adoration Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Drag Me to Hell
Girl says no to woman at the bank, and soon falls under the wrath of the woman's witchy gypsy ways. It sounds like you're regular ol' horror movie, but it's also Sam Raimi's return to the genre. I wasn't the biggest fan of the film, but considering the fact that most of the people I know loved it, I'll defer to them. In his review, Peter Martin said: "Raimi has made a joyful romp through his personal horror playground and come up with a very entertaining horror-comedy that gets back to the basics." Buy it. Also on Blu-ray.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon

The Proposal
Sandra Bullock is an easy-to-hate boss ... until she's about to be deported back to Canada. Desperate to keep her job and stay in the U.S., she whips up a marriage of convenience with her assistant Ryan Reynolds. In her review, Jette Kernion said the film "offers little that is fresh or new for romantic comedy fans ... but perhaps watching Sandra Bullock in her element will be enough for many of her fans. Me, I'm still waiting for her to find a film that better matches her talents." Still, Rent it to hang with Betty White. Also on Blu-ray.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon

Land of the Lost
In Hollywood's ever-moving push to remake old Hollywood, we got the picture you'd never imagine, taking the most cult classic of super-low-budget television and turning it into a big-money experience. I wish they stuck to the old formula. But Todd Gilchrist says "Land of the Lost offers a sobering alternative to the pre-packaged and otherwise conventional blockbuster fare offered by studios this summer, even if its charms would ultimately benefit from (if not require) chemical enhancement of some kind to be properly enjoyed." Rent it. Also on Blu-ray.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon

Also out: Natural Born Killers Director's Cut, The Stepfather, Hardware, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Happy Birthday to Me, Moonlight & Mistletoe, An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving, Wuthering Heights, A Christmas Carol, Infestation, The Christmas Choir, American Violet, The Killing Room, The Objective, iMurders, Shark City, West 32nd

Mike Jones over at Variety's The Circuit Blog posted yesterday the first 27 films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)and, not surprisingly, most of them hail from previous fest premieres at Cannes, Berlin and SXSW.

The Gala Presentation will be South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and The Weird, which I saw at Cannes earlier this year and loved. Somewhat reminiscent of Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff. Toronto film fans should really enjoy this one.

I'm home from the Cannes Film Festival now, after nearly two weeks of great movies, interesting interviews, and lots of conversation with many very smart film folks over dinner, drinks at the La Petit Majestic, or lingering cups of cafe au lait at cutesy cafes. This was my first year at Cannes, and I think it's now my second favorite film festival (I don't think any fest will ever take first place over Telluride in my little film-geek heart).

Your first time at Cannes can be overwhelming; there's much to learn and assimilate, and you have to do it pretty quickly. I had to get by on my shockingly limited knowledge of the French language, since I took German in high school (hey, I hung with the punk crowd, and we weren't going to take French with all the preppies). Fortunately, I had James Rocchi there to guide me and act as my interpreter; he jokes about his French being poor, but I assure you, he does quite well.

Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan's 1997 Palme d'Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person -- or even ourselves?

Last night, I had the honor of being asked to co-host IFC.com's red carpet coverage for the Cannes premiere of the film Adoration, starring Scott Speedman and Rachel Blanchard. (We'll post a link to IFC's archived video coverage as soon as they have it, FYI.) This not only meant that I got to cover the film's opening with IFC's personable host Matt Singer, but I also got to take advantage of one of the best views that Cannes has to offer. If you want to check out the red carpet at Cannes like you've never seen it before, head down to the gallery below. And for our complete coverage of the 2008 Festival de Cannes, click on over to our festival hub.

For his previous feature film, Where the Truth Lies, Atom Egoyan got some fairly big stars -- Colin Firth, Kevin Bacon and Alison Lohman. Sure, it wasn't a blockbuster cast, but it was higher profile than Egoyan was used to working with. And it probably would have appealed to more American moviegoers if it weren't for that NC-17 rating (and all the male anatomy that warranted it). For his next film, the Canadian auteur is going back to working with relative unknowns. He's cast Rachel Blanchard, who also co-starred in Where the Truth Lies, Scott Speedman of the Underworld films and TV's Felicity, teenage actor Devon Bostick and Mrs. Atom Egoyan, Arsinée Khanjian, who has appeared in most of her husband's films. As we learned from Monika last month, this new drama, titled Adoration, will deal with "a high school student who claims to be a figure from recent history." My guess is that Bostick plays the student.

Both in their early 30s, Speedman and Blanchard are too old to play teens yet too young to play parents of a high school student. So, their roles are beyond anything I could guess. I definitely see Khanjian playing Bostick's mother, though. In addition to reporting the cast, Variety also shares some new, yet unspecific info about the plot of Adoration: Egoyan described the film, which we already know has something to do with the internet, as a drama dealing with "this brave new world and how people can invent themselves, or re-invent themselves, through technology." The script for Adoration is "fluid," which I take to mean "open," as we learned last month that Egoyan plans to change things he's written depending on what he learns while shooting. Blanchard, who we last saw in Snakes on a Plane has little in the pipeline before Egoyan's film, while Speedman could become better known to audiences with this fall's The Strangers, in which he stars opposite Liv Tyler. Adoration starts shooting in Toronto next month.

It's been a few years since Atom Egoyan brought us his last feature film -- 2005's Where the Truth Lies. The uber-sexy film followed Alison Lohman as a journalist trying to uncover the long-hidden and mysterious story behind the breakup of a comedy team played by Bacon and Colin Firth, which ended years before when they found a dead girl in their hotel room. Now Egoyan is cooking up another film with Serendipity Point Films-head Robert Lantos, leaving the adult world for some adolescent fare, and straying from the carefully-laid out mystery plot of Truth. The new drama is called Adoration, and it will begin shooting on September 17, right after TIFF wraps up.

According to Playback, the film is a teen drama that "will examine how kids redefine themselves through the Internet," by focusing on "a high school student who claims to be a figure from recent history." Oh, vagueness! Is this kid channeling Lonelygirl15? While she's made waves, I wouldn't quite call her a figure of history, so your guess is as good as mine. The director will look into the ways that the Internet changes relationships between kids, when compared to classroom interaction. That's about all that we know about the film, but there might not be too much more to tell. Egoyan has a script, but it's one he's planning on changing as it goes: "What excites me is that the script...is open enough that I can change and modify based on what we find out as we're shooting it. That, to me, is the ideal kind of structure." Ah, film Playdoh!

[via CBC]