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While he’s set to shoot two films back-to-back this summer and fall, Terrence Malick also has another film in the can and after going through some possible titles, including The Burial, it looks like the romantic drama has finally got it’s official name. The official Classifications & Rating Administration has revealed the name to be To the Wonder and it’s rating of R for “some sexuality/nudity.”

While we have no details on what that title actually refers to, this classification is a promising one, as it usually means the film is in its final stages of completion. It does state a 2012 release, but those are normally just thrown in there as a guess. Hopefully we’ll hear more when it likely hits the Cannes marketplace for buyers. Check out a synopsis of the film which stars Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Rachel Weisz, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet and Jessica Chastain below:

“[I]t concerns a philanderer (Ben Affleck) who, feeling at loose ends, travels to Paris, where he enters a hot-and-heavy affair with a European woman (Olga Kurylenko). Said Lothario returns home to Oklahoma, where he marries the European woman (in part for visa reasons). When the relationship founders, he rekindles a romance with a hometown girl (Rachel McAdams) with whom he’s had a long history.”

In the meantime, Malick is shooting Lawless (which will certainly undergo a title change due toJohn Hillcoat’s Cannes-bound drama of the same name) and Knight of Cups later this year, which include a cast of Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Wes Bentley and Isabel Lucas. Stay tuned for any and all updates.

Do you like the title?

SOURCE: The Film Stage

Both themes were designed and coded by the talented Tathy of Night & Day Design and I hope you think them as lovely as I do

The gallery is open again!

The curtain rises on Hester’s methodical preparations, to the exquisite strains of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto: She closes the curtains in her dingy London flat, stuffs a towel under the door, puts a note on the mantelpiece, swallows some pills, inserts coins in the gas meter, turns on the valve, lies down and drifts off as it hisses. …

There will be a rude awakening — more than one, actually — in this somber adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea,” a play literally and figuratively dated to England’s postwar doldrums of 1950. Its heroine is Hester (Rachel Weisz), attractive young wife of an older gentleman-judge, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale). The story plays out in sporadic flashbacks: One night in a raucous pub, she meets dashing Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), an RAF pilot still obsessed by the war.

Freddie is stuck in his heroics of the ’40s. She’s stuck in a sexless marriage, with her mother-in-law from hell (a fabulous monster, played by Barbara Jefford). They spar nastily at dinner. “I’m sure Hester didn’t mean to be impolite,” Sir William apologizes to mum.

We’re sure she did.

In any case, William is stunned when she leaves their life of luxury to move in with fickle, faithless Freddie, who awakens her sexuality but can’t give her the love or stability that William did — and that she didn’t want.

Like most of Rattigan’s dramas (“The Winslow Boy,” “The Browning Version”) “The Deep Blue Sea” (previously filmed in 1955 with Vivien Leigh) is upper-middle-class based, full of understated and misunderstood emotions. He was more of an Annoyed than an Angry Young Man of his generation — not my favorite playwright. But he gave us several wonderful screen adaptations of his plays, namely “Separate Tables” (1958), with David Niven’s Oscar-winning performance, and the deliciously oddball “Prince and the Showgirl” (1957) starring that deliciously odd couple of Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. Plus the great-fun original script of “Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1964).

In the script at hand, both main characters are equally maddening — but equally well-played. A-list leading lady Rachel Weisz (2005 Oscar winner for “The Constant Gardener”) inhabits a difficult role with which it’s hard to empathize: This incredibly needy, manipulative, self-obsessed woman puts Freddie’s shoes on a table after he tells her that’s bad luck. She hopelessly confuses lust with love. Her newfound ecstasy with him is not so new or ecstatic to him, but she’s so sexually repressed, she can’t see that or the sadomasochistic rhythm of his abusiveness and her forgiveness.

A-list Weisz’s B-list leading man, Tom Hiddleston, was Loki in the Marvel comics movie “Thor” (which he’ll be reprising next year in “Thor 2″ — I can hardly wait), and played Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” last year. Mr. Beale is excellent as long-suffering hubby William.

Director-scriptwriter Terence Davies (“The Neon Bible,” “The House of Mirth”) has a beautiful but deadly slow and mirthless approach — to Rattigan as well as Wharton.

His vision of the blitz is terrifically evocative in one amazing dreamlike flashback: a slow-pan tableaux of Londoners seeking refuge in the Aldwych Underground Station.

Most powerful, though, is the film’s incredible first sequence, to Hillary Hahn’s performance of Barber — the most exquisite American violin concerto ever written — culminating in a circular shot of the illicit lovers in a John-and-Yoko-style nude embrace. Hester licks Freddie’s shoulder once — just once — at the very end of it.

This — and all other music in the film — is crucial to the storytelling, especially the great old sentimental, boozy bar songs like Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me” — a fine foolish notion, if ever there was one. There must be 50 ways to leave your lover, as Paul Simon teaches us. None of them is very nice, but some are much crueler than others: After the rejection, the incredulity, the devastation, when does the “acceptance” come — before, during or after the suicide attempt?

It is not exactly uplifting, and it’s highly theatrical in structure as well as dialogue, but it is nuanced and believable — the torment of a love/lust too overwhelming either to handle or suppress, the painful loneliness upon realizing the impermanence: that love is a can of delicious soup — with an expiration date.

Everyone in “Deep Blue Sea” is shaped, damaged or still living in the emotional wreckage of the war. When written (with shades of “Brief Encounter”), it was a metaphor for the disillusion, exhaustion and diminishment of postwar Britain. The metaphorical shoe may fit post-terror-war America, as well.

The heart and the language of it are lovely. After Hester’s suicide attempt, William breaks his boycott of her and shows up to ask if she still loves Freddie and if Freddie still loves her. “I thought my indifference would hurt your vanity,” he says, now more regretful than enraged. “You betrayed my friendship and trust. If we’d had a child, would it have made any difference?” She replies: “To whom?”

“This is a tragedy,” he concludes.

“Tragedy is too big a word,” she corrects. “Sad, perhaps.”

Opens Friday at Regent Square Theater.

SOURCE: Pittsburg Post-Gazette

By Clint O’Connor, The Plain Dealer 

“The Deep Blue Sea” should have been much better than it is. It features the wonderful Rachel Weisz as a married woman tormented over her affections for her lover, played by the terrific Tom Hiddleston. It’s smart and subtle and nicely evokes its era of postwar Britain.

But ultimately, it does not satisfy. We never quite crack the code of these characters, and their emotional arcs are left floating on the surface, despite the title.

The film is based on the play by Terence Rattigan. Director Terence Davies (“The House of Mirth”) eliminated a lot of superfluous characters and stripped down the story to Hester and her two men, but mostly Hester.

We first meet her at an excruciatingly pivotal moment: attempting suicide. It was done out of anger against Hiddleston’s Freddie, a former World War II pilot who has never quite gotten over the war or his need to drink it away. Hester gave up the life of being Lady Collyer, wife of Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), a prominent judge who kowtows to his ornery mother and refuses to give his wife a divorce.

She and Freddie share a small apartment and struggle to pay the rent. He occasionally looks for a job; she sits around sulking and smoking. Much of “The Deep Blue Sea” is told in fragments of flashbacks, with Hester dreaming or reflecting while standing at the window blowing long exhales of cigarette smoke.

It’s as if she were Bette Davis contemplating some woeful act in between puffs. The film harks back to dramas of the 1940s, such as “Now, Voyager,” “Letter From an Unknown Woman” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter.” Davies has said that he wanted to pay homage to those films and filmmakers such as Lean. He succeeds, although I could have done without the soaring, overdramatic violins drenching the score.

Hester’s recollections suggest she does not possess the tools to deny her heart. Of the handsome Freddie, she says, “I had no power to resist him.”

Hiddleston’s star is fast rising. He played F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” then the dashing British Cavalry officer in Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse.” He also spent time in Cleveland last summer as part of his semiregular gig of playing the evil Loki, first in “Thor” and next in “Marvel’s The Avengers” (out Friday, May 4).

“The Deep Blue Sea” is an amalgam of Hester’s smoky memories. The story is told by her from the inside out, so we need to trust her point of view. Or not.

By the way, the drama, which lands today at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights, is rated R for “a scene of sexuality and nudity.” That’s misleading. During one making-love-in-bed moment, all of the so-called naughty bits are cleverly and artistically covered by sheets or nonnaughty body parts. The R seems extreme.

SOURCE: cleveland.com

By Sally M. Hill / movie reviews / Your Houston News

Actors Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig have agreed to play in an American-Hungarian co-production on the history of the ÁVH, the dreaded state security office of the Rákosi dictatorship, Magyar Hírlap reports.

It is not known who will direct the movie. The story will begin in 1945 and end on October 6, 1956 with the reburial of László Rajk and the arrest of state security lieutenant colonel Vladimir Farkas.

SOURCE: xpatloop.com/Hungary Around The Clock

From:
Brandon Nichols
brandon.nichols@ginsberglibby.com

Message:
Music Box Films will release THE DEEP BLUE SEA in New York and Los
Angeles on March 23, 2012.

View the trailer: http://youtu.be/MIQR_99II3k

Official Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thedeepbluesea

In a deeply vulnerable performance Weisz is the latest incarnation of
Hester Collyer, the wife of a High Court judge (British theatre actor
Simon Russell Beale), a free spirit trapped in a passionless marriage.
Her encounter with Freddie Page, a troubled former Royal Air Force
pilot (Tom Hiddleston, Thor, Midnight in Paris, War Horse, The
Avengers) throws her life in turmoil, as their erotic relationship
leaves her emotionally stranded and physically isolated. Nearly
abandoned by Freddie, Hester attempts to win him back through a
desperate gesture. This only serves to estrange her more from the men
in her life and reality itself.

Through flashbacks, Terence Davies creates memorable cinematic
compositions against the backdrop of post-war England. His signature
style includes beautiful tracking shots as well as the use of popular
music of the day including Samuel Barber’s majestic Opus for Violin
and Orchestra. Besides his two acclaimed semi-autobiographical
features Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes,
Davies’ films include The House of Mirth, The Neon Bible, and Of
Time and the City, his masterful nonfiction exploration of his native
city, Liverpool.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA was adapted for the screen and directed by Terence
Davies. Produced by Sean O’Connor and Kate Ogborn, the Director of
Photography is Florian Hoffmeister, the Production Designer is James
Merifield and the Editor is David Charap.

 

And here’s the official trailer: