In this morning’s roundup of movie news ‘n’ notes from around the web, a financial reporter isn't buying “Wall Street,” and Jesse Eisenberg isn’t acting.
Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” hasn’t exactly won over most movie critics – and now, it turns out, it’s not winning over financial columnists either. Joe Nocera, who writes the Talking Business column for the New York Times, says the movie “was not the fictionalized version of the financial crisis of 2008 I had expected” – and when Stone says that he doesn’t think a credit default swap could really be filmed, and that he was trying for something else, Nocera begs to differ. “Truth to tell, I wasn’t really buying what Mr. Stone was selling. The more he protested, the more he sounded like a man who hadn’t pulled off what he had set out to accomplish and was now making after-the-fact excuses. Not unlike Wall Street itself in the aftermath of the financial crisis …. ” Ouch. (The New York Times)
(Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
Jeff Wells looks at Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech” and Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network,” and decides that Firth is “acting” and Eisenberg isn’t. By which he means that in Firth’s performance – which he keeps insisting that he really likes – the performer is “clearly using acquired skills to inject varying degrees of feeling into a given scene,” whereas Eisenberg is “spellbinding” because “the notion that he’s performing doesn’t surface. At all.” I’d say that it’s easier to act without “acting” if you’re playing a contemporary, as opposed to a member of the British royal family from 75 years ago, but I certainly agree that they’re both terrific. (Hollywood Elsewhere)
In the quest to deliver an experience that could never be duplicated at home with a DVD player, the new trend is “immersion experiences,” says Victoria Richards. She’s speaking mostly of a British company, Future Cinema, which stages events in which guests sign up to see a film at an undisclosed location, and don’t know what they’ll be seeing until they arrive. The latest outing involved actors, animals and onlookers “transform[ing] North London into Damascus for David Lean’s epic ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’” Said the Future Cinema founder, "Cinema is part of people's lives and it shouldn't be restricted to a sterile multiplex." Here in the United States, the Alamo Drafthouse’s Rolling Roadshow does something similar, though so far they’ve drawn the line at camels or costumes. (The Independent)
With tickets going on sale for the London Film Festival on Monday, Ryan Gilbey offers a preview of Britain’s biggest film festival, though he’s decided to stay away from recommending the obvious biggies (“127 Hours,” “Black Swan,” “Never Let Me Go”) or the ones that’ll open within a few days of playing the fest (“The Kids Are All Right,” “Another Year”). Instead, he says his money is on Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock” or Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” and that he’s also looking to catch “Meek’s Cutoff,” “A Screaming Man,” “Aurora” and a few others. (New Statesman)
