One of my biggest complaints about Broadway theater is the lack of artistic risk. (Indeed, one could make the case that Julie Taymor’s cursed production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had the media riveted more by its performers’ injuries than by its Hollywood blockbuster budget. The safe Great White Way had become dangerous again!) Which is why it’s been like a breath of fresh air to take in several English-surtitled productions from Toneelgroep Amsterdam (headquartered a very easy hour’s train ride away from the International Film Festival Rotterdam), where in lieu of bodily harm to actors there’s a couple of Belgian directors willing to challenge not just an audience but themselves as well.
Both the company’s artistic director Ivo van Hove and Thalia Theater Hamburg’s Luk Perceval have each decided to tackle intensely philosophical works, pieces laden with heavy artistic baggage outside the cloistered theater world.
Both the company’s artistic director Ivo van Hove and Thalia Theater Hamburg’s Luk Perceval have each decided to tackle intensely philosophical works, pieces laden with heavy artistic baggage outside the cloistered theater world.
- 1/29/2012
- by Lauren Wissot
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
In the midst of our recessionary times, it might be comforting to read these great novels about people losing their jobs. Novelist Jess Walter recommends his favorites, from Saul Bellow to Bukowski.
Seize the Day By Saul Bellow
Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads
"Everyone was supposed to have money" -at least that's how it seems to Tommy Wilhelm, the divorced, unemployed salesman in Bellow's fevered story of ambition and regret. Living in an Upper West Side hotel with his father (who pesters Tommy to find a job where he'll make "five figures" ), Tommy has given his entire savings to a possible con man, and over a single, frenetic day, must hustle to avert disaster. Overheated and desperate, by turns despairing and determined, Tommy is one of Bellow's most affecting characters, a powerful refutation of the myth of the self-made American. As Bellow writes: "You...
Seize the Day By Saul Bellow
Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads
"Everyone was supposed to have money" -at least that's how it seems to Tommy Wilhelm, the divorced, unemployed salesman in Bellow's fevered story of ambition and regret. Living in an Upper West Side hotel with his father (who pesters Tommy to find a job where he'll make "five figures" ), Tommy has given his entire savings to a possible con man, and over a single, frenetic day, must hustle to avert disaster. Overheated and desperate, by turns despairing and determined, Tommy is one of Bellow's most affecting characters, a powerful refutation of the myth of the self-made American. As Bellow writes: "You...
- 11/30/2010
- by Jess Walter
- The Daily Beast
Chicago – One of our best living actors, John Malkovich, drives the very good drama “Disgrace” with the subtlety of his decisions as an actor reflected back in a complicated script based on the acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning novel by J.M. Coatzee. This is a rare film willing to leave some questions unanswered and to be content with the knowledge that life is full of gray moral areas more often than black and white.
Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0
Malkovich plays the supremely cocky David Lurie, a Professor at the University of Cape Town. We meet David sleeping with a prostitute and watch as he later beds a gorgeous student named Melanie (Antoinette Engel), a girl literally less than half his age. David is one of those men almost proud of the fact that he does as he chooses. He doesn’t literally rape Melanie, but her reaction to their sex together makes it...
Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0
Malkovich plays the supremely cocky David Lurie, a Professor at the University of Cape Town. We meet David sleeping with a prostitute and watch as he later beds a gorgeous student named Melanie (Antoinette Engel), a girl literally less than half his age. David is one of those men almost proud of the fact that he does as he chooses. He doesn’t literally rape Melanie, but her reaction to their sex together makes it...
- 5/5/2010
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
This decent, extremely faithful adaptation of Nobel laureate Jm Coetzee's 1999 Booker-winning novel is the work of an Australian team led by director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli. John Malkovich stars as the arrogant 52-year-old David Lurie, a lecturer in English literature at a Cape Town university, who loses his job after refusing to apologise sufficiently for an affair with a coloured student and then joins his lesbian daughter at a remote farm where she is raped by three young marauding black men. The contrasted ways father and daughter react to this terrible act define their responses to a radical social change.
Disgrace is both a compelling human fable and a complex, ambiguous allegory of post-apartheid South Africa, raising issues about white guilt, black vengeance, the shift in political power and the problems occasioned by the country's deeply divided past and problematically shared future. Malkovich invariably plays men apart...
Disgrace is both a compelling human fable and a complex, ambiguous allegory of post-apartheid South Africa, raising issues about white guilt, black vengeance, the shift in political power and the problems occasioned by the country's deeply divided past and problematically shared future. Malkovich invariably plays men apart...
- 12/6/2009
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Almost transcendental levels of humiliation await John Malkovich in a faithful adaptation of Jm Coetzee's award-winning novel
Jm Coetzee's 1999 Booker prizewinner, set in post-apartheid South Africa, has been respectfully transformed into a heartfelt, intelligent film with two very good performances at its centre. John Malkovich is the white Cape Town academic David Lurie, whose seduction of a mixed-race student initiates the first phase of a catastrophic personal downfall. Jessica Haines plays his grownup daughter Lucy, the intimate witness-participant in his ruin.
In its opening act, Professor Lurie's story runs along lines familiar from Philip Roth novels such as The Human Stain and A Dying Animal – both translated into movies of varying quality. Liberal academic males of a certain age defy the approaching chill of death and professional obsolescence, clinging fiercely to their passionate rapture for women's bodies and a refusal to concede culpability in the face of political correctness. Added to all this,...
Jm Coetzee's 1999 Booker prizewinner, set in post-apartheid South Africa, has been respectfully transformed into a heartfelt, intelligent film with two very good performances at its centre. John Malkovich is the white Cape Town academic David Lurie, whose seduction of a mixed-race student initiates the first phase of a catastrophic personal downfall. Jessica Haines plays his grownup daughter Lucy, the intimate witness-participant in his ruin.
In its opening act, Professor Lurie's story runs along lines familiar from Philip Roth novels such as The Human Stain and A Dying Animal – both translated into movies of varying quality. Liberal academic males of a certain age defy the approaching chill of death and professional obsolescence, clinging fiercely to their passionate rapture for women's bodies and a refusal to concede culpability in the face of political correctness. Added to all this,...
- 12/4/2009
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Theo Tait on the transition from page to screen of Coetzee's novel
It's often said that good novels make bad films: they're too nuanced, too complex, too long to fit into a slot two hours long. Readers don't thank film-makers for trampling on their treasured mental visions of a book – for making Sebastian Flyte shout "All you ever wanted was to fuck my sister!" at Charles Ryder, as in last year's film of Brideshead Revisited, or for casting Demi Moore as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter or Nicolas Cage as Captain Corelli. The resulting adaptations tend to be, at worst, a travesty (Bonfire of the Vanities, Love in the Time of Cholera) and, at best, faithful and bloodless (Atonement, Revolutionary Road) – weighed down by the desire to do justice to a big reputation.
Few contemporary novels have a bigger reputation than Disgrace, Jm Coetzee's chilly, shocking 1999 tale of post-apartheid South Africa,...
It's often said that good novels make bad films: they're too nuanced, too complex, too long to fit into a slot two hours long. Readers don't thank film-makers for trampling on their treasured mental visions of a book – for making Sebastian Flyte shout "All you ever wanted was to fuck my sister!" at Charles Ryder, as in last year's film of Brideshead Revisited, or for casting Demi Moore as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter or Nicolas Cage as Captain Corelli. The resulting adaptations tend to be, at worst, a travesty (Bonfire of the Vanities, Love in the Time of Cholera) and, at best, faithful and bloodless (Atonement, Revolutionary Road) – weighed down by the desire to do justice to a big reputation.
Few contemporary novels have a bigger reputation than Disgrace, Jm Coetzee's chilly, shocking 1999 tale of post-apartheid South Africa,...
- 11/28/2009
- The Guardian - Film News
Total Videos: (4)
Total Images: (2)');">Disgrace is Based on the Booker Prize winning novel by Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee, the story of a Professor, David Lurie that life falls apart after he has an impulsive affair with one of his students. Forced to resign from Cape Town University he escapes to his daughter's farm. The relationship is tested when they both become victims of a vicious attack.Starring John Malkovich and directed by Steve Jacobs.Watch the trailer after the jump.<a href='http://www.filmsnmovies.com/?img=2518/disgrace_01.jpg'><img src='http://www.filmsnmovies.com//media/galleries/2518/disgrace_01s.jpg'></a><center><embed width="460" height="300" src="http://www.filmsnmovies.com/player/?id=11146" bgColor="#Ffffff" quality="high" allowScriptAccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></center>...
Total Images: (2)');">Disgrace is Based on the Booker Prize winning novel by Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee, the story of a Professor, David Lurie that life falls apart after he has an impulsive affair with one of his students. Forced to resign from Cape Town University he escapes to his daughter's farm. The relationship is tested when they both become victims of a vicious attack.Starring John Malkovich and directed by Steve Jacobs.Watch the trailer after the jump.<a href='http://www.filmsnmovies.com/?img=2518/disgrace_01.jpg'><img src='http://www.filmsnmovies.com//media/galleries/2518/disgrace_01s.jpg'></a><center><embed width="460" height="300" src="http://www.filmsnmovies.com/player/?id=11146" bgColor="#Ffffff" quality="high" allowScriptAccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></center>...
- 10/18/2009
- Films N Movies
Chicago – In a stark and compelling tale of naked vulnerability, John Malkovich becomes the centerpiece of the continuing battle for territory and humanity within the country of South Africa, in the newly released “Disgrace.”
Rating: 4.0/5.0 Based on a novel by J.M. Coetzee, Malkovich portrays David Lurie, a Cape Town university professor who gets caught up in a career-ending scandal involving an affair with a mixed race student. Forced out of his realm, he takes up residence with his estranged daughter, a frontier practitioner living off the unyielding but beautiful country far from civilization.
Reduced to menial labor and an ascetic lifestyle, the professorial Lurie is useless when a gang of rebels raid the modest house, attacking him and raping his daughter. Forced now to deal with both his weakness and the lack of justice in the harsh territory, Lurie must come to terms with his own perceptions and face the...
Rating: 4.0/5.0 Based on a novel by J.M. Coetzee, Malkovich portrays David Lurie, a Cape Town university professor who gets caught up in a career-ending scandal involving an affair with a mixed race student. Forced out of his realm, he takes up residence with his estranged daughter, a frontier practitioner living off the unyielding but beautiful country far from civilization.
Reduced to menial labor and an ascetic lifestyle, the professorial Lurie is useless when a gang of rebels raid the modest house, attacking him and raping his daughter. Forced now to deal with both his weakness and the lack of justice in the harsh territory, Lurie must come to terms with his own perceptions and face the...
- 9/26/2009
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
SYDNEY -- John Malkovich starrer Disgrace, an adaptation of South African-born author J.M. Coetzee's 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel, is among three features and five TV drama projects marked for funding Thursday by the Film Finance Corporation of Australia. Described as an unflinching look at the ethical complexities of modern South Africa, Disgrace features Malkovich as disgraced Cape Town University professor David Lurie, who is forced to confront the irrevocable changes in his country. The screenplay was adapted by Australian writer-producer Anna Maria Monticelli, and her filmmaking partner Steve Jacobs is set to direct. Monticelli will co-produce with Emile Sherman, with Fortissimo Films handling international sales and Dendy Films distributing in Australia.
- 7/20/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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