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bbclesmis · 5 years

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Andrew Davies Preps For The End Of One Series And The Beginning Of Another

Screenwriter Andrew Davies has been a true master of modern television adaptations, brining such iconic works as Middlemarch and Little Dorit to the MASTERPIECE screen for decades. Now, as he looks ahead to the end of his critically-acclaimed recent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Davies also previews his charming new adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished final novel, Sanditon, set to appear on MASTERPIECE in 2020.

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Transcript:

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

This week on Les Misérables, ten more years have passed, and Valjean and a now-teenaged Cosette are living in a Parisian convent while Javert, now in charge of the capital city’s police force, continues to hunt his ever-elusive quarry.

CLIP

Cosette: What was my mother like?

Jean Valjean: Don’t make me speak of it. She was one of my workers and I dismissed her.

Cosette: What for?

Jean Valjean: For nothing, for concealing the truth.

Jace: Here to discuss the narrative time-jump and simmering political and personal tensions in Les Misérables is writer Andrew Davies. Davies has been one of the United Kingdom’s most prolific screenwriters, bringing his sumptuous adaptations of titles as varied as Middlemarch and Little Dorrit to MASTERPIECE for decades. Davies is already on the job for his next big MASTERPIECE series: a bold new adaptation and completion of Jane Austen’s tragically unfinished final novel, Sanditon. But with a few more episodes of Les Misérables to go, he offers a preview of the upcoming conclusion of his French revolutionary drama series.

Andrew Davies: Sometimes it’s the best not to kind of explain it to the audience just to say, you know, ‘Here it is. This moved and also baffled me. You know, let’s see what you make of it.’

Jace: Davies joins MASTERPIECE to talk Sanditon, the morals of Les Misérables, and his remarkable legacy as a true master of screenwriting.

And this week we are joined by Les Misérables writer Andrew Davies, welcome.

Andrew: Thank you.

Jace: What drew you to adapting Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables? And why is now the perfect time for such an adaptation of that specific book?

Andrew: It’s a big daunting kind of thing. And it probably wouldn’t be something that I’d have voluntarily just suggested to anybody. It’s not really my kind of book, in the sense that Jane Austen is my kind of author, because I’m reading it in translation. It’s great virtues are not to do with subtleties and wit. And, you know, the little varieties of human behavior. It’s a big kind of book. It reminds me of the Bible. You know, it’s so strong, it’s so iconic. It was suggested to me, and I read it, and I was kind of bowled over by it, by the strength of it and also by the sonorities and the echoes of like the world we live in today. A divided society, certainly, as far as UK and France are concerned but you know, maybe America as well, in which there are there are the haves and the have-nots and this is a book predominantly about the have-nots. It seemed very apposite and contemporary to do this book now.

Jace: True or false: your tagline for the project was, ‘Nobody sings’?

Andrew: That’s true, yes. Yes, that’s right. We came across that quite early on.

Jace: You were quoted in The Telegraph as saying that this adaptation quote, ‘Will rescue Victor Hugo’s novel from the clutches of that awful music with its doggerel lyrics.’ Fans of the musical and some of its cast members were not pleased with your words. How do you react to their retorts?

Andrew: Well I mean, of course they were! I was very rude about the musical, but you know, you have to say what you think, don’t you? You have to be honest. I know a lot of people love the musical, but I thought it was a very feeble attempt to represent the novel. I completely accept that other people disagree with me. That’s the way it is it, isn’t it?

Jace: This version of Les Misérables sans singing gives us instead backstories of Fantine and Jean Valjean. We’re privy to very different aspects of these characters. A lighthearted romantic Fantine, a raging, almost feral Valjean.

CLIP

Jean Valjean: How could I not have a heart full of bitterness and hatred? I’d like to see you after nineteen years in the hulks! So don’t preach to me about God and love.

Bishop: I beg your pardon, forgive me, I should have considered your feelings.

Jace: Was it important to you to focus the first episode on these untold stories?

Andrew: Oh yes and I like the way you characterize Jean Valjean raging, almost feral. Yes, sure. I think that’s that’s kind of where it comes from my first encounter with Les Misérables was when I was a little boy, I had a book called, Great Stories From the Classics, and it was little little petite extracts and it was a story of the Bishop’s candlesticks, and I saw, you know this poor Bishop, here comes this this terrifying figure who’s, you know, hardly human. He is so rough and so rude. And I found it quite hard to understand the behavior of the Bishop and also the behavior of Jean Valjean after the Bishop been so kind. You know, I thought surely he should be terribly grateful. Instead he robs the Bishop and then the Bishop not only forgives him, but gives him more things. And that that that kind of puzzled me. But that I wanted to, I don’t know, preserve that sense of and it comes across in the book I think of how frightened people are of Valjean because he’s a man of extraordinary power and strength and he’s so resentful against society, because of society, what society has done to him that I wanted to keep that frightening aspect of him. And that gets echoed later on in the story, when he takes Cosette out to see the dawn rising over the gates of Paris. It turns out that really he wants to see the convicts.

CLIP

Cosette: Can they really be men?

Valjean: Yes, they are men. They are men like me. Cosette?

Cosette: I think if I crossed paths with one of those men, I think I would die. Just from looking him in the face.

Andrew: It’s so strange it’s not like it’s like kind of novels you normally read, is it? It’s like something it’s like a kind of solemn mystical religious tale, you know, more than a book. You know, you could live your life by this book, somehow.

Jace: You could. I mean, it’s about a monster who becomes a man, and a man who becomes a monster and sort of the inherent complexities of humanity. It’s interesting to me because we we get a glimpse of Fantine. Traditionally we sort of picture her sort of a tragic sex worker. We get to see her entire backstory here. She’s given entirely new dimensions. Javert, however still remains a bit of a mystery. Did you consider filling in his backstory at all? I mean we get the fact that he was raised in a prison. But to see that additional dimension.

Andrew: Yeah. It would mean going too far back, too far back in flashback or whatever. Yeah, I could have done it. And one of those strange things that struck as somebody reminded me when we’d been developing the story for sometime, somebody said, ‘Valjean and Javert both seemed to be virgins,’ which is so extraordinary. You know, two mature men, and we don’t have any account of either of them having a loving relationship or a sexual relationship. Maybe sex is unimportant to Javert. And then having met Jean Valjean, he gets so annoyed with him that this develops into a kind of obsession, which is like a twisted love affair. And it’s like, Jean Valjean doesn’t seem interested in Javert at all, except as part of the forces that he’s fighting against. Once he gets out of prison, he never gives Javert another thought until he comes into his world and starts tormenting him.

CLIP

Rivette: That’s one man out of hundreds — and that was a decade ago. He may have been dead for years.

Javert: No, no, I am convinced that he is still alive and here in Paris, laughing at us. I shall never be at peace until he is back in chains.

Andrew: And one of the things I did in the adaptation I think was because I just couldn’t believe that coincidence that I would turn up and then having turned up that neither of them would recognise each other. I mean that’s way Hugo has it in the story. I think well, actually it makes it much richer. If you think there has I heard about this guy and he thinks I’m beat it’s that guy I had in jail and I bet he’s been committing crimes all the time and I just want to see him again. And I want to trap him. I want to nail him. I want to get him in my power. And so then it becomes a situation where they both know, but neither of them is letting on. Yeah, Javert is just waiting for Jean Valjean to reveal himself.

Jace: You’ve become known as a master of adaptations. You once said it gave you ‘A wicked thrill’ to cut down War and Peace. Are there any sacred cows when it comes to adapting fiction?

Andrew: No, I don’t think so. But I’m aware that these great books are not called Great Books for nothing. I mean these guys knew what they were doing. So I do respect the excellence of the original. But having said that, an adaptation is my take on them. It’s not the definitive one, necessarily, but I think it’s my job and my duty to get my reading of a book, not just try to humbly prostrate myself before the Great Author.

Jace: Given that you’re adapting rather colossal tomes for the screen, how do you prioritize or decide what makes it in and what doesn’t?

Andrew: I do a thing at the beginning, after a first reading, or my most recent rereading if I’ve read it long ago in the past, ask myself, ‘What really is the story here? Whose story is it? Who do we love? Who do we need to keep at the forefront of our minds?’ And base the whole adaptation around those two questions.

Jace: And how much of that decision making is personal versus thinking about what the audience might want or need?

Andrew: Um, entirely personal. I obviously I’m concerned about the audience but the audience is something very amorphous. I think the first audience as being me. I want to write something that I would like to see and that I would enjoy seeing, and there is something that I think most people wouldn’t realize which is that the first people that see it the people the time working closely with and they’re three or four very clever, very sympathetic, very clued up young people who are decades and decades younger than me, and close behind pleasing myself, I want to please them. And I don’t think of the audience in general. I think when I’m writing it, ‘Have I got it right for myself?’ and then I think, ‘Oh Laura’s going to laugh at this, Will is going to be moved by that.’ So those thoughts are quite uppermost in my mind.

Jace: Before this next question, a quick word from our sponsors…

Jace: Now this week’s episode moves the action forward to 1832. We find a teenaged Cosette and Jean Valjean are still living at the convent. How did you decide where to place the time jump in the series? Was there always a notion that it would be at sort of a natural halfway point?

Andrew: I think Hugo himself helps us here, I mean he did this, we don’t get a lot of detail about how Cosette goes from age 6 or 7 to 16 or 17. We find her again a fully changed character, from being this abused little girl who’s clearly a survivor. And little Cosette is somebody who, when she’s shown love, reciprocates and she hasn’t been too damaged by all the abuse she’s suffered. And they have one of those almost idealized, perfect father daughter relationships. I invested a lot of emotion myself, I’m the father of a daughter. And there’s just a brief period in the girl’s life when her father is just everything, and she falls in love with you. And and then she’s going to gradually, yeah change, and of course Jean Valjean who’s known no love in his life before, can’t bear it that this is going to change.

Jace: You mentioned briefly earlier about Javert happening onto Montreuil where Jean Valjean just happens to have set himself up. Les Misérables relies rather heavily on coincidence — Marius ends up in Valjean and Cosette’s old flat next to the Thenardiers, whom his father told him saved him during the war. Cosette that ends up with the doll made of her dead mother’s hair. Should these occurrences be read as coincidence or as providence?

Andrew: Well I think again, as I said before this is one of those books, it’s not like an ordinary book. I’ve tried to sort out or explain or get away from some of the coincidences, but I guess some of the things in the book you’ve just got to understand. We don’t know for definite that the doll is made out of her mother’s hair, but it might be, because it could be the same guy. I mean he goes around the country, ‘I’m buying and selling I’m selling and I’m buying.’ And the teeth and the hair the get redistributed again and again.

Jace: Marius meets Eponine, and she tries to tempt him through a peephole in the wall. His romantic attraction to Cosette is complicated by sexual desire for Eponine which culminates in a we’ll say vivid dream he has. What were your intentions with this scene and with Marius’s sense of guilt?

Andrew: Well I was just fascinated by by Eponine and her character and just her juxtaposition with Marius at this stage. In the book, Marius is just such a po faced puppet, really. And I wanted, you know, to make him more like you know a real young man who’s been, I mean. In a way, like like most of the kids in this book, he’s been abused. I mean his upbringing was ridiculously privileged but he’s been brought up as a kind of little fascist, really. And he’s worked out for himself that with some prompting that some in his grandfather’s view is biased and crazy. And that he’s got to work out his own and things and of course here’s this here’s this girl who’s possibly a teenage prostitute. It’s never absolutely clear what she does, and she’s living next door and she likes him. And I just think it’s I always like if I can find any sources for humor in these these these sort of grand, iconic books and the situation where he has this pure romantic love for Cosette, but there’s this girl next door who’s sort of tempting him physically, and so I couldn’t resist giving him an erotic dream about the wrong girl. He wants to have a dream about Cosette, which is all kind of pure and kissy-kissy. Instead he finds she’s she’s changed into Eponine, who has a more kind of direct and visceral appeal. I suppose for him though from Eponine’s point of view, Eponine has a kind of pure attraction for. She just thinks he’s lovely and she’d do anything for him. I mean he’s he’s a you know a different kind of boy from the kind of boys she’s known.

Jace: There’s a massive fight sequence between Valjean and the Thenardiers and their criminal associates who ambush him, and ultimately Javert shows up as well.

CLIP

Valjean: You dare to threaten my Cosette? You think you can do anything to impress me? Look! Now do your worst!

Jace: How difficult was it to write this pivotal action sequence?

Andrew: I thought it was difficult because it’s so strange in the book. The most vivid thing in all this encounter, is that he allows himself to be overpowered and bound and then his superhuman strength is a given in the story. So he throws them all off, and proceeds to take this iron out of the fire and wound himself with it in order to demonstrate how puny any effort to frighten him about that kind of thing would be. So it’s again, it’s, you keep getting these things that are, you know, not rational and not logical and something like a kind of mystical text.

Jace: I mean it is craziest thing.

Andrew: That we need to reflect on and say, ‘Well what is that? What could that mean?’

Jace: That moment is the craziest of all craziness. Because he does burn himself. It is a demonstration of sort of his strength and his fearsomeness and it sort of is that moment where he allows the monster to come out that he’s been containing, it is sort of his true self. I mean, what were you trying to convey with that precise action?

Andrew: I was just trying to I don’t know, represent that episode in the book, I think. And it was something that I found you know very powerful and moving, but hard to understand. And sometimes, you know, it’s the best not to kind of explain it to the audience, just to say, ‘Yeah here it is. This moved and also baffled me. You know, let’s see what you make of it.’

Jace: We have an Andrew Davies adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sanditon on the horizon. Austen only wrote about 100 pages of that fragment. Was it challenging or liberating getting to finish an unfinished work of Jane Austen?

Andrew: Well it was, but it was both both challenging and liberating. It’s odd, it’s just a fragment, it’s quite a long fragment, I would imagine she would have ruthlessly edited the hundred or so pages that she wrote, because I find that there was enough for half the first episode, but that was all in her hundred pages. But she did get to introduce the characters and set out the situation and that was a really bold departure for Jane Austen, because the situation is the transformation of a little seaside village into a fashionable seaside resort like Brighton or somewhere like that. And the characters are again a departure. Of course, we’ve got our young heroine, who is a fairly typical Jane Austen heroine. She’s a bit like a rather more clued up version of Catherine Morland out of Northanger Abbey, she’s come from a large family of which she’s the oldest girl. So she’s quite sussed out about farm life and looking after her younger sisters. But she gets pushed into a new world with a lot of different people who are different from all the sorts of people that she’s known before. And crucially these main people, they’re not kind of aristocrats or gentleman farmers, they are business people, they’re entrepreneurs. They want to make a new world and make themselves some money. And you know, that’s different from all Jane Austen’s characters before and and so a lot of the novel is about things like raising money, attracting celebrities, trying to build momentum. How modern! And also it’s got Jane Austen’s first black character, who’s an heiress from the West Indies with a fortune. I’ve said it was a hundred thousand pounds, which is huge for those days but it makes it so, on the one hand, she will encounter of course a lot of prejudice because this an England seaside village, no one will ever seen a black person before. But on the other hand, whoever marries her is going to be set up for life. So that’s an interesting situation. And then you’ve got the local rich lady, who’s got lots of money that she might leave to this person or this person or this person. And so we’ve got several people who are after her money. And of course, an entrepreneurial family of brothers all need her money as an investment. And so we’ve got a wonderful situation I think to start a story, and it was very liberating to write it. And also I was very, very much in mind that this Regency period where it’s set. She set it, I think well, she was writing it in 1820, so I thought, let’s let’s go for 1820, which was late Regency period. A period of extreme kind of looseness in society, really, which was much more dissolute, and actually than we’ve got today. Jane Austen knew all about that stuff, but she always kept it below the surface with discrete references. We’re not going to be so discreet.

Jace: I’d expect nothing less. Andrew Davies, thank you so very much.

Andrew: Thank you.

Jace: MASTERPIECE viewers already on the edge of their seats thanks to Season 3 of Unforgotten won’t want to miss next week’s podcast, where we go behind the scenes with this season’s horrific killer as DCI Cassie Stuart and DI Sunny Khan catch their prey.

CLIP

Sunny: The ticket was issued at 6:20 a.m, on the A-405.

Cassie: Which is where?

Sunny: About six miles outside Middenham.

Cassie: And was he heading to, or from?

Sunny: From.

Jace: That’s next Sunday, May 12, following the explosive third season finale of Unforgotten.

MASTERPIECE Studio is hosted by me, Jace Lacob and produced by Nick Andersen. Elisheba Ittoop is our editor. Susanne Simpson is our executive producer. The executive producer of MASTERPIECE is Rebecca Eaton.

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #Andrew Davies #podcast #Interviews #pbs

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND March 15, 2019 - WONDER PARK, CAPTIVE STATE, FIVE FEET APART

Since I’m writing quite a bit about the wide releases over at my regular gig at The Beat, I’m not sure what more I can say here. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is clearly going to be the victor here, but I’ve only seen one of the new wide releases.

Probably the strongest of the new offerings is Paramount’s WONDER PARK, an animated family film featuring the voices of Jennifer Garner, Mila Kunis, Kenan Thompson, Ken Jeong, Matthew Broderick, John Oliver and many more. It’s also the only animated movie ever to be made without a director – at least, there is none credited, which is never a good sign for a movie, as it generally means problems in production. Generally, kids won’t care about that and it looks like a fun premise with a lot of talking animals that I personally will never ever see.

The young adult romantic drama FIVE FEET APART, the latest from CBS Films, stars Cole Sprouse from Riverdale and Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and Haley Lu Richardson from Split and awesome movies like Support the Girls, The Edge of Seventeen and Operation Finale. This is a teen drama in the vein of Josh Boone’s The Fault In Her Stars to the point where I feel it might be a direct rip-off of it, but since I haven’t actually seen it, I’m going to assume that this is a romance between two young people who need to remain five feet apart, and I’m not sure you can even get to first base at that distance.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt returns with the sci-fi thriller CAPTIVE STATE (Focus Features), is the one movie of the weekend I did see, and that’s an interesting look at an alien incursion nine years after they’ve arrived. It takes place in Chicago and has an interesting cast that includes John Goodman, Vera Farmiga, Ashton Sanders and many more, and it’s a much slower cerebral affair than the typical alien invasion movie, one more dealing with an underground human rebellion wanting to take it to the aliens and their human government allies.

You can also read my interview with Wyatt over at The Beat.

Mini-Review: I was definitely intrigued by the premise for this sci-fi thriller since I’ve always found Rupert Wyatt to be a thoughtful and intelligent filmmaker, and this was something he conceived with his wife and co-writer Erica Beeney.

It starts with an alien invasion that’s shown in a rather quizzical way where we don’t exactly know what’s happening, but over the opening title credits, we get a lot of information about the alien incursion and how it affected the people of earth. The story is focused on Chicago nine years after the invasion with part of the city declared a Closed Area which the aliens have taken over as their own.

John Goodman plays a police detective who is trying to track down the mysterious “Phoenix” who is leading the rebellion against the aliens, while Ashton Sanders is a young man whose parents were killed by the alien invaders with his older brother missing. How these two will be brought together is part of what keeps the movie compelling, but Wyatt doesn’t go out of his way to make clear exactly what is happening or how the aliens affected those in the city. That’s stuff you learn as the film goes along, and it makes Captive State more of a challenging sci-fi films rather than the typical action movie in which the humans fight against CG aliens (ala Starship Troopers and Battle L.A.)

The casting is particularly interesting since it’s been a long time since we’ve seen John Goodman in anything close to a leading role, even though he used to do plenty of them in the ‘80s and ‘90s. (Who could forget Arachnophobia?) I also thought Ashton Sanders was much better in this than he was in Moonlight, where I thought his segment really suffered. It’s clear that he’s improved greatly as an actor, and he does decently as the film’s lynchpin to which audiences can relate. Personally, I love Vera Farmiga, and I wish there was more of her in the movie, but her role is one of the film’s bigger twists, so it makes sense that she doesn’t appear more.

It’s pretty obvious that (despite the way it’s being marketed) Captive State is not meant as science fiction film for the masses, but rather, one meant for dedicated sci-fi fans who read novels and want to be challenged intellectually. It may take a good hour before you can get into what Wyatt was trying to do, but he’s created a strong movie about revolting against oppression during a time when many are being oppressed on a daily basis, so in that regards, it’s fairly timely. Rating: 7/10

Lionsgate’s LatinX subsidiary Pantelion Films will release NO MANCHES FRIDA 2, the sequel to the 2016 comedy hit, which grossed about $11.5 million without ever being in more than 500 theaters. I never saw the original so I’ll probably never see this one, and we might as well just go straight to the…

LIMITED RELEASES

There are a few decent movies in select cities this weekend including Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s directorial debut THE MUSTANG (Focus Features), starring Matthias Schoenaerts as Roman, a convict in a Nevada prison with anger issues who tries to escape his violent past by joining the prison’s horse-training program. Led by Bruce Dern and bonding with a fellow inmate played by Jason Mitchell, Roman quickly takes to his horse and uses the bonding experience. This was a really wonderful movie, and it’s a shame that it didn’t come out last year with the other wonderful horse movies, Chloe Zhao’s The Rider and Lean on Pete, as it would have fit right in. But this also has the element of redemption and growth that I appreciate from modern-day prison movies, and this joins Shot Caller and O.G.as some of the better prison-related character dramas. Exec. produced by Robert Redford, the movie will open in New York and L.A. this weekend and hopefully it will expand later. Good news! I just learned that Focus plans on expanding the movie nationwide (probably a couple hundred theaters) on March 29!

Another movie I quite enjoyed for reasons I’ll explain is the historical drama THE AFTERMATH (Fox Searchlight), directed by James Kent (Testament of Youth) and starring Jason Clarke and Keira Knightley as Col. Lewis and Rachel Morgan, a British officer and his wife who have moved into a luxurious mansion in Hamburg, Germany following WWII. The mansion is owned by a German widower, played by Alexander Skarsgard, who they allow to remain there with his daughter. As Lewis is pulled further and further into his work to uncover Nazi rebels, Rachel gets closer to the owner of the house. So yes, this is a fairly typical WWII drama similar to ohers Knigthley has done before, but I was particularly interested in it, since my father was born in Hamburg, and I had gone back there to see his childhood home, which had been rebuilt after being bombed in the British air raids. So I had this connection, but then I generally love Knightley and like Skarsgard anyway, and they were quite good in the film, which deals with the personal lives of these people while also dealing with the bigger story of the Germans and British trying to recover after a brutal war that left many dead. In other words, this is totally my kind of movie, and if it’s something that sounds interesting, it will open in select cities on Friday.

My Interview with James Kent

Fresh off his “Saturday Night Live” debut, Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with YARDIE (Rialto Pictures), a movie set in ‘70s Kingston Jamaica and 19802 Hackney (a Jamaican community in London)that’s based on the novel by Victor Headley. It centers around the world of Jamaican narcotics syndicates and a courier named D (Aml Ameen from The Maze Runner) who wants revenge for his brother’s murder.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-Ke, but oddly, I really liked his new movie ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Cohen Media) when it played at the New York Film Festival last year. It’s more of a crime film ala the work of Johnny To looking at the jianghu gangs within a small mining town and the relationship between a mob boss and his wife, played by Lao Fin and Zhao Tao. It’s a really good film from China that’s especially memorable for the transformative performance by Zhao Tao as the film covers many decades in her life. The movie will open in New York, L.A. and San Francisco this weekend.

Opening at the Film Forum Wednesday is REZO, a wonderful Russian animated doc by Leo Gabriadze about his father, filmmaker and puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze, that’s exec. producer by Russia’ Michael Bay, Timur Bekmambetov. In the film, Rezo talks about his interesting life after WWII when the family takes in a German POW, much to the ire of his father, but the stories are told in entertaining ways with quirky animation to illustrate them, and I ended up enjoying this more than I thought I would. The film is being shown with the Russian animated short Tale of Tales by Yuri Norstein, which is definitely a strange one, having been made in 1979 but not really appearing on the film festival circuit until 2002, as Norstein was caught behind the Wall of Communism and unable to travel to receive the awards the film received.

An odd release by Warner Bros is the sort-of-sequel Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, which normally would be straight to home entertainment but is actually getting a substantial theatrical release. Unlike the 2007 Nancy Drew, which starred a young(er) Emma Roberts in the title role, this one stars Sophia Lillis (Beverly from 2017’s Itmovie) and is directed by ‘80s and ‘90s genre filmmaker Katt Shea (Poison Ivy), so it should be an interesting bit of counter-programming for younger girls. Again, I have no idea how many theaters this will be in, as I’ve heard NADA about this from my Warner Bros. contacts, but hey, if you’re a fan of the character it’s another option.

I’m really interested in the Western Never Grow Old (Lionsgate/Saban Films), starring Emile Hirsch and John Cusack, mainly because I loved director Ivan Kavanagh’s earlier horror film The Canal. The film takes place in the frontier town of Garlow when a vicious Dutch outlaw (Cusack) arrives with his gang, and the local undertaker (Hirsch) has to decide whether to keep taking the blood money from burying their victims or do something about it. I expect this will get the usual Saban limited release but mainly be seen on VOD.

Hey, look! Alexander Skarsgard is in ANOTHER movie this weekend! The Hummingbird Project (The Orchard) from Canadian director Kim Nguyen (War Witch) stars Skarsgard and Jesse Eisenberg as New York cousins playing the high-stakes game of High-Frequency Trading who want to build a fire optic line between Kansas and New Jersey. It also stars Salma Hayek as their old boss who wants to stop the duo from making millions. Again, select cities and VOD.

Daredevil and Ghost Rider director Mark Steven Johnson returns with Finding Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the recent digital release Chasing Bullitt), starring Travis Fimmel, Rachael Taylor, William Fichtner, Lily Rabe and Forest Whitaker. It’s about a gang of thieves looking to steal $30 million in illegal campaign contributions to President Richard Nixon who become the subjects of an FBI manhunt. It opens in select theaters as well as On Demand.

Netflix is giving The Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s Highwaymen, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the Texas Rangers who brought down Bonnie and Clyde, a release into select theaters on Friday before its streaming debut on March 29. Like last week’s Triple Frontier, I haven’t seen the movie yet, though I hope to see it before its streaming release. We’ll see if that happens.

Marc Cousins’ doc The Eyes of Orson Welles will open at the IFC Center on Friday, as Cousins was given unprecedented access to some of Welles’ sketches, paintings and drawings to help learn more about the enigmatic filmmaker’s inner life.

Opening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklynthis Friday and at the Landmark Nuartin L.A. on Friday 22 is Yann Gonzalez’s trashy sexploitation movie Knife + Heart, which premiered at Fantastic Fest last September. The former Mrs. Johnny Depp Vanessa Paradis plays Ann, a woman whose relationship with her editor (Kate Moran) is over just as someone is going around killing the actors in her low-budget gay porn production company. So she puts the murders into her new film “Homo-cide.”

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

This Friday, the Metrograph will open a restoration of the late Nietzchka Keene’s 1990 directorial debut The Juniper Tree (Arbelos Films), starring pop superstar Bjork while she was 21 and still a part of the Icelandic group The Sugarcubes. She plays a young woman on the run with her sister from persecutors who killed their mother as a witch. This week’s Late Nites at Metrographoffering is Catherine Breillat’s 2001 film Fat Girl, a fantastic drama worth seeing. Playtime: Family Matineesis going with Ishiro Honda’s 1954 monster movie classic… go-go-Godzilla! That will play on Saturday and Sunday at 11AM, and I will definitely be at one of those shows. (I guess the Metrograph are also showing The Last Unicornone more time since it did so well last weekend.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Tarantino’s repertory theater has another amazing and varied week beginning with Joan Crawford’sMildred Pierce (1945) on Wednesday, then double features of Cliff Robertson’s J.W. Coop (1971) and Patrick Murphy’s 1972 thriller Riding Tall on Weds. and Thursday, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1975) and Carl Reiner’s 1982 comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, starring Steve Martin, on Friday and Saturday, and then Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) and John Wayne’s The Quiet Man (1952) on Sunday and Monday. This weekend’s midnight offerings are Tarantino’s own Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2004) on Friday night and the 1976 comedyTunnel Vision, starring Chevy Chase, John Candy, Larraine Newman and more on Saturday night. The weekend’s Kiddee Matinee is George Miller’s 1982 filmThe Man from Snowy River, starring Kirk Douglas, while the 1999 survival thriller Ravenous will screen on Monday. Tuesday night’s Grindhouse double feature is The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and Sorority House Massacre (1986).

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Bob & Wray: A Hollywood Love Story starts this Friday and running through April 2, looking at the films of married couple, screenwriter Rob Riskin and actor Fay Wray. It kicks off Friday with a double feature of Frank Capra’s 1934 film It Happened One Night, written by Riskin, and It Happened in Hollywood starring Wray. Friday will be a screening of The Wedding March (1928) introduced by Victoria Riskin (with live piano accompaniment). Saturday sees a double feature of King Kong with It Happened One Night, and then Sunday and Monday sees a double feature of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Platinum Blonde (1931), which I might go see. This weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is Frank Capra’s 1937 film Lost Horizon, which was also adapted by Riskin. (In theory, one could do a Frank Capra TRIPLE feature on Sunday.)

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

The American Cinematique’s rep theater is screening Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier, as part of the Greg Proops Film Club Podcast. The theater is also kicking off an Alex Cox retrospective (with Cox in person) including double features of Highway Patrolman (1991) and Walker (1987) on Friday, and my personal favorite Repo Man (1984) with Cox’s new film Tombstone Rashomon on Saturday. On Sunday, the theater will present the St. Patrick Swayze Day double featureRoad House (1989) and Point Break (1991).

AERO (LA):

Meanwhile, at the American Cinematique’s other theater, they’re doing a series of 3-D Favorites, including Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) and The Glass Web (1953) on Thursday, Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), starring the late Julie Adams (with her son introducing the film) on Saturday. Also, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2014 film Goodbye to Languagewill screen Saturday, and then Sunday will be a special presentation of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Immersive Storytelling through 3-D Cinematography. Wrapping up the Hitchcock, Truffaut and Jones series with Kent Jones’s doc Hitchcock/Truffaut (see? I was right!!!) and Hitchcock’s 1942 movie Saboteur.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad is finishing up its Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet series in time for the new restoration of Blier’s 1978 film Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Cohen Film), as well as showing Blier’s 1983 rom-com My Best Friend’s Girl on Thursday and Friday nights.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

This weekends offerings are: Waverly Midnights: The Feds presents Mike Newell’s 1997 crime-comedy Donnie Brasco, starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. Weekend Classics: Early Godard takes another weekend off but the weekend’s Late Night Favorites is Bruce Willis’ Die Hard, as well as David Lynch’s Eraserhead and once again... Ridley Scott’s Alien.

MOMA (NYC):

This week’s Modern Matinees: B is for Bacallofferings are 1948’s Key Largoon Weds, Young Man with a Horn (1950) on Thursday and Sidney Lumet’s 1974 Murder on the Orient Expresson Friday. (I might actually go see the latter, so if you go, come over and say “Hi!”) William Fox Presents More Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation continues with John Ford’s 1926 movie 3 Bad Men and 1931’s Quick MIllions on Wednesday, While New York Sleeps (1920) and John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928) on Thursday and much more running through the weekend.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

On Saturday, MOMI is showing Creature of the Black Lagoon with a post-screening conversation with Mallory O’Meara who wrote The Lady from the Black Lagoonand my pal Grady Hendrix. Saturday also begins a Tribute to Bruno Ganz, the late Swiss actor with screenings of Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977) on Saturday and Sunday, as well as Wnders’ Wings of Desire(1987) on Sunday.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

This Friday’s midnight offering is Sam Raimi’s 1987 horror classic Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, starring Bruce Campbell.

STREAMING AND CABLE

I still haven’t seen J.C. Chandor’s TRIPLE FRONTIER (thanks a lot, Netflix!), but the heist thriller, written by Oscar winner Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker), stars Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Garrett Hedlund and Charlie Hunnam as a group of special ops soldiers planning a heist, and it’s already on the streaming network. I’ve actually seen TV commercials for it, but it looks like I’ll have to watch this on my tiny television rather than in theater, which is a bummer since it looks like a good big screen movie. (Maybe Spielberg is right?) This Friday, the streaming network will also be debuting the fifth and final season of Arrested Development … but does anyone even care anymore? Netflix will also premiere the first season of Turn Up Charlie starring Idris Elba (he’s just everywhere!) as a struggling DJ.

I haven’t had a chance to watch Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley yet, but it will premiere on HBO on Monday, and on Sunday, Showtime will present the new season of Billions, another show that I haven’t watched yet, but they shot some stuff for the new season on my block!

Next week’s big new release is Jordan Peele’s horror film Us, starring Lupita Nyong’o, which will hope to continue the success the filmmaker had with 2017’s Get Out.

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