After the success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.), one can hardly blame booksellers or filmmakers for running back to Sweden. The land of beautiful people, hot accents (Skarsgård!), pancakes and meatballs also seems to be a hotbed of thrillers (Three Seconds) just itching to be translated to film.
Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News, My Life as a Dog) will be taking on the Lars Kepler best-selling thriller, The Hypnotist. The book follows Detective Joona Linna investigating a triple homicide. After witnessing the murder of his family, the only survivor -- a young boy -- is so traumatized he cannot recount what happened. A renowned and retired psychologist is convinced to help; he agrees to hypnotize the boy to search his subconscious for clues. The story is said to be filled with unexpected twists and turns and the...
Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News, My Life as a Dog) will be taking on the Lars Kepler best-selling thriller, The Hypnotist. The book follows Detective Joona Linna investigating a triple homicide. After witnessing the murder of his family, the only survivor -- a young boy -- is so traumatized he cannot recount what happened. A renowned and retired psychologist is convinced to help; he agrees to hypnotize the boy to search his subconscious for clues. The story is said to be filled with unexpected twists and turns and the...
- 2/8/2011
- by Cindy Davis
Oscar-nominated director Lasse Hallstrom ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat," "Dear John") is set to direct his first Swedish film in 24 years with an adaptation of the best selling crime novel "The Hypnotist" by Lars Kepler says The Hollywood Reporter.
The film is the first in a planned franchise based on the Detective Joona Linna series, arguably the most successful and/or well-known Swedish crime novel series worldwide outside of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (ie. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series) and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander books.
In this novel, Linna investigates a grisly triple homicide where the only survivor, a young boy, is too traumatized to testify. Linna convinces a famous psychologist, against his better judgment, to hypnotize the boy, setting off a terrifying chain of events.
Hallstrom will begin shooting this winter for a planned 2012 release in Sweden. Borje Hansson, Bertil Ohlsson and Peter Possne will produce.
The film is the first in a planned franchise based on the Detective Joona Linna series, arguably the most successful and/or well-known Swedish crime novel series worldwide outside of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (ie. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series) and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander books.
In this novel, Linna investigates a grisly triple homicide where the only survivor, a young boy, is too traumatized to testify. Linna convinces a famous psychologist, against his better judgment, to hypnotize the boy, setting off a terrifying chain of events.
Hallstrom will begin shooting this winter for a planned 2012 release in Sweden. Borje Hansson, Bertil Ohlsson and Peter Possne will produce.
- 2/7/2011
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
"Keeping Mum" takes the position that a family in crisis does not need a Dr. Phil or a Dr. Ruth; it needs an ax murderer. Since we haven't enjoyed a genteel English dark comedy in ever so long, it's fun to revisit the genre and even more fun to do so in the company of Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith and Patrick Swayze. With a strong promotional push from ThinkFilm, "Keeping Mum" should attract a fair number of over-25 admirers of English comedy to sophisticated art houses.
Remarkably, this movie did not start out as an English comedy. The original screenplay was written by American novelist Richard Russo, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Empire Falls", inspired the HBO mini-series and who penned the screenplay for Harold Ramis' "The Ice Harvest". English director Niall Johnson adapted Russo's script to a bucolic English country-village setting of idyllic charm and quaintness, and somehow it all works.
Johnson has slyly given many place and personal names double meanings. For instance, the sleepy parish of Little Whallop has no trouble living up to its name. Gloria (Thomas), the desperate housewife of the town's vicar, Walter Goodfellow (Atkinson), suffers sexual frustration since her husband has seriously misplaced or lost interest in his goodfellow. So much so that a dalliance with Lance (Swayze), her oily American golf instructor, looks increasingly necessary though of course extremely foolish.
Meanwhile, daughter Holly (Tamsin Egerton) decorates a different boyfriend seemingly every other day. And son Petey (Toby Parkes) finds himself the target of school bullies. What the family needs to set things right is a touch of Grace (Smith), the new housekeeper who arrives with an ominous leather trunk.
Four decades ago, as a perky young woman, Grace was hauled off a train by police with that same trunk leaking blood. The source of these fluids turned out to be the dismembered bodies of her philandering husband and his mistress. Grace has only recently secured her release from a prison for the criminally insane despite the fact that the one point she and her psychiatrist could not agree upon was the use of violence to solve interpersonal problems.
So, not unexpectedly, an obnoxious barking dog, a nosy neighbor and a school bully turn up missing or dead. When Grace gets wind of Lance's intentions, his continuing good health is most definitely in jeopardy. What makes these murders go down ever so lightly is the fact that all this dreadful business takes place between perfectly brewed cups of tea and the most courteous of manners.
However, not all problems require physical exertion: When the vicar struggles to write an opening address to an upcoming religious convention that is not "dry and boring," Grace suggests a touch of humor. Soon enough, Walter is surfing the Net for sites like "Giggle With God" in search of good religious jokes.
The actors all strike just the right tone to carry off the black comedy. Atkinson, of course, has made a career out of playing comic distraction with brilliance. Here is no exception as his Walter Goodfellow notices almost nothing of life around him. On the other hand, Smith's Grace notices everything. She is the soul of practicality and sympathy -- to the point one can easily overlook her single character flaw.
Thomas displays hitherto underutilized comedic talents to explore sexual frustration that has reached the point where it overwhelms good sense. Swayze is pure id, without possessing any good sense to be overwhelmed. Egerton's nymphomaniac daughter sees boyfriends as her point of rebellion against stifling social and familial conformity.
Cinematographer Gavin Finney and designer Crispian Sallis create a magical English village out of locations in Cornwall and the Isle of Man.
"Mum" is not likely to attract many teens, but that R rating still grates. A softer R is hard to imagine. A few naughty words and momentarily bare breasts result in a rating equal to "The Wild Bunch". How silly is that?
KEEPING MUM
ThinkFilm
Summit Entertainment/Isle of Man/Azure Films present a Tusk production
Credits:
Director: Niall Johnson
Screenwriters: Richard Russo, Niall Johnson
Story by: Richard Russo
Producers: Julia Palau, Matthew Payne
Executive producers: Steve Wilkinson, Anne Sheehan, Steve Christian, Marc Samuelson, Bertil Ohlsson, David Garrett
Director of photography: Gavin Finney
Production designer: Crispian Sallis
Music: Dickon Hinchliffe
Co-producer: Nigel Wooll
Costumes: Vicki Russell
Editor: Robin Sales
Cast:
Walter Goodfellow: Rowan Atkinson
Gloria Goodfellow: Kristin Scott Thomas
Grace Hawkins: Maggie Smith
Lance: Patrick Swayze
Holly: Tamsin Egerton
Petey: Toby Parkes
Mrs. Parker: Liz Smith.
Running time -- 104 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Remarkably, this movie did not start out as an English comedy. The original screenplay was written by American novelist Richard Russo, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Empire Falls", inspired the HBO mini-series and who penned the screenplay for Harold Ramis' "The Ice Harvest". English director Niall Johnson adapted Russo's script to a bucolic English country-village setting of idyllic charm and quaintness, and somehow it all works.
Johnson has slyly given many place and personal names double meanings. For instance, the sleepy parish of Little Whallop has no trouble living up to its name. Gloria (Thomas), the desperate housewife of the town's vicar, Walter Goodfellow (Atkinson), suffers sexual frustration since her husband has seriously misplaced or lost interest in his goodfellow. So much so that a dalliance with Lance (Swayze), her oily American golf instructor, looks increasingly necessary though of course extremely foolish.
Meanwhile, daughter Holly (Tamsin Egerton) decorates a different boyfriend seemingly every other day. And son Petey (Toby Parkes) finds himself the target of school bullies. What the family needs to set things right is a touch of Grace (Smith), the new housekeeper who arrives with an ominous leather trunk.
Four decades ago, as a perky young woman, Grace was hauled off a train by police with that same trunk leaking blood. The source of these fluids turned out to be the dismembered bodies of her philandering husband and his mistress. Grace has only recently secured her release from a prison for the criminally insane despite the fact that the one point she and her psychiatrist could not agree upon was the use of violence to solve interpersonal problems.
So, not unexpectedly, an obnoxious barking dog, a nosy neighbor and a school bully turn up missing or dead. When Grace gets wind of Lance's intentions, his continuing good health is most definitely in jeopardy. What makes these murders go down ever so lightly is the fact that all this dreadful business takes place between perfectly brewed cups of tea and the most courteous of manners.
However, not all problems require physical exertion: When the vicar struggles to write an opening address to an upcoming religious convention that is not "dry and boring," Grace suggests a touch of humor. Soon enough, Walter is surfing the Net for sites like "Giggle With God" in search of good religious jokes.
The actors all strike just the right tone to carry off the black comedy. Atkinson, of course, has made a career out of playing comic distraction with brilliance. Here is no exception as his Walter Goodfellow notices almost nothing of life around him. On the other hand, Smith's Grace notices everything. She is the soul of practicality and sympathy -- to the point one can easily overlook her single character flaw.
Thomas displays hitherto underutilized comedic talents to explore sexual frustration that has reached the point where it overwhelms good sense. Swayze is pure id, without possessing any good sense to be overwhelmed. Egerton's nymphomaniac daughter sees boyfriends as her point of rebellion against stifling social and familial conformity.
Cinematographer Gavin Finney and designer Crispian Sallis create a magical English village out of locations in Cornwall and the Isle of Man.
"Mum" is not likely to attract many teens, but that R rating still grates. A softer R is hard to imagine. A few naughty words and momentarily bare breasts result in a rating equal to "The Wild Bunch". How silly is that?
KEEPING MUM
ThinkFilm
Summit Entertainment/Isle of Man/Azure Films present a Tusk production
Credits:
Director: Niall Johnson
Screenwriters: Richard Russo, Niall Johnson
Story by: Richard Russo
Producers: Julia Palau, Matthew Payne
Executive producers: Steve Wilkinson, Anne Sheehan, Steve Christian, Marc Samuelson, Bertil Ohlsson, David Garrett
Director of photography: Gavin Finney
Production designer: Crispian Sallis
Music: Dickon Hinchliffe
Co-producer: Nigel Wooll
Costumes: Vicki Russell
Editor: Robin Sales
Cast:
Walter Goodfellow: Rowan Atkinson
Gloria Goodfellow: Kristin Scott Thomas
Grace Hawkins: Maggie Smith
Lance: Patrick Swayze
Holly: Tamsin Egerton
Petey: Toby Parkes
Mrs. Parker: Liz Smith.
Running time -- 104 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 9/29/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Fate is the hunter in this romantic drama, covering the tumultuous '30s and early '40s in Europe, which wants to mix character study with historical context but winds up with unconvincing melodrama. As an infamous playgirl winning and breaking hearts with reckless abandon, newly crowned Oscar winner Charlize Theron delivers an eye-catching performance, while Penelope Cruz contents herself with an offbeat supporting role with homoerotic overtones. Evoking Hemingway's fiction and movies ranging from Casablanca to The English Patient, John Duigan's Head in the Clouds, for all its attentive period details, glamour and music, is a hollow exercise.
The film should appeal to older adults, who fondly recall old Hollywood tales of clandestine activities and affairs set in the crumbling social mores of a world at war. Dollops of nudity and kinky sex spice up what otherwise might pass for a Warner Bros. patriotic programr, circa 1942, about World War II and the heroic underground Resistance.
What perhaps distinguishes Duigan's version from those films is how the movie, its plot and characters pivot around the notion of fate. In the opening scene, a palm reader refuses to tell a young girl her fortune because I saw your 34th year. This ambiguous fate not only causes that girl, Gilda Besse (Theron), to lead a hedonistic life devoted to mind-numbing pleasure and multiple sex partners, but also seems to bring people together and thereafter intricately intertwine their destinies.
One night, fate directs Gilda, a French-American heiress already notorious for her affairs, into the quarters of Guy (Stuart Townsend), an Irish-born student at Cambridge. There she hides out until morning to avoid compromising her lover, a university don. For his chivalry, Guy gets invited to a party with the decadent aristocratic set, where he falls further in love with the madcap heiress.
Three years later, she pops up again in Paris and in a fit of nostalgia summons Guy to her studio/apartment. Here she lives with the beautiful but lame Spanish refugee and model-cum-striptease artist Mia (Cruz) and dabbles in avant-garde circles as a neorealist photographer. Soon all three live together, forming an interesting menage that passes for normal in Paris between the wars.
Unlike Gilda, though, Guy and Mia possess social consciences, so the Spanish Civil War beckons them both to the Republican cause. Gilda feels betrayed since she believes in living for the moment. There will always be wars, she pouts.
A brief interlude sums up Guy and Mia's civil war experiences, in which fate allows their paths to cross only for fate to snuff out Mia's life. Guy then returns to Paris, only Gilda coldly rejects him. Six years later, he parachutes into occupied France as an Allied spy. A pretty bad one, apparently, for he cannot resist returning to his old haunts, where everyone knows him, to confront Gilda, who has taken up with a Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann). One more surprise awaits us before Gilda faces her fateful 34th year.
In truth, there are no real surprises. Things follow the predictable course of most World War II movies. Unlike, say, Casablanca, where personal and historical destinies are masterfully intertwined, the two seem on parallel tracks in Head in the Clouds: Shallow lives superficially examined and brief snippets of 20th century history interrupt one another, with neither illuminating the other. The only real surprise is how little chemistry there is between Theron and Townsend.
Theron does suggest what might have been a fascinatingly complex and ambiguous heroine had Duigan chosen to focus his movie on her.
But Guy is the focus and, frankly, he is the least interesting person in the movie, more narrator than actor. Even Steven Berkoff as Gilda's father and several of her lovers come across with more elan.
Period music and decor are excellent, demonstrating what can be done on a modest budget.
HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
Sony Pictures Classics
Movision
Credits:
Writer-director: John Duigan
Producers: Michael Cowan, Bertil Ohlsson, Jonathan Olsberg, Jason Piette, Andrew Rouleau, Maxime Remillard
Executive producers: Julia Palau, Matthew Payne
Director of photography: Paul Sarossy
Production designer: Jonathan Lee
Music: Terry Frewer
Costume designer: Mario Davignon
Editor: Dominique Fortin
Cast:
Gilda: Charlize Theron
Mia: Penelope Cruz
Guy: Stuart Townsend
Maj. Bietrich: Thomas Kretschmann
Charle Besse: Steven Berkoff
Lucien: David La Haye
Lisette: Karine Vanasse
MPAA rating: R
Running time -- 120 minutes...
The film should appeal to older adults, who fondly recall old Hollywood tales of clandestine activities and affairs set in the crumbling social mores of a world at war. Dollops of nudity and kinky sex spice up what otherwise might pass for a Warner Bros. patriotic programr, circa 1942, about World War II and the heroic underground Resistance.
What perhaps distinguishes Duigan's version from those films is how the movie, its plot and characters pivot around the notion of fate. In the opening scene, a palm reader refuses to tell a young girl her fortune because I saw your 34th year. This ambiguous fate not only causes that girl, Gilda Besse (Theron), to lead a hedonistic life devoted to mind-numbing pleasure and multiple sex partners, but also seems to bring people together and thereafter intricately intertwine their destinies.
One night, fate directs Gilda, a French-American heiress already notorious for her affairs, into the quarters of Guy (Stuart Townsend), an Irish-born student at Cambridge. There she hides out until morning to avoid compromising her lover, a university don. For his chivalry, Guy gets invited to a party with the decadent aristocratic set, where he falls further in love with the madcap heiress.
Three years later, she pops up again in Paris and in a fit of nostalgia summons Guy to her studio/apartment. Here she lives with the beautiful but lame Spanish refugee and model-cum-striptease artist Mia (Cruz) and dabbles in avant-garde circles as a neorealist photographer. Soon all three live together, forming an interesting menage that passes for normal in Paris between the wars.
Unlike Gilda, though, Guy and Mia possess social consciences, so the Spanish Civil War beckons them both to the Republican cause. Gilda feels betrayed since she believes in living for the moment. There will always be wars, she pouts.
A brief interlude sums up Guy and Mia's civil war experiences, in which fate allows their paths to cross only for fate to snuff out Mia's life. Guy then returns to Paris, only Gilda coldly rejects him. Six years later, he parachutes into occupied France as an Allied spy. A pretty bad one, apparently, for he cannot resist returning to his old haunts, where everyone knows him, to confront Gilda, who has taken up with a Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann). One more surprise awaits us before Gilda faces her fateful 34th year.
In truth, there are no real surprises. Things follow the predictable course of most World War II movies. Unlike, say, Casablanca, where personal and historical destinies are masterfully intertwined, the two seem on parallel tracks in Head in the Clouds: Shallow lives superficially examined and brief snippets of 20th century history interrupt one another, with neither illuminating the other. The only real surprise is how little chemistry there is between Theron and Townsend.
Theron does suggest what might have been a fascinatingly complex and ambiguous heroine had Duigan chosen to focus his movie on her.
But Guy is the focus and, frankly, he is the least interesting person in the movie, more narrator than actor. Even Steven Berkoff as Gilda's father and several of her lovers come across with more elan.
Period music and decor are excellent, demonstrating what can be done on a modest budget.
HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
Sony Pictures Classics
Movision
Credits:
Writer-director: John Duigan
Producers: Michael Cowan, Bertil Ohlsson, Jonathan Olsberg, Jason Piette, Andrew Rouleau, Maxime Remillard
Executive producers: Julia Palau, Matthew Payne
Director of photography: Paul Sarossy
Production designer: Jonathan Lee
Music: Terry Frewer
Costume designer: Mario Davignon
Editor: Dominique Fortin
Cast:
Gilda: Charlize Theron
Mia: Penelope Cruz
Guy: Stuart Townsend
Maj. Bietrich: Thomas Kretschmann
Charle Besse: Steven Berkoff
Lucien: David La Haye
Lisette: Karine Vanasse
MPAA rating: R
Running time -- 120 minutes...
- 9/24/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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