In the Cut

[edison]

Mark Rufalo (In the Cut) is in talks to replace Val Kilmer in Michael Mann's Collateral opposite Tom Cruise

he will be on the level of "stardom" as tom

he will not reach any level even close to the guys you mentioned

.....looks like i'm .right .

i have been waiting for quite a while for you to finally post that news, still doesnt mean hes going to be a "big" star.

8)

..never go against ruffalo..he is badass.. like del toro...

[Finn]

Just got back from it. I thought it was pretty much a mess all the way through. Jane Campion did an excellent job with her directing and I was immediately absorbed and interested in the story. Meg Ryan and all the other actors were great in their roles as well. But the screenplay brought everything down. There's been a lot of controversy about the sex scenes, but they really weren't needed and didn't bring anything to the story. The Kevin Bacon character was really pointless as well and wasn't explained very much. Some of the events were predictable and once we get to the very end, it makes no sense what-so-ever. There's alot of talent in front and behind the camera, but the writing makes me give this a   .

[NEON MERCURY]

..man this sucks..i have read alot of bad reviews...about this..


but then i hear that alot of people miss the point of the film and the mood it suggests.....i hear it has a "quasi" eyes wide shut vibe runing thoughht it..kinda surreal tone to it.....
..an dnot your typical homicide thriller......

any one else seen it yet?..?

[Finn]

Comparing "In the Cut" to "Eyes Wide Shut" is like comparing "Gigli" to "Punch Drunk Love".

[MacGuffin]

How 'bout we compare your avatar to Reg. Karate's.

[Sleuth]

How 'bout we compare your avatar to Reg. Karate's.

<3

[NEON MERCURY]

Comparing "In the Cut" to "Eyes Wide Shut" is like comparing "Gigli" to "Punch Drunk Love".

..your missing my point..im not comparing the two films as a whole...but rather the mood and underlying themes  beneath all the sex and murder in the film....eyes wide shut is a surreal and beautiful dreamlike quality film that explors more than just sex.(which some viewers appear to be on the surface)....i hear that in the cut has the se sam e characteristics and I was just wondering (for poeple who have seen it)..is it justified ???......
or i could be comeplettey wrong and this film does in fact suck......

How 'bout we compare your avatar to Reg. Karate's.

..true.....

[Finn]

Yeah, I see the point you're making, NEON MERCURY. I didn't see anything similar to the mood or theme of Eyes Wide Shut. I don't think there's anything deeper than what was on screen. Although that is something to think about.

MacGuffin, that's one of the more obvious comments I've heard in a long time. Yes, I realize that the avatars are similar but I thought this would be appropriate for the day after Halloween.

[tpfkabi]

so does Meg seem comfortable playing a sexier role?

i was thinking the other day, the whole nudity thing did wonders for Halle Berry and Diane Lane and others........but what about Heather Graham? has she just picked bad role one after another? i hate it because she's so be-A-utiful

[modage]

I thought this would be appropriate for the day after Halloween.

its not! halloween season is over buddy.  on to the next thing!

[edison]

this movie was so boring i fell asleep and we left about an hour into it and still got free passes in return!

[Fernando]

Obsession. To say that Jane Campion herself is obsessed with the subject might be going a bit too far, although extreme emotions and psychological anxiety seem to consume not only the stories the Oscar-winning director finds worth telling, but also the ones she most admires by other directors. Born in New Zealand, Campion started out making short films before earning international critical acclaim with The Piano, about a man so intent on seducing his neighbor's mail-order bride that he buys her prized piano and offers it back to her one key at a time.

Such compulsive attachments also drive Campion's latest film, In the Cut, a thriller that feels anything but routine in this director's hands. Where the damsel in distress would normally be, Campion positions an assertive and sexually aggressive female writer (Meg Ryan) who knowingly puts herself in dangerous situations. Campion's independent heroine is entirely unphased by the fact that the police detective (Mark Ruffalo) she's intent on seducing may also be a serial killer. That decision alone has already polarized the critics, who seem unsure whether to embrace the idea of such a sexually assertive woman in an exploitation genre. Here, the director explains five films that obsess her and the way they shaped the attitude, realism and acting style of In the Cut.

The Conformist
(1970; dir: Bernardo Bertolucci, starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli)
The Conformist is one of my favorite films. It's an amazingly confident film by a young film director, so stylistically strong and radical and gutsy. At the time in Italian cinema, there was so much support for that kind of filmmaking. Sometimes you don't want to revisit your favorite films in case you kill them off, but it had been such a long time since I saw it that I thought it was time to take another look and maybe understand something different this time. What I took away from watching it again was that haunting quality, the way Bertolucci uses these images as a container for this whole poetic sensibility. It's basically like a poem. When you go to make your own movies, you think about the films that you loved and what influenced you, and you're thinking, 'Will this be an opportunity for me to express that back?' With In the Cut, one of the things I kept saying was, 'We're going to solve the mystery of the story. We're going to find out who did it, but we're also going to put these two characters in a position where they can perhaps start their love affair.' In a way, I wanted the apparent plot stories to be over, but I wanted there to be a sense of mystery and a haunting that comes from the film beyond that, an atmosphere, and I guess one of the expressions of that would be The Conformist.

Taxi Driver
(1976; dir: Martin Scorsese, starring: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd)
Taxi Driver is a seminal film for me. I really think that it's perfect. It's so amazing, so individual and so memorable on so many different levels: Travis Bickle, Harvey Keitel is amazing, the performance of Jodie Foster, and the humor, the city, the poetry of it. The characters are really present and flawed, and Scorsese himself takes on a really interesting cameo. He's obsessive, and [the movie is about] people with obsessions that are odd and strange. It's brilliant, the way he creates a hero who is in fact a madman. Interestingly enough, you always think of it as a very gritty film, but when you look at it again, the movie also uses these slow-motion shots of smoke coming up from the subways and the taxi drifting through the city like a shark. It was actually quite poetic in the way that Scorsese fetishized the taxi. With In the Cut, it's 100 percent shot in New York. We didn't create any of that. Our cinematographer, Dion Beebe, loves photography, and he's a real influence on how the movie looks. He's got a beautiful aesthetic, and I get it completely. I think he's the master and I'm the slave in this relationship. I also like it when you can sit back and moderately make decisions about what you're going to look at, but that wasn't what we chose for this film because I was adapting a book which was first person, so we told it from an intimate point of view.

The Godfather
(1972; dir: Francis Ford Coppola, starring: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino)
The Godfather was a huge influence for me on the acting style of the film. The Godfather is a film I revisit regularly because I really think it's a classic, and I'm bowing and worshipping at Coppola's throne. What I appreciate about the acting is the way you look at a character like Robert Duvall's and think, 'What's he doing? He's not doing anything.' But whatever he's doing, it comes from such a deep and focused place about his job with that family, it takes you way beyond the scene and puts roots down in the story. You see a tree standing up and you know there are roots down there, but you can't see them; it's like that. There's no indicating in the acting, and the movie is very graceful in the way it handles violence. On In the Cut, I said to everybody, 'There's no indicating in this film. Don't gasp and say, "I see the tattoo!" We'll do that for you.' The truth is, in life, if you see something and you don't want someone to know, they're not going to know. I want the audience to understand that we're dealing with people who can keep secrets, that you don't always know what people are thinking. You can have your assumptions about it, but you can be really wrong, the way Frannie was really wrong in the movie.

The French Connection
(1971, dir: William Friedkin, starring: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider)
I really like the way that [director] William Friedkin looked at the social aspect of the detectives compared to the crooks. The cops are [treated like] lower-class people. They get paid badly. They have to sit out in the freezing cold and eat a hamburger or a hot dog while the crooks they're trying to catch are having glamorous French cuisine. It's such a great portrait of cops, the individual quality of them, just the focus that Gene Hackman has. He's like an eye dog. He's obsessive, the way he goes into that mode where he won't let go. I love what [screenwriter] Susanna Moore did [when adapting her novel In the Cut] because she actually researched her cops. She drove around for a year with them, so the voices of those detectives is very authentic. If you go and ask real detectives, 'Do you talk like that in bars? Do you talk about women like that?' they'll tell you, 'Yes.'

Bad Timing
(1980, dir: Nicolas Roeg, starring: Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell)
You can't get it now, but I introduced a movie called Bad Timing to an audience in Toronto, and we had a group discussion about it. It's a Nicolas Roeg movie with Art Garfunkel. It's an amazing performance, absolutely incredible. I think Nicolas Roeg is one of the great unsung cinema heroes. He also directed Performance, which was a very revolutionary film. I saw it with my dad back when I had bobby socks on, and my eyes were on stalks. It made you feel like there was a world made of all sorts of illogical but fascinating observations and realities. Performance was very provocative to me even as a child growing up. Bad Timing followed about 10 years later, and it's a meditation on obsessive relationships. It's a story told backwards or in flashes, like Harold Pinter's Betrayal or something. It starts with Theresa Russell being rushed to the hospital from a suicide attempt and eventually reveals this relationship that so confounds the protagonists -- the Art Garfunkel character and Theresa Russell -- that is drives them crazy. (Also, Harvey Keitel's in that one, too.)

[aclockworkjj]

Mark Rufalo (In the Cut) is in talks to replace Val Kilmer in Michael Mann's Collateral opposite Tom Cruise

FUCK!!!!

I thought for sure I would land that role after the casting call was posted here on xixax...

no good, crapass, actors....

[SHAFTR]

Answer me this, budget theatre $4.50 for a ticket, is In the Cut worth going to?

[godardian]

From my blog:

"I know I must respect the right of an artist to grow, and I realize that hoeing the same row can lead to stagnation worse than any creative miss, but oh, how I wish Jane Campion could once again display the perception she brought to Sweetie and An Angel at my Table.

In the Cut is a feminist tract and a murder-mystery thriller, but its head is in some strange, vague place where either timidity or indecision reigns. Whichever it is, this film suffers badly from lack of identity or purpose.

Meg Ryan- let's just say the performance is neither awful nor a revelation and just leave it at that- is a New York City schoolteacher who worries about her unhappy, heartsick half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her own empty bed. The teacher flirts with a gritty 'n gruff New York City cop (Mark Ruffalo), whom she met when he questioned her about the grisly murder of a woman whose body was dumped outside of her apartment building.

Because Campion seems to think she's cleverly couching her radical (they're not) polemics in a riveting (it's not) thriller, nothing makes any sense or really works on any emotional level. Ryan and Leigh reminisce about their mother's courtship fable. Then, in nightmarish, intriguing but badly done black-and-white flashbacks, the old-fashioned romantic ideals and gender roles are revealed ot us- surprise!- to be flawed and maybe dangerous.

The rest of the film is shot in a murky, neon-lit, handheld, sub-Law and Order style that works when the colors and mood also connect, which is maybe a third of the time. Since the film can only hope to work on mood and atmosphere, these picky little details become crucial, and Campion drops the ball again and again; particularly grating is her choice of music, consisting of horrible soft-rock radio hits which she apparently believes to have deep thematic connections with the action of the scene.

Campion's last film, Holy Smoke!, was a mess, but at least there was something going on; there were more than a few worthwhile patches. With In the Cut, Jane Campion disappoints us by transforming herself from a self-appointed iconoclast with a fresh, cockeyed take on things into an indie-film poseur with all the visual and aural adventurousness (but little of the humor or earthiness) of the Oprah demographic.