The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| Mortensen, Dunst a glamour couple in Hitchcock vein in Berlin Posted: 11 Feb 2014 07:02 PM PST The movie marked the highly anticipated directorial debut of Iranian-British screenwriter Hossein Amini, who penned blockbusters such as 2011's "Drive". It is based on a novel by the late US crime writer Patricia Highsmith ("The Talented Mr Ripley"), who delighted in ripping away the veil of middle-class propriety to find what lurks beneath. The film opens in a sun-kissed Athens of the 1960s, with besotted American couple Chester and Colette (Mortensen and Dunst) impeccably dressed and touring the Acropolis. They catch the eye of Rydal, a Greek-speaking American tour guide who seems dazzled in particular by Colette, a classic Hitchcock blonde with a secret. Rydal is played by Oscar Isaac, who won rave reviews last year for his turn as the brooding singer-songwriter of "Inside Llewyn Davis". They fall into conversation and Rydal shows them around town while good-naturedly conning them out of petty cash along the way. The couple joins Rydal and his date, a beautiful American heiress, for dinner that night. But after Chester and Colette retire to their five-star hotel, tipsy on ouzo, there is a knock on the door from a private detective. The man accuses Chester of swindling his clients back in New York out of a fortune with a shady oilfield investment scheme and, in the course of a scuffle, the detective is killed. Rydal at the same moment realises he has found Colette's new Greek bracelet and, while trying to return it, happens upon Chester trying to hide the body. The three go on the run from the Greek police together, laying the foundation for a fateful love triangle and leading to a finale that borrows heavily from Greek mythology. Mortensen, who described himself as a fan of Highsmith's, said he loved the film noir aspects of the story. "It's a term that's thrown around a lot - it needs to have shadows, it needs to be black and white," he told reporters. "The only thing I would say is that the characters need to lie and lose, and it needs to end badly for everyone." Mortensen said characters should always have a secret. "That's what the story's generally about: the masks, and the masks fall away, and what you end up seeing about these people is often ugly and embarrassing," he said. "But when it's well done, when the thriller aspect works in terms of storytelling, no matter how badly they behave you're on their side somehow. You don't want the cops to catch them." Hossein, who was born in Iran, said he long faced a kind of typecasting as a screenwriter, with projects offered to him that dealt only with his native region. "When I went to the BBC or something it was always 'well, why don't you write about your country?' and I don't have a country. I left my country," he said. "The world becomes your country and you can tell stories from different places." "The Two Faces of January" is screening out of competition at the Berlin film festival where it generated mixed reviews. London's Daily Telegraph called it an "elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class". But movie website Indiewire dismissed it as a "competent disappointment". – AFP, February 12, 2014. |
| Netflix drama ‘House of Cards’ returns en masse Posted: 11 Feb 2014 06:11 PM PST "House of Cards" returns Friday to Netflix, the Internet streaming video service that threw away the Hollywood playbook a year ago when it sent out all 13 hour-long episodes of its flagship original drama in one fell swoop. It will do so again this time to its 31 million subscribers in the United States, plus those in Canada, South America, Britain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Finland. Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey stars as the vengeful and manipulative congressman Frank Underwood, with Robin Wright as his wife and willing accomplice Claire, and Kate Mara as ambitious young reporter Zoe Barnes. Netflix has ordered up a third season, and hinted there may be even more, after "House of Cards" collected nine Emmy nominations, the first ever for an Internet-delivered series, and won Wright a best-actress Golden Globe. "We think there is plenty of great storyline" to keep the show running, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers told AFP. Political dramas are already a winning fixture on American television, with ABC's "Scandal" starring Kerry Washington resuming its third season on February 27 and cable channel Showtime's spy-focused thriller "Homeland" renewed for a fourth season. How accurately "House of Cards" – whose presentational style follows the eponymous post-Margaret Thatcher BBC miniseries set in Westminster – portrays real-life Washington is debatable. "Honestly, the egos and the quest and thirst for power is very prevalent in Washington," Republican congressman Jeff Duncan, who like the fictional Underwood hails from South Carolina, told Politico.com. But President Barack Obama only wishes that Washington could be as "ruthlessly efficient" as it appears on "House of Cards," he told a gathering of technology executives in December. Season two of the show, which is actually filmed north of Washington in the city of Baltimore, finds Underwood assuming the vice presidency, having ruthlessly undercut rivals and even murdered someone in a protracted act of revenge after earlier being denied the promised post of secretary of state. "One heartbeat away from the presidency and not a single vote cast in my name. Democracy is so overrated," snickers Underwood in one of his signature asides to the viewer, according to TV critics who got a early look at the new season. Eschewing mainstream television's fixation with ratings, commercial-free Netflix won't comment on how many people stream "House of Cards," saying only that it is "one of the most popular series" in its lineup. But Evers disputed the notion that Netflix series are usually watched in one sitting, despite the possibility created by shunning the one weekly episode format favored by other smash-hit shows such as the now-ended "Breaking Bad". "We find that our members typically watch two, sometimes three episodes at a time. It is pretty rare for people to marathon-watch entire series," Evers said. Brian Carso, a constitutional history professor at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania and fan of the show, sees in "House of Cards" the complicated relationship in American politics between the lofty ideal of virtue and the cold hard reality of power. "There's something oddly attractive about Frank Underwood and Claire Underwood and Zoe Barnes and the various other players," he told AFP, "and yet they're also repulsive and corrupt – I mean, big-time corrupt." Political science professor Jeffrey Bosworth of Mansfield University, also in Pennsylvania, thinks Spacey's portrayal of Underwood "plays into public cynicism about politicians and what motivates them" – namely, greed. "Because Americans are so cynical about politicians, the show appears to be an 'honest' view of our political class," he said. But Jessica Seigel, who's expecting 30 to 40 people for a "House of Cards" viewing party Friday at Swarthmore College, says the show isn't putting off her dream of one day working in Washington's corridors of power. "It is slightly discouraging that you see this corruption," the political science student said, "but at the same time it encourages me as someone who really cares about changing Washington to be more involved." – AFP, February 12, 2014. |
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