closer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Reuniting after 2004's Closer, it appears that stars Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, along with Bourne writer Tony Gilroy, are all out to have a bit more fun with Duplicity; the trailer just went up over at Apple.

If anything, it comes off as more of a zippy heist film of sorts than the thriller I took it to be from the earliest synopsis on, even though corporate espionage remains the name of the game. Then again, maybe we're overdue for another Thomas Crown Affair-like outing, and between the cast (which also includes Tom Wilkinson, who was in Gilroy's Michael Clayton, and Paul Giamatti, who shared the screen with Clive in Shoot 'Em Up) and the crew, I'm pretty much sold.

(If Billy Bob Thornton is still in this, though, as Monika reported last January, he sure isn't showing up here, and IMDb remains mum.)

Duplicity opens on March 20th of next year -- about a month after Clive's bang-ier espionage efforts in The International.

This will no doubt be an illegal movie forever. After seeing it at the UC Theater in the summer of '82, I recently found a copy on a bootleg VHS for $1 at a Friends of the Library sale, still burned with the Sundance Channel bug. In today's cinema, much is made of the nostalgia value of the 1980s soundtrack: a famous example being Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" during Donnie Darko's opening. You can have your MTV, though, since URGH! A Music War was the soundtrack to my 1980s. Hey, what a surprise, no Duran Duran, no INXS, no Soft Cell covering a Gloria Jones soul classic and convincing a history-impaired generation that they wrote it. And yet it's clear why this film failed.

As a business scheme URGH seems, in 2008 hindsight, a uniquely quick way to burn a fortune. The film documents second-wave punk and New Wave bands playing from LA to London, editing them together without any particular zeitgeisty event like a music festival. So: play it a little under a real kiss-of-death title, and then wait to be deafened by the wails of bands, managers and lawyers zooming in to fight over the non-existant money. The Police were the headliners, opening and closing the film. They wrap up the film, too; you can see drummer Miles Copeland wearing an URGH! T-shirt. Is this perhaps all he was paid for this film? There are mostly cinematic performances here, and we see how much was lost by the fact that the Industry couldn't figure out a way to use their talents in the movies. Here's a key to the best of the show, omitting slurs of forgotten bands who perished long years ago.

The World Entertainment News Network (WENN) is reporting that Natalie Portman has second thoughts about doing a nude scene for Wes Anderson's short film Hotel Chevalier, which will play in front of The Darjeeling Limited when it expands to nearly 800 theaters tomorrow. According to WENN, Portman said: "I'm really sorry I didn't listen to my intuition. From now on, I'm going to trust my gut more. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say no." Portman also says she'll never appear nude on screen again -- cue thousands of pervy men crying out like Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith: "Nooooooooooo!!!"

You might recall that Portman had second thoughts about nudity in the past. She played a stripper in Mike Nichols' Closer but then evidently convinced Nichols to cut out footage that was too revealing. Then rumor had it that she appeared in the buff in Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts, but the naked bits were provided by a body double -- and it was an unpleasant torture scene anyway.

What surprises me about her latest regret is that Wes Anderson financed Hotel Chevalier out of his own pocket. He's not exactly known as a hound dog director, exploiting actresses by making them take off their clothes, though most of his films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) have included nudity. Is it possible that she's more concerned now because the interest in Hotel Chevalier has been driven almost entirely by her exposed bits? (All due respect to Anderson, but there's no way half a million people would have downloaded the short off iTunes if not for her appearance.) Or possibly she's tired of all the cute headlines calling her "Naked Natalie." (Guilty as charged.) Maybe we can all get it out of our system this weekend.

UPDATE: It was all a big misunderstanding. WENN based their news item on a press release by PARADE, touting Portman's first-person article, "What I've Learned (So Far)," which will appear in print on Sunday. In a statement that has been forwarded to Cinematical by a publicist representing Portman, PARADE states: "In the release, we say that Portman regrets doing a nude scene in the movie Hotel Chevalier. This is wrong. When Portman writes about this in PARADE, she does not mention a specific movie title. However, she tells us she was referring to a torture scene with a body double in Goya's Ghosts, which was taken out of context and leaked onto the internet. Portman is very happy with Hotel Chevalier and proud of her work in the film. PARADE apologizes for the error." The entire article is now available online.