Fanfare posts tagged with MarkRuffalo Posts tagged with 'MarkRuffalo' at Fanfare. Sun, 19 Aug 2018 07:57:58 -0800 Sun, 19 Aug 2018 07:57:58 -0800 en-us 60 Movie: The Normal Heart A gay activist attempts to raise H.I.V. and A.I.D.S. awareness during the early 1980s.,2018:site.12134 Sun, 19 Aug 2018 07:57:58 -0800 ellieBOA Movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind When their relationship turns sour, a young couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories. <a href="">Rolling Stone</a>: The core of the movie is what's going on in Joel's head. And it's here that the filmmakers lavish their most creative and insightful notions. As Joel struggles to hold on to the memories of the woman he truly loves, Kaufman and Gondry grapple with the concept of memory itself and how it defines our lives. This is heady stuff — gorgeously shot by Ellen Kuras — that might fly off the handle into meta-hot air were it not for the grounded and groundbreaking performances of Carrey and Winslet. Never once do we doubt the bond that holds these embattled lovers despite their crippling flaws.<br> <br> <a href="">The Atlantic</a>: At its core, Eternal Sunshine is about the need for atonement and redemption. "Freed" from the memory of their painful breakup, Joel and Clementine can no longer forgive nor ask forgiveness for past hurts received or inflicted, and can reconcile neither with one another nor with themselves. Their past together is like a frayed nerve that leads nowhere, the phantom limb of the amputee. No matter how many times they wander in the footsteps of their lost memories they can never recapture them. It is only through Fate or God's grace or True Love--or, for the more literal-minded, a glitch in Lacuna's process--that they are given a second chance to make themselves whole. These are admirably big themes.<br> <br> <a href="">Entertainment Weekly</a>: ”Eternal Sunshine” has a lilting psychological fancy, yet it works because it’s also rough and real and intimate and alive, with Gondry using a handheld camera to stage backward leaps in time that feel, in execution if not tone, highly influenced by ”Memento.” Kaufman, never shy about excess, keeps multiplying the structural complications. A subplot with Kirsten Dunst as another Mierzwiak assistant is nifty and clever; the one with Elijah Wood’s Patrick exploiting the memory procedure for his own gain is a tad underdeveloped. Yet the cumulative impact leaves the audience happily and profoundly buzzed.<br> <br> <a href="">NYTimes</a>: The inspiration for ''Sunshine,'' seems to be Harold Ramis's ''Groundhog Day,'' which -- like any great movie -- gains in stature as time passes. Where Bill Murray dominated that film -- and its accomplishment seemed overshadowed because he bestrode the picture like a giant -- ''Sunshine'' is filled with a group of outsize selfish folks whose minor-league brattiness makes the second half of the film funny and ugly.<br> <br> <a href="">Slate</a>: The laws of time and space are constantly flouted, yet the film moves along an unbroken thread of memories—a filament that's white-hot with emotion. Like the greatest science fiction writers, Kaufman is using a bizarre futuristic scenario to tell us something about the here and now: about the loss of our most vivid loves to the impermanence of memory; and about the life we lose when, to go on living, we force ourselves to forget. In Being John Malkovich (1999), Kaufman boxed himself into a corner and the movie went sour, but here he comes up with a beautiful and searching last scene—irrational in its hopefulness yet completely convincing.<br> <br> <a href="">Roger Ebert</a>: The wisdom in "Eternal Sunshine" is how it illuminates the way memory interacts with love. We more readily recall pleasure than pain. From the hospital I remember laughing nurses and not sleepless nights. A drunk remembers the good times better than the hangovers. A failed political candidate remembers the applause. An unsuccessful romantic lover remembers the times when it worked.<br> <br> <a href="">Trailer</a><br> <br> <a href="">Now streaming on Netflix</a><br> <br> <a href="">The Science of Eternal Sunshine</a><br> <br> <a href="">Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind? Scientists develop 'proof of principle' that memories can be erased</a><br> <br> <a href="">Happy 10th Anniversary, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!</a><br> <br> <a href="">Must Watch: The CG Effects of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</a><br> </ahref>,2018:site.10943 Thu, 01 Mar 2018 19:00:46 -0800 MoonOrb Movie: Spotlight In the summer of 2001, new Boston Globe editor-in-chief Marty Baron tells his staff on the paper's "Spotlight" team that he wants them to focus on allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Initial incredulity aside, they come on board, one by one. This movie is a journalism procedural, which means there's a lot of talking, digging for facts in musty basements and libraries, and some courtroom maneuvering to boot. Director Todd McCarthy ("The Station Agent") eschews scenes of high emotional drama in favor of quiet revelation: a great example is when reporter Sacha Pfeiffer's extremely Catholic grandmother reads the initial, groundbreaking report of the coverup and quietly asks Sacha for a glass of water.<br> <br> Standout performances: Michael Keaton (Walter Robinson), Mark Ruffalo (Mike Rezendes), Rachel McAdams (Pfeiffer), Liev Schreiber (Baron) and Stanley Tucci playing a plaintiff's lawyer that's essentially a composite of several real-life people. <br> <br> One of the most effective moments in the film is the final shot as well as the end credits, where we learn conclusively that the abuse and its coverup were <strong>worldwide</strong>. The Globe itself does not escape scot-free either. <br> <br> I saw this movie in a city close to Boston, where some parishes were definitively scarred by the abuse and coverup. As the credits rolled, more and more people applauded... I think they needed some time to digest what they'd just seen. It's that kind of movie. <br> <br> Notable reviews:<br> <br> <ul><br> <li>Ty Burr in the <a href="">Boston Globe</a></li><br> <li>Michael Phillips, <a href="">Chicago Tribune</a></li><br> <li>A.O. Scott, <a href="">The New York Times</a></li><br> </ul>,2015:site.5273 Sat, 28 Nov 2015 15:15:07 -0800 Sheydem-tants Movie: Foxcatcher Wrestler Mark Schultz forms a relationship with his new sponsor, millionaire John du Pont, as they train for the 1988 games in Seoul - a union that leads to unlikely circumstances as both men feel inferior to Mark's revered brother, Dave. From the <i>Variety</i> review by Justin Chang:<br> <br> <blockquote>In “Capote” and “Moneyball,” Bennett Miller gazed into the souls of real-life American iconoclasts launching bold and unexpectedly costly new enterprises, a theme that the director has now taken to powerfully disturbing extremes in his great, brooding true-crime saga “Foxcatcher.” Chronicling the events leading up to the 1996 murder of Dave Schultz, the Olympic wrestling champion who tragically found the wrong benefactor in the Pennsylvania multimillionaire John E. du Pont, this insidiously gripping psychological drama is a model of bleak, bruising, furiously concentrated storytelling, anchored by exceptional performances from Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and an almost unrecognizable Steve Carell. Perhaps the sole credible awards-season heavyweight to have emerged from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Nov. 14 Sony Classics release should land with major impact among serious-minded moviegoers, as well as a possible cross-section of Tatum and Carell fans who don’t mind a dramatic change of pace.<br> <br> Despite its hefty 134-minute running time, “Foxcatcher” doesn’t have an ounce of the proverbial narrative fat: If the screenplay, by Dan Futterman (“Capote”) and E. Max Frye, is relatively spare in terms of dialogue, it’s satisfyingly rich and thorny in its conception of the tightly wound triangle at its center, while Miller’s direction evinces the same sustained intensity and consummate control of his material that defined his first two features.</blockquote><br> <br> You can read the <a href="">full review here</a>.<br> <br> According to Wikipedia, <i>Foxcatcher</i> will receive a limited release on November 14, 2014.<br> <br> <strong>Director:</strong> <a href="">Bennett Miller</a><br> <strong>Writers:</strong> <a href="">E. Max Frye</a>, <a href="">Dan Futterman</a><br> <br> <a href="">Trailer</a>,2014:site.1392 Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:13:21 -0800 joseph conrad is fully awesome Movie: Zodiac A San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac killer. Roger Ebert outlines the accomplishments of the film in his 2007 <a href="">film review</a>:<br> <br> <blockquote>"Zodiac" is the "All the President's Men" of serial killer movies, with Woodward and Bernstein played by a cop and a cartoonist. It's not merely "based" on California's infamous Zodiac killings, but seems to exude the very stench and provocation of the case. The killer, who was never caught, generously supplied so many clues that Sherlock Holmes might have cracked the case in his sitting room. But only a newspaper cartoonist was stubborn enough, and tunneled away long enough, to piece together a convincing case against a man who was perhaps guilty.<br> <br> The film is a police procedural crossed with a newspaper movie, but free of most of the cliches of either. Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years, and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful. I could imagine becoming hopelessly mired in the details of the Zodiac investigation, but director David Fincher ("Seven") and his writer, James Vanderbilt, find their way with clarity through the murk. In a film with so many characters, the casting by Laray Mayfield is also crucial; like the only eyewitness in the case, we remember a face once we've seen it.</blockquote><br> <br> Wikipedia has a detailed section about the <a href="">development</a> of <i>Zodiac</i>, of which one background story concerns the director's own personal history:<br> <br> <blockquote>Fincher was drawn to this story because he spent much of his childhood in San Anselmo in Marin County during the initial Zodiac murders. "I remember coming home and saying the highway patrol had been following our school buses for a couple weeks now. And my dad, who worked from home, and who was very dry, not one to soft-pedal things, turned slowly in his chair and said: 'Oh yeah. There's a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who's threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus.'" For Fincher as a young boy, the killer "was the ultimate boogeyman". The director was also drawn to the unresolved ending of Vanderbilt's screenplay because it felt true to real life, as cases are not always solved.</blockquote><br> <br> (Footnotes removed, see <a href="">Wikipedia</a> for full details.)<br> <br> From the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="">review</a> by Manohla Dargis:<br> <br> <blockquote>Informed by history and steeped in pulp fiction, “Zodiac” stars a trio of beauties &mdash; Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo &mdash; all at the top of their performance game and captured in out-of-sight high-definition digital by the cinematographer Harris Savides. Mr. Gyllenhaal is the sneaky star of the show as the real-life cartoonist turned writer Robert Graysmith, though he doesn’t emerge from the wings until fairly late, after the bodies and the investigations have cooled. A silky, seductive Mr. Downey plays Paul Avery, a showboating newspaper reporter who chased the killer in print, while Mr. Ruffalo struts his estimable stuff as Dave Toschi, the San Francisco police detective who taught Steve McQueen how to wear a gun in“Bullitt” and pursued Zodiac close to the ground.</blockquote><br> <br> <a href="">IMDb Trivia</a> (more at link):<br> <ul><li>"The shooting script was 200 pages long. To combat any problems with overlength that might be caused by such a big script, David Fincher decided to make his actors speak faster."</li><br> <li>"The producers hired a private investigator to track down the real-life Zodiac survivor, Mike Mageau."</li><br> <li>"The only real comment that Robert Graysmith said about the finished screenplay was 'God, now I see why my wife divorced me'."</li><br> <li>"The real-life Zodiac survivor, Bryan C. Hartnell, makes a cameo with his wife in the police station."</li><br> <li>"Even though Jake Gyllenhaal was David Fincher's first choice for the role of Robert Graysmith, had Gyllenhaal turned the role down, Fincher's second choice was Orlando Bloom."</li><br> <li>"Jake Gyllenhaal shares one of the film's creepiest scenes with Charles Fleischer. In real life, the two have known each other since when Gyllenhaal was three years old."</li></ul><br> <br> <i>"If it was so important, what did you do? Hovered over my desk? Stole shit out of wastebaskets? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm being unkind. You went to the library."</i><br> <br> <b>Director:</b> <a href="">David Fincher</a><br> <b>Writers:</b> James Vanderbilt (screenplay), Robert Graysmith (book)<br> <br> Links<br> <a href="">Movie Trailer</a><br> <a href="">The script (pdf)</a>,2014:site.1265 Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:55:59 -0800 joseph conrad is fully awesome Movie: Begin Again The latest film from writer-director John Carney (ONCE), BEGIN AGAIN is a soul-stirring comedy about what happens when lost souls meet and make beautiful music together. Lovelorn songwriter Gretta (Keira Knightley) meets Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a disgraced record-label exec. From this chance encounter emerges an enchanting portrait of a mutually transformative collaboration, set to the soundtrack of a summer in New York City.,2014:site.431 Sun, 27 Jul 2014 12:46:32 -0800 jacquilynne