Lake Bell to Direct 'The Emperor's Children' with a Script by Noah Baumbach

The multi-talented Lake Bell won a lot of fans with her directorial debut, In a World..., a funny and charming look at sexism in the voice-over industry. She's been keeping plenty busy since then, recently appearing in Million Dollar Arm opposite Jon Hamm, but now she's finally landed her follow-up behind the camera and it's a project that has been developing for quite some time.

About four years ago Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha) was set to write and direct an adaptation of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, with hopes of Keira Knightley, Eric Bana and Richard Gere starring. That never happened, and Scott Cooper briefly eyed the job only for that to also fall through. Now Bell takes over the reins with Baumbach's screenplay still in play. The story follows "three entitled but unsuccessful late twentysomethings who orbit the life of a famous journalist in the months before and after the events of 9/11. Two people's entrance into this circle threatens an upheaval."

No word on if there will be an attempt to lure back any of the earlier stars or if Bell plans to take a role for herself. Bell will be seen next in John Erick Dowdle's action flick, The Coup, starring Owen Wilson and Pierce Brosnan. [THR]

Read More

Review: 'Million Dollar Arm' Starring Jon Hamm, Lake Bell, and Suraj Sharma

So how is it that Disney's latest uplifting sports drama, Million Dollar Arm, which is the true story of Major League Baseball's first Indian-born players, somehow is REALLY about how a rich, white sports agent saved them from an unfulfilled life? The stories of Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal) are of the underdog variety in every sense of the word, capable of warming the coldest of hearts and making you feel a little bit better about the bloated sport of baseball, all while providing an ethnic twist on a formula Disney has perfected over generations.  But rather than taking the opportunity to go in a somewhat different direction, we're treated to the same old slow-pitch fluff that can be seen coming from a mile away.

Ironic that Mad Men star Jon Hamm leads the ensemble as struggling sports agent J.B. Bernstein, because somebody at Disney must have pitched the Hell out of this movie to get him to sign on. Bernstein gambled and left his cushy gig with an established firm to start his own, and now it's not looking like such a smart move. With all of his big money clients gone and their one major prospect bailing, Bernstein takes another huge risk. A moment of late night enlightenment involving a cricket match and Susan Boyle convinces him that the best way to turn things around is holding a reality TV competition in Mumbai. Gather India's best cricket bowlers and somehow turn them into Major League baseball pitchers, and in the process tap into that lucrative South Asian market. Problems solved. It's a ridiculous plan nobody thinks he can pull off, but Bernstein is desperate to maintain his lifestyle of fast cars and faster women. Speaking of women, he's renting out a room to a sexy med student (Lake Bell) who is destined to be a love interest. No two ways about it. It's formulaic claptrap but enjoyable and relatively inoffensive claptrap thanks to Hamm, Bell, and co-star Aasiv Mandvi who give the story some comedic punch early on. Plus, Hamm plays a great unaware douchebag. The only thing he does better is silent torment, and that comes later.

Once in India the film simply hits all of the stereotypes like this were batting practice. Bernstein can't stand the heat, can't endure the traffic, and can't eat the food. The one baseball scout he can get to make the trip is a surly old curmudgeon, naturally played by Alan Arkin, who thinks the whole thing is a disaster. That is until he starts hearing some real juice. That's right, hearing it. He doesn't even open his eyes unless he hears a pitch go over 80mph, and they come from strong-armed lads Rinku and Dinesh.  Still untrained in how to pitch like a real baseball player (one uses a weird crane technique like The Karate Kid); Bernstein flies them back to Los Angeles to work with a skeptical pitching guru (Bill Paxton).

Screenwriter Tom McCarthy (Win Win, The Station Agent) vacillates from bland inoffensiveness to ethnic awkwardness. Take for instance Bernstein's cartoonishly eager assistant, Amit, played by Bollywood actor Pitobash Tripathy. Apparently he's failed to realize this isn't a Bollywood movie because the level of overacting on his part, while charming at times, is mostly a distraction. Once back home there's little effort to go beyond the fish-out-of-water standard. Rinku and Dinesh eat too much pizza, struggle to learn baseball, marvel at Bernstein's massive home and gawk at his neighbor. We get a few brief moments where the pressure seems to get to them, and in these quiet asides we see that Sharma, who was so good in Ang Lee's Life of Pi, is the real deal as an actor. Performances aren't the problem here. Even Bell makes the most out of a stock role that is way beneath her at this point, and Arkin chews up the grass as we'd expect him to. But it's Hamm who has to carry most of the burden and he does seem to be the many sides of Don Draper most of the time. Bernstein is a manly guy whose masculinity is measured by his success, and when that starts to crumble so does he. Hamm wears the uncertainty and anger Bernstein carries well, and while the film as a whole isn't much he gives a game effort.

The problem is that the story is framed to follow Bernstein's quest for success, not Rinku and Dinesh's journey to the big leagues. There's very little actual baseball seen here, yet even less of the two boys acclimating to a place of total excess. The fish-out-of-water aspect is unfortunately played up for laughs (which are few) rather than insight, and basically the whole thing feels very safe and sanitized. Craig Gillespie's direction is bright, sunny, and indistinct, while McCarthy's script lacks his usual nuance. One of McCarthy's greatest traits, seen in literally every one of his films, is the ability to show how strangers can find a common bond and become a family. He tries to do that here but never quite pulls it off.  Million Dollar Arm fits in the tradition of other crowd-pleasing, inspirational sports dramas, and for that reason it will surely have most audiences cheering. For that reason the film is more of a base hit than a total strike out.

Read More

First Trailer and Poster for Disney's 'Million Dollar Arm' Starring Jon Hamm

What happens when you mix baseball, Slumdog Millionaire, and American Idol? You get Million Dollar Arm, a new Disney drama based on the reality competition series cooked up by agent J.B. Bernstein to find the latest baseball superstars from India's greatest cricket players. Sound a little ridiculous? Maybe, but Disney is bringing the inspirational story to the big screen and the first trailer has just taken the mound.

Jon Hamm stars as Bernstein, who is forced to come up with a radical new idea when he starts to lose ground to younger, more hungry agents. While watching a cricket match on Indian TV, he comes up with the idea to find the first major league baseball player ever from India, and heads to Mumbai to lead a competition series to pluck through 40,000 hopefuls. Alan Arkin, who seems stuck in crotchety old man mode, plays a combative scout, while Lake Bell is Bernstein's neighbor and love interest. Life of Pi star Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal are the two 18-year-old winners who are then flown to America where they learn cricket is nothing like playing baseball in the pros.

At one point, Bell's character says "This whole alternative family thing looks good on you", and the idea of creating a sense of family wherever one can is a theme writer Tom McCarthy has explored in all of his movies, from The Station Agent, to The Visitor, and Win Win. While this looks like a definite crowd-pleaser, McCarthy may be able to give it a bit more depth than this trailer suggests. Directed by Craig Gillespie, Million Dollar Arm opens May 16th.

Read More

15 Actresses Deserving of Oscars Attention (But Probably Won't Get It)

I'm bored of the old guard of actresses ruling the Best Actress field every year, and this Oscar season doesn't look to be any different. In fact, most of the main Best Actress contenders skew a little bit older, and of course Meryl Streep is there for August: Osage County, apparently because she wore a lot of make-up and didn't wear out her throat screaming for two hours. Good for her. Her place in the race is assured no matter what, but this year in particular there were a wealth of great performances by women who will probably be ignored by the Academy, even though they have as much right to be there as anybody.

So what I recognized, and this will be the case for male performances too, is that most of the performances that had the greatest impact on me probably have no shot at receiving a golden statue. What they all share in common for the most part are two things: youth and opportunity. The oldest actress on my list is veteran scene-stealer Kristin Scott Thomas who gives bad mothers an even worse name in Only God Forgives. Right next to her is TV vet Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who displays in Enough Said a wit and dramatic range could have made her a big screen star. Others, like Brie Larson for Short Term 12, are under 25 and taking advantage of their first chance to play truly complex, lived-in characters. And then there are those in-between like Gaby Hoffmann, who has been acting steadily for 25 years and is only now just starting to come into her own as a blissful hippie traveler in Crystal Fairy. And yeah, a few were just extremely hot, like the crimson-haired Christa Theret in Renoir as the woman who reignited the legendary artist's passion.

What I've tried to do in each case is provide a clip to show off why these extremely talented ladies were so unforgettable. As always, feel free to weigh in with your own picks!

Waad Mohammed- Wadjda



Melonie Diaz- Fruitvale Station



 Christa Theret- Renoir



Rosario Dawson- Trance



Kristin Scott Thomas- Only God Forgives



 Veerle Baetens- The Broken Circle Breakdown




Amy Acker- Much Ado About Nothing



Berenice Bejo- The Past



Gaby Hoffmann- Crystal Fairy



 Greta Gerwig- Frances Ha



Julie Delpy- Before Midnight




Lake Bell- In a World....



Shailene Woodley- The Spectacular Now



Julia Louis Dreyfus- Enough Said



Brie Larson- Short Term 12

Read More

Lake Bell Joins 'The Coup'; Brenton Thwaites in 'Gods of Egypt'; Salma Hayek Learns "Hot to Make Love"

* The multi-talented Lake Bell (In a World...) is moving back in front of the camera for The Coup, joining Owen Wilson and Pierce Brosnan in the thriller directed by John Erick Dowdle. Co-written by Dowdle and his brother Drew, the film centers on an American family living in Southeast Asia who must flee a dangerous rebel leader when a violent coup erupts. Bell will play "Annie Dwyer, a woman who is loved by everyone and has a seemingly perfect family life, but wonders sometimes if she should be happier than she is." [THR]

* Fast-rising star Brenton Thwaites, who has the Disney adaptation Maleficent and the lead role in The Giver coming up, has added another major project. He'll join Alex Proyas' Gods of Egypt, which stars Gerard Butler, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Geoffrey Rush. Thwaites will play a human thief who teams up with the god Osiris to get revenge on Set, who murdered his own brother and cursed the land. [Deadline]

* Salma Hayek has won the lead role in How to Make Love Like an Englishman, a sexually-charged romantic comedy that stars the suddenly ubiquitous Pierce Brosnan and Jessica Alba. Directed by Tom Vaughn, the story has Brosnan as a hedonistic Cambridge University professor who falls for the perfect woman played by Hayek. Unfortunately it happens after he's already impregnated her grad student stepsister, played by Alba. [Deadline]

Read More

Lake Bell joins 'Million Dollar Arm' with Jon Hamm and Suraj Sharma

Lake Bell has come a long way since she was one of David E. Kelley's many small-screen beauties, appearing on The Practice and starring in Boston Legal. She's proven herself a terrific comedic talent on Cartoon Network's Children's Hospital and in the vastly underrated A Good Old Fashioned Orgy. But she recently showed some significant directing skills with her debut feature, In a World..., which performed well at Sundance and is slated to drop later this year. The film recently played at Sundance London, and it was there that Bell revealed she's now joined the cast of baseball drama, Million Dollar Arm.

The Disney film features a script by Tom McCarthy (Win Win) and direction by Craig Gillespie, and stars Jon Hamm as sports agent J.B. Bernstein, who created a reality show for cricket players to find new Major League Baseball talent. Life of Pi star Suraj Sharma plays one of his discoveries, a pitcher who must learn to acclimate to America. Bell didn't spill the beans on her role, but she'll be joining a supporting crew that includes Alan Arkin and Aasif Maandvi.

Bell will be seen later this month in Black Rock, an indie thriller starring Kate Bosworth and Katie Aselton. You can find a review of that here. In a World....is slated to open on August 9th, and Million Dollar Arm takes the field in 2014. [ThePlaylist]

Read More

Sundance Review: 'Black Rock', starring Kate Bosworth and Katie Aselton

Since no successful female genre film can be allowed to flourish without comparison to one of it's male counterparts(Bridesmaids is the female Hangover!), Black Rock will unfortunately be tagged something like the all-girl version of Deliverance. It should be an honor to be mentioned in the same breath with a film of that caliber, but it and Black Rock only share surface similarities. Based on a story by star Katie Aselton and written by her husband Mark Duplass, two indie stalwarts who helped revolutionize the "mumblecore" movement, the note perfect dialogue and commitment to character is what helps separate Black Rock from the pack, even as some of it's more cliche elements drag it back down.

Lou(Lake Bell) and Sarah(Kate Bosworth) are two old friends headed for a camping getaway in one of their favorite childhood spots, an isolated island off the coast of Maine known as Black Rock. When they arrive at the docks, they are met by Abby(Aselton), and it's clear from the start there's some old anger between her and Lou. Sarah lied to them both in order to get them together, and patch up the feud that's been boiling for six years. Using a combination of guilt and deception, Sarah convinces both to stay.

On the island, old emotions quickly bubble to the surface. Lou and Abby nearly come to blows, while Sarah struggles to play peace maker. Thinking they have the place all to themselves, the women relax and try to fix old wounds, but it's not long before they're shocked by the arrival of three hunters. Before you think this will devolve into a bunch of drunken rednecks groping at the hot city chicks, it's played in a totally different way. All three men are soldiers fresh from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's something just not quite right. Like they need to be mixed into society a bit more slowly. Recognizing that one of the men is the younger brother of a high school friend, Abby makes the fateful decision to invite them to dinner by campfire.

Awkward conversation full of empty pauses are only interrupted by Abby's drunken flirting. Inviting one of the men into the woods for a little action, he gets too aggressive and tries to rape her, but in defending herself Abby accidentally kills him. In response, his friends tie the women up and beat them to a bloody pulp. Hell bent on getting revenge by killing the women in brutal fashion, with one wanting to 'go all Hadji on them', they instead set the women free in order to hunt them down like animals.

While the world "mumblecore" is hated by those associated with it, what the small budget, indie movement specializes in is naturalistic dialogue and forging believable human interactions. Duplass, who wrote the brilliant scripts for movies like Cyrus and The Puffy Chair, puts that skill to perfect use here with the three women. They talk and rib each other in the way only people who know each other's most intimate secrets can. They fight like sisters, and that more often than not means getting a little dirty in the most hurtful ways. Bell, Bosworth, and Aiselton in a surprising dramatic turn(if you've seen her in The League it's an eye opener) are all excellent at capturing how these women evolve under such severe adversity.

Ironically, it's Duplass' characterization of the men that falls short. By making them soldiers, often referred to as heroes in the film, the impression is that they won't be just another silly, over-the-top, screeching bad guy like we always see in these movies. Unfortunately that's exactly what we get, and it blunts some of the film's well earned realism. As the hunters get louder and more clownish, the film soon starts to feel very familiar, and there aren't enough twists to sustain the momentum. Clocking in at roughly 80 minutes, it could have used a bit more to further flesh out the women's fight for survival.

Having never seen Aselton's previous directorial efforts, her unflinching, in your face style was a welcome surprise. In particular she never backs down on the level of violence perpetrated, and a lot of the film's power comes from not knowing just how far things are going to go.

Black Rock is a very good survival thriller, but it could have been great if the secondary characters were treated with the same respect as the central ones.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Read More

Review: It's Complicated

My biggest beef with Nancy Meyers' films is that she has the tendency to leave us poor men in the dust. We're either hopeless or clueless. I just never got the feeling that she has any sort of ear for male dialogue. By contrast, a writer like Nick Hornby who has been accused in the past of not being able to write women wrote arguably the strongest female lead of the year in An Education. Here, Meyers does her best writing of men yet in a film that frankly succeeds by the skin of it's teeth and the strength of it's leads.

The incomparable Meryl Streep plays Jane, an almost unnaturally successful baker with a huge glamourous house. The house is an issue for me. It feels like it's there solely to be used as a plot device, and it definitely is. Jane also has an ex-husband, Jake, played with his usual brilliant comic timing by Alec Baldwin. Jake is married to the same woman he cheated on Jane with 10 years prior, the much younger and somewhat looney Agness. Jane is just finally starting to get ahold of her life, but as is to be expected, things don't quite go as planned.

Jake is in the middle of one of those midlife crisis things. He's no longer in love with the woman he married, burdened by the many needs of a parent that he thought he was past now that his other kids have already grown up. During a trip to NY to celebrate their son's graduation, Jake and Jane revisit old memories. Drinks get drank, nature starts rising, and the two fall into old habits...and into bed. For Jake, Jane is like his own personal shot of B-12. She invigorates him, makes him feel younger again, ironically given their ages, and it's like they never left. For Jane, it's a confusing act that goes against how she's been her entire life. She's now the homewrecker she and her friends always hated, but damn if it ain't fun!

It's Complicated walks a fine line between madcap hilarity and sitcom cliche, and most of it starts when Jane meets her architect, Adam(Steve Martin). Adam is building a new wing onto her house because...well, I guess it's just not quite huge enough. She needs a kitchen that can rival Julia Child. Doesn't quite ring true, but that's a minor quibble. Adam represents a potential fresh start for Jane. A genuinely good guy, without Jake's bloviating and smugness. The two hit it off like gangbusters, only confusing her situation even more.

Meryl Streep could find depth and nuance out of reading the phone book. It's not often that we get to see her playing "the other woman", but she pulls it off with genuine ease. Apparently she can do whatever she puts her mind to. She's sexier and funnier than ever, and when she and Alec Baldwin are together it makes for one wild ride. Baldwin does what he does best, playing the overgrown big lug with a big ego and even bigger strut. Jake's enthusiasm for Jane is infectious, and you can see how these could have once been in love. I was less convinced by the pairing of Jane and Adam, and that's no knock on Steve Martin. His character just seems like more of a bland outline of a "decent guy" than a genuine person. He does everything right, gets hurt at just the right moments, and basically stands as a less interesting but acceptable option to Jake. Ok, not totally uninteresting. He does know how to get high, and seeing Steve Martin and Meryl Streep stoned out of their minds is as funny as it sounds. Definitely one of the film's highest notes. I can also say that I finally liked John Krasinsky in something not on TV. Watching him stumble around as Jane's future son-in-law who finds himself knowing more than he ever hoped to about Jane and Jake is an absolute riot.

There's a lot to like here. Meyers is mining some of the same material she explored in 2003's
Something's Gotta Give, which I liked but felt somewhat disconnected from. Her point there seemed to be to highlight the burgeoning "cougar" generation while simultaneously crucifying men who date younger women, and I found it irritating. It's Complicated has no such ideas. It's just plain funny. Nothing complicated about that.
6/10

Read More