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

Bradley Cooper & Jennifer Lawrence in Depression drama "Serena"

"Serena" Featurette - The Story (2015) -  starring Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Rhys Ifans, directed by Susanne Bier. In Depression-era North Carolina, the future of George Pemberton's timber empire becomes complicated when it is learned that his wife, Serena, cannot bear children.

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In an exclusive clip from “Serena,” Lawrence’s on-screen reunion with “Silver Linings Playbook” star Bradley Cooper, we have just that type of dazzling majesty on display. Cooper’s character, George Pemberton, has not yet met Serena (Lawrence), and is totally enthralled watching her ride around on the horse, while Agatha (Charity Wakefield) gives him the scoop on Serena’s sordid past.

“I hit the jackpot being able to work with Jennifer Lawrence twice in a row on ‘Silver Linings Playbook,’ and now on ‘Serena,’” Bradley Cooper says in this new feaurette for Susanne Bier’s drama “Serena." “She is a wonderful, wonderful actress.” While that may be true, “Serena” got hammered with negative reviews back in the fall of last year — which wasn’t a huge surprise given the movie was delayed for almost two years.

Official synopsis: North Carolina mountains at the end of the 1920s – George (Bradley Cooper) and Serena Pemberton (Jennifer Lawrence), love-struck newly-weds, begin to build a timber empire. Serena soon proves herself to be equal to any man: overseeing loggers, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving a man’s life in the wilderness. With power and influence now in their hands, the Pembertons refuse to let anyone stand in the way of their inflated love and ambitions. However, once Serena discovers George’s hidden past and faces an unchangeable fate of her own, the Pemberton’s passionate marriage begins to unravel leading toward a dramatic reckoning.

“Serena” does not arrive in theaters until March 27th, but it hits VOD this Thursday, February 26th. Watch a new international trailer, a clip from the film, and the aforementioned featurette below, plus check out a handful of new photos. Source: blogs.indiewire.com

The situation, tragic and stormily fateful, will be familiar to anyone versed in wide-screen Hollywood outdoor romantic tragedies of the late 1940s and early fifties. If you squeeze your eyes tightly enough, Serena might drain its colour to evoke a black-and-white Robert Ryan/Barbara Stanwyck vehicle directed by King Vidor or Raoul Walsh. But open them again and you’re still watching Serena, one of those movies that proves that the mere presence of all the right ingredients does not a happy meal make. It’s all in the mixing.

Filmed two years ago (between Lawrence and Cooper’s bell-ringing collaborations in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle), the delay of this movie is mysterious given that its stars may only be more bankable together than they already are apart. How could you lose with a retro-romantic period noir about a love so toxic it clear cuts the Carolina hills? The answer, it seems, is simply to stand back and hope chemistry will do its own work.

But even nitro and glycerine won’t go boom unless they’re properly mixed. For Serena to have succeeded, and to have lived up to the promise of a modern-day classic Hollywood throwback, it needed to get so deeply inside the madness of the attraction between Serena and George that nothing else would matter. Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

An arrestingly nihilistic Depression melodrama, marked by courageous performances and exquisite production values, this story of a timber-industry power couple undone by financial and personal corruption nonetheless boasts neither a narrative impetus nor a perceptible objective. The result is both problematic and fascinating, an unsympathetic spiral of human tragedy that plays a little like a hand-me-down folk ballad put to film. It’s not hard to see why a U.S. distributor has been slow to step forward.

Magnolia Pictures, sister outfit of the pic’s production company 2929, will ultimately release “Serena” Stateside in 2015, while Blighty auds will get to see it later this month, hot on the heels of its London festival premiere. Marketing for the film is already positioning it as a throwback romance in the “Cold Mountain” vein, with understandably heavy emphasis on Lawrence and Cooper looking scrumptious in Signe Sejlund’s impeccable period costumes. As a study in mutually destructive marital abrasion, “Serena” boasts no less bleak a worldview than David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” with which it would unexpectedly form a canny double bill.

The Stanwyck comparisons lavished upon Lawrence’s Oscar-winning work in “Silver Linings Playbook” resurface here; she certainly looks every inch the Golden Age siren with her crimped vanilla locks and array of creamy silken sheaths that, true to vintage Hollywood form, never seem to get sullied in the wild. The star also makes good on her proven chemistry with Cooper, who acquits himself with stoic intelligence and a variable regional accent in an inscrutable role that, for its occasional flourishes of Clark Gable bravado, is equal parts hero, anti-hero and patsy. Source: variety.com


Bradley Cooper's (Film Progression) video, featuring pictures and stills of Bradley Cooper & co-stars Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldaña, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Heather Graham, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Connelly, Jaime King, Sandra Bullock; ex-wife Jennifer Esposito, girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, etc. Soundtrack: "Treat Me Nice", "Stuck On You", "She's Not You" & "Paralyzed" by Elvis Presley, "The Greatest Love" by Lee Dorsey, "Little Boy" by Eileen Barton, "Whole Lotta Loving" by Fats Domino, "Baby Be Mine" by The Jelly Beans, and "Oo-Wee Baby" by Jeff Barry & Darlene Love.

Oscars' Nominees and Winners - Next Projects

Steve Carell, Foxcatcher - Carell, 52, has wrapped the indie drama Freeheld, starring Julianne Moore, and next shoots The Big Short with Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale. He also is executive producing the TBS comedy series Angie Tribeca, starring Rashida Jones.

Bradley Cooper, American Sniper - He'll reunite with Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell and star Jennifer Lawrence for Joy in March. After Cooper, 40, performs The Elephant Man onstage this summer in London, he will produce and possibly star in Warner Bros.' human-slavery drama Orphan X.

Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night - Cotillard, 39, wrapped The Weinstein Co.'s Macbeth with Michael Fassbender, and they'll reunite on Fox's Assassin's Creed. Before that, she has auteur Nicole Garcia's romance Mal de Pierres.

Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game - The 38-year-old Brit will play Hamlet starting in August at the Barbican Centre in London before transitioning to the lead role in Doctor Strange for Marvel, scheduled to shoot in the fall.

Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything - Jones, 31, won the female lead in the Star Wars standalone movie directed by Gareth Edwards. Before that, she'll appear in J.A. Bayona's A Monster Calls (Oct. 14, 2016) and will shoot Ron Howard's Dan Brown adaptation Inferno with Tom Hanks in the spring.

Michael Keaton, Birdman - Keaton, 63, has wrapped the Catholic Church sex-scandal pic Spotlight and is attached to make Universal and Legendary's King Kong: Skull Island and will play Ray Kroc in The Founder, about the origin of the McDonald's chain.

Julianne Moore, Still Alice - Moore, 54, will go straight from an Oscar win to Maggie's Plan with nominee Ethan Hawke. She has the final Hunger Games in the fall and wrapped Freeheld, in which she plays a gay detective.

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl - Pike, 36, will join Charlie Hunnam in the romance The Mountain Between Us and is attached to a diving thriller titled The Bends.

Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything - The newly crowned best actor winner, 33, has Jupiter Ascending currently in theaters and is reuniting with Les Miserables director Tom Hooper on The Danish Girl, in which he plays a transgender artist.

Reese Witherspoon, Wild - The actress-producer, 38, is in Warners' Hot Pursuit (May 8) and is attached to Alexander Payne's Downsizing with Matt Damon.

Patricia Arquette, Boyhood - Arquette, 46, is returning to television with the CSI spinoff CSI: Cyber, which premieres March 4 on CBS, following her win Sunday at the Oscars.

Laura Dern, Wild - The 48-year-old actress next appears in the Toronto Film Festival drama 99 Homes, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon. She also is developing an ensemble comedy with Judd Apatow about female football fans, and she's in talks for Kelly Reichardt's next film with Michelle Williams.

Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game - The 29-year-old Brit next stars in the thriller Everest (Sept. 18), with Jake Gyllenhaal and Josh Brolin. She hasn't taken another movie role because she's expecting her first baby in the spring, and then she'll make her Broadway debut in an adaptation of Therese Raquin, set to open in October.

Edward Norton, Birdman - Norton, 45, has done voice work on Seth Rogen's Sausage Party and is producing HBO's Lewis and Clark miniseries, which shoots in the summer. He also produced a Netflix doc about fathers and sons (March 6).

Emma Stone, Birdman - Stone, 26, has Cameron Crowe's ensemble dramedy Aloha out May 29, and she has wrapped Woody Allen's latest, Irrational Man, which Sony Pictures Classics will release in the summer. She also is developing a project with Easy A director Will Gluck and a comedy called Little White Corvette.

Meryl Streep, Into the Woods - Streep, 65, the most-nominated actress ever, has finished work on two projects: Suffragette, playing a woman fighting for the right to vote (Helena Bonham Carter co-stars); and TriStar's Ricki and the Flash, in the role of a fading rock musician. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Happy Valentine's Day (Blue Valentine)

Blue Valentine is about a marriage that’s slowly, if not quite surely, falling apart, yet the movie is every inch a love story. That’s why it stings so exquisitely. Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) have been together for six years, with a daughter they’re devoted to, but their lives are a mess. Dean, a softhearted, blustery screwup with a youthfully receding hairline, is a freelance house- painter who likes the work because he can enjoy a beer at eight in the morning. He says so with a boastful grin. In other words, he’s trouble. Cindy, a kindly, beleaguered nurse who is looking to move up in the medical world, is sick of his slovenly pursuit of pleasure, his slipshod career options, and his refusal to be an adult.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling in "Blue Valentine" (2010)

At the same time, we can see what she’s drawn to: Dean is sexy, with a slightly saddened little-boy charm, and he’s forever working his way back into her good graces. They’ve turned the addict/enabler two-step into an elegant rehearsed dance. In one memorable sequence, they take a romantic night off and go to a tacky theme motel, where they’re booked into a room with lunar wallpaper and a sci-fi spaceship motif. In this dingy kitsch palace, the two guzzle vodka and mess around (she asks him to get rough — less out of nastiness than nostalgia), fumbling toward the moment when they can feel those old feelings they used to have.

Trying to set the mood, Dean puts on a scratchy old soul song. It’s ”You and Me,” a curio from the ’70s by Penny & the Quarters, and all we have to hear is a few bars of its warbling sweet plea (”You and me/You and me/Nobody, baby, but you and me”) to know that it’s their song and that it’s a heartbreaker, because the two probably haven’t felt that way in a very long time. As the tune goes on, it sounds more and more achingly beautiful. It becomes the wistful ”our song” of everyone in the audience. Source: www.ew.com

Ryan Gosling and Christina Hendricks attend the "Lost River" premiere during the 67th Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2014 in France.


After having created his own cult of indie thrillers with Drive, Only God Forgives, Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, actor Ryan Gosling is stepping behind the camera for his latest project Lost River. Warner Bros. has released the first trailer for this thriller, which stars Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan and Eva Mendes. And it looks like another underground masterpiece for the burgeoning filmmaker. Lost River weaves elements of fantasy noir and suspense into a modern day fairytale. Lost River is coming to select theaters this April, and will be made available on Digital HD the same day. Lost River is produced by Marc Platt and Adam Siegel on behalf of Marc Platt Productions, along with Gosling himself via his Phantasma Films banner, and Michel Litvak and David Lancaster via the Bold Films banner. Source: www.movieweb.com

Derek Cianfrance's thoughtful use of violence in the 2013 drama The Place Beyond the Pines (starring Gosling and Bradley Cooper) was a reaction to his experience with the MPAA. Cianfrance is now in the process of editing The Light Between Oceans, a drama based on the Australian novel about a lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) and his wife (Rachel Weisz) who find a shipwrecked baby. When asked if he worries about a possible NC-17 rating, the director admits that it’s been on his mind. “Yeah, because I’m working on a love story right now, and I want it to be true,” he says. “I think about it all the time.” Source: www.yahoo.com

Derek Cianfrance, one of the screen’s most gifted and innovative new directors, proved to be a master storyteller with a rare and unflinching emotional directness with Blue Valentine, the hauntingly intimate 2010 dissection of a marriage. Reunited with that movie’s star, Ryan Gosling, for another richly detailed and seamlessly calibrated triumph of classical filmmaking called The Place Beyond the Pines, his maturity of vision is repeated and expanded into a broader and more complex tapestry of interconnected family relationships that spans generations and keeps you paralyzed with suspense. Told in a daunting but poetic narrative triptych that pares the film into three sections, the effect is lyrical.

Despite the fact that Romina is living with another man, Luke turns from vagabond loner into caring and devoted father, but to provide for his kid, lure his girl away from her new lover and make a home for them both, building cribs and buying ice cream has limitations. With no parenting skills, Luke turns to robbing banks, in another series of dizzying action sequences, including a high-speed chase through a cemetery with a flat tire.

Enter Bradley Cooper as Avery Cross, the college dropout and loser son of a New York Supreme Court judge-turned-rookie cop who accidentally brings Luke to a violent, premature date with destiny and takes all of the credit. It’s a jarring scene, but in a sense, Mr. Gosling’s impact is just beginning, as Mr. Cooper takes up where his unfinished story left off. Mr. Cianfrance’s artistic vision catapults it above the limitations of contrivance and into a realm of constantly evolving shifts of tone and mood. The film is beautifully photographed by British cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (Shame), with exquisitely nuanced performances by Mr. Gosling (who surpasses all expectations) and Mr. Cooper (far superior to his limited role in Silver Linings Playbook). And Dane DeHaan, as Mr. Gosling’s emotionally damaged son, Jason, adds a magnetic younger accent to the already dark landscape of The Place Beyond the Pines. Source: observer.com


Ryan Gosling may be chugging along with this whole acting thing, but the Drive star, who's currently shooting The Nice Guys with Russell Crowe, does love his music.

And he wants to ensure that his firstborn daughter loves her music, too! "Ryan sings to the baby," a source tells E! News, dishing details on the "infatuated" new dad's relationship with his and Eva Mendes' now 4-month-old baby girl. "He loves it. Sometimes he'll make up his own songs and include her name in them. It's very sweet." Source: uk.eonline.com

Romantic Comedies in Hawaii: "Aloha" and "Wings Over Honolulu"

“Sometimes you have to say goodbye before you can say hello.” Fortunately, Aloha means both on the islands. Here’s our first look at writer-director Cameron Crowe’s Hawaii-set romantic comedy with a few actors you might have heard of. a defense contractor (Cooper) who falls for an Air Force pilot (Stone) after he is assigned to oversee the launch of a weapons satellite from Hawaii. Bradley Cooper stars as a celebrated military contractor who falls from grace but gets a second chance. He returns to Honolulu and reconnects with an old flame (Rachel McAdams) while unexpectedly falling for the Air Force watchdog (Emma Stone) assigned to him. Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin co-star in the pic produced by Crowe and Scott Rudin. Columbia Pictures and Regency Enterprises originally had set a Christmas 2014 date for Aloha, but last summer it got pushed back to May 29. Source: deadline.com

Bradley Cooper, Oscar Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for "American Sniper" (2014)

Emma Stone, Oscar Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for "Birdman" (2014)

Cameron Crowe returns with a new film in his signature style: entirely uncool and old-fashioned, but often satisfying in its honeyed smoothness. He’s the director of irony-free romances such as Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and Say Anything, and new film Aloha seems to be in very much the same vein. Bradley Cooper returns to the middle of the road as military contractor Brian Gilcrest, having his balls broken by his superior Alec Baldwin for messing up a space mission. He must return to Hawaii, where he made his name. Why? Because in Cameron Crowe’s world, life is one big second chance. Source: www.theguardian.com

Ray Milland and Wendy Barrie in "Wings Over Honolulu" (1937), which was Oscar Nominated for Best Cinematography by Joseph A. Valentine


A Navy pilot gets involved in a romantic triangle while stationed in Hawaii. Directed in 1937 by H.C. Potter, starring Ray Milland, Wendy Barrie and William Gargan, based on a story by Mildred Cram published in "Redbook Magazine" (1936)

In this wartime drama, a young woman nearly comes unhinged when her husband, a Navy pilot, is transferred to Pearl Harbor on their wedding day. She goes with him. Once in Hawaii she is surprised to see her ex-boyfriend sailing about in an expensive yacht. Her husband becomes totally engrossed in his work and begins neglecting her so it seems natural that she would go for a little sail with her ex-flame. When her husband learns about her philandering, he gets jealous and ends up crashing his plane in the harbor. As a result, he is court-martialed. His wife, sorry for her actions, defends him, gets him acquitted and never strays again. Marital bliss ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi