Entertainment In Brief
Michelle Pfeiffer, from hunted to hunter in 21 years. Plus, the 100th anniversary of Hollywood, sort of...
The Change Has Come...
You would almost think these two photos are from the same film.
Look closely and you’ll see it’s actually a case of the student becoming the teacher as Michelle Pfeiffer stars in the period drama Chéri (pictured top left), which finds older courtesan Lea de Lonval (Pfeiffer) seducing a much younger man, nicknamed Chéri (Rupert Friend).
It’s been 21 years since Pfeiffer played the chaste Madame de Tourvel, who is seduced by the sexually experienced Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) in Dangerous Liaisons (pictured top right).
Both films are set in France — Chéri takes place during France’s grand Belle Epoque period that spanned the late 19th-century until the onset of WWI, while Dangerous Liaisons is set in the late 18th-century and captures the social and sexual mores of the French aristocracy.
Both films are based on renowned books; Collete wrote the two Chéri novels that are amalgamated into the single film, while military officer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos penned Les Liaisons dangereuses.
And in both films the seducers make the grave mistake of betraying their personal rule of never falling in love with their play toys.
What makes Chéri such a full-circle moment for Pfeiffer is that it’s written by Christopher Hampton and directed by Stephen Frears, the writer and director behind Dangerous Liaisons.
Asked what it was like to work with Frears 20 years after teaming up for Dangerous Liaisons, Pfeiffer told LoveFilm.com, “It’s funny because he hasn’t changed a bit and I probably haven’t either. Maybe we’re both a little bit more stubborn and set in our ways but we kind of just picked up where we left off.”
—Ingrid Randoja
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Artifact
This month’s objet de film
Selig Polyscope Company
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles area’s
first permanent movie studio, the Selig Polyscope Company — not quite
in Hollywood, but just to the east in the L.A. suburb of Edendale. This
tiny bungalow was one of the studio’s first buildings.
Founded by Chicago’s William Selig, the studio made hundreds of
movies at their new dry, sunny location. Other studios soon followed to
Edendale, including Fox Studios and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. In
1918, Selig Polyscope folded due to financial problems, and the studio
was transformed into a zoo, since it housed a huge menagerie of animals
for use in its films. By the 1920s most of the other studios had left
Edendale as well, setting up shop a short drive to the west in
Hollywood.
—Marni Weisz
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Uma Thurman
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On home turf
Films shooting across Canada this month
The gods have descended on Vancouver. Uma Thurman. Rosario Dawson.
Steve Coogan. Pierce Brosnan. They’re all in town to play Greek deities
in the fantasy flick Percy Jackson, currently shooting in B.C.
Based on a five-part book series by Rick Riordan, the film revolves
around young Percy (Hoot’s Logan Lerman), who has just found out he’s
descended from the Greek god Poseidon. This newfound knowledge plunges
poor Percy into the middle of a longstanding battle between the deities
— Thurman is Medusa, Dawson is Persephone, Coogan is Hades, Brosnan is
Chiron, etc.
Think of it as Harry Potter with Greek gods instead of witches and
warlocks, especially since the film is directed by Chris Columbus, who
helmed the first two Potter pics.
—Marni Weisz
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Out of Africa
A documentary sequel? Perhaps documentary spinoff is a better term for director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Soul Power.
While working as a film editor on When We Were Kings, the 1996 documentary about Muhammad Ali’s 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire, a.k.a. “The Rumble in the Jungle,” Levy-Hinte was aghast at the quality and quantity of archival footage that went straight back into the vault, unused. Particularly footage of “Zaire ’74,” a music festival Don King organized as an offshoot of the fight, and which combined some of the best African and African-American artists working at that time.
James Brown, Miriam Makeba, B.B. King, Celia Cruz, Manu Dibango, Bill Withers and The Spinners were all there, as was Ali himself, to deliver a diatribe against racial injustice.
In his director’s statement, Levy-Hinte admits he feared his documentary — which is basically a collage of behind-the-scenes and concert footage, and gets a limited release on July 24th — may be viewed as “parasitic and derivative” and would be “judged harshly against its very accomplished elder sibling,” but he also felt that if he didn’t make the film he would be guilty of obscuring an important cultural milestone.
—Marni Weisz