Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moore)
04-14-14, 06:25 PM
#1
DVD Talk Ultimate Edition
Thread Starter
Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moore)
This looks interesting. Nice to see Cronenberg returning (if only slightly) to the horror genre.
A vicious look at a twisted Hollywood dynasty, Maps to the Stars follows the lives of Weiss family: Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) is a psychotherapist, who has made a fortune with his self-help manuals; his wife Cristina (Olivia Williams) manages the career of their thirteen-year-old son, Benjie, a child star, who recently came out of a drug rehabilitation program; their daughter Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) has recently been released from a sanatorium where she was admitted for the treatment of criminal pyromania.
Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), one of Stafford’s clients and an actress, wants to shoot a remake of the 1960s movie, starring her mother Clarice which made her famous. Clarice has been dead for sometime now and visions of her ghost come to haunt Havana at night.
MAPS TO THE STARS TRAILER
A vicious look at a twisted Hollywood dynasty, Maps to the Stars follows the lives of Weiss family: Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) is a psychotherapist, who has made a fortune with his self-help manuals; his wife Cristina (Olivia Williams) manages the career of their thirteen-year-old son, Benjie, a child star, who recently came out of a drug rehabilitation program; their daughter Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) has recently been released from a sanatorium where she was admitted for the treatment of criminal pyromania.
Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), one of Stafford’s clients and an actress, wants to shoot a remake of the 1960s movie, starring her mother Clarice which made her famous. Clarice has been dead for sometime now and visions of her ghost come to haunt Havana at night.
MAPS TO THE STARS TRAILER
Last edited by Perkinsun Dzees; 04-16-14 at 05:32 PM.
04-14-14, 06:38 PM
#3
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
me too. but that trailer didn't do a lot to excite me.
04-14-14, 09:25 PM
#4
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
04-16-14, 10:21 AM
#5
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
05-20-14, 10:55 AM
#7
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/f...wake-from.html
Cannes 2014, Maps to the Stars, review: 'a nightmare you don't want to wake from'
David Cronenberg's satire about 'making it' in Hollywood is not only nightmarishly compelling, it could clinch the director his first Palme d'or
Dir: David Cronenberg; Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Julianne Moore, Robert Pattinson, John Cusack, Sarah Gadon, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird. Cert tba, 111 mins.
A thin, young woman is curled up on the seat of a Greyhound bus on its way to Hollywood, as many thin, young women have done before her. She hugs her knees and pulls a thick black jacket around her shoulders. There’s a logo on it for a television show: ‘Bad Babysitter’. We also glimpse some kind of scarring on her neck.
She looks vulnerable, but also somehow dangerous. Is she ready for what this town can do to a girl? And, more to the point: is this town ready for what this particular girl can do?
This is how David Cronenberg beguiles you into his extraordinary new film, Maps to the Stars, which spits poison in the faces of its Cannes competition rivals. It’s the Canadian director’s best film at least since Spider, in 2002, and could conceivably lead to his first Palme d’Or.
The screenplay, written by the novelist Bruce Wagner, has a little in common with Robert Altman’s The Player and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. But Cronenberg’s film takes place in a kind of pharmaceutically heightened hyper-reality of its own: it’s not so much a twisted dream of making it in show-business, as a writhing, hissing, Hollywood waking nightmare.
There are so many snakes in play, it takes a while to work out which fangs connect to which rattle. The first is Agatha, the young woman from the coach, played by Mia Wasikowska. She’s come to town ostensibly to help the actress Carrie Fisher, whom she befriended on Twitter, to write a novel – “although it might become something for HBO,” she blithely tells Jerome, a chauffeur and would-be actor winningly played by Robert Pattinson.
The second is Benjie Weiss, a troubled child-star played with stomach-curdling plausibility by Evan Bird, a relatively unknown 13-year-old actor, until tonight. Benjie was a teen heartthrob earning $300,000 a week – “enough to f - - - up Mother Teresa”, we’re told – and his quickly cultivated drugs-and-alcohol habit put his career is now in free-fall. Now his self-help guru father (John Cusack) and fragile mother (Olivia Williams) – two relatively minor serpents in this ouroboric tangle – want to see his reputation, and lucrative career, restored.
Last, and about as far from least as it’s possible to be, is Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an actress who lives and works in the shadow of her Hollywood icon mother Clarice Taggart, who died young and tragically in a blaze. Clarice will be forever young, burning bright in the public’s memory; while with every missed and minor role, Havana’s own star continues to fade.
But there’s a chance at redemption: a forthcoming remake of one of Clarice's films, for which Havana is being considered for the role originally played by her mother. The director is a rising talent called Damian Javitz: “He’s no P. T. Anderson, but he resurrects actors,” we’re told. (Wagner’s script is as tough and bitter as old lemons, but film-biz insider jokes help sweeten things up.)
His stars in place, Cronenberg then starts sketching constellations, making connections between his characters until, with a sickened lurch, we realise the exact nature of the join-the-dots pictures that are being revealed.
All kinds of taboos are broken along the way: sexual, social, scatological, you name it. Witness, as the Cannes audience did today with their jaws between their feet, the extended bathroom sequence in which Moore’s character grunts and growls her way through a particularly tricky bowel movement, while cheerfully shouting orders at Agatha, whom she’s enlisted as a personal assistant. This is not how you’re supposed to make movies, and Cronenberg knows it.
My instant reaction, after stumbling, open-mouthed, from the cinema, was a pathological need to stumble back in again. There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.
Cannes 2014, Maps to the Stars, review: 'a nightmare you don't want to wake from'
David Cronenberg's satire about 'making it' in Hollywood is not only nightmarishly compelling, it could clinch the director his first Palme d'or
Dir: David Cronenberg; Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Julianne Moore, Robert Pattinson, John Cusack, Sarah Gadon, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird. Cert tba, 111 mins.
A thin, young woman is curled up on the seat of a Greyhound bus on its way to Hollywood, as many thin, young women have done before her. She hugs her knees and pulls a thick black jacket around her shoulders. There’s a logo on it for a television show: ‘Bad Babysitter’. We also glimpse some kind of scarring on her neck.
She looks vulnerable, but also somehow dangerous. Is she ready for what this town can do to a girl? And, more to the point: is this town ready for what this particular girl can do?
This is how David Cronenberg beguiles you into his extraordinary new film, Maps to the Stars, which spits poison in the faces of its Cannes competition rivals. It’s the Canadian director’s best film at least since Spider, in 2002, and could conceivably lead to his first Palme d’Or.
The screenplay, written by the novelist Bruce Wagner, has a little in common with Robert Altman’s The Player and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. But Cronenberg’s film takes place in a kind of pharmaceutically heightened hyper-reality of its own: it’s not so much a twisted dream of making it in show-business, as a writhing, hissing, Hollywood waking nightmare.
There are so many snakes in play, it takes a while to work out which fangs connect to which rattle. The first is Agatha, the young woman from the coach, played by Mia Wasikowska. She’s come to town ostensibly to help the actress Carrie Fisher, whom she befriended on Twitter, to write a novel – “although it might become something for HBO,” she blithely tells Jerome, a chauffeur and would-be actor winningly played by Robert Pattinson.
The second is Benjie Weiss, a troubled child-star played with stomach-curdling plausibility by Evan Bird, a relatively unknown 13-year-old actor, until tonight. Benjie was a teen heartthrob earning $300,000 a week – “enough to f - - - up Mother Teresa”, we’re told – and his quickly cultivated drugs-and-alcohol habit put his career is now in free-fall. Now his self-help guru father (John Cusack) and fragile mother (Olivia Williams) – two relatively minor serpents in this ouroboric tangle – want to see his reputation, and lucrative career, restored.
Last, and about as far from least as it’s possible to be, is Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an actress who lives and works in the shadow of her Hollywood icon mother Clarice Taggart, who died young and tragically in a blaze. Clarice will be forever young, burning bright in the public’s memory; while with every missed and minor role, Havana’s own star continues to fade.
But there’s a chance at redemption: a forthcoming remake of one of Clarice's films, for which Havana is being considered for the role originally played by her mother. The director is a rising talent called Damian Javitz: “He’s no P. T. Anderson, but he resurrects actors,” we’re told. (Wagner’s script is as tough and bitter as old lemons, but film-biz insider jokes help sweeten things up.)
His stars in place, Cronenberg then starts sketching constellations, making connections between his characters until, with a sickened lurch, we realise the exact nature of the join-the-dots pictures that are being revealed.
All kinds of taboos are broken along the way: sexual, social, scatological, you name it. Witness, as the Cannes audience did today with their jaws between their feet, the extended bathroom sequence in which Moore’s character grunts and growls her way through a particularly tricky bowel movement, while cheerfully shouting orders at Agatha, whom she’s enlisted as a personal assistant. This is not how you’re supposed to make movies, and Cronenberg knows it.
My instant reaction, after stumbling, open-mouthed, from the cinema, was a pathological need to stumble back in again. There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.
05-20-14, 01:18 PM
#10
DVD Talk Legend
05-20-14, 01:35 PM
#12
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
One of the more under-appreciated Cronenberg films.
05-21-14, 03:12 PM
#14
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3TG0Qf8a-RA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
05-21-14, 09:16 PM
#16
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
Even though I no longer indulge in commentaries as much as I used to, I always find time to listen to Cronenberg's. They are always intelligent and never boring.
07-19-14, 10:33 AM
#18
DVD Talk Hero
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
A more accessible red-band trailer:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/zy2Zk196uYM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Man, Julianne Moore is smoking hot!
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/zy2Zk196uYM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Man, Julianne Moore is smoking hot!
09-17-14, 01:23 PM
#22
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
David Cronenberg: ‘My imagination is not a place of horror’
The great Canadian director made his name with the body-horror classics Dead Ringers and The Fly and most recently with the savagely funny Maps to the Stars.
Here he answers questions from Observer readers and cultural figures including Margaret Atwood and Viggo Mortensen :
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014...lace-of-horror
The great Canadian director made his name with the body-horror classics Dead Ringers and The Fly and most recently with the savagely funny Maps to the Stars.
Here he answers questions from Observer readers and cultural figures including Margaret Atwood and Viggo Mortensen :
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014...lace-of-horror
09-22-14, 10:00 AM
#23
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Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
Saw this on Saturday night in a packed theatre.
I thought it was great! It has its flaws, of course, but it really pulls you into the lives being portrayed on screen. I've only seen Mia Wasikowska in a few things, but thought she was fantastic here. Pattinson was actually likeable and dare I say, GOOD, in his role. I actually wanted him to have more screen time. Moore was a little over-the-top in her "self-obsessed fading movie star" sort of way.
Dread and suspense are prevalent throughout the film, and boy does Cronenberg deliver at just the right times. I wouldn't call this a "horror" by any means, as mentioned in the OP, though. More of a dramatic thriller.
Biggest complaints:
- CGI fire. This is all too common now, and it looks terrible.
- Cronenberg's first (?) toilet humour. Seemed out of place, even in this flick.
Biggest compliments:
- pretty much everything else.
Great film. Check it out.
I thought it was great! It has its flaws, of course, but it really pulls you into the lives being portrayed on screen. I've only seen Mia Wasikowska in a few things, but thought she was fantastic here. Pattinson was actually likeable and dare I say, GOOD, in his role. I actually wanted him to have more screen time. Moore was a little over-the-top in her "self-obsessed fading movie star" sort of way.
Dread and suspense are prevalent throughout the film, and boy does Cronenberg deliver at just the right times. I wouldn't call this a "horror" by any means, as mentioned in the OP, though. More of a dramatic thriller.
Biggest complaints:
- CGI fire. This is all too common now, and it looks terrible.
- Cronenberg's first (?) toilet humour. Seemed out of place, even in this flick.
Biggest compliments:
- pretty much everything else.
Great film. Check it out.
09-22-14, 10:15 AM
#24
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
Shit I have plans on the 27th
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014/fil...s-to-the-stars
The 52nd New York Film Festival
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, 2014
Canada/Germany | Format: DCP | 111 minutes
U.S. Premiere
Q&A with director David Cronenberg, screenwriter Bruce Wagner, and actress Julianne Moore on September 27
Sat, Sep 27 9:00pm Alice Tully Hall
Sun, Sep 28 3:00pm Alice Tully Hall
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014/fil...s-to-the-stars
The 52nd New York Film Festival
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, 2014
Canada/Germany | Format: DCP | 111 minutes
U.S. Premiere
Q&A with director David Cronenberg, screenwriter Bruce Wagner, and actress Julianne Moore on September 27
Sat, Sep 27 9:00pm Alice Tully Hall
Sun, Sep 28 3:00pm Alice Tully Hall
12-19-14, 09:36 PM
#25
DVD Talk Hero
Re: Maps to the Stars (2014) (D: Cronenberg; S: Cusack, Wasikowska, Pattinson, J. Moo
What the hell happened to this movie? My buddy imported the blu-ray from France, and it's honestly the truest to form Cronenberg movie he's put out in a while.