Film

A contagious yawn

Where I have my debut as a tv journalist, talk Contagion with Matt Damon and almost risk getting Gwyneth Paltrow killed off again. Only this time by boring her to death.

After a business trip to Hong Kong, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) finds herself surprisingly sick and dies in the hospital to the astonishment not only of her husband Mitch (Matt Damon), but also of the medics.

Real pandemics do not spare celebrities. Hard core realism by Steven Soderbergh

In Contagion a fatal, new pandemic travels aross the world with the speed of a sneeze, while a handful of doctors race toward saving people and come up with a vaccine.

Not only is Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller extraordinarily well cast; having ‘Gwynnie’ choke within the first ten minutes echoes at-the-time-huge-star Drew Barrymore being slaugthered in the opening sequence of Scream. It is also a chillingly realistic account of how such a phenomenon would play out in real life.

Move it, Mr. Fishburne, you may be Deputy director of The Center for Disease Control, but we are the stars.

“The truth is so much scarier than fiction,” Matt Damon told me, when I met the two stars, old friends back from shooting The Talented Mr. Ripley, for a tv interview in Venice in september.

I thought it would be fun to have Gwyneth Paltrow comment on the fact, that in this film it is not a testosterone Jason Bourne type, who struggles against the evil. Damon is just a guy trying to protect his daughter. Meanwhile, all the doctors and scientists are women, because this is, according to Soderbergh and script writer Scott Z. Burns’ research, the way it is today. So I asked her:

Is it a new trend, d’you think, that it’s the women saving the earth in this film?

She straigthens herself a bit, puts her bare arms around her long-stemmed legs, like a cat on a couch trying to find a more comfortable position, and purrs:

Watching Gwyneth die was incredibly disturbing, says Matt Damon - watch the interview on www.kino.dk

“Arent’ we always ..?”

I cut it out. You don’t really want people yawning at your first tv interview.

It is unlikely however, that the audience will be as bored watching Soderberg’s fascinatingly scary thriller, as Gwyneth Paltrow was talking to me.

Now, there’s a chance for a contagious yawn.

Love and a bit with a dog – The Artist is the new Shakespeare in Love

Where I fall in love with a black and white silent movie, and meet the director whose name is soon going to be on everybody’s lips. If they can pronounce it. 

”I call my brother and I say, ’I spent millions on this movie. It’s a black and white silent movie. And he goes ’What?!’”

I am at the Odeon Theatre at Leicester Square in London. Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood tycoon is on the stage presenting his company’s new film The Artist, which on the surface has all odds against it.

Jean Dujardin as the charming George Valentin

Like the other 500 people in the cinema I laugh politely, full of expectation,  like everybody else present, because rumour has it, this film will blow us away. And it does.

Set in 1917 The Artist emulates the early days of cinema, telling the story of a movie mega star, George Valentin, a kind of Douglas Fairbanks character, famed for silent movies in Hollywood. Just as he is threatened by the arrival of the talkies, he falls in love with a young extra Peppy Miller. But Peppy not only becomes a star of the new popular talkies, she becomes the symptom of Valentin’s failure, as he and his pet dog are forced to leave their mansion and privileged life.

Inspired by classics such as Singing in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard, the French director Michel Hazanavicius has created something which may seem deadbeat old fashioned, but which when it’s best, offers the freshness of the Dogme-movement.

”I always wanted to do a silent movie, and I began to write this film, when Avatar was showing. It is not a political movie, but making a silent movie today is a political gesture,” Hazanavicius, whose last name stems from relatives in Lithuania, tells me when I meet him at the posh Hotel The Dorchester.

Fancy a room? Prices start at circa 500 pound.

Michel H at The Dorchester

In a time when studios and audiences are infatuated with 3D animation and 3-D glasses and what not, The Artist delivers old school, brilliant visual storytelling. When many filmmakers tend to forget that cinema is all about telling stories in pictures, he does this uncompromisingly. And in a very funny way.

At times, it is even sexy. For instance when the young, hopeful Peppy finds her way to Valentin’s wardrobe and approaches his dinner jacket on a hanger, puts her arm in one sleeve and cautiously begins to caress herself.

Some years ago Shakespeare in Love became extremely popular, despite channeling an artform from the 17th Century. Much in the same way, the comedy The Artist, plays on our knowledge of the silent era, making us laugh at it and with it.

Bérénice Bejo as perky Peppy

And just like Shakespeare in Love, The Artist might go all the way – to be one of the few comedies ever to win an Oscar.

The Artist may not be a political movie. But it has the power to remind us what movies are really about. The story is simple enough for children to understand but layered enough for movie buffs to swoon. It is about cinema, celebrity, pride and progress. And above all – it has what makes a hit, in the words of Geoffrey Rush’s Philip Henslowe in Shakespeare in Love:

”Love – and a bit with a dog!”

Heroines, Helen Mirren, Oscars and Beyond

Where I meet one of my biggest idols and – oh – by the way – Pernilla Augusts beautiful Beyond wins the Nordic Council Price

She is just as classy as I had imagined, Helen Mirren, not only one of the world’s most skilled and charismatic actresses but also a personal idol, particularly because of her super cool depiction of Superintendent Jane Tennison in the now classical crime show Prime Suspect. You think The Killing is great and that Sarah Lund is a determined bad ass detective? Who do you think we learned from?

Dame Helen Mirren is in Copenhagen to hand out the Nordic Film Council Prize, which I am delighted goes to Pernilla August, another great actress, for her debut as a director, Beyond.

In her bold and lyrical film, the idyllic Ikea scenery in 34 year old Leena’s family home is interrupted, when her mother calls from her deadbed. ”I thought your parents died many years ago?” says her husband. Well.

In Beyond Noomi Rapace, also an actress who embodied a defining crime heroine –  Lisbeth Salander – plays Leena who is forced to deal with her demons from an upbringing by alcoholics in the 70s. The film is a rare piece of poetic social realism that delivers fabulous cinematic experience and manages to express hope.

”This is my kind of movie, ” says Helen Mirren, who admits she is here to glamour up the prize in order to help what we call art house cinema. And not only is she glamourous, she is just as kind, and poised as I would have thought and meeting her is a highlight for me. Then again it also leaves me a little disappointed, because she is one of the film personalities that I would have dreamed of really getting to talk to. But in the days of many multimedia platforms, the biggest stars you share with your colleagues. Today there were eight of us sitting with her at the Danish Design Center.

A Swedish journalist wants to know how she felt about winning the Oscar?

”Well it’s weird because I have to say that that was rather great. It’s funny because it’s also sort of unreal, and I never expected it because I never made many of those movies that Hollywood usually adorns. It was a mixed experience of both vulgarity and greatness. … Then again, I don’t really believe in prizes,” she says.

”Except for this one ..?!” I offer. And she laughs: ”Except for this one!”