Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm consider whether ‘Love Is All You Need’
There’s nothing about the premise of Susanne Bier’s Love Is All You Need that sounds promising. A young couple plans their wedding in a sumptuous Italian villa while their newly-single parents strike up a potential romance of their own. Add some comic relief annoyances and the stage is set for wacky misunderstandings and love under the lemon trees. The result, while not spectacular, is fortunately much more satisfying than expected.
Love Is All You Need opens today in limited release. My review is at Film Racket.
Have you heard about how the glass ceiling has been shattered by women moving into positions of power across American industry? No? Neither has New Republic reporter Lydia DePillis, whose new Tumblr 100 Percent Men does nothing but highlight all the “Corners of the world where women have yet to tread.” Some highly sarcastic selections:
So some are more surprising than others (NASCAR). As snark goes, it’s a handy flashlight on the unspoken biases still permeating a society that has supposedly moved beyond such things.
One of the more overlooked films of 2012 was the Matt Damon and John Krasinski-scripted Promised Land, possibly because it was marketed as a film about the gas-fracking controversy, when in fact it’s a smart and sensitive drama-comedy about the broader state of the nation.
It hit DVD and Blu-ray last week, here’s part of my review:
“You’re the natural gas people.” That’s how folks identify Steve (Matt Damon) and Sue (Frances McDormand). There’s a lot to unpack in that assessment, and Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land is smart enough to take most of its running time to do so, spinning a clever moral comedy at the same time. In those few words are contained just about every element, from hope to greed to fear and anxiety, that makes up the emotive froth of American malaise, circa 2012…
It’s been a few years, but the inimitable Wong Kar Wai is back with a new film. Eschewing the fashion-plate romanticism of In the Mood for Love that made him en vogue with the culturati, he’s now returning to the impressionist wuxia films of his earlier career (Ashes of Time and such). The Grandmaster looks to be a full-on period martial-arts blowout, starring Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, last seen on this side of the Pacific in John Woo’s epic Red Cliff.
Weinstein Company is planning for an August 2013 release, but don’t be surprised if that gets pushed back when the director decides to do some more editing or shoot additional footage.
The 2013 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs through this weekend, is starting off well. The planners are continuing their trend of paring down the offerings and focusing more on their strengths (on-point documentaries, the occasional high-profile indie drama or comedy) than trying to appeal to everybody with a scattershot program overly reliant on marquee names and red-carpet events. The result is many stories about grim things, from Oxycontin abuse in Appalachia to the 1985 Philadelphia police’s fatal bombing of a radical group’s rowhouse.
I’ve been covering some of the first weekend’s films for PopMatters, here’s some of what was on offer:
The Project and Big Men — Mercenaries stumble in creating an anti-pirate militia in Puntland, while American wildcatters confront pitfalls aplenty in Ghana and Nigeria, in two documentaries examining crises in Africa.
Let the Fire Burn and The Kill Team — Two documentary autopsies of violent tragedies, the first in Philadelphia and the second in Kandahar, show the results of systematic dehumanization.
Oxyana and Bottled Up — A gritty documentary and fluffy comedy bring a similarly hardheaded sensibility to the invisible epidemic of pain pill addiction.
Remember Occupy Wall Street?
