Decent performances from fantastic actors isn’t enough to save Carnage, the latest film from director Roman Polanski. If your idea of time well spent is watching people argue, yell, and scream at each other for two hours, then you’ve hit the jackpot with this one.

Polanski’s sketchy history is enough to have some critics refuse to review his films altogether, and while I’m certainly not endorsing his actions, I don’t have a moral problem with watching one of the guy’s films. Taking his off-set behavior out of the equation and examining Carnage by itself, it didn’t seem like there was much to it from a directing standpoint. The story is based on a French stage play called God of Carnage, so naturally it’s going to be confined to a limited number of locations. This isn’t to say that there’s no room for stylistic flourishes in close quarters – if Michael Bay made this movie, it would look a lot different than Polanski’s – but because Polanski chose to film everything in a straightforward way, the movie felt a little flat. Everything’s just kind of…there.

The film opens on a shot of kids playing in a park in New York City, and after the credits roll, one kid hits another in the face with a stick. The movie then transitions to the home of the parents of the victim (Foster and Reilly). They’ve invited the parents of the attacker (Winslet and Waltz) over to talk it out and shed light on the situation. Things heat up when blame starts getting thrown around – turns out the attacker is in a gang, unbeknownst to his parents – and these apparently civil adults abandon their pretensions, plummeting off the deep end into name-calling and drunkenness.

Jodie Foster’s character was by far the most annoying, a haughty writer working on a book about Darfur. She whines and cries throughout, trying the patience even of her on-screen husband, John C. Reilly. He’s the best part of this movie, and the only thing that made it remotely tolerable for me; when he gets some alcohol in him, his inhibitions fall away and he starts telling it like it is, providing the funniest lines in the film by far. Waltz’s character is a lawyer who spends at least half of his screen time on his cell phone, locked in uninteresting conversations with one of his pharmaceutical clients about covering up a scandal. Kate Winslet’s character isn’t much better, a snooty holier-than-thou type who, in one of the film’s rare instances of something interesting happening, projectile vomits on a coffee table. I realize that’s not a character trait, but it’s the most important thing she does in the film, which tells you a bit about the dynamics of the conversations here.

Carnage is yet another statement on society seen through the eyes of a small group of people in one location. Over the past few years, I’ve drastically lost patience with these kinds of films; most of them are less like Sidney Lumet’s excellent 12 Angry Men and more like Frank Darabont’s dismal The Mist, which is to say that recent variations on this formula have tended to get overly heavy-handed. Because the characters in Carnage are educated and pseudo-intellectual, I think their devolution into chaos is more of a condemnation of humanity than the one depicted in The Mist - at least the characters in the latter film are depicted as idiots from the start.

Because this movie is such a grinding buildup of constant unpleasantness, I was yearning for its end far earlier than it arrived. But when the ending finally does happen, it’s so abrupt – seemingly in the middle of a random string of arguments, much like any other here – that it has absolutely no impact, other than providing the freedom for which I so desperately longed. Carnage will work for some people, but trudging through the annoying characters and grating dialogue just wasn’t worth the takeaway for me. Though it’s nowhere near as abysmal as Just Go With It or Burning Palms, Carnage is a film I’ll never watch again. Until next time…

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Paramount Pictures has today released a new trailer for Titanic 3D ahead of the re-release next April. The trailer first appeared on Titanic‘s official Facebook page with an introduction from director James Cameron.

Paramount has also released a poster for the re-release, which you can view below:

It’s been 14 years since Cameron’s movie won 11 Oscars and made over $1.8 billion worldwide. Will you be buying a ticket to see it in 3D?

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Sony Picture Classics have released a new trailer for Roman Polanski’s Carnage, an adaptation of the stage play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza. The film follows two sets of parents (Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly) who meet up to talk after their children have been in a fight that day at school.

Watch below:

A showdown between two kids: about eleven, in a local playground. Swollen lips, broken teeth…Now the parents of the “victim” have invited the parents of the “bully” to their apartment to sort if out. Cordial banter gradually develops a razor-sharp edge as all four parents reveal their laughable contradictions and grotesque prejudices. None of them will escape the ensuing carnage.

Carnage has a US release date set for December 16th, 2011. It premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival last month and currently has 94% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 16 reviews.

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Today sees the release of the first trailer for Roman Polanski’s Carnage, an adaptation of the stage play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza. The film appears to solely take place within the confines of one house, but that doesn’t matter at all when you have Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz being hilarious. Yes, it’s a comedy.

Watch below:

A showdown between two kids: about eleven, in a local playground. Swollen lips, broken teeth…Now the parents of the “victim” have invited the parents of the “bully” to their apartment to sort if out. Cordial banter gradually develops a razor-sharp edge as all four parents reveal their laughable contradictions and grotesque prejudices. None of them will escape the ensuing carnage.

Carnage has a US release date set for December 16th, 2011. Potential Oscar-bait?

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Warner Bros. have released the first trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s virus thriller Contagion, which stars Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne.

In a bold movie the studio has decided to show the death a character played by one of the main players mentioned above, but as the trailer progresses you understand that the death is actually pretty important to the story and they couldn’t really skip around it.

Watch below:

The movie follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. As the fast-moving epidemic grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself. At the same time, ordinary people struggle to survive in a society coming apart.

Contagion will be released September 9, 2011 in the US and October 21 in the UK.

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Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition, Jarhead) was unofficially hired as director of Bond 23 back in January and had been flirting with various projects while the MGM situation dragged on for most of the year. With MGM emerging from bankruptcy, a November 2012 release pencilled in, and composer David Arnold revealing this week that the film was “back on” it looks like things will finally get moving on Bond 23.

Now Kate Winslet, who recently divorced from Mendes but remains good friends, revealed that she will be heading back to London next year with their children so that Mendes can work on the next Bond film.

From The Daily Mail:

‘Sam is doing the next Bond film, all being well, and we’ll all be in England if that happens. It’s such a massive commitment for him and it’s not fair for him to commute backwards and ­forwards to New York from ­London. It would be impossible. The children will be there with me,’ Kate told me exclusively.

I asked Kate if there was a small role for her in the Bond picture, perhaps as a Bond girl? She laughed and shook her head and said: ‘No!’ However, she did not rule out the possibility of working with Sam again. ‘I can see us working together again — that’s the way it is. ‘We’re really good friends and have very good respect for each other. I can see it, but you’d have to ask Sam what he thinks,’ Kate told me.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Kate Winslet in Bond 23, in fact I would actively encourage it, but that’s for Mendes and the producers to decide and what works best for the story.

Last year Peter Morgan, writer of The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland, was hired to work on the script for Bond 23 alongside regular James Bond scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. As the film starts back up again their script could be dusted off for a polish, or they could hire new writers to work on a totally different story. We’ll probably find out over the next few months what MGM’s plans are.

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Back in March Avatar director James Cameron said he and 20th Century Fox had plans to convert his second highest grossing film of all time, Titanic, into 3D and re-release it in the spring of 2012 which will be the 100 year anniversary of the sailing of the ship.

Well in an article commenting on Gloria Stuart’s 100th birthday (the actress who played old Rose in the movie) the L.A Times confirmed that Cameron is “converting the blockbuster into 3-D for re-release in April 2012″.

Cameron has been critical of studios undertaking rushed conversions on movies as he says that they end up “putting out an inferior product”. We’ve seen over recent months with movies such as Clash of the Titans that quickie conversions aren’t that great, but it seems if Cameron is going to convert Titanic he is going to do it the right way. He can’t exactly go back and re-shoot the whole film in 3D so making a non-rushed quality 3D conversion is the next best thing.

Are you interested in seeing Titanic in 3D in 2010?

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In February it was announced that Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne had all signed up for Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion, which follows an international team of doctors and scientists brought in by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) after an outbreak of a deadly virus.

No concrete release date had been set, however today Warner Bros. announced that the film will be released on October 21st 2011 in 3D.

The cast list alone is enough to get people to see the film so i’m not sure why it needs to be in 3D. But I suppose if everyone else is doing it they might as well, and Soderbergh was apparently impressed with Avatar so he may want to give it a go.

Scott Z. Burns (The Informant! and The Bourne Ultimatum) has written the script, which apparently is “terrifying”, and the film is scheduled to begin filming later this year.

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In February it was announced that Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne had all signed up for Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion, which follows an international team of doctors and scientists brought in by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) after an outbreak of a deadly virus. We haven’t heard anything about it since the casting, although Jude Law recently said that he will be shooting for 10 days at the end of the year.

Well today The Playlist got more details on the film, including details on who will be playing who. (Spoilers below)

Gwyneth Paltrow plays a character called Beth Emhoff who is struck down by a mysterious ailment during a Hong Kong flight, and her husband, Matt Damon, is is forced to care for his wife, and soon his step-son, as her condition worsens.

Laurence Fishburne plays Dr. Ellis Cheever, the head of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and Kate Winslet plays his colleague Dr. Erin Mears. Both are battling to find a cure for the disease, and Winslet’s character is sent to examine Gwyneth Paltrow at her home in Minnesota.

Marion Cotillard plays European doctor Leonora Orantes who works for the World Health Organization. She is also working on finding a cure and heads to Hong Kong to investigate what appears to be the genesis spot of the breakout.

And finally, Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, “a hungry, truthseeking blogger with an unfortunate interest in conspiracy theories”. His character is “responsible for spreading information about the disease, both true and false, around the world.”

My interest in Contagion first sparked after hearing the talent that had signed on, and I can now see why they did. As well as being an interesting thriller, there are many meaty roles to go around and it seems to be a true global affair (as deadly viruses usually are).

Scott Z. Burns (The Informant! and The Bourne Ultimatum) has written the script, which apparently is “terrifying”, and the film is scheduled to begin filming later this year for a 2011 release (no official release date has been set).

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According to Deadline Hollywood Warner Bros. has outbid it’s fellow studios for Steven Soderbergh’s next movie Contagion. The film follows an international team of doctors and scientists brought in by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) after an outbreak of a deadly virus. These aren’t your average doctors and scientists, however. They will be played by the likes of Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne.

Specific roles haven’t been outlined yet, however the events will stretch across four continents, so one can assume Winslet and Law will be tackling the outbreak in the UK, Damon, Paltrow and Fisburne in the US, and Cotillard will be fighting the bacteria from hell in France.

The budget is set at $60 million and according to The Playlist the script is “terrifying”. Writer Scott Z. Burns has previously contributed to the cinematic world with The Informant! and The Bourne Ultimatum so it’s bound to be good. So good in fact that Soderbergh has pushed everything aside in order to fast track shooting for later this year. Here’s one to keep an eye on.

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