane DeHaan, Robert Pattinson, Ben Kingsley, and Joel Edgerton. Guess who’s playing Nicholas Ray? Probably not Robert Pattinson. Featured characters include Jack Warner, Eartha Kitt, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Pier Angeli … Underrated English indie filmmaker Duane Hopkins, director of 2008’s Better Things, is finally back with his second feature, Bypass, a lost-youth drama about a young small-time fence (played by rising star George MacKay) who comes to a crossroads in his life …
I Am Love writer-director Luca Guadagnino follows up with The Reliable Wife, a romantic period drama set in 1908 Wisconsin about a widower and his mail-order bride who both get more than they bargained for. It’s adapted from the Robert Goolrick novel by Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. But whither Guadagnino’s Body Art, co-adapted by Don DeLillo from his novel The Body Artist and to star Isabelle Huppert, Sigourney Weaver, Denis Levant, and, er, David Cronenberg? Originally to be shot in Portugal last year, this psychodrama about a widowed artist who finds a mysterious intruder in her home, has been put on hold—permanently? … Denis Villeneuve, on a roll after Enemy and/or Prisoners, is gearing up for Sicario, in which an Arizona cop travels to Mexico with a pair of mercenaries to track down a drug lord. It sounds more interesting when you add Benicio Del Toro to the mix, along with Emily Blunt … And our Least Needed Sequel of the week is of course Ghostbusters III, nominally produced by original director Ivan Reitman and actor Dan Aykroyd but literally getting a Judd Apatow makeover (Apatow is also producing) with a cast including Jonah Hill, Emma Stone, Bill Hader, Will Forte, and emphatically no Bill Murray.
