Roman Holiday Is Immortal Classic Movie

Roman Holiday (1953) Directed by William Wyler. Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert (119 min).

A valentine to Rome, as a princess eludes her minders for a few hours of freedom, a Vespa ride, some gelato, a really cool haircut and the promise of amore with reporter Gregory Peck. “Audrey Hepburn gives the popular old romantic nonsense a reality which it seldom had before. Amid the rhinestone glitter of Roman Holiday’s make-believe, Paramount’s new star sparkles and glows with the fire of a finely cut diamond” (Time Magazine).

Few actresses made a splash the way Audrey Hepburn did in Roman Holiday. Meltingly beautiful, poised and playful, with one film she instantly became one of classic Hollywood’s most beloved stars. The bittersweet tone has kept the film modern, challenging the saccharine sweetness of many 1950s romances.
Roman Holiday took a long time to get to the screen. Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, wrote the original story in 1948, and had writer Ian McLellan Hunter front it for a sale to Frank Capra’s Liberty Pictures. Capra’s independent producing era, in partnership with William Wyler and George Stevens, did not last long, (one of the great financial disappointments was It’s a Wonderful Life) and the assets of the company were sold to Paramount. The studio had some money that could only be used abroad, so filming using Italian lire had a financial incentive. This would be the first American film shot in its entirety in Europe since World War II. Hunter received screenplay credit, although both Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges may have worked as script doctors, and it was Hunter who would receive an Oscar for his writing. In 1993, the Academy acknowledged Trumbo’s contribution, and awarded his wife and children his posthumous Academy Award for Roman Holiday's screenplay.

Capra’s originally planned to cast Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant as the princess and the reporter, a deal which never came to fruition. After the film became a Paramount property, many auditioned for the role until Hepburn, a young actress who had played bits in several films and starred on stage in Gigi was tested. She was interviewed about her experience for a while and then, believing the camera was shut off, showed a more playful side to her nature by stretching, hugging her knees and asking how she’d done. The actor who read with her took a more cynical view, “This little doe-eyed charmer is a very smart cookie. She knows perfectly well that the camera is still running and giving it the works.” (Paris). Wyler said, “She completely looked the part of a princess. A real, live bona fide princess. And when she opened her mouth, you were even sure you found a princess. The one variable was, could she act like a princess?" (Maychick).

Filming had its challenges. The Roman summer was stiflingly hot, the outside temperature was in the 90s and inside the buildings it was even hotter. Crowds swarmed over all the locations, making huge impromptu audiences for the actors. Clashes between political parties resulted in strikes and other unrest that threatened to disrupt production. Wyler had wanted to shoot in color, but the budget couldn’t accommodate the added expense.

The Embassy Ball sequence included real Italian nobility, slumming and donating their salaries to charity, and the reporters at the end were real reporters, 38 international correspondents. The script capitalized on the worldwide gossip about British Princess Margaret’s romance with a commoner, RAF Group Captain Peter Townsend, an entanglement scuttled by Queen Elizabeth, herself.

Eldred Gregory Peck (his mother found the name in a phone book) grew up with his maternal grandmother in rural La Jolla, California after his parents’ divorce. Majoring in medicine at UC Berkeley, he discovered acting only when asked to try out for a play in his senior year because he was tall (6’3”) but found he preferred the stage. He went to NYC to try the actor’s life with little success at first, and occasionally slept in Central Park. Winning a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse, his acting career began in earnest. Classified 4-F because of a bad back (Martha Graham pressed her knee into his back during a class in an attempt to improve his flexibility and ruptured a disc) he quickly found a niche in Hollywood where many leading men were in the service. He was nominated 4 times for an Oscar in the 1940s without winning, and throughout his life devoted much of his time to the arts and liberal political causes, even making Nixon’s enemies list.

Peck had first worried that his part was secondary to the Princess, in fact, many leading men had turned the part down for that reason. He had never done a comedy before, and this relaxed performance shows him at his most charming. Or, as Wyler put it, “Peck used to be a somber sort of a fellow. In Roman Holiday he simply learned to put his hands in his pockets.” He warmed to the experience, and even insisted that Hepburn’s name be above the title. His agent protested saying that such a privilege was the result of many years of work. But Peck insisted, “If I don’t I’m going to make a fool of myself because that girl is going to win the Oscar in her very first performance.” He may also have been in a romantic frame of mind. On the way to Rome, he had been interviewed in Paris by a young reporter, Veronique Passani. When filming was completed, he returned to Paris and renewed his acquaintance with her, and fell in love. They were married nearly 50 years when Peck died in 2003.

William Wyler was a studio director of many important films, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives among them, and had been nominated for a Best Director Oscar 8 times. He was a perfectionist, sometimes shooting the same scene 60 times. Luckily, this cast did not mind the leisurely pace. The scene where Peck puts his hand in the Mouth of Truth contains a gag that was a surprise to Hepburn, and you can see her spontaneous reaction. Only that scene was done in a single take. Hepburn despaired at her inability to cry in one scene after many retakes, a problem Wyler resolved by yelling at her until she was reduced to tears. He was not above borrowing from another director; some of the “putting the princess to bed” routine is lifted from Buster Keaton’s last silent film.

One reason for the enormous success and influence of this film was the way Audrey Hepburn looked on screen. In an age where a more voluptuous figure was the ideal, Hepburn’s slender grace and dazzling appearance in Edith Head’s chic wardrobe is still being imitated today. In her autobiography, Head spoke of Princess Anne’s first appearance in a stiff and formal brocade gown, and how important to contrast with her “run-away” clothes. “To create the contrast, I put her in funny little flat shoes, a gathered cotton skirt, and a plain blouse with the sleeves rolled up. She even goes to the barber and has her regal crown of hair chopped off. Suddenly, she is the kind of girl you wouldn’t look at twice. It sounds easy to do, but it wasn’t. Trying to make Audrey, who has so much hauteur, look anything but chic is very difficult. I had to adjust the length of the skirt, for instance, making it too long so that she looked somewhat dowdy. I used fabric that was limp to create the impression that she just didn’t care what she wore. The costuming was very important in this film—it told the story. First she was a fairy tale princess, then she because a sporty, wild, happy, very real person who had no regard for her appearance.”

At first, Head thought that her major job as costumer would be to disguise Hepburn’s so-called “figure flaws” her long neck, prominent collarbone, thin arms and strong dancer’s legs, not to mention her flat chest. Nobody at Paramount thought their new star would be setting standards for a new kind of beauty. The New York Times wrote recently, “Thanks to their first glimpse of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, half a generation of young females stopped stuffing their bras and teetering on stiletto heels.” (Keogh). One of the three Oscars the film won (out of 10 nominations) was for Edith Head’s costumes, her fifth, the others were for Hepburn and the screenplay.

Her director said, “Audrey was the spirit of youth—and I knew that very soon the entire world would fall in love with her, as all of us on the picture did.” Peck said of his co-star, “It was my good luck during that wonderful summer in Rome to be the first of her screen fellows, to hold out my hand, and help her keep her balance as she did her spins and pirouettes. Those months were probably the happiest experience I ever had making movies.”

European 3D Horror Film "Provence Psycho"

Europe's first 3D horror film <<Provence Psycho>> have been identified in the domestic release. The film has remained a mysterious gesture, the story of the film, starring and other tight-lipped, only one exposure of the film concept maps, all distributed atmosphere of terror and suspense of reverie, causing the fans and friends a great curiosity.

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Roadie Movie Review

Failure and regret are confronted via a return trip home inRoadie, Michael Cuesta's hodgepodge of indie clichés about a Blue Oyster Cult roadie named Jimmy Testagros (Ron Eldard) who, fired after 20 years of service setting up the band's gear, temporarily moves back in with his mom (Lois Smith) in his old Forest Hills, Queens neighborhood. With mutton chops and matching bushy mustache, a cigarette often on his lips and a leather jacket affixed to his pudgy frame, Jimmy is a rock n' roll lifer gone to seed, one whose anger at being let go is dwarfed by the more pressing shame and embarrassment of having never achieved his dreams of stardom or, at least, of being BOC's manager and songwriting partner. Nonetheless, he claims those latter roles as his own when confronted by Mom, former bullying classmate Bobby (Bobby Cannavale), and Bobby's wife—and Jimmy's teenage girlfriend—Nikki (Jill Hennessy).

Ensnared by these lies and forced to confront semi-reciprocated feelings for Nikki, Jimmy soon finds himself spiraling out of control, and with him goes Cuesta's movie, a slice of slight character-driven conventionality in which directorial sensitivity and drama rooted in tense conversations and intermittent blow-ups prove incapable of imparting depth to a tale that plays like a series of simplistic stock gestures.Eldard embodies Jimmy with a soul-sickness that's authentically concealed beneath a façade of desperate fairy-tale falsehoods, but like so much of Roadie, his emotional circumstances are obvious and uncomplicated.

The same is true of Cuesta's basic narrative, which—between Jimmy getting nostalgic in his '70s-preserved bedroom listening to old vinyls, suffering Bobby calling him the hated high school nickname "Testicles," and eventually confronting his, Nikki, and Bobby's self-deceptions during a night of motel drinking and drugging—is pockmarked by standard scenarios that offer no insight into remorse or starting over. Instead, it's just formula designed to give its performers some stripped-down material on which to chew, and in that regard, Cannavale and Hennessy, like Eldard, get at their characters' hang-ups and resentments with minimal histrionics. Even with Jimmy's mom ultimately slapping down her son's self-pity, however, Roadie takes its characters' suffering seriously without ever properly justifying said misery as enlightening or unique, leading to a story that ultimately finds itself with nowhere to go but down a things-fall-apart path that ends with that most hackneyed of root causes for Jimmy's unfulfilled aspirations and current down-on-his-luck predicament: daddy issues.

We Need To Talk About Kevin Movie Review

What we really need to talk about is the fraudulence of Lynne Ramsay's overripe collage of bright colors, smug pop music, and flimsy characterizations. The acclaimed Scottish filmmaker's first film since 2002's Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin is all fatuous mood, a purposefully fragmented evocation of a woman's fraught state of mind. Ramsay both sets the film's incoherent tone and states her stale feminist agenda immediately with a shot of Eva (Tilda Swinton) being hoisted by a throng of tomato-doused revelers at Buñol's El Tomatino festival. Just as there's no sense of this artfully photographed vision as memory or fantasy, Eva's unmistakably Christ-like pose makes clear who the victim is in this story about a troubled mother-son relationship.
First, though, let us talk about Gus Van Sant's Béla Tarr-biting Elephant, how its fussily minimalist aggrandizement of the Columbine massacre has informed the way other films, both good (Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique) and bad (Antonio Campos's Afterschool), regard high school tragedy. Like Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin's spawn of Afterschool, this particular breed of sociopath porn prides itself on abstracting meaning out of the meaningful; almost none of them are concerned with contemplating the void from which they all seem to echo out of. But We Need to Talk About Kevin is the worst for the way it spikes Elephant's fashionable nihilism with Alan Ball's puerile flair for sensationalism.
Something close to Miranda July's worst nightmare, We Need to Talk About Kevinpresents the horror of Eva's relationship to her sociopathic son, from pamper-wearing infancy to mopey, obliques-blaring teenagehood, out of sequence. Ramsay freely collages incidents from this mother and son's past and present, with the color and shape of Tilda Swinton's hair about the only thing rooting us in a particular time and place. If one wanted to be kind, the purpose of this fractured storytelling is to leave the audience feeling as unmoored as the film's protagonist, who endures the relentless and inexplicable cruelty of her monstrous offspring with the tenacity of Christ on the cross. But if one wanted to be right, the purpose of Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on The Omen.
I haven't read the novel by Lionel Shriver on which the film is based, but in a recent article for Slate, the author speaks of pregnancy, to Eva, as "an infestation," and her world travels as a means for the character to assert her superiority over others. From this we may glean that Eva possibly did travel to Buñol at one time, that the cartographic wallpaper inside one of the rooms in her luxe manse, like the job she takes in the present day at a travel agency, expresses her search for worldliness, but we shouldn't have to look to the book to help us make sense of the film. Because We Need to Talk About Kevin fails to articulate Eva's desire to travel, it means nothing that the walls in her favorite room are covered in rare maps instead of, say, pink elephants when the malicious Kevin charges into his mother's study with a paint-loaded squirt gun in hand.
Here and there you grasp a glimmer of a point to the litany of horrors Eva is forced to endure, from Kevin, well past the age that he should be using diapers, deliberately craps himself after his mother has wiped his bum, to his feigning, as a teenager (played by Afterschool star Ezra Miller), interest in mother-son QT, which begins pleasantly enough at a miniature golf course before leading to a combative dinner he purposefully enters into on a full stomach. In Swinton's face you sometimes sense the nature of Eva's almost existential torment, her wondering whether she deserves this abuse or not, whether motherhood means enduring so much pain, and when she flips Kevin the bird, how she wishes she didn't have to any more. Her choice to persevere despite Kevin's behavior at least explains why she allows herself to be humiliated by the family of the victims of a high school massacre committed by Kevin, the nature of which the audience pieces together from the shards of exposition Ramsay sprinkles throughout the film. Eva never gives up on her sociopathic offspring, and as such takes responsibility for his actions.
But Ramsay works on a more artificial, affected page than her star, such as cutesily transitioning between past and present (shades of Martha Marcy May Marlene abound), noxiously complementing Eva's crisis whenever possible with cringingly on-the-nose pop tunes (whereas the use music throughout Polytechnique eerily hints at the characters' troubles and desires, here it cartoonishly bolds what's already obvious), and condescendingly painting Eva's coworkers at the travel agency she goes to work at in strokes so broad it would make the writers ofThe Office, an intentional comedy, blush. The film's trite sensory cues persistently undermine the nuance of Swinton's handiwork.
So, we understand that Eva must have lost her fortune in the wake to her son's trial for murder, but how she and her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) were able to afford their expensive digs back in the day is, like much in the film, deliberately and frustratingly left to our imaginations, particularly the nature of Kevin's psychotic behavior. But that's the point here, for Ramsay wants to leave us, like Eva herself at the end of this malicious film, asking why. Though Ramsay feigns philosophical profundity by suggesting, like some teenage connoisseur of Camus, that there's no rationale for Kevin's actions, that one isn't necessary, the truth is that director doesn't quite have the patience, humanity, and sensitivity to actually articulate a reason.

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same Movie Review

If you think you know what you're getting into with a "truth in advertising" title like Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, well, you're probably right, especially if you expect a no-budget, eager-to-please, DIY film that sounds like a cross between Go Fish and an early Jim Jarmusch comedy by way of John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet. Madeleine Olnek's debut feature, which borrows heavily from Dan Aykroyd'sConeheads, lays all of those cards on the table right at the outset. Whether those cards represent ceaseless quirk, the can-do charm of a tight group of like-minded filmmakers, or abject horror will depend on the viewer.
The double opening introduces our two protagonists, who are, of course, destined to meet. Jane (the appealing Lisa Haas) confesses to her therapist that a recent UFO encounter seemed like a pickup from an extra terrestrial; untold light years away, an alien newscast (and unvarnished info dump) tells us that big emotions are destroying the ozone layer of a planet of bald-headed beings, and that, through some logical leaps of faith, a trio of lesbian aliens are dispatched to Earth in order to...I don't know. They meet up with Earthbound lesbian singles in New York City, so I think we're just supposed to accept that when the montage of disastrous blind dates begins, it has something to do with the continued survival of the aliens' home planet. Olnek, who wrote as well as directed, seems to understand instinctively that, if the viewer cringes when the aliens first appear (garrulous, spastic, awkward, and loud), our response is, at least, mirrored in the faces of the Earthlings. Jane, who can't seem to quit smiling, even under duress, is the only exception, and she finds a match in Zoinx (Susan Ziegler).
Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny. The movie is in its finest form when a gag is over before it has a chance to overstay its welcome; by contrast, when Zoinx dances with Jane for the first time, and her alien dance is revealed to be a jaw-dropping atrocity of jerky movements and the obliteration of personal space, you feel like the scene lasts 20 minutes when it's really more like two. On the other hand, Olnek puts her faith in blackout-sketch-style cutting, checking in from time to time with a pair of government agents, discussing nothing while on what looks to be a stakeout, or—in an elaborate setup for the movie's best joke—showing one of the aliens on a TV dating show.
You have to wonder how much care and preparation went into the making of a movie likeCodependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, so that when you sense even the slightest hint of carelessness, you kind of resent it, regardless of how few demands the movie seems to make in terms of time and attention. On the other hand, you also want to feel charitable whenever the movie gets something right, unless those thoughts loop back, and you ask yourself why you're setting the bar low just because a couple of friends got together and decided they'd make a film they could all kick back and laugh at, with chintzy sci-fi costumes and a spaceship that's clearly a takeout plate filmed from the underside in close-up. (If there was a budget, it was split evenly between the SUV rental and dressing the set of the walk-in tent that serves as the spaceship's interior.) Whatever the case may be, Olnek earns a fair amount of goodwill and doesn't spend all of it in one place.