Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence's dark love story in "Serena", Suki Waterhouse in "Insurgent"

It’s 2015 and a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper movie is going straight to video. Let us help explain the confusion that is Serena. Hypable reports that the movie was filmed in the same time span as Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle — films that earned Jennifer and Bradley a collective four Oscar nominations, with Jen taking home the Best Actress statue for Playbook. Given the box office success of the two movies, not to mention the Oscar nods and the star power of the two actors, it doesn’t seems practical to skip a theatrical release for Serena.

Movie critics chimed in with possible explanations, citing everything from poor reviews to the 18 months the movie spent in post-production. Vulture claims, “Some of its flaws are obvious: Bier has no feel for the Smoky Mountains, or the Depression, or, really, America, and the story doesn’t flow with any particular coherence, let alone momentum. Other flaws are harder to pin down. The tone is distressingly subdued for a film that’s ostensibly about rapacious ambition run amok. The script never really decides whether Serena is a calculating cutthroat or a winsome woodland foundling. (Or neither. Or both!)”

The New York Post panned Bradley and Jennifer’s performances, saying he “struggles with a Boston accent,” while she “has trouble making believable an eagle-training independent woman who goes mad after a miscarriage and the discovery that she may have to share her husband’s love with his newborn illegitimate son.” Back in September, the Hollywood Reporter noted that multiple distributors passed on picking up the movie, even when three different versions were cut. One potential buyer reportedly said, ”The film was so edited, it made no sense.” Source: popcrush.com

Speaking with The Times, Susanne Bier insists her vision for the Depression-era drama was never one for mass consumption, but things changed as the film's stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence became more famous. "I had to fight for Jennifer when we were financing the movie,” Bier says. “I had to fight for her! But we cast them both, and in the interim, they became these huge stars, and that changed the expectations around the movie. It was always a dark, dark, love story. Never a mainstream film.”

And while Bier never comes right out and says it, the participation of Cooper and Lawrence seemed to change as they became more cautious about the resulting picture. "It did become a more complex process. And I want to say that neither of them [Cooper and Lawrence] —I mean, Bradley has come to Copenhagen and has been engaging very much in the editing. And they both have been really supportive and great. But it, er, it is more complex. I think what happened is that a lot of people got more anxious because they became such big stars and...” Source: blogs.indiewire.com

Filming will take place at the old garage next to Heav’nly Donuts. North Reading Police said the film going by the names of both “Joy” and “Kay’s Baptism” will be back for more shooting on Winter Street on Monday, March 23 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The film stars Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro. They have been filming in Wilmington and North Reading over the past month. The Winter Street garage has been transformed into a Hollywood set. Source: patch.com

Hollywood has been criticized for not creating many strong roles for women, but “Divergent” boasts an enviable roster of female talent, including Sahilene Woodley, Naomi Watts and Kate Winslet. Not only is the movie centered on a woman, played by Woodley, but her main antagonist, played by Winslet, is female. “These explorations of young women in science fiction, by its category and very nature, feels fresh and exciting,” said producer Doug Wick.

Cast members said they hoped that the commercial response to “Divergent” and other female-driven blockbusters such as “The Hunger Games” may help shatter glass ceilings across the entertainment industry. “We have A-list, we have new stars, we have veterans, we have the whole spectrum of female talent,” said Maggie Q, one of the film’s stars. “Everybody brings what they bring in such a complete way that I really hope that more female ensembles will happen because they really don’t happen that often.” Source: variety.com

Suki Waterhouse is preparing to make an impact in The Divergent Series: Insurgent. The 23-year-old model plays the role of Marlene, a member of the Dauntless faction in the sequel to the 2014 movie Divergent. Divergent was the first film in the planned series and last year Summit Entertainment announced the third book in the trilogy will be split into two parts with Allegiant - Part 1 due out in March 2016 and Allegiant - Part 2 scheduled for release in March 2017.

Suki, no doubt, has been getting plenty of acting tips from her Oscar-nominated boyfriend Bradley Cooper. 'We were introduced and hit it off almost immediately,' she said in an interview with Rollercoaster magazine. 'We were dancing at the after-party, and he asked me if I fancied going to a club. We went to Cirque Le Soir in London – and he's a ridiculously good dancer,' she added. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Suki Waterhouse in GQ magazine, April 2015
UPDATE: Bradley Cooper and Suki Waterhouse have split up. Source: uk.eonline.com

Happy Anniversary, Raoul Walsh!

Happy Anniversary, Raoul Walsh (March 11, 1887 - December 31, 1980). “I’m a lone wolf in this business,” Raoul Walsh told Hedda Hopper in an interview in January 1965.


"The Bowery" (1933) directed by Raoul Walsh, is a historical film about the Lower East Side of Manhattan around the start of the 20th century, starring Wallace Beery and George Raft.

Director Raoul Walsh filming "The Bowery" (1933) with scenarist James Gleason, cameraman Bert Glennon and star George Raft

In New York City, the Bowery that Walsh later put on film was already a sprawling tenement full of lower-class concert halls, brothels, and flophouses, an area Walsh soon relished as a childhood hangout. The ships and schooners that he spent hours sniffing out as a kid and that billowed into huge proportions in his films Captain Horatio Hornblower and Blackbeard the Pirate already stirred his imagination—there they were, docked at New York’s Peck’s Slip, a romantic neck of the city that Walsh and his younger brother, George, loitered in regularly. Even the gangs on the Lower East Side were taking over Hell’s Kitchen and adjacent neighborhoods that Walsh later re-created on the “New York” streets of Warner Bros. for The Roaring Twenties, his Cagney-Bogart gangster picture.

Known in Hollywood as the San Quentin of the movie studios, Warner Bros. earned the moniker, not only because the company’s signature product—dark social realism and gangster pictures—made great profits during the 1930s and 1940s, but also because Warner’s obsession with running a tight ship was almost legendary. Walsh thought that he had found studio nirvana, especially after his freelance days following his parting from William Fox nine years earlier. To him, Warner Bros. was “a plum for any director.” Not only did Warner’s no-nonsense style in turning out pictures suit him, but the studio’s essentially somber, naturalistic view of the world—which produced stories about men and women trying to change their often unalterable fate or rallying against it—also suited Walsh’s own worldview. His heroes, usually fleeing from one world to find a better one and not usually succeeding, made him a good choice for the top material Warner Bros. contract writers produced.

With its dark and gritty palate, its brokendown characters who try to but cannot outdistance or overcome their milieu of psychological and economic hard times, They Drive by Night is quintessential Warner Bros. of the 1940s, a picture in the tradition of what the critic Manny Farber later called the “broken field journey,” his descriptive way of talking about films in which characters break down emotionally on a road fraught with peril. Drawn partly from a novel by A. I. Bezzerides, and partly recycled from an earlier Warner Bros. picture, Bordertown, starring Bette Davis, this picture, like Walsh’s Manpower to come, offers moviegoers the cinematic equivalent of literary naturalism—a story characterized by the inability of men and women to control or to get out from under the unforgiving social forces that loom large and significant around them. Walsh gave his hard-knocks characters both a lyricism and a biting wit in this story of two brothers who try to make a go of it as truckers in Los Angeles but find only heartache and hard times for their efforts.

With a shooting script now in place, filming of "High Sierra" began just outside Lone Pine, California, on August 5, 1940, even though numerous other locations in the area were also used. Walsh shot the climactic chase scene fifteen miles west of Lone Pine on a slope at the side of Mt. Whitney, about eighty miles from the “sink” of Death Valley. A group of twenty men from the studio worked for four days to clear a path so that mountain-trained mules, packing cameras and other equipment, could get up to the shooting area. But the event most everyone remembered was Walsh’s colorful wardrobe. Since the cast and crew did a good amount of hunting and fishing, Walsh wore a seven-colored jacket at Arrowhead and Palm Spring locations—to make certain that hunters there would not mistake him for a deer. Bogart had to run three miles up a mountainside for two days for the ending sequence, and everyone was surprised that the only injury he received was a skinned knee.

High Sierra is Walsh’s riskiest film of the early Warner Bros. period because of the emotional depth he gives the characters. Unlike They Drive by Night, which is moved by the same kind of raw swagger that would characterize the sensibility of the upcoming Manpower, High Sierra swiftly dives inside the hearts of its characters and finds in them a deep sense of sadness and loss. The pervasive sorrow that defines Earle and Marie originates, of course, in Burnett’s novel. But Walsh taps into it so readily, clicks into place with it so firmly, that at some level his own psyche merges with those of his characters. Unconsciously or not, he allows himself close proximity to their vulnerabilities. His camera catches them in medium shots and close-ups—close enough to their faces, earmarking their sad posturing. Their anxiety and worry pervade the entire film frame. Earle and Marie are not the hard-as-nails firecrackers from They Drive by Night.

Burnett’s novel makes it explicit that Earle is a conflicted soul, easily joining Walsh’s repertoire of characters longing for an unattainable sense of peace who emerge in his 1940s Warner Bros. films. Burnett first paints him clearly: “Roy came blinking out into the sunlight. He had on a neat blue serge suit Big Mac had sent him. He didn’t look so bad except for his prison-bleached complexion. But his coarse dark hair had silvery streaks in it and his dark eyes were weary and sad.” Earle is “weary and sad” from the start, and Walsh could understand a man like him without much trouble.

Earle the gangster is still a human being with a soft side. He remembers a childhood that he lost long ago and now idealizes. Walsh could claim the same thing. Roy Earle is on the run from his past, not only his criminal past, but also an innocent past that left him long ago. Walsh always was fascinated with characters on the run, running somewhere better than where they had been before and where they are now. The past was traumatic, just as Walsh’s had been. Walsh and Earle idealize the past nevertheless.

Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Walsh twice, the first time in 1970. He remembered: [Walsh] was very friendly, and his wife [Mary] was very hospitable. She made us some great orange juice from oranges they had growing there. It was a sprawling ranch style, but not that big. He was not that tall by then, maybe five foot ten or so. Oh, he was attractive, though, still attractive. He was very vital and funny. He was a guy. Men aren’t like that anymore. He was macho but he was gentle, and he liked women. He wasn’t the type of macho guy who doesn’t like women that [we] mostly [have] now. He was kind of courtly. —"Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director" (2011) by Marilyn Ann Moss

Bradley Cooper: Preeminent Movie Star

While the tentpole heavy summer season is still a few months away, March features a number of eagerly awaited titles, including several sequels and follow-ups. Neill Blomkamp's latest Chappie and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel kick off the month, with Divergent sequel Insurgent arriving on March 20 and Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence's latest onscreen collaboration (albeit one filmed before Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle), Serena, closing out the month on March 27.

Insurgent (March 20): The second installment in the film franchise based on Veronica Roth's bestselling young-adult trilogy returns Shailene Woodley, Kate Winslet, Theo James, Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller. The sequel, directed by R.I.P.D. helmer Robert Schwentke after Divergent director Neil Burger bowed out of the follow-up, continues the inter-faction battle as the Divergents fight the increasingly powerful Erudites. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

This year, Hollywood made major strides in recognizing the importance of mental health through the accurate portrayal of psychiatric disorders in film. Reese Witherspoon gave a riveting performance in Wild as a woman healing from the emotional trauma of losing her mother by walking the Pacific Coast Trail and reconnecting with herself. Whiplash showed the stress that's an inevitable part of striving to be the best, and the strong impact teachers can have on their students — for better or worse. In The Imitation Game, Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed genius code breaker Alan Turing in a way that showed just how isolating genius can be.

Meanwhile, The Theory of Everything depicted not only how ALS has affected Stephen Hawking, but also the emotional burden on his wife and family. For many, movies are the first vehicle through which they see and begin to understand mental health issues, which is why it is so important that these films reflect reality.

I am thrilled to see Hollywood creating more and more films over the last five years that accurately portray different types of mental illness and hardship. From Silver Linings Playbook to The King's Speech, these films are making a real difference in how the public views and comprehends mental health. Mental health is often misunderstood, but it doesn't have to be. Accurate portrayals of mental illnesses such as autism or bipolar disorder in the media help the general public better understand the reality behind these diseases. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Bradley Cooper earned himself a record-tying third straight Academy Award acting nomination (for American Sniper, following his 2012 Best Actor nod for Silver Linings Playbook, and 2013 Best Supporting Actor nod for American Hustle) —the first time that’s happened since Russell Crowe pulled off the achievement in 1999-2002. Cooper is only the tenth actor ever to score an Academy Award nomination three-peat, and the company that puts him in is, to say the least, illustrious: Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, William Hurt and Russell Crowe. Whether Cooper is as great as those legends is a topic for another debate, but his place alongside them in Oscar history speaks volumes about his current hot streak.

Be it Silver Linings Playbook’s mentally unstable Philadelphian, American Hustle’s ambitious Jheri-curled federal agent, or American Sniper’s stout, nobly patriotic military man, Cooper has exhibited a deft ability to employ his magnetism in varied ways, so that in Playbook, his charm helps offset his character’s self-destructive hang-ups, and in Sniper, his irrepressible self-confidence helps convey—and augment—Chris Kyle’s unwavering sense of duty.

In all three films, Cooper doesn’t turn his characters into versions of himself, but rather emphasizes parts of his natural appeal—his big smile, his hustler-type energy, his poise and quick-witted intelligence—in order to get to the heart of his protagonists. And as 2015 begins, it definitively establishes that he’s more than just a pretty face—he’s our preeminent movie star. Source: www.thedailybeast.com


Bradley Cooper ("Bewildered") video: almost half and hour of pictures and stills of Bradley Cooper.

Gary Cooper, Bradley Cooper & Ryan Gosling

Movies are quick corrections for the fact that we exist in only one place at only one time. When I watch the older movies on TCM, I am struck by the beauty of gray, which makes up the bulk of black and white. How can the absence of color be so gorgeous? Black and white is so tonally unified, so tone-poetic. Shadows seem more natural, like structural elements of the composition. The dated look of the films is itself an image of time, like the varnish on old paintings that becomes inextricable from their visual resonance. There is something more that draws me to TCM’s old stuff. Those films have an integrity that most of today’s films almost always lack.

If watching old movies is a form of escapism, it is at least not an escape from the human world. It is, in fact, an escape to the human world. When your own corner of the universe is hard or grim, there is dignity in escape. Yet anything that enhances your sense of reality and renovates your sense of possibility cannot be denigrated as “mere” escapism. We watch movies because life must be faced. Source: www.nytimes.com

Romantic Comedies for People Who Hate Romantic Comedies # 1. Silver Linings Playbook (2012): Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence play deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters who are struggling to regain their sanity and rebuild their lives. Gay fave Lawrence won the Oscar — Cooper should have too. And watching him learn how to dance is worth the price of admission. Source: www.advocate.com

According to David O'Russell, Bradley Cooper may look "leading-man-ish in a little bit of a Gary Cooper way", and "weird" at other times. If you stood a blue-eyed, 6ft 1in, white American actor with a long nose and jutting jaw in front of a room full of admen, Bradley Cooper is probably the name they’d come up with for him. It’s a good, dependable, square-shouldered name – but with a hint of refinement: Bradley, rather than plain old monosyllabic Brad, followed by an echo of Hollywood’s past.

The first famous Cooper on film was the great Golden Age heart-throb Gary, who smouldered his way through films such as High Noon and Sergeant York as thickly and dependably as a fire log. It’s a fine legacy to hitch on to. But Bradley Cooper has never been rebranded. Cooper has been nominated for an Academy Award for the past three years on the trot: an achievement that puts him in select company. Only 20 others have managed it.

In Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, the films that yielded Cooper’s first and second Oscar nominations, he bounces around the screen, eyes shining and teeth bared – a chemically enlivened hybrid of screwball and pinball. In American Sniper, Chris Kyle, on the other hand, spends long sections of the film lying on rooftops, staring down his rifle’s telescopic sights. He’s a classic lone gunman in the grand Eastwood style, and the moments when we get to know him tend to be silent. His most effective weapon is that face: since it’s obviously too good to be true, it’s ideal for projecting a false front. Cooper can make a smile mean absolutely anything.

But it was just as important in the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers, in which he plays a despicable social climber with the unimprovable name Sack Lodge. Though he’s a small fish in Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s tank, Cooper throws everything at the part. In a 22-second exchange with Rachel McAdams, his smile is by turn sarcastic, patronising and furious – all in a scene that he mostly spends with his head down the lavatory.

There was also a brief marriage to the actress Jennifer Esposito: they wed in December 2006 and she filed for divorce the following May. Newly single and sober, he kept busy. Cooper tried his hand at most things, including two horrors: one with Vinnie Jones called The Midnight Meat Train, and another called Case 39, on which he met Renée Zellweger and vomited wasps.

In early 2009, he played a supporting heartbreaker in the ensemble rom-com He’s Just Not That Into You, but it was later that summer, when audiences saw him in the stupefyingly successful comedy The Hangover, that he made the transition from actor to movie star.

If The Hangover established Cooper as a star, the next few years delivered proof: not only in blockbuster projects such as The A-Team and Hangover sequels, but also Limitless, an original science-fiction thriller whose poster didn’t promise much more than Cooper and a busy city, but was a respectable box-office hit.

This was also when David O Russell got in touch. Cooper’s performance in Wedding Crashers had stuck with the director of The Fighter, and when he needed an actor who could do manic funny, he got in touch. The result was Silver Linings Playbook, a screwball comedy in which a man with bipolar disorder finds a renewed zeal for life through his relationship with a young widow.

 Silver Linings Playbook secured Cooper his first Oscar nomination, and also established him as a great co-star, with an intuitive sense of when best to hang back and cede the spotlight. Jennifer Lawrence was also Oscar nominated for the film, and eventually won, but Cooper gave her enough space to do so.

Those instincts were even sharper in his next film with Russell, American Hustle, which yielded Oscar nomination two. Cooper plays a New Jersey FBI agent who becomes romantically involved with Amy Adams’s conwoman – and, while Adams shines as the slinky seductress, Cooper makes a perfect seducee.

That film seemed to make fresh things possible: not only American Sniper, but new films with Russell and Cameron Crowe, and also a Broadway revival of The Elephant Man that will transfer to London in May. Cooper obsessed over the role as a teenager when he discovered David Lynch’s film, and performed monologues from the Bernard Pomerance play as a drama student. He performs the part without prosthetics or special make-up – again, turning his face against itself.

But while Russell is often credited with turning Cooper into a credible actor, there’s a brilliant, undervalued film made just before Silver Linings Playbook in which you can see the transformation taking place in real time.

In Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, Cooper plays a lawyer-turned-beat cop who has a confrontation with a bank robber played by Ryan Gosling: a meeting whose consequences reach out through time like tendrils.

The film opens on Gosling as a mythic outlaw figure, following him through a fairground in an unbroken, three-minute tracking shot. But Cooper’s introduced so straightforwardly, there’s no sign he’s going to matter. He turns up around 40 minutes into the film, and the first time we see him he’s driving a police car, via an unflattering shot from the passenger seat.

But as the film progresses it shifts its focus to Cooper’s character, who’s more calculating and determined than we first realised. Events leave him racked with remorse, but his political ambitions remain undimmed, and his blue-eyed, fresh-faced look turns from straightforward all-American wholesomeness into an unsettling advertisement for itself. For me, it’s the best performance Cooper has given to date: not because it plays to his strengths, but because it turns them into weaknesses, allowing him to portray a certain type of seemingly impregnable manhood in crisis. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Bradley Cooper on his role in "The Place Beyond the Pines": It was about working with Ryan Gosling, who I'm a huge fan of, and Derek. That was the whole reason I did it. I had heard how Derek works -- this idea of making it as real as possible and doing extreme things in preparation. SPOILER ALERT I thought this would be a great learning experience, even though I was not crazy about playing this guy that kills Ryan. I'm so glad I did it though, because it wound up being an experience where I fell in love with playing this role -- which was not why I got into it in the first place. This is the most complicated guy I've played for sure. It felt like I was getting in the ring with a real motherfucker. He's generous and sweet and no-bullshit and he had no weird antics -- he just works the way I like to work, too. I thought, "This just feels like home." Source: www.huffingtonpost.com


Ryan Gosling ("Werewolf Heart") video, featuring pictures and stills of Ryan Gosling and co-stars Rachel McAdams, Michelle Williams, Emma Stone, Eva Mendes, Carey Mulligan, etc. Songs "Werewolf Heart" and "Dead Hearts" by Dead Man's Bones.

Cinema as violent experience: "My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn" & "American Sniper"

The documentary "My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn" tracks the making of Danish filmmaker Refn's 2013 film "Only God Forgives" starring Ryan Gosling. From the six-month shoot in Bangkok to the premiere of "Only God Forgives" at the Cannes Film Festival, it's recounted here — as witnessed by Refn's wife, Liv Corfixen. "My Life" lets you in on the open secret that the auteur behind such brutal, macabre tough-guy flicks as the "Pusher" trilogy, "Bronson" and "Drive" is actually a lanky, bespectacled and manic-depressive 44-year-old family man with fair-haired young daughters. And that Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky reads tarot cards. And that Gosling is a terrific baby-sitter.


Half home movie, half treatise on the anxieties that plague every artist, this documentary by Liv Corfixen (aka Mrs. Refn) offers a warm, domestic perspective on the creative process and an all-access-granted portrait of one of world cinema’s most enigmatic figures.

The biggest revelations here: The Hua Hin International Film Festival in Thailand coughed up tens of thousands of dollars for Refn and Gosling to appear, and the money went toward the budget of "Only God Forgives"; Refn had no idea what his film was about even after principal photography had commenced; and he changed his opinion on the finished product from great to awful within hours. With a running time of one hour, "My Life" probably should have just been a special feature on the "Only God Forgives" DVD. Source: www.latimes.com

Refn: I’m not a very violent person, but “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is probably the movie that told me, “Whatever that movie does, I want to do.” I think cinema can be a violent experience, but there’s a difference between a violent experience and seeing something violent. I don’t particularly like seeing violent movies anymore, but I like to have the experience of being violated. Source: www.salon.com

Director Derek Cianfrance, Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling in "The Place Beyond the Pines" (2012). "I don't think violence is beautiful. I don’t think it’s art. I don’t think it’s cool” -Derek Cianfrance.

In "American Sniper", Hall’s script, Eastwood’s direction and Cooper’s masterful performance give us a film that accomplishes much more than the failed biopic so many critics have described. In the tradition of the greatest westerns, from “The Searchers” to “Unforgiven,” “American Sniper” offers up its familiar western narrative not as a triumphalist myth but as a disturbing object for contemplation and critique. From the violence that is visually foregrounded in the now infamous “sheepdog” scene until the shot that foreshadows Kyle’s murder, “American Sniper” tells a story of a man who is unable to insulate his family or his homeland from the violence of the war he is fighting. Like John Wayne’s character, Ethan, in “The Searchers,” his own character is under threat of being overtaken by the very savage violence he set out to quell. Source: www.salon.com

Eastwood does here what he’s done repeatedly in his career: he resolves his hero’s ambivalence, psychic pain and sense of structural powerlessness through masculine honor, sacrifice and vulnerability (often played out on a highly racialized landscape). In Eastwood’s rendering of Chris Kyle, Kyle’s need to be a killer of almost superhuman proportions makes him not sociopathic, but rather the sheepdog: someone who operates in a state of constant, anxious alertness against inevitable attack. With this characterization, Chris Kyle’s violence is justified in advance. Ultimately, American Sniper dispenses with conventional political ideology to portray the raw, emotional core of white vulnerability. Chris Kyle evinces a wounded-ness (a kind of powerlessness) that does not re-establish white male superiority. Source: www.science20.com