The Runaways

[MacGuffin]

Teaser Trailer

Release date: 2010

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon, Tatum O'Neal

Directed by: Floria Sigismondi

Premise: The movie chronicles THE RUNAWAYS from 1975 - 1977; formed by teenage girls living near Hollywood, CA., and heavily manipulated by their manager Kim Fowley as 'jailbait rock' (all the girls were 16 or younger when the band recorded their first album). The band ultimately succeeds on their own merits as musicians, becoming the first all-girl rock-band to ever break into the world of arena-filling hard rock acts.

[Stefen]

I love the look of this. Let's hope Kristen Stewart's acting doesn't ruin the whole thing. She can do that.

[matt35mm]

Yeah, looks pretty good!  But I have the feeling that I'd spend most of the movie being disturbed by my attraction to Dakota Fanning.

[Pubrick]

haha kristen stewart is totally ridiculous! she can't stop licking her lips! whoever made the trailer must have realised the joke she's becoming cos they made her highlight all about her stupid lips again. such a weird thing, if she doesn't stop doing that it's only a matter of time before she'll be receiving a cease and desist letter from LL COOL J.

i don't know shit about the runaways, whatever that is, but i do know Floria Sigismondi. if this is any good it's because of her, obviously. it should always be noted when a great music video director makes their feature debut, it almost always guarrantees visual excellence - that's a given - so the real interesting part is to see how they develop the rest of their talent, like their ability to tell a good story, develop characters, not rely on just cool fucked up visuals (jonas akerlund i'm puking in your direction) and all that.

[MacGuffin]

[RegularKarate]

Strange how much affect that poster has on me.  I want to rip it off the wall and burn it and at the same time, it makes me want to spontaneously start to J/O.

[Pubrick]

yes that's an excellent poster.

so far everything bodes well for this film LOOKS wise. it'll be stylish as fuck. shame about LL COOL Stewart and whatever-happened-to-that-rape-movie Fanning, but they just hav to look pretty and everything will be fine (hard to do for dry-lips macgee). mark my words, we should all be paying close attention to first films by notable music video directors. as far as that goes, it's also pontentially the announcment of another good female director to add to the handful that are barely eking out an existence right now.

[Gold Trumpet]

A surprisingly very positive review courtesy of Dark Horizons. They don't get carried away too often.


Sundance Review: "The Runaways"

By Paul Fischer
Source: Dark Horizons

The perfect Sundance film is "The Runaways", a film that is both provocative and haunting, a film that captures the mid-seventies with clarity and that beautifully explores the fascinating world of teen girl band The Runaways, fleetingly big at a time of social unrest.

The movie focuses on the often turbulent and protective relationship between guitarist/vocalist Joan Jett and lead vocalist Cherie Currie as they navigate a rocky road of touring and record-label dramas. The film beautifully chronicles the band's formation as well as their meteoric rise under the pervasive eye of an abusive manager.

"The Runaways" marks the feature directorial debut of video artist Floria Sigismondi who directs this riveting and hypnotic work from her own script, one that is both a sharply observed study of character, epoch and the purity of rock 'n' roil. Visually the film is strikingly gorgeous, one that cinematically explores the contrasts between the often hazy world of drug-induced fame and trailer park poverty. But far from being merely a film of visual ideas, director Sigismondi cast her film perfectly and elicited some flawless work from her lead actresses.

Breaking free from the shackles of Bella, Kristen Stewart finally breaks loose delivering a stunning performance that covers a wide range of the acting spectrum yet achieved in a way that is far from self-conscious. Her Jett is ferociously angry, anti-establishment, fragile, sexual and exquisitely vulnerable as a girl desperately running away from a life that is conservative at a time when America was undergoing such pivotal change and not necessarily for the better. Stewart is phenomenal, a powerhouse proving how incredibly talented and multi faceted she is.

Fanning is an utter revelation as this tragic character drawn into a world that ultimately consumes her. Sexy, fragile, luminous and simply magnificent, with this role, she is raw and glorious, well and truly adrift from that childlike persona of a not-so-distant past. This is one of those singular performances that will be spoken of well and truly after the film closes.

The Runaways is a provocative and powerful film about the tragedy of celebrity and fame, media manipulation and the need to regain independence. It's the perfect film for today's celebrity-obsessed America, and sadly shows that little has changed in three decades.

The film's soundtrack is a reminder of what great era the seventies was, and the music superbly enhances the film's themes. It's a remarkable achievement for this first-time director and one has high hopes for its commercial success once it opens in late March.

[Stefen]

While reading that I just pictured the montage in Boogie Nights where everyone is reading the hyperbolic reviews of their movies.

The metaphors and hyperbole of that review slayed me. LL Cool Lips breaking free of the shackles of Bella should be something considering she's showed us nothing.

I still want to see it. I think Sigismondi's visual style will keep me entertained.

[Gold Trumpet]

Well, Ebert thinks her talent already extends further than Twilight...

Via Twitter today: "Saw 'Welcome to the Rileys.' Kristen Stewart is a fine actress. Saints preserve her from vampire movies."

[Stefen]

Yeah, well, Ebert's fucking nuts. He lost his marbles long ago and is above offending young starlets because life's too short to be mean.

She's terrible. Just awful. Maybe she turns out to be the greatest actress ever, but she's terrible right now. Take away her bangs and her lips and she doesn't have shit to do.

[children with angels]

Just want to step in for the defense. I think she's actually really rather good. Her range may be limited, but what she does she does extremely well. I genuinely can't think of a young a young actress I've seen who's so good at conveying the yearning of (frustrated) sexual desire: in both Into the Wild and Twilight it's almost absurd how good she is as it seeming as if she wants so badly just to fuck. She also does her conflicted, awkward, gauche girl thing very well - in Adventureland, but also in Twilight: the strength of her performance as Bella is one of the reasons the tone of those films is so weird - she's actually too naturalistic for the material.

[matt35mm]

I've only seen her in Into The Wild, Panic Room, and, if you want to count her two minutes in it, Undertow.  I can't really remember how well she did in Panic Room because I saw that almost 10 years ago, but she seemed perfectly fine in Into The Wild.  What was she so bad in?  Why the hate?

[children with angels]

Why the hate?

I would guess mainly because she's the star of Twilight. Those movies have come to represent something much larger than themselves now - they're a conceptual punching bag, hence the bile produced by the news Thom Yorke lent a song to the franchise.

[matt35mm]

I see.

Anyway, I found some stuff that I thought I'd post here.

A clip from the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzvG2BFbc5E&feature=player_embedded

And a couple of reviews.  One generally positive:

---------------------------------------------------
Sundance Review: The Runaways
by Kevin Kelly

I'll be blunt about this: I really wasn't looking forward to this movie. I'm not the biggest fan of lip-chewing, hair-twirling Kristen Stewart, or the wide-eyed, blank face expert Dakota Fanning. I love rock and roll (so put another dime in the jukebox, baby) as much as the next person, but these two starring in a movie about an all-girl, teen sensation, flash in the pan band from the 1970s? I just didn't think they could pull it off. Hey, at least I'm big enough to admit I was wrong. The Runaways rocked the Joan Jett / Cherie Currie backstory's pants off (literally), and I'll be buying the soundtrack, which features K-Stew and D-Fan singing the blasts from the past.

However, this movie really should have been called The Joan Jett & Cherie Currie Show, because the other Runaways are hardly featured in this movie at all. Sandy West (who co-founded the band with Joan Jett), and Lita Ford's stories aren't given much attention in the film, and Ford seems to exist just to cause drama. Additionally, The Runaways had six different bass players during their short four-year history (including Micki Steele who went on to The Bangles) so the filmmakers decided to create a fictional girl named Robin Robins. She's played by Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame, and she unfortunately gets only one or two lines.

Although he's not given as much screen time as Fanning and Stewart, Michael Shannon takes this movie, straps it to his back, and walks away with it completely. He plays their over the top manager Kim Fowley, and he looks like Frankenstein meets David Bowie. He chews up scenery left and right and steals every moment he's onscreen, even when he has no lines. At one point, he just gives a monsterly grimace on the other end of a phone call, and owns that entire moment. When he realizes he's bottled the lightning, he caws "You bitches are gonna be bigger than the fucking Beatles!" Although the relationship between Currie and Jett is caustic at times, Fowley is definitely the bad guy in this movie.

In the effort of cramming their story into two hours, the film rushes through the Joan Jett story as she rags on her guitar teacher for trying to instruct her with "On Top Of Old Smoky" and telling her "Girls don't play electric guitar." In a blink, she's meeting Kim Fowley at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco in Hollywood, and Fowley, smelling money and opportunity, introduces Jett to drummer Sandy West. They start jamming with Fowley listening, who is seemingly coked to the gills with a bent towards pedophilia. He decides the band needs, as he so eloquently illustrates with his finger pointed at a woman's crotch, more sex. He and Jett go trolling for the face of the band back at Bingenheimer's, where they find Mountain Dew-sipping Fanning, complete with feathered-blonde hair, and ask her to audition.

Fast-forward to Jett and West now with Lita Ford and their fictitious bass player rehearsing in a ramshackle trailer in the Valley. Currie shows up to audition, having rehearsed a Suzi Quatro cover song all night, but Fowley quickly nixes it. They end up writing "Cherry Bomb" on the spot, and with some coaxing, Currie nails it. Then he puts the girls through rock and roll boot camp, which includes teenaged boys throwing trash and dogshit at them, so they can learn how to deal with hecklers. With lightning speed, they're off and running, playing parties in Los Angeles, hitting the road for shows, cutting a record, and touring Japan.

But the real story takes place in the cracks between the electric soundtrack. Kristen Stewart steps out of her normal angsty girl act and nails down the punk rock, hard as nails Jett, and Fanning is equally as good with her disconnected portrayal of Currie, who is dealing with the fact that she's abandoning her alcoholic father and her twin sister Marie (played as fraternal in the movie, although they were identical in real life) to embrace a life of rock and roll. It's not long before the girls are full-on in the swing of drugs while on the road, and Fanning and Stewart share an extremely intimate kiss on the floor of a skating rink before the camera swirls them up into a heavily implied sex scene, which is something the movie doesn't shy away from. We see Fowley banging some woman while on a phone call, Currie having sex in a dressing room, and Jett teaching Sandy West how to masturbate ... to Farrah Fawcett.

The Runaways flamed out in four quick years, although that timeline feels a lot shorter in this film. By the time the band begins to break up, it only feels like a few months have passed, and that's the only real fault in the movie. To try and keep this under two hours long, they've compacted four years of the first influential, teenaged, all-girl rock band into the Almost Famous story. By the end of the film, Jett is enjoying the rise of her solo fame, and Currie has taken a different path. There are crawls telling us what happened to Jett, Currie, and Fowley, but no mention of the other Runaways, which mirrors the movie. Powerful performances from Stewart, Fanning, and Shannon, and a song showcase that puts in bold what the Runaways were all about, while giving a bit of short shrift to the other band members. These girls were, for a very short time, the Queens of Noise. Fanning's concert performance of "Cherry Bomb" will be ringing in your ears for days.

One final note: Beware Twihards and Twi-Moms, this is not your sweet and innocent Bella. Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett urinates on electric guitars, pops pills, snorts coke, and loves other ladies. Just a fair warning.

------------------------------------------------------

And a review that is un-positive:

Alex's Sundance Review: Floria Sigismondi's The Runaways
by Alex Billington

I never would've thought I could dislike a movie about a badass rock band. I caught the world premiere of The Runaways last night and while it's a very loud and very energetic movie, it's not good at all. It felt very rushed, skipping over all the important moments of the band's creation and throwing in concert scene after concert scene and an occasional streets-of-LA moment. Former photographer Floria Sigismondi makes both her writing and directing debut with The Runaways and is unfortunately the weakest link in the film. She should stick with photography, because it seemed obvious that she doesn't know how to direct a feature.

The Runaways is a biopic of sorts about the infamous all-girl rock band from the 70's called The Runaways. The focus is mainly on lead guitarist Joan Jett (played by Kristen Stewart), lead singer Cherie Currie (played by Dakota Fanning), and their producer/manager Kim Fowley (played by Michael Shannon). The rest of the band is there, but the story is not really about them. In fact, Alia Shawkat (from "Arrested Development") who plays the band's bassist, doesn't even have a single line in the entire movie. But whatever, I guess, it's about The Runaways' story and their fame and their eventual downfall, even though they only lasted 4 years.

The problem is that Sigismondi really didn't put any care or concern into crafting a comprehensive story. Nor did she put any care or concern into directing. And despite her photography background, it didn't even look that great either (except for the concert scenes). I'm not sure if I thought it looked so bad because it was just a rough cut being shown at this festival or because I saw Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine right before this (and that was the most beautifully shot film I've seen in years). The best way to describe Sigismondi and her directing comes from Thomas Townend on Twitter: "Floria Sigismondi = good ol' fashioned music video director - with the structural sensibilities of a spider on LSD." I couldn't agree with Thomas more!

I have a feeling that women will enjoy The Runaways a lot more than I did and those who were alive at that time might be entertained by it simple because it'll be a trip down memory lane for them. But for me, I was completely unimpressed with Floria Sigismondi's inability to handle the characters, the story, or the film at all. And despite having a good time watching concert scenes, I don't have much else good to say about The Runaways. This was one of the first big let downs of Sundance for me and I was even looking forward to it.

Alex's Sundance Rating: 4 out of 10