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Post by Yada on Sept 19, 2007 20:45:59 GMT
[glow=red,2,300][/glow] The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford PlotAn action western surrounding the private life and public exploits of America's most notorious outlaw, Jesse James. As the charismatic and unpredictable outlaw plans his next great robbery, he wages war on his enemies, who are trying to collect the reward money--and the glory-- that is riding on his capture. However, the greatest threat to Jesse's life may ultimately come from those he trusts the most. CastDirector:Andrew Dominik Writers:Andrew Dominik (screenplay) & Ron Hansen (novel) Brad Pitt ... Jesse James Mary-Louise Parker ... Zee James Brooklynn Proulx ... Mary James Dustin Bollinger ... Tim James Casey Affleck ... Robert Ford Sam Rockwell ... Charley Ford Jeremy Renner ... Wood Hite Sam Shepard ... Frank James Garret Dillahunt ... Ed Miller Paul Schneider ... Dick Liddil Production Status: In Production/Awaiting Release Logline: In 1881, a younger member of the notorious Jesse James gang becomes so inextricably drawn to and frightened of his mentor that his own delusions of grandeur force him to consider doing the unthinkable. Genres: Action/Adventure, Western and Adaptation Running Time: 2 hrs. 40 min. Release Date: September 21st, 2007 MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and brief sexual references. Studios: Warner Bros. Pictures Filming Locations: Alberta, Canada Produced in: United States The Trailer Screen stills
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Post by Yada on Sept 24, 2007 22:00:19 GMT
Review: 'Jesse James' different, terrificCNN) -- Hollywood's favorite outlaw, Jesse James, is usually portrayed as a folk hero.Tyrone Power and Audie Murphy played him as a dashing rural guerrilla, a southern Robin Hood whose robberies targeted those capitalist carpetbaggers, the banks and the railroad. In the words of the famous ballad, "He took from the rich and he gave to the poor / He'd a hand, and a heart, and a brain." At first blush the dapper, bearded Brad Pitt would seem to fit the mold of the classic James: a watchful alpha male, stern but naturally authoritative, and several degrees warmer than his remote older brother, Frank (Sam Shepard). He'll share a joke with the boys, or sit on the porch and smoke a convivial cigar. But Andrew Dominik's elegiac, rueful -- even funereal -- film of Ron Hansen's novel, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," begins late in his career, after the disastrous Northfield, Minnesota, raid and the disintegration of the original James-Younger gang. With 25 robberies and 19 murders under his belt, Jesse has a high price on his head, and he seems to sense the glory days are behind him. He's not about to hand over any money to the poor either, nor is there any hint that he ever did. "It's all lies, you know," Jesse gently chides his greatest fan, Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), who's grown up reading the dime-store novels that had begun to valorize the outlaw when he was in his twenties. Already we've seen a glimpse of the other -- ruthless -- Jesse beating a man so brutally even his cohorts are shocked. This psychotic streak becomes more pronounced as the gang splinters, and "Tom Howard" (the name James went by after his escape from Minnesota) is left to ponder which of his associates will betray him first. Even so, when he launches a preemptive strike it seems to be as much in sorrow as in anger. Somber and ruminative, Pitt plays Jesse as a lonely man, isolated by his fearsome reputation and the patina of celebrity he carries with him -- and the bounty that goes with it. But this is really Casey Affleck's movie. Indeed, director Sam Fuller may have gotten there first, but "I Shot Jesse James" could serve as an alternate title for this film. "People take me for a nincompoop," Bob Ford admits to Frank James early on. "I have qualities that don't come shining through." That's putting it mildly. The new James gang is a makeshift bunch of dim opportunists and layabouts, mostly cousins and neighbors (they include Jeremy Renner, Chris Speers, Garret Dillahunt and Sam Rockwell as Bob's big brother Charlie), but even in this distinctly mild bunch Bob is a standing joke, the designated boob. Frank can only shake his head and give him a wide berth. A desperado in his own imagining, Bob idolizes Jesse so fervently it's as if he wants to pull on the outlaw's boots in the morning. There is something abject in such hero-worship, and the wretched Robert Ford suffers mightily for it; this long (160-minute) movie describes his two years' in Jesse's orbit as a series of humiliations and indignities, most of his own making. Affleck doesn't sentimentalize Bob's pinched and twisted narcissism, but he makes it clear the assassination was Ford's tragedy as well as Jesse's, a grand and infamous folly he would live to regret but could hardly avoid. Dominik's previous film, "Chopper," was also dedicated to debunking a sociopathic pop idol, and featured a star-making turn from Eric Bana as the volatile sadist Mark Brandon Reid. Drawing heavily from Hansen's novel, especially for great gobs of eloquent, neo-Victorian voice-over narration, "The Assassination of Jesse James" is an altogether more reflective and self-conscious piece of mythic revisionism. It's not just the narration but the patient, languid tempo that evokes the spirit of Terrence Malick and Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon": the sense that a figure might just wander off into all that landscape and never find his way back home. (Kudos to cinematographer Roger Deakins for the gorgeous photography.) After a single viewing (and that came five films into a Toronto festival day) I'm not entirely persuaded Dominik has pulled off the masterpiece he's shooting for, but it's a film of grave authority and fine artistry; I hesitate to make the comparison, but this is the most ambitious Western since "Heaven's Gate. " One hopes it doesn't meet the same commercial fate. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" is rated R and runs 160 minutes edition.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/21/review.james/index.html
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Post by Yada on Oct 11, 2007 19:52:49 GMT
[glow=red,2,300]Pretty boy Brad Pitt grows up[/glow] From The Times October 6, 2007
He’s known for his body and beauty. But in a rare interview Brad Pitt reveals his serious side to our critic
Brad Pitt has reached a turning point. To the public he is one of Hollywood’s hottest actors. Together with wife Angelina Jolie he forms one of the most famous partnerships in the world. They are even a word in their own right: “Brangelina”. However, Pitt no longer wants to be seen as just eye candy. Can he makes us see him any differently?
We meet, waiting for a lift in a hotel in Deauville, France. Our rooms are next door to one another. Jolie is at Pitt’s side, sleek in black. She has just put the children to bed. He inquires affectionately if they are asleep. She replies that they are. The couple seem relaxed and happy.
Outside a milling crowd held back by a fully holstered squad of French police awaits their appearance.
Pitt starts talking about his new film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which is having its premiere at the town’s film festival. His role as James won him Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival“I hope they like the film,” he comments in his syrupy Missouri drawl, taking a sip from the glass of champagne that he’s holding, “because it is a really slow-burn picture. If you think this version is long, you should have seen the four-and-a-half-hour one. This is the fast-track one.”
This version is a mere two and a half hours long. It has taken Pitt about a decade to get it on the screen and he takes the role of Jesse James, the legendary 19th-century American outlaw, and is also one of the producers, with Ridley Scott.
“It’s a delicious film and it was a real joy for me because I really wanted to make it,” he tells me. “My choice to make it was not about how well it would do. Film-making is a crapshoot and as I don’t bet on the horses this is my gamble. It will find a time and place for itself. I believe all good films do. It will sit and breathe like a good wine. This film isn’t the popular version of the swash-buckling Jesse James. It’s more of a throwback to some of those complex, complicated films of the 1970s.
“It hasn’t got a lot of dialogue and is what our director (the New Zealander Andrew Dominik) calls ‘a plotless film with no nude scenes’! Everybody keeps asking where is the nude scene of me in the bath? We never shot one.”
The film is a poetic meditation on a murder and its consequences. It is set in the last year of James’s life, when he is planning his next great robbery and waging war on his enemies, who are trying to collect the reward money – and the glory – that is riding on his capture.
It is also a time when he and his young devotee, Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, the brother of Ben Affleck, had certain psychological scores to settle. The assassination happens in James’s own home, when he is shot in the back by “the coward” Ford, who harbours a grudge that his feelings for James have not been reciprocated. “James is at a point in his life when he feels psychologically bad about what he has to do to protect himself,” Pitt expands. “He is self-absorbed and he is almost the last figure of the ‘old’ America, living in the Robber State, Missouri, a state that people emigrating from East to West would skirt around. I’m actually from the same area in Missouri that he was. He lived in a changing America, with a lawless, unsettled country behind and a modern, electrified America with telephones, cars and a new government ahead.”
Pitt thinks James was “one of the first American superstars. There are aspects of his celebrity that I absolutely understand. One is the byproduct of celebrity – being hunted. He was a man hunted with a bounty on his head. That can happen to me but at least nobody is pointing a gun at me, as Robert Ford did at Jesse.”
Jesse James is Pitt’s 30th film, and he has come a long way from his middle-America beginnings: born in Oklahoma, growing up in Springfield, Missouri, where he went to the unlikely named Kicka-poo High School.
The son of a businessman in trucking, he’s the eldest of three in a close-knit, strict Baptist family. He is still very linked to his hometown, donating $100,000 (£49,000) to the Discovery Center, a children’s learning museum there.
Pitt first came to public attention in a 1991 Levi’s ad, and his gorgeous body was again famously on display as a sexy drifter in Thelma and Louisethe same year.
He has long since tempered his pin-up prettiness with muscles, fire and brimstone, in films that include playing the Greek warrior Achilles in a skirt in the swords-and-sandals epic-drama Troy, Fight Club, Seven, Snatch and the lively Mr & Mrs Smith with Jolie. They met on the set of the film, in which they played married assassins, in 2003. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in Legends of the Fall and won one for Twelve Monkeys (for which he was also Oscar nominated).
Now, at 43, he has his own family, a daughter with Jolie, and is father to her three adopted children. “I think I’m about at the halfway mark now I am over 40, ” he says. “I guess the direction gets clearer and the haze clears and you really focus on what you want to focus on as you get older.”
That would include carving a reputation as a respected producer, as with A Mighty Heart, starring Jolie as Mariane Pearl, the widow of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by jihadist militants while reporting in Karachi in 2002. James Christopher, The Times’s chief film critic, raved that Jolie’s performance as Mariane had “rigour and passion”.
“I was very taken with Mariane’s story, and Angelina knew her independently from me,” Pitt says. “It was important for me to be a part of the film, even though there was no acting role for me. Through the producing I got to take part in the film and see it through to the end. That’s the producer’s job: make sure things stay on the rails. It’s a really interesting side to film-making – we don’t have to be in front of the camera.”
He adds that he is working on several projects and “plans to tell some great stories” with Brad Grey, his partner in the film company Plan B. While he produces, Jolie is starring in a high-action thriller coincidentally called The Assassin, jumping off and on trains and training young assassins. “We have two boys at home who are very happy about it,” he says.
Pitt is clearly determined to explore the road less travelled and adds a coda about the future which may surprise his fans.
“I try not to do conventional action pictures or giddy romantic comedies nowadays,” he says. “I loved the Ocean’s films, which were all-day fun to make, but I prefer character roles. Nobody coaxes me to take my shirt off any more! I want to go and explore things, and if it’s new and interesting to me, then there’ll be others out there who’ll find it new and interesting too. Maybe not the masses, but there’ll be someone. The various times I’ve tried to satisfy other people, or some film industry ‘machine’, it has been miserable.”
Away from film, the Jolie/Pitt Foundation recently raised $1 million for relief in Darfur, and Pitt is now regularly pictured in magazines with his kids, playing and shopping. “I can’t recommend family life enough,” he says. “Astonishingly, I have become more efficient now that I have less time. Family comes first and so I have to work more quickly but somehow, even with sleep being nonexistent, paradoxically I get more work done.” At the Venice Film Festival Pitt said that he and Jolie wanted to have another child as soon as possible.
So, what does his own family think of it all now, I wonder.
He laughs. “One day I called my grandfather and asked how he was doing. He said: ‘We just saw your movie.’ I said: ‘Which one?’ And he called to my grandmother: ‘Betty, what was the name of that picture we were just watching?’ ” A celebrity enigma to us, but to his grandparents, he’s just their grandson.
Pitt shakes my hand courteously as we part, Jolie says a friendly goodbye, and together they head towards the flashbulbs.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is showing on Fri, Oct 19 at 8.30pm at OWE2, and Sun, Oct 21, midday, at OWE2. It goes on general release on Nov 30
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Post by dvbalove ♥ on Oct 14, 2007 15:48:37 GMT
I'm bummed, it's not playing anywher near me
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Post by dvbalove ♥ on Oct 21, 2007 12:12:28 GMT
^So the art house theater got the movie, and I saw it last night.
It is a very slow moving creepy movie! Casey Aflect is sooooo creepy, the movie is more about him than Jesse James per se.
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Post by Yada on Oct 21, 2007 14:00:32 GMT
^ I am glad you had the opportunity! I am looking forward to seeing it.. These days, I am going to see Beawulf though! ;D
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Post by Yada on Oct 26, 2007 20:38:50 GMT
Here is some great review from Total Film magazine!!
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Post by Yada on Nov 7, 2007 20:39:30 GMT
Here is a detailed review of the film.. Enjoy reading!
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Post by Yada on Nov 27, 2007 21:48:09 GMT
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Post by Yada on Dec 4, 2007 20:58:08 GMT
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