It’s been a while — November 2008– since the release of her last film, you know that little film Twilight, the one that made her the highest grossing female director EVER. It’s taken way too long for her to get back in the saddle. I personally don’t understand why it has taken this long. She had a couple of things in the works but they all fell through. Guy directors always are able to get the next project going. Lee Daniels, director of Precious has booked Selma, and Guy Ritchie, the director with 22,000 lives is taking advantage of his current good fortune with Sherlock Holmes and booked King Arthur.
But now it looks like Hardwicke has gotten the green light from Warner Brothers for The Girl with the Red Riding Hood starring Amanda Seyfried (who will be feted next week as Showest’s breakthrough star.)
The premise for the red riding hood redo came from Leonardo DiCaprio and his production company will produce along with Warner Brothers.
Here’s a description from EW:
[The film] is about a girl who tries to uncover the true identity of the wolf that’s been terrorizing her village for the two decades. She must also resolve her feelings for her wealthy fiance and the town’s bad boy.
I guess that Warner Brothers has seen the writing on the wall and has moved on from the days not too long ago when they supposedly did not want to see any scripts with female leads. I’m sure it helped to have Leonardo DiCaprio’s name attached to this one. According to Screen Daily, the budget is a little over the budget of Twilight which was $37 million so Warners commitment is contained.
Hardwicke will receive the Honorary Director Award from the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto later this month. Here’s what she said about the award:
“Thank you, Female Eye Film Festival, for honoring me with this award. It’s such a privilege to be a part of a festival that recognizes what all the women filmmakers around the world have to offer. Looking forward to chilling with my northern sisters!”
Details on the Female Eye festival.
Hardwicke set to shoot Riding Hood in Vancouver (Screen Daily)
Tags:
Amanda Seyfried,
Catherine Hardwick,
Twilight
Nicholas Sparks is box office gold, especially for women. Remember The Notebook? That movie played really well (it made about $115 million worldwide) and made Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams movie stars. Seems like lighting hit again last weekend even with the Super Bowl and the smowmageddon in many states on the east coast.
Dear John starring Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum took in $32.4 million (and had a budget of $25 million according to box office mojo) and pushed Avatar out of the top slot after 8 weeks and making it the top grossing film ever on a Super Bowl weekend. (PS Titanic was in the top spot for 15 weeks.) It was a comeback of sorts for director Lasse Hallstrom best known for The Cider House Rules and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape who got his biggest opening yet, who has not had either critical or commercial successes of late. I like him as a director and would be glad to see him getting back into the game in a bigger way.
Women, especially younger ones fueled Dear John’s success making up 84% of the audience on opening weekend with 64 percent of the ticket buyers below 21 (according to The Wrap.)
Who says women aren’t a market? (I decided that I am going to end every story of women’s box office prowess with that question from now on.)
‘Dear John’ dethrones box office king ‘Avatar’ (AFP via Yahoo)
Screen Gems’ Box Office Diamond: ‘Dear John’ Tops With $32.4M (The Wrap)
Tags:
Amanda Seyfried,
Avatar,
Dear John,
Rachel McAdams,
The Notebook
Jennifer’s Body written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama is exactly what I expected. It’s a campy, women centric look at the atrocities of being a teenage girl. For some of us who have been there, the first line of the film “Hell is a teenage girl” seems just right. Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried play two best friends who have grown apart. Jennifer (Fox) is the nasty sex pot and Seyfriend plays Anita (Needy) the nerdy girl with the cute boyfriend who has become Jennifer’s lapdog.
Much has been made about how Diablo Cody wanted to put a feminist bent on the horror genre which she loves. I’m not a big horror fan and this was way more campy than scary. It’s about revenge on all the people who do you wrong. Jennifer becomes evil “not high school evil” as Needy says but evil evil when an idiot band of indie rockers decide that the best way for them to become famous is to sacrifice a virgin to the devil. (Go with it.) Since they are in a small town, they think all the girls are virgins and so we know there will be trouble when Jennifer gets into their van looking for fun pretending she is a virgin. Clearly, she doesn’t know what they have in mind and quickly believes she is about to be gang raped. The ritual goes awry when the idiots sacrifice a non-virgin and so Jennifer becomes possessed by a demon. (Go with it.) And the demon wants revenge. She wants revenge on all the guys who treat high school girls like crap.
Cody said in an interview with Reuters: “(Director) Karyn Kusama and I are both outspoken feminists. We wanted to subvert the classic horror model of women being terrorized.”
So now the terrorized is the terrorizer. I want to make it clear that this film is by no means a work of art. Megan Fox is beyond plastic looking and her acting is atrocious and on the whole the film is not particularly scary. But as a fan of Cody’s work I love how she takes expectations and messes with them. I also love the pop culture laden language and while Cody has talked about the feminism as being subversive, I found it to be very present and overt.
Here’s my favorite line: “PMS isn’t real. It was created by the boy run media to make us seem crazy.”
Any movie that has the guts to say a line like that gets points in my book.
Film opens wide tomorrow.
Tags:
Amanda Seyfried,
Diablo Cody,
Karyn Kusama,
Megan Fox
It’s been a while — November 2008– since the release of her last film, you know that little film Twilight, the one that made her the highest grossing female director EVER. It’s taken way too long for her to get back in the saddle. I personally don’t understand why it has taken this long. She had a couple of things in the works but they all fell through. Guy directors always are able to get the next project going. Lee Daniels, director of Precious has booked Selma, and Guy Ritchie, the director with 22,000 lives is taking advantage of his current good fortune with Sherlock Holmes and booked King Arthur.
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