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PG-13-ifying adult-centric horror classics doesn't necessarily mean debasing what made the original so great. Given the MPAA's weird post-millennial bloodlust, releasing John Carpenter's original "Halloween" today could probably earn the film a PG-13, provided those damaging bare breasts were concealed. And it's more exciting to consider scares without an explicit focus on blood and gore, so a hypothetical PG-13 remake of something like "Friday the 13th" would sound both incredibly dumb and slightly interesting, given that the restrictive rating might promise a new emphasis on ideas, concepts, and scares that last beyond opening night.
"Hellraiser" is not one of those concepts. Adapted by Clive Barker from his own series of short stories "The Hellbound Heart," the original film saw release in 1987. It dealt with a lead character, unfulfilled by his ritualistic S&M practices, who then finds an ancient puzzle box that tears his soul apart. When a former lover moves into his abandoned house with his brother, he returns to the flesh, desperate for victims to feed upon to regain his humanity. However, a council of leather-clad elders for all things debauched and disturbed, the Cenobites, are aware of this disturbance in the natural order. His suffering, they promise, will become legendary.
So yeah, freaky sex, bloodletting, supernatural monsters. Everything about the blood-soaked original (and the underrated second film) screams R-rated. Not to The Weinstein Company though, who now view this long-in-development property as appropriate for a teen audience. They have hired director Christian E. Christiansen to helm a PG-13 take, despite previously flirting with Pascal Laugier and the team of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, the French filmmakers behind grisly Gallic bloodbaths "Martyrs" and "Inside," respectively. Christiansen is about to make his American debut with "The Roommate," the Minka Kelly/Leighton Meester thriller that looks like eight hundred other PG-13 teen-horror permutations starring pretty people with hateable faces. We actually saw the trailer basically get booed off the screen at New York Comic Con.
The "Hellraiser" series is an unusual case, in that it's receiving the big screen treatment as it continues to have a strong shelf life on the, well, shelf. The Weinsteins purchased the property, which has spawned eight sequels (the last four direct-to-DVD), but their remake hopes were dashed by a poor development period, resulting in the need to make a new film, or to lose the property. The Weinsteins being stingy as always, have commissioned "Hellraiser: Revelations" to hit disc sometime in 2011, keeping their remake hopes alive, though it wouldn't be a surprise if that were more watchable than seeing Baby Pinhead bludgeon his victims with pool noodles.
The first bonafide awards season controversy (of sorts) has arrived thanks to the MPAA slapping a boneheaded NC-17 rating on the indie drama "Blue Valentine" last week. For many, this once again underscored the inconsistency of the ratings board and its bizarre preference for bloody violence over anything resembling nudity (and strangely enough, "Blue Valentine" doesn't have any violence or nudity). For pretty much everyone who has seen the film (including us) the rating makes absolutely no sense.
Following The Weinstein Company's announcement that they plan to appeal the ruling, director Derek Cianfrance has spoken out about the box office-killing rating his film has received, saying, “we were shocked by it, in all honesty. I think we made a very respectful film. It’s not exploitative. It’s honest, it’s intimate… it leaves a lot to people’s imaginations. And we’re going to fight it. We all respect the MPAA and the work that they do but we think that this decision is wrong.”
However, he does take heart in the support he's received from those who have seen the film and disagree with the MPAA, saying, “I have been surprised and honored that so many people have come to the defense of the film. There’s nobody in the press or the public that have seen the film that seem to agree with the decision.”
The film, which has been tweaked and edited by Cianfrance since it debuted at Sundance earlier in the year (it was ten minutes shorter at Cannes and a few more minutes were shaved for TIFF), is the version he feels "everyone should see." But whether or not that happens is up to the MPAA.
While there are numerous theories as to what scene or sequence the MPAA were offended by, the bottom line is no one gets naked or blown up in the film; yes, it's an emotionally intense and raw-nerved film but we don't recall that being a reason to tag the film with a rating that will effectively kill it on the vine. An R rating is certainly more appropriate and realistic, but whether the "family values" led MPAA will realize the error of their ways we'll have to wait and find out. And in case you missed it, here's the trailer.
The Weinstein Company are doing some release date shuffling as the Oscar season begins to go into full gear.
As was expected following the news earlier this week that Julian Schnabel's "Miral" was heading out of 2010, The Weinstein Company have confirmed that the film will get a limited release on March 25, 2011. With the film getting a lukewarm response from critics at both Venice and TIFF, any chances of awards season hope the film might have had are non-existent now so no surprise that the studio isn't going to throw money after it. Word was that Schnabel continued to tinker with the film after it unspooled in Venice so don't be surprised if he continues to fine tune it before it hits theaters.
Meanwhile, "The Company Men" has been pushed from its previously scheduled October 22nd release date right into the heart of awards season prestige and blockbuster territory, hitting theaters on December 10th. The downsizing drama starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner and Maria Bello was directed by John Wells, premiered at Sundance, was picked up by The Weinstein Company and then sort of forgotten about. Well, TWC will have time to get it back on everyone's radar with a couple more months to get some marketing out there and certainly, they'll be piggybacking off what is sure to be a Warner Bros. Oscar campaign for "The Town." No word yet on the fate of "Blue Valentine," recently tagged with a ludicrous NC-17 rating. Things have been surprisingly quiet from the TWC camp which leads us to believe Derek Cianfrance is quietly re-cutting/submitting the film (note: he's been shaving the running time down since Sundance; it was ten minutes shorter at Cannes and few more minutes shorter at TIFF) and/or they are going through the appeals process quietly. When the studio went public with their outcry regarding the R-rating for "The Tillman Story" earlier this year, it didn't seem to make much difference.
File under: expected move. "No, it's not just a rumor. Julian Schnabel's 'Miral' has been pushed into 2011," wrote David Poland on Twitter early this morning.
While we probably shouldn't take this as official announcement word yet, it's not much of a surprise. Originally positioned as an awards contender with a December 3, 2010 release, the film pretty much tanked upon arrival with critics at the 2010 Venice Film Festival earlier this year. This meant many critics — including our reporters in the field — skipped the film and any heat the picture might have briefly gone has evaporated.
The Weinstein Company, while seemingly bouncing back from their financial woes, still don't have a huge Oscar budget. They basically pick one show pony and ignore the rest because they essentially don't have the dough to back more than one contender. And since "The King's Speech" won the Toronto International Film Festival's audience prize (and the Hamptons film festival prize this weekend) and is already considered a major Oscar Best Picture shoo-in, it's no shocker that "Miral" is being tossed off into 2011. No doubt the studio will have to rethink the date and then reconfigure what to do with the picture.
Bit of a shame, we're huge fans of Schnabel's "The Diving Bell & The Butterfly" and "Before Night Falls," ("Basquiat" to a lesser extent), but we assume the guy had to shoot a dud one of these days. That said, we'll still give it a shot, whenever we get the chance to see it.
Adapted by Rula Jebreal's novel of the same name, the drama revolves around a real orphanage in Jerusalem set up by a Palestinian woman (Hiam Abbass). From the looks of the trailer, Freida Pinto seems to take center stage here as a former inhabitant of the orphanage. The film also stars Willem Dafoe, Yasmine Elmasri, Alexander Siddig and Vanessa Redgrave. We're sure we'll hear official word sometimes soon, but until then it's probably TBD 2011.
Update: Kris Tapley at In Contention has confirmed the report, and says that the film will be released in March 2011. According to an Variety piece from September, Schnabel has edited the picture "much differently" since debuting in Venice.
>>> Julian Schnabel's 'Miral' Reportedly Pushed Into 2011 >>>
The MPAA has made some boneheaded, confounding and confusing decisions in the past but his one is a serious head-scratcher. The ratings board has inexplicably come down very hard on the forthcoming Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams-starring relationship drama "Blue Valentine" giving the film a dreaded NC-17 rating.
So what raised the ire of the ratings board? According to Deadline, the sequence in question involves the couple (Gosling and Williams), who in the midst of the worst emotional crisis of their relationship, head to a theme hotel to spend the night to try and sort things out. They both get drunk and he wants to have sex, but she doesn't. However, in order to keep the peace, she agrees to anyway. It's a tough moment, but certainly not violent; if anything it's wrenching and unsettling, but like the rest of the film, it's bracingly honest and mature about the complexities of a relationship on the rocks and that extends to sex too. The scene itself is hardly explicit and the film has no nudity really, except for a flashback scene where Williams is shown having sex with an ex-boyfriend at college; you see partial bum (gasp!), but that scene is also emotionally difficult for entirely different reasons that we won't spoil here.
It's unknown what action The Weinstein Company will take or if they will appeal the decision at all. Earlier in the year they already butted heads with the MPAA who tagged their documentary "The Tillman Story" with an R-rating (which stood after they appealed), and their other major awards season horse, "The King's Speech" is also stuck with an R-rating thanks to a single scene where the word "fuck" is uttered excessively (more than three "fucks" and you automatically get an R-rating).
But as is pointed out countless times, the MPAA is a strangely conservative group. Foul language and sex are given a hard time, while the group doesn't bat an eye at violence. We'd be surprised if The Weinstein Company let this go without a fight, so expect them to respond quickly. If the rating stands, it makes things very difficult for The Weinstein Company. They could release the film unrated but that would pretty much kill its box office, or they could ask director Derek Cianfrance to make some edits to the offending scene but there's no word yet on if he would be willing to do so. Either way it's an asinine move from the MPAA in a long line of absurd, asinine moves. Torture porn films get R-Ratings and a relationship drama with little sex gets a NC-17? The misguided decision boggles the mind.
Here's our first look at Michelle Williams in her role as the iconic Marilyn Monroe in Simon Curtis' "My Week With Marilyn."
It's a remarkable similarity for Williams, often and rightfully touted as one of the best actresses of her generation. The story uses the diaries of Colin Clark (to be played by rising star Eddie Redmayne), an assistant on the set of the 1956 film "The Prince And The Showgirl," and tells the story of the tumultuous production which teamed Monroe up with Laurence Olivier.
Lensing on "My Week With Marilyn" began today in London with Julia Ormond and Dougray Scott also added to the cast, which already boasts the likes of Kenneth Branagh as Olivier, Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike, Emma Watson as a costume designer, Dominic Cooper as producer Milton Greene, Derek Jacobi as a royal librarian and Toby Jones in an unnamed role. Ormond, in fact, replaces Catherine Zeta Jones who was evidently set to play the role of Vivien Leigh but had to pull out due to her husband, Michael Douglas' recent throat cancer diagnosis, while Scott will play Arthur Miller.
Scribe Adrian Hodges adapted Clark's diaries for the screen with David Parfitt ("Shakespeare In Love") producing through his Trademark Films shingle, and The Weinstein Company already on board as distributor and co-financeers along side BBC Films and Lipsync Productions.
Like pairing chocolate and milk or peanut butter and jelly, The Weinstein Company have sealed up an instant awards horse, getting Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts to team up for the big screen adaptation of the Tony-award winning play, "August: Osage County."
Set to be directed by John Wells ("The Company Men") and utilizing a screenplay by the playwright Tracy Letts, the film will find Streep once again stretching her talents playing "Violet, the drug-addicted matriarch of the working class Weston clan. Roberts will play Barbara Fordham, the oldest daughter in the family. While mom's problems and her penchant for revealing family secrets is a big issue, Barbara is melting because her husband is cheating with a college student. They are brought together when Violet's husband goes missing and all three of their daughters come home to rally around mom. In the process, a lot of family secrets get revealed." Sounds pretty damn great.
Production on the film is set to begin by next summer. What effect this might have on the gestating Streep vehicle "Great Hope Springs" with Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini, which was aiming for a March shoot, remains to be seen, but we hope it's still in the works.
PG-13-ifying adult-centric horror classics doesn't necessarily mean debasing what made the original so great. Given the MPAA's weird post-millennial bloodlust, releasing John Carpenter's original "Halloween" today could probably earn the film a PG-13, provided those damaging bare breasts were concealed. And it's more exciting to consider scares without an explicit focus on blood and gore, so a hypothetical PG-13 remake of something like "Friday the 13th" would sound both incredibly dumb and slightly interesting, given that the restrictive rating might promise a new emphasis on ideas, concepts, and scares that last beyond opening night.
