WEIRDLAND

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Bipolar: Kim Novak, Amanda Bynes, Catherine Zeta Jones, The Informant (Matt Damon)

CBS has won the rights to a new half-hour comedy that will be executive produced by Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The show, More Time With Family, will star comedian Tom Papa and has been given a put pilot commitment. According to Deadline, the comedy “centers around a guy (Papa) who changes his career and gives up a life on the road to spend more time at home with his family.” The project was originally created between Damon and Papa, who have worked together on several films including "The Informant!" and HBO’s Liberace film "Behind the Candelabra." The two have agreed to team up with Ben Affleck’s company Pearl Street Films and 20th Century Fox to produce the show. Source: www.pastemagazine.com

Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre in "The Informant!" (2009) directed by Steven Soderbergh

Damon is superb as a demonically smart guy who comes across as rather dim. Is Whitacre a knight in shining armor, a compulsive liar, playing secret agent or plagued by mental illness? Or is he all of the above?

With his earnest demeanor and straightforward delivery, Damon convincingly obfuscates Whitacre's motives. We don't question his veracity as much as try to muddle through it. A big part of the fun is piecing together the puzzle that is Whitacre. In a strange but fascinating touch, Damon voices his inner monologue. Often, his thoughts — an inane stream of consciousness — seem wholly unrelated to what's going on around him, which adds an intriguing absurdist quality to an already quirky tale. We come to realize Whitacre is the least reliable narrator in an already slippery setting. Source: usatoday30.usatoday.com

Kim Novak in "Vertigo" (1958) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Kim Novak's Bipolar Disorder: After leaving her hand and footprints in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater (a signal honor for actors and actresses), Kim Novak was interviewed by Bob Osborne, the host of Turner Classic Movies. In front of a small live audience, she revealed for the first time that she has bipolar disorder, and that it played a role in her decision to leave Hollywood so long ago.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Kim as saying, during the interview, that her father suffered from depression and there was a great deal of conflict at home during her chldhood. She also said she wasn't diagnosed with bipolar until much later in life. Now, she indicated, she takes medication, but as her condition was undiagnosed, not treatment was available for her then. "I go through more of the depression than the mania part," she said. Kim told Osborne that she "plans to hold an exhibition of her paintings for the first time next year, and will devote the proceeds of any sales to mental health philanthropies." Source: bipolar.about.com

Following months of speculation about Amanda Bynes' mental illness, a new report indicates that the star has both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The formal diagnosis was made while Amanda was still being treated at UCLA Medical Center, which she recently left for a rehab center in Malibu. “It was difficult to process for her parents," a source said, despite the fact that Amanda Bynes' mental illness was what they both expected. Source: www.thehollywoodgossip.com

Catherine Zeta Jones in "Side Effects" (2013) directed by Steven Soderbergh. Catherine Zeta-Jones has recently battled bipolar II disorder and checked into a health care facility for treatment.

The Bipolar Boom: "In the United States, people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia are losing twelve to twenty years in life expectancy compared to people not in the mental health system.” Robert Post added: “Right now, fifty years after the advent of antidepressant drugs, we still don’t really know how to treat bipolar depression. We need new treatment algorithms that aren’t just made up.” Although “bipolar” illness is a diagnosis of recent origin, first showing up in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980 (DSM-III), medical texts dating back to Hippocrates contain descriptions of patients suffering from alternating episodes of mania and melancholia. Jules Baillarger, dubbed this illness la folie à double forme. In his 1969 book, Manic Depressive Illness, George Winokur at Washington University in St. Louis treated unipolar depression and bipolar illness as separate entities."

Gateways to Bipolar: "Today, according to the NIMH, bipolar illness affects one in every forty adults in the United States, and so, before we review the outcomes literature for this disorder, we need to try to understand this astonishing increase in its prevalence. Psychotropic drugs—both legal and illegal—have helped fuel the bipolar boom. In 2003, former NIMH director Lewis Judd and others argued that many people suffer “subthreshold” symptoms of depression and mania, and thus could be diagnosed with “bipolar spectrum disorder.” There was now bipolar I, bipolar II, and a “bipolarity intermediate between bipolar disorder and normality,” one in every four adults now falls into the catchall bipolar bin, this once-rare illness apparently striking almost as frequently as the common cold. Four million American adults under sixty-five years old are on SSI or SSDI today because they are disabled by mental illness. One in every fifteen young adults (eighteen to twenty-six years old) is “functionally impaired” by mental illness."
-"Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America" (2010) by Robert Whitaker.

Friday, October 18, 2013

Matt Damon: Behind the Candelabra clip, Tom Ripley's guarded sexual identity


EXCLUSIVE CLIP: Matt Damon Talks About 'Behind The Candelabra', Starring Michael Douglas As Liberace 'Behind the Candelabra', on home release today, sees him turn convincingly into a teenage hot-shot Scott Thorson, drawn into the extravagant world of Vegas star Liberace. The couple's long relationship, through various trips to the drug dealer and the plastic surgeon, is the subject of 'Candelabra', which won Best Movie at the recent Emmys, and another gong for director Steven Soderbergh. Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

With appropriate fin de siècle melancholy and the relentlessness of a thriller, ''Ripley'' nails both the wonder that has attended our century's celebratory version of the American dream and the anxiety that is stirred up by that dream's stealthy doppelganger. ''Ripley'' asks us to identify with an American man who, like so many before him, believes in the democratic ethos that says anyone can jettison the past, wipe the slate clean and with pluck and luck be whoever he or she wants to be. The earnest, upwardly mobile Tom Ripley, played by Damon, isn't particularly greedy or ambitious, but he does want to rise above his drab circumstances to grab the right, socially acceptable lifestyle, along with love and money.

Dickie Greenleaf -- a dazzling all-American golden boy and a role very likely to confer stardom on the British actor Jude Law -- is off idling in Italy, sybaritically pursuing a dilettante's calling as a jazz saxophonist and a romance with Marge Sherwood (Paltrow), an aspiring writer from his Park Avenue set. Dickie's disapproving dad offers Tom $1,000 to visit his son in Italy and bring him home to take his rightful place in the family business.

In ''Vertigo,'' James Stewart was John (Scottie) Ferguson, a smart, emotionally remote detective whose psyche plunges into voyeurism and sexual obsession once he is sent by a shipping magnate on a mission that tosses him into a bizarre plot of mistaken identity, murder and suicides both real and faked. In ''Ripley,'' Damon, only recently seen as Steven Spielberg's American Everyman, Private Ryan, portrays another smart, emotionally reticent Peeping Tom, and his parallel assignment for another shipping magnate tosses him into similar horrors.

Where Scottie wants to remake the Novak character into his dream girl, Tom wants to remake himself into his dream boy. He wants to duplicate Dickie -- in looks, in savoir-faire, in Gucci accessories -- until he can pass as being to the manner, and perhaps even to the Greenleaf manor, born. ''I always thought, Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,'' Tom says, and no matter what the human cost, including the annihilation of his own self, he will not be denied.

Damon is in every scene of the film and, with his initially bookish and wholesome presence, serves as its irresistible bait. There's much to like about Tom. He's cultured (he travels with the collected Shakespeare and Blue Guides), talented (he plays Bach at the piano) and sensitive (he seems to care for Dickie's variously ill-treated women more tenderly than Dickie does). ''Everybody's not been invited to the dance at one time or another,'' says Damon, who took on the gutsy and demanding assignment -- for which he lost weight, studied piano and modulated his vocal pitch and posture -- in part because of his identification with the character's ''total discomfort in his identity'' and his compassion for the character's ''deep, intense loneliness.''

Blanchett, intriguingly, plays a character that didn't exist in Highsmith: another expatriate East Side socialite who gets caught in the Tom-Dickie web. In a witty inversion of Ripley's efforts to trade up in social class, she uses an assumed name to disguise her identity as a textile heiress. As written and acted, the role adds a shimmering Jamesian portrait of a trapped American woman to the canvas, and it is but one of many significant alterations Minghella has made to the novel. Minghella, who is not gay, also had to figure out what to do about the book's use of Ripley's guarded sexual identity. In the novel, Marge says dismissively of Tom: ''All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean."

During their final weeks on the film, the director and editor kept tinkering subtly with the closing footage of Damon so that Minghella could land the cathartic blow he wanted, in which the audience is left alone with Ripley in an inky psychological no man's land. Source: www.nytimes.com

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

George Clooney & Matt Damon in "The Monuments Men" Trailer # 2


The Monuments Men - Official Trailer #2 (2013) starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, etc.

It's a testosterone filed movie preview with George Clooney's next directional project, THE MONUMENTS MEN starring George Clooney of course, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, French actor Jean Dujardin and the sole woman Cate Blanchett. Watch the new trailer preview.

Matt Damon as James Rorimer and George Clooney as George Stout in "The Monuments Men" (2013)

THE MONUMENTS MEN could easily be a companion piece to Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, but this one is based on a true story and adapted from the book by Robert M. Edsel with Brett Witter. A World War II platoon is sent in to Germany by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves. Among the army men are seven museum directors, curators and art historians who know nothing of shooting an M-1. The group, referred to as the Monument Men, race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of artwork before the Reich as their army falls to American forces.

The George Clooney-directed film opens December 18, 2014. Source: cinemovie.tv

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of "Nightcrawler"

Scans of Jake Gyllenhaal in GQ (Australia) magazine, November 2013

Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of "Nightcrawler" on October 13th, 2013

Nightcrawler, which began shooting on October 6, is set LA and also stars Bill Paxton and Rene Russo, who is wed to the film's director, Dan Gilroy.

The star was filmed walking out of a police station while clad in loosely fitted trousers, a white button-up shirt and tie, and a jacket that hung off his sloping shoulders. Even his usually handsome waving hair appeared to have undergone a change. His brown locks were long and combed back as though his character, Lou, hadn't had time for a haircut either.

On Monday, the action moved to Venice Beach, where the actor was filmed stealthily sneaking out from behind palm trees in his striking outfit of grey pants, brown oxfords and pale pink shirt. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of "Nightcrawler" on October 14th, 2013, Los Angeles

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Claire Trevor: B-Movies & Noir Heroine

"Girls, young women, or really any woman who trudges off to the theater can be expected to find a universe that looks much like their husbands, brothers, and sons, and ends right there, fifty percent of the way through real life. Could this be what’s causing the grand total of around five percent of women working behind the camera? If you grow up without heroes you can emulate on screen, wouldn’t you automatically turn to books, music, or another other art form where you felt you’d be heard? The fine folks who operate websites can cultivate female critics and commentary, reward diversity, and seek out dissenting opinions. We can use our own mental devices, such as avoiding marketing; to counter the tricks a billion dollar business is trying to pull on us. Millions of people are emotionally moved by film every day, let’s turn it back into a tool that moves the culture forward, presenting new ideas and ways of thinking, encouraging discussion about art. That tool is invaluable, and we’ve let most of it slip through our hands by supporting too much lesser cinema." -“How Studios Abandoned Women to Focus on Sequels and Superheroes And Why It’s Ruining Cinema” (2013) by Laremy Legel

Claire Trevor arrived in Hollywood after signing a contract with Warner Brothers in 1925. She had few stars in her eyes when she arrived as a girl living the ‘American Dream’, seeking success and willing to work long lackluster hours. Among her admirers were William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, also known as the ‘Dollar Bills’ because none of their films ever lost money. Unusually, because Trevor came to Hollywood directly from her first love, the theatre, she already understood that movie-making was not an art form, but an industry that existed to generate wealth.

She was a star who more than most represented the rapidly changing moods of her culture and time, moving easily along with her audience, between the high optimism and grandiose scale of Western frontier idealism to the forlorn desperation, depression, corruption and deep set shadows of Film Noir. She was the consummate actress of her generation, performing unerringly as the glamorous leading lady opposite every top male star from Robinson and Bogart to Tracy, Douglas and Wayne.

Claire Trevor in "The Amazing Doctor Clitterhouse" (1938) directed by Anatole Litvak

The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse was billed as a bizarre, exciting and amusing story, in which Robinson gave his greatest performance as a highly respected neurological surgeon whose interest in the mental and physical reactions of criminals at the moment they were engaged in illegal activities becomes an obsession. Eventually he decides to use himself as a guinea pig and he embarks on a career of ruthless crime.

The offers never dried up, but she continued to be treated as an asset rather than a fully-fledged and competitive star. The pattern repeated itself when, in quick succession she made The Velvet Touch, Corkscrew Alley and Key Largo. Again Hollywood shouted that Trevor would be tops, only for her once more to be forgotten.

Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor in the 1942 film "Street Of Chance."

Film Noir offered portraits of complex female characters. Here, she had the chance to exist as a champion alongside the biggest male stars of the day. In what were often shocking performances, Trevor could portray the darkest sides of the female. Her characters could be selfish, possessive, slovenly, calculating, callous and even masochistic, intelligent, shrewd and cunning, often lacking in morals, but always aware of her unique feminine tools.

From 1933 through 1938 Trevor starred in twenty nine films, often having either the lead role or the role of heroine and usually playing a sweet young woman in B movie potboilers and cheap westerns. Disillusionment swiftly crept.

Claire Trevor and John Wayne in "Stagecoach" (1939) directed by John Ford

Life was tough and uncomfortable for her at Fox. She, like many other female stars, found it excruciating to be out riding in the California sun in velvets and heavy costumes. None of the sound stages had air conditioning, “They had big fans to blow some air in but the stages would be red hot with the lights and especially if it was color because the lights they used for color were much more potent and radiated much more heat. And I didn’t like locations much more. You’d be traipsing around in forests and hills.”

William Wyler delivered a powerful adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s play, delving keenly into the social inequities of contemporary urban life and he successfully submerged Trevor’s fresh blonde beauty into the characterization of an unkempt hardened prostitute and former sweetheart of gangster Bogart. Under his tutelage she delivered a powerful electrifying performance as a downtrodden streetwalker opposite Bogart that lit up the sensitivity of both actors.

She also enjoyed working alongside Bogart and McCrea. “Joel was so nice and so handsome. I remember hearing him on the telephone outside my dressing room, calling Frances Dee, his wife. He was talking to her in just the sweetest way and I thought that girl is so lucky.”

Warner Bros had wanted her to sign up for a five year stint, telling her they wanted her to be their “Oomph Girl.” Although she turned them down, once more she later regretted it saying that Warners did make the kind of movies that suited her talents. “I was foolish and Ann Sheridan became the “Oomph Girl instead.”

"For some reason John Ford was interested in me as an actress, I couldn’t understand why, because I had nothing at Fox that would have shown any promise. You can imagine how thrilled I was when he sent me the Stagecoach script."

Later, Ford himself felt her performance in Stagecoach went largely unnoticed by the critics because she was so subtle in it. “At the end of the first rough cut, he told me that. He and I were good friends. We had a rapport. He said, ‘It’s going to be great. And you are so good in it, they’re not even going to realize how good you are’. That was a big compliment. And he didn’t give them out often."

Crack Up (RKO) 1946 was directed by Irving Reis. Here Trevor played a more sympathetic noire femme opposite Pat O’Brien, who Trevor later recalled as a “dear man, warm and wonderful off screen.” “I played villainesses in many films but it never entered my mind if people thought I was like the characters I played. If they did that was their hard luck. It never bothered me. You had to make those parts believable and some of them were not written in a way that was true to life. They were the concoctions of a dreaming author so that was the difficulty. Nothing is any good unless it’s believable.”

"Born to Kill" (1947) directed by Robert Wise, was critiqued as a “homicidal drama strictly for the adult trade” and a “sexy, suggestive yarn of crime and punishment.” A grim business about a killer, his marriage for money and his extra-marital yens and the reviewers also referred to “More Trevor neuroticism.”

Claire Trevor in "The Velvet Touch" (1948) directed by Jack Gage

Trevor had done plenty of good work in bad pictures but in 1948 she stormed into what was to be her last film noire, recapturing lost ground in Key Largo. A star of lesser caliber might not have wanted to take the risk that Trevor grabbed with this movie. Trevor turned in an extraordinary performance as washed-up, boozy nightclub singer Gaye Dawn opposite Edward G Robinson’s big time gangster. She stole the show as his long suffering moll who is now a fallen favorite with fading looks and who drinks to forget.

Hollywood Reporter: Trevor’s performance is one of those superlative jobs of acting that comes from this performer whenever she is given the opportunity. It is played thoughtfully and intelligently and reaches heights of pathos in the sequence wherein she tries to recapture the days of her singing career.

She won the Oscar for best supporting actress. Trevor said, “Bogie was over for dinner a couple of nights before the Awards and he told me that if I won I should get up and say that I wasn’t going to thank anyone, that I did it all by myself.”

Trevor and Bogart were already close friends, “I always felt like he was my buddy and I appreciated his humor. I called him ‘Bogart’ not ‘Bogie’ and no one called him Humphrey except as a joke.”

She herself could often be dismissive of her career and of Hollywood, saying that she felt films were not an art but a business and that anyone, given a chance, could do what she did. It was instinctive and she never really valued her own talent. She had steadfastly refused to knuckle down to standard Hollywood convention and didn’t seem to accept or respect the mythology surrounding the biggest stars of her era. Her artistic honesty might have been too much for the Hollywood star system.

“Looking back on Hollywood, I think the demise of the studio system is just too bad because they knew how to make stars. They weren’t business men like they are today. To be the head of a big corporation doesn’t mean you know anything about show business. They were showmen in those days and they were marvelous. I made mostly B pictures. I never had a Howard Hawks fighting for me, or a Von Sternberg like Dietrich had. Or a Mauritz Stiller, like Garbo had. And then it became just work. I am talking about making movies in eighteen days. I am talking about working Saturday nights. I am talking about doing three pictures at once. I worked hard – like a demon actually. I was paid nicely. But let’s face it, the parts I would have given my soul for - Bette Davis got.” -"Claire Trevor: Queen of the Bs and Hollywood Film Noir" (2013) by Carolyn McGivern