Author: Lisa Schwarzbaum (1-10 of 138)

Mar 30 2012 04:10 PM ET

'Fifty Shades of Grey': E L James explains Anastasia's traces of Bella Swan

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Anastasia Steele, half of the hot couple in E L James’s runaway erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey, bites her lip a lot. The habit may remind a lot of readers of what some call the Kristen Stewart Lip Bite, so much a part of the character of Bella Swan in the movie adaptations of the Twilight saga. Coincidence? James, who gave her first American interview exclusively to Entertainment Weekly, describes herself as a Twihard who began her mid-life literary career after devouring Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy. The married mother of two teenage sons posted an early version of the current novel on a Twilight fan fiction website under the title Master of the Universe; at the time, she says, she still called her characters Bella and Edward. “You’ll find a lot of erotic stories about Edward on [those sites],” she says.

So is Ana’s mannerism left over from Fifty’s first online incarnation? READ FULL STORY »

Jan 28 2012 11:31 AM ET

Sundance 2012: 'The Surrogate': A story of sex and the single guy with polio makes for a hot crowd-pleaser of a movie

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In The Surrogate, a 38-year-year-old man named Mark O’Brien hires a woman to relieve him of his virginity. But wait, there’s more: Because of childhood polio, the man can’t move his body below his neck, and when he isn’t spending hours in the iron lung that helps him breathe, he’s lying flat on a gurney, cared for by a rotation of attendants. Also there’s this: The woman he hires isn’t a prostitute but a surrogate partner, trained as a sex therapist and experienced at working with disabled clients. The real O’Brien, a poet and journalist, wrote eloquently about his life, including the article “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” published in 1990; he died in 1999 at the age of 49. The movie O’Brien is played by Winter’s Bone’s wonderful John Hawkes; Helen Hunt is frequently, frankly, and rather elegantly naked as Cheryl, the therapist who teaches him How To. O’Brien was a devout Roman Catholic, and William H. Macy has a great turn as a priest who becomes the poet’s great friend as well as confessor. (With more priests like Macy, there might be a boom in church going.)  READ FULL STORY »

Jan 26 2012 09:21 PM ET

Sundance 2012: ‘Compliance’ wants to make you desperately uncomfortable, and succeeds admirably

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Nerve-wracking, extremely troubling, and teetering on that fine Sundance line between useful provocation and self-satisfied exploitation (yes, I’m talking to you, Catfish), Compliance is the cinematic counterpart to one of those famous psychological studies from the 1960s in which volunteers who thought they were assisting in a scientific experiment in pain tolerance were instructed to increase the intensity of pain they inflicted on fellow humans. But rather than studying those being hurt, the real subject was those who complied with authority to do the hurting. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Nazis.) READ FULL STORY »

Jan 26 2012 01:12 PM ET

Sundance 2012: 'Shadow Dancer,' 'Smashed,' 'Nobody Walks,' the pleasures of second-half festival-going, and the sadness of losing a Sundance stalwart

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Image Credit: Rob Hardy

For party animals, star gazers, hungry movie-acquisition teams, and Twitter fiends, diving in at the halfway mark of Sundance has definite drawbacks: The celebrity-circus caravan has left Park City, and that starting-gate itch, both for acquisitions types and critic types, to be first to weigh in on hot titles has been scratched. Fine with me! I arrived in Park City on Tuesday afternoon to already thinning crowds, and with pretty reliable input (not necessarily from Twitter fiends!) into hits, misses, and curiosities. The downside: I missed a sighting of Richard Gere. The upside: I missed a public harangue by Spike Lee.

The Film Festival director wasn’t being hyperbolic when he introduced filmmaker James Marsh to an appreciative audience earlier this week as “Sundance royalty.” After last year’s documentary triumph Project Nim and his 2008 beaut Man on a Wire, Marsh is someone Festival goers reasonably want to follow anywhere. Switching from nonfiction to drama, Marsh doesn’t disappoint this year with Shadow Dancer, a  gripping, slow-building cat-and-mouse political thriller pitting British undercover intelligence agents against Irish Republican Army operatives in 1993 when the bloody Troubles in Northern Ireland were at a critical juncture. READ FULL STORY »

Sep 15 2011 11:26 AM ET

Toronto: 'Butter' spreads a publicity stunt on the media, but the movie is a smear of condescending political attitudes

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Image Credit: Steve Dietl

The publicity stunt recently whipped up for Butter at the Toronto Film Festival worked like a charm: By extending an “invitation” to Minnesota Congresswoman and Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann to “co-host” an Iowa premiere of the political satire, Harvey Weinstein and company cleverly grabbed media headlines, employing impish Michael Moore-style tactics to stake out a political position that’s presumably catnip to the movie’s left-learning and/or Democratic base.

Mission accomplished! But that still leaves Butter to cut through, and for my vote, the movie has the backfiring effect of making its liberal core audience look just as smug, self-righteous, and condescending as conservative opposition insists it is. READ FULL STORY »

Jun 8 2011 04:20 PM ET

January Jones in 'X-Men: First Class': If gentlemen prefer blondes, why does she look so sullen?

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Image Credit: Murray Close

Like the fiery redhead or the sultry brunet, the cool blonde is one of those old-fashioned, L’Oréal-sanctioned visual codes for female sexual temperament that white western audiences still eat up like yellow popcorn. Alfred Hitchcock knew that — that’s why he made a fetish of his blond heroines, none cooler on the outside (and, if fantasies came true, hotter on the inside) than Grace Kelly.

I’m dreaming in hair color lately as I’ve been considering the recent dye-cast career of January Jones — first and most effectively as a porcelain-doll housewife blonde in Mad Men; later and more problematically as a “funny” blonde-joke blonde hosting SNL; and now, with only intermittent success, as a very, very icy blonde in X-Men: First Class. This time around, as the descriptively named Emma Frost, Jones’ ambitious blonde works on the side of evil, clad in sexy James Bond-worthy underwear that accentuates her sides of good. The actress’s READ FULL STORY »

May 22 2011 08:55 AM ET

Cannes Film Festival: Lisa's Palme d'EW awards before the real event (and news of a last-minute contender for top prize)

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Juries at the Cannes Film Festival have confounded betting odds over the years by picking one of the very last entries in the competition schedule as their Palme d’Or winner. (Exhibits A, B, and C: Taste of Cherry in 1997, Rosetta in 1999, and last year’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives.)

As it happens, the very last entry I saw before returning home on Saturday (I missed the final competition entry, having seen 18 out of the 20 on the ballot) is, I think, a real contender for this endearingly Cannes-ish distinction: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, by READ FULL STORY »

May 19 2011 10:30 AM ET

Cannes Film Festival: 'Le Havre' remains a favorite port in the festival storm

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Image Credit: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

Now, in the final lap of the Cannes Film Festival, is the time when we critics begin comparing notes and conjecturing meaninglessly on possible prize winners. (Analyze this: What will jury president Robert De Niro like? And have Lars von Trier’s thoughtless comments, reported at face value by disingenuous journalists with no time for context, ruined the chances for von Trier’s great movie Melancholia?) Meanwhile, as we shmooze and quantify, here’s a quiet headline: There’s not a critic I know, including me, who READ FULL STORY »

May 18 2011 11:53 AM ET

Cannes Film Festival: 'Melancholia' director Lars von Trier talks about Nazis, and gleeful reporters sacrifice meaning in pursuit of a quote

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Image Credit: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

At the press conference following the first screening of his masterpiece Melancholia, Lars von Trier was his own worst enemy, and his own jester, too. What else is new? Answering the usual, dim, blah-blah press conference questions (What were your influences? Are you happy with the movie? How was it working with Kirsten Dunstzzzzzzz?) the Danish filmmaker with a talent both for making movies and making mischief went off on weird, dumb tangents. He talked about porn (He said that’s the kind of movie he’s making next), he mentioned Jews, and got tangled up in musings about Nazis. (He said he used to think he was a Jew. Now he thinks he may be a Nazi.) Then again, he also said that maybe his new movie is crap. READ FULL STORY »

May 18 2011 11:18 AM ET

Cannes Film Festival: Lars von Trier's stunning 'Melancholia' -- the end of the world (and a challenge to 'The Tree of Life')

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Image Credit: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

With this morning’s premiere of  Lars von Trier’s stunning Melancholia, there may be a critics’ face-off of cosmic proportions brewing here at Cannes. Two years ago, von Trier arrived at the Festival armed to shock les bourgeoisie with Antichrist, a howling gyno-nightmare of a cinematic provocation born of the black depression into which the restlessly creative Danish trickster-filmmaker had admittedly sunk. In contrast, although Melancholia, by its very title, declares a mournful state of mind, the movie is, in fact, the work of a man whose slow emergence from personal crisis has resulted in a moving masterpiece, marked by an astonishing profundity of vision. READ FULL STORY »

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