Apparently you can see Jacob's arm, more of Bella's legs and Edward's jacket. Click for UHQ
Source
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Boston Globe opinion piece on "Remember Me"
"Coasting on the Fumes of a Common Cultural Response?" by Ty Burr, Globe staff
Fair warning: If you haven’t seen the current Robert Pattinson movie, “Remember Me,’’ and don’t want the twist ending spoiled, do not read any further. This entire article is a spoiler. Are we clear on that? OK, let’s go.
The reason the film’s ending merits discussion — really, more than the rest of “Remember Me,’’ an intensely mopey saga of young love in Manhattan — is that it uses a major historical event in a way that deeply moves some audiences while deeply offending others. (I’m serious: If you don’t want to know what happens, stop now. The exit’s that way.) And it raises the question once again of when — and how, and if — disaster can or should be repurposed for our entertainment.
Here’s how the finale plays out (last chance, bye-bye): Pattinson’s character, a twitchily misunderstood New York University student named Tyler, has been wrestling with his love for fellow student Ally (Emilie de Ravin) over the course of the film, and things are finally looking up. He has made peace with her cop father (Chris Cooper) and even with his own dad, an imperious Master of the Universe type played by Pierce Brosnan. We’re in New York City at an indeterminate time, although if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll know exactly what year it is.
Tyler drops by his father’s office one morning for a meeting; dad is running late because the ice around his heart has finally melted and he’s taking his young daughter (Ruby Jerins) to school. Tyler looks at dad’s screensaver — a family slide-show — and is filled with love for the world. He steps to the window. Cut to the sister’s classroom, where the teacher is writing the date on the board: September 11, 2001. Cut back to Tyler at the window; the camera pulls back for the big reveal. He’s high up in one of the World Trade Center towers. Quick montage of shocked faces looking up, a shot of a funeral, Ally carrying on, and roll the credits. Now do you feel sorry for him?
It’s obvious why the filmmakers — screenwriter William Fetters, director Alan Coulter — chose to use 9/11. The tactic validates the characters and their dramas by suddenly reframing them within the context of a historical tragedy that carries agreed-upon cultural significance. By borrowing our emotions about that day, “Remember Me’’ seeks to inflate the meaning of the rest of its story.
And it seems to work, at least for some people. During the movie’s press screening the week before it opened, my colleague Wesley Morris and other local critics sat there with jaws agape and steam coming out their ears even as the smattering of college journalists present wept quietly into their notebooks. Go to the Internet Movie Database, and you’ll find dozens of user reviews lauding the final sequence as “unexpected and very tastefully done,’’ “a beautiful and gentle reminder that 9-11 was about people.’’ (A few naysayers have chimed in on the message boards: “I don’t know if I can ever think of a more manipulative ending solely designed to try and get girls to cry. It was pandering at a level I cannot even think of a reasonable comparison for.’’)
All right, people are moved by what they’re moved by and offended by what they’re offended by — these are honest reactions all. And I honestly know where I stand as a moviegoer: The twist in “Remember Me’’ sickens me. It doesn’t ennoble the characters, it cheapens history, and it abuses my personal memories of the event. Yet I’m open to the fact that others can feel differently, and if I don’t quite understand how, I’m willing to entertain the why of it.
For instance: Is this a matter of age? Although not all the online praise for the movie is coming from the under-30 contingent, a sizable chunk of fans are college age and younger. An 18-year-old would have been 9 when the towers fell, a 21-year-old 12. A 15-year-old “Twilight’’ fan would have been 6, the age I was when John F. Kennedy was shot, which maybe explains why I don’t feel the same measure of disgust for Oliver Stone’s “JFK.’’ National catastrophes experienced in our youth are generalized into frozen images and recollections of grown-ups crying; they don’t happen to us in any way we can conceptualize because they happen when we’re pre-conceptual.
Is it a matter of physical distance? If you processed 9/11 solely through the media coverage, it remains a distant horror made of shared fragments of sound and vision. Because I was living in Brooklyn then, because I just missed seeing the second tower hit as I walked to the corner after voting in the mayoral primary, because my children watched the towers fall from their classroom across New York Harbor, because my older daughter came home clutching a charred memo that had blown across the water, because the air smelled of burning electrical insulation for weeks, because people I knew lost people they knew — because of these and countless other unique memories, the event is a private grieving ground for me even as I share it with millions of others who were closer and farther away.
To not want those experiences whipped into an all-purpose multiplex fiction may be illogical, but we’re not talking about logic here. We’re talking about watching 2,752 individual human beings perish from a close distance. (For that reason, the only 9/11 movie that for this writer carries any weight is the 2002 HBO documentary “In Memoriam: New York City,’’ which is mostly a collage of footage that re-creates the day as it occurred, along with a handful of interviews. At one point, Rudy Giuliani notes that “we’re going to have to remember September 11 in its reality’’ if we don’t want to “rob people of the ability to relive it,’’ an observation that goes a long way in explaining why “Remember Me’’ bugs me so much.)
Which leads to the next consideration: Is it a matter of temporal distance, of time? Even civic and national wounds heal; even psychic scars fade. Three days after the attacks, I wrote in a blog post for my then-employer, Entertainment Weekly, “Entertainment itself suddenly seems obscene. . . . Warner Brothers has indefinitely put off releasing the new Arnold Schwarzenegger terrorism thriller, ‘Collateral Damage.’ Better they should throw the whole project in the dumpster; I can’t think of a genre that now seems more pathetically out of touch than the he-man demolition fest purveyed by actors like Arnold and directors like Michael Bay. Seriously, would you ever, ever want to watch things blow up for the fun of it again?’’
Feel free to laugh in my face. “Collateral Damage’’ came out the following February and made $40 million; Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’’ was the biggest hit of last summer. Of course the entertainment-industrial complex rebounded; of course we still watch things blow up for the fun of it, now more neurotically than ever. The human aspect of disaster becomes subsumed by the rhythms of daily life and the slow tick of years. We watch “Titanic’’ precisely to be reminded of the individuality of the men, women, and children who perished at sea in 1912, even as we accept the foregrounding of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as one symbolic story out of thousands. Would we accept a similar love story set in the towers or would we find it distasteful? If so, why do we accept a love story that ends there?
And, of course, the culture is different now, so much faster and more aggressive in the way it slices and repackages our actuality. That said, two silent movies re-creating the sinking of the Titanic were released within months of the disaster: a 35-minute German film called “In Nacht und Eis’’ (recently rediscovered, it can be seen on YouTube) and the lost 10-minute saga “Saved From the Titanic,’’ starring an actual survivor, Dorothy Gibson, wearing the actual gown she had on the night of April 14, 1912.
There are no records of shocked audience responses. There are no surviving records whatsoever. But movies were a novelty then, and the restaging of famous battles and other newsworthy events was common. This was a way to grapple with the tragedy, to see it, not to mention a way for Dorothy Gibson to grab a little fame. 9/11, by contrast, was so widely recorded, so seen, that its iconography was immediate. Because of that the event remains difficult to consider afresh. “Remember Me’’ doesn’t even try, choosing instead to coast on the fumes of our common cultural response.
Is it the way the movie uses 9/11, as a “Twilight Zone’’-style gotcha in a tale of ordinary adolescent madness, that sits like an anvil in my stomach? Stone’s 2006 “World Trade Center’’ is a decent film rather than a great one, but at least it’s about the attacks. Same with Paul Greengrass’s “United 93,’’ the TV movie “Flight 93,’’ and other entries in 2006’s brief “Is It Too Soon?’’ genre. Is it still too soon, though, for a teen-oriented romantic melodrama to use the towers as a narrative punch line? What’s the statute of limitations for crap?
What about 9/11 novels like Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man’’ and Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’’ — do we cut them a break because they represent one artist’s attempt to describe the indescribable rather than a collaborative Hollywood star vehicle? What about the Adam Sandler drama “Reign Over Me,’’ in which it’s revealed that the hero’s depression is due to his family’s death in one of the planes? Fair game or not?
As to that last one, I’d say yes, barely, because Sandler gives an honorable performance while Pattinson gives a terribly busy one, made up of grimaces, shrugs, and other James Dean-derived tics. (De Ravin, by contrast, seems grounded and real.) Ultimately, “Remember Me’’ isn’t about the people we lost on 9/11 at all but about more generic notions of living the full life and appreciating what you’ve got while you’ve got it (and who you’ve got while you’ve got them). Really, the bait-and-switch is right there in the title: Remember me, not them.
Some of us aren’t ready to forget about them just yet.
source
Rob Wins Best Foreign Actor Award
From RobPattzNews:
Rob has won for Best Foreign Actor in Russia’s ‘Georges’ awards.
The awards are presented by online movie site kinopoisk.ru.
Our lovely follower @kosh789 says the ceremony was March 31.
‘New Moon’ won for Best Foreign “Drama” (bit odd, but we’ll take it), and it came in at #4 in the category of Top Films of the Year. Kristen also won for Best Foreign Actress.
Best part for us.. learning how to spell Robert Pattinson in Russian: Congratulations Роберт Паттинсон!
2 great videos of Rob filming Bel Ami today
Rob leaving the Pub set - Mar 30th
via spunk-ransom.com
More Pictures from the Bel Ami set today - HQ
Source
Robert Pattinson on Fans, Fame and Fighting.
ROBERT PATTINSON ON FANS, FAME AND FIGHTING.
By Alan Drake
By Alan Drake
Move over Hugh Grant and Daniel Craig. Right now, Robert Pattinson is the biggest British movie star in Hollywood. Since hit vampire films Twilight and New Moon, R-Patz mania has exploded. Once, girls left notes on his car windscreen. Now they set themselves on fire outside his hotel.
"You start getting a bit paranoid," he admits. "Looking around when you're walking down the street, in case you get mobbed by teenage girls."
When Pattinson, 23, shot his latest film, romantic drama Remember Me, in New York, the hysteria almost killed him. Spotted by a bunch of 'Twi-hards' (as his obsessive fans are known), he crossed the road - narrowly missing being hit by a taxi. Everywhere, fans crowded to watch him shoot scenes with co-star Emilie de Ravin.
"It was mad," he says. "I didn't see it coming. I thought it was going to be a little film shot in New York, and I'd be able to just hang out!"
For Pattinson, those days are long gone. "I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to not be seen," he explains. "It's annoying but the pay-off is infinite.
If no one finds out where you're staying, if people aren't following you, or outside a restaurant if you have dinner there... then it's great."
The big question is over his relationship with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart. The pair reputedly got together when filming New Moon, but when Stewart collected the Orange Rising Star Bafta in February, they arrived separately - presumably to avoid a 'Twi-hard' riot. Does he find it even more difficult to go out with Stewart?
"It's difficult either way," he says, refusing to elaborate. "When the spotlight seems centred on you, the best thing is to remain as much of a mystery as you can."
If R-Patz isn't quite ready to cuddle up to Kristen in public, his new film casts him as a modern-day Romeo. He plays Tyler, a rich kid rebel who falls for de Ravin's student, despite her father's objections.
"I wanted to play something grounded in reality, a solid story of normal people," he says.
Is he a romantic? "In a confused way," he nods. "I think I try. The way to be romantic is to be uncynical and innocent about relationships. I am innocent about that."
He admits going to slushy movies. "I really like The Notebook" - further proof he's every teen girl's ideal man.
But, in common with his Remember Me character, Pattinson admits a history of getting into fights.
"I've been beaten up a few times," he says. "I generally don't see it coming... it's been a few years, though."
It's hard to imagine this gentle-looking boy, who grew up with two elder sisters, slugging it out. Is he a peaceful guy at heart?
"Not really," he grins. "I just like wounds!"
But could the pressure of fame be getting to him? On its first US weekend, Remember Me took just $8 million (£5.3m) - way off the records New Moon set.
"You see articles, 'If this doesn't make any money, what's his worth to the world?'" he cries. "I don't know! Nothing!"
Does he ever think of rebelling against this life?
"Yeah," he nods. "I didn't go through a rebellious streak when I was younger and now I'll suddenly rebel against stuff completely unnecessarily."
In truth, Pattinson's upbringing was sound, his parents encouraging him to act. "They're really proud," he says. "They think it's more impressive than I do. It's just luck to me. I never set out to find fame. It's strange."
How so? "I still have to learn how to make my life work."
Not that the madness engulfing him will let up any time soon. Third Twilight film Eclipse is due in summer and he is now shooting Bel Ami with Uma Thurman and Christina Ricci. In October he films Breaking Dawn, the final in the Twilight saga. It's why he likes living in Los Angeles.
"I like the isolation. If you want to be alone, you're really alone in LA."
At least with Kristen by his side, Pattinson will be anything but lonely.
Remember Me opens today
Out of the Vampires Shadow
As Hollywood’s hottest property, Robert Pattinson doesn’t need to sit around waiting for the phone to ring.
Sifting through a mountain of scripts and trying to navigate a satisfying career path, while everyone wants a piece of him, will be a more familiar scenario.
With the whole world watching his every move, how did the star of the Twilight films decide to follow the smash hit New Moon with humble independent movie Remember Me?
Fairly easily, it turns out.
“I never like anything, so it’s quite easy to decide what to do,” he admits, candidly.
“I’ve never felt any pressure to do anything, particularly. Even when we were shooting it I never thought about the box office.”
It may be far from his mind, but Pattinson, known as R-Patz to his adoring fans, is certainly box office-friendly. Propelled to stardom as the pale and mysterious vampire Edward Cullen, he now inspires hysteria whenever he steps out in public.
Today is no exception, and journalists preparing to grill him about his latest release have had to wait patiently as he works the red carpet outside the film’s premiere in London’s Leicester Square, signing autograph after autograph for overwhelmed fans.
In person, he is undeniably good looking, with a striking bone structure, tousled hair and cheeks decidedly rosier than those of his vampire alter ego.
He is also rather self-deprecating, and has a tendency to backtrack and correct himself while he’s speaking. Even so, he seems to know his own mind when it comes to career choices.
“I had read tonnes and tonnes of scripts over the summer after I did Twilight, I mean hundreds, and everything seemed exactly the same.
“But this one, the way the dialogue was written, it just seemed much more naturalistic than most things,” he says.
“It’s not really a feel-good movie. They don’t make movies like it anymore, I think that’s how I kind of choose stuff, that’s the only criteria I have. There seems to be a gap in the market for something and I just try and do that.”
Remember Me is about as far away as you can get from the fantastical world of vampires and werewolves that Pattinson is best known for.
Set in New York, it stars the 23-year-old as Tyler Hawkins, a handsome and somewhat lost young man, who is going through life in the aftermath of his brother’s suicide.
Tyler meets and falls in love Ally Craig, played by Lost’s Emilie de Ravin, a kindred spirit whose life has also been marked by family tragedy.
The film is set in 2001, the significance of which emerges later in the movie.
Although, in his own words, Tyler “starts off with a lot of baggage”, Pattinson rejects suggestions that he’s always drawn to playing the “brooding” types.
“I did do the kind of lighter stuff before Twilight came out and it just so happened that Twilight became so much about him being an archetypal brooding person,” he insists.
“I never thought Tyler was that brooding,” he laughs.
“I hadn’t even heard the word before Twilight. I guess you like to play broken troubled characters because it seems more interesting, especially because I’m not particularly broken and troubled myself.”
As well as being a love story, which features scenes racier than Twilight fans will be used to seeing their heartthrob in, Remember Me is the tale of Tyler’s frustrations with his father Charles, a wealthy and powerful businessman played by Pierce Brosnan.
Pattinson is full of praise for his “very, very charming” screen dad.
“As soon as you meet him he’s very, very charismatic and Charles on the page is someone who’s very domineering and quite a negative character.
“Pierce, just by being Pierce, kind of changed all that, which was great and made it a much more interesting relationship.”
Tyler also has a touching relationship with his 11-year-old sister Caroline, played by Ruby Jerins.
Although he only has two older sisters himself (“I think I always wanted a younger sibling – not that I have anything against my sisters!”), Pattinson credits the young actress for making their closeness believable.
“It’s very easy to do anything with her. You just look at her and you know what to do immediately.”
Tyler gets into a few punch-ups in the film, clashing on more than one occasion with Ally’s dad, played by Adaptation’s Chris Cooper.
But Pattinson is typically self-effacing when describing his scenes with “a big stunt guy”.
“I hit with what I thought was my full strength. I hit his face about four times. And every time I was like ’I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ and he was like ’it’s fine. It didn’t really hurt.’ That was kind of an ego deflator.”
He admits he hasn’t been in a fight in real life “for a long time”.
“I’m too scared. I think if I got into a fight now someone would just kill me,” he says, prompting laughter from the room.
“I liked a lot of the rebelliousness and audacity of the character. It was kind of a fantasy of myself. Like ’Yeah, I’m the type of guy who randomly gets into fights. I do it all the time’.”
“I don’t. I’m not really,” he quickly adds.
Pattinson was first linked to Remember Me before he was a household name, and the film’s producers are thankful his new-found stardom didn’t turn him off the project.
In fact, an executive producer credit for the actor is testament to his passion for the movie.
Judging by the hordes of screaming girls who turned out to catch a glimpse of the heartthrob at the premiere, the film has a ready-made audience in Twilight’s huge fanbase.
And while Pattinson acknowledges his previous work, and that of de Ravin, will attract more publicity for the film, he refuses to worry about how fans will receive it.
“Obviously you hope people like things but I think if you start doing stuff to please a certain audience then you’re going in the wrong direction,” he says.
“I mean, you don’t even know the people you’re trying to please, especially if you’re trying to please whole swathes of people.”
He laughs before adding: “I hope they like it.”
Remember Me is released on Friday April 2
EXTRA TIME – ROBERT PATTINSON
Robert Pattinson started acting in local drama group, the Barnes Theatre Club, where he took part in a production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
He played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire.
In Remember Me, he found his American accent came easily from just reading the script, although he didn’t consciously affect a New York one. “I’ve spent a bit of time in New York and just try and pick up on how people speak,” he says. “I don’t know where my accent is now. I wouldn’t say I had a specific London accent any more.”
He has a “very, very close knit” set of friends, the same ones he’s had since he was 12.
He has no particular heroes other than his family. “They’re great people and my parents are great parents and they brought me up very well, I think. That’s about all the heroes I’ve had.
New Eclipse Paperback Covers
The second one look like fan art, but its from Barnes and Noble. I dont know...
Click for bigger
Click for bigger
Pre-order: Here | Here
Via LovingRob
Hello Magazine Poll - Rob pitched against Taylor
1
Joe Jonas
552 votes
2
Kiefer Sutherland
350 votes
3
Taylor Lautner
111 votes
4
Robert Pattinson
71 votes
OK! Magazine Mexico Interviews Rob - Scans + Translation
Translation
What’s thw first thing you say to a girl on a date?
I don’t talk about myself, no way. You can’t show yourself too quickly. You have to find out what she likes before you start talking.
How can they win your heart?
With money!
Anything else?
Infinite pacience.
What do you hate about fame?
I get paranoid; I have to be careful and try to tell who genuienly likes me, and who wants to be with me just so I like them.
And how can you tell if you can trust them?
If you give them your number and they call you right away, you can’t trust them. If they can’t wait to call and call you the very next day, I don’t want to know about them anymore (laughs).
You seem like a hostage of your own success. Would you prefer to go back to the days when you were unknown?
No, if I had that sort of mentality, I would go nuts. It’s annoying to see how people will stop at nothing. You learn a lot about human behavior. It gets irritating. But I wouldnever want to go back to the past.
Where do you live in America?
I’ve been staying in hotels for that past three years.
Photo. About Mexico city, a place he visited for less than 48 hours while promoting Twilight he said: “I’ve never seen anything like it. In every city there’s an industrial zone around the airport, and in Mexico city you leave the airport and the entire city is just right there, and it’s immediatly vibrant. I’ve never seen such an active city, I really liked it. Wouldn’t mind living there for a while.
What’s it like to live in hotels all the time?
You get tired. I came close to buying a house in America last year, but I realized it would’ve been very complicated. Too much money and I’m not even sure I’ll work there in the next few years.
What makes you feel at home when you travel for a long time?
I always take my guitar with me. I’ve had it for a few years, but I got a new one recently. I like Skype, it’s amazing how you can communicate with everyone no matter where they are. I used to like the feeling of isolation.I used to leave for a year and not talk to anybody. When I came back to London I realized that your life can collapse if you don’t talk to anybody.
In the beginning I thought I could play him close to myself, but it ended up being a different character.
Are you close to your sisters like your character is to his sister?
Yes, very. My sister Liz is older than me, so it’s a bit different. I always wanted a younger sibling. I like working with younger people. Ruby will be amazing when she grows up. She’s so natural in front of the camera. I’ve never worked with anyone as good as her, she’s amazing at improvising and no matter what you say, she doesn’t break character.
Have you ever felt the aggression that Tyler has against life?
I still feel it. It’s an inexplicable anger that’s not directed to anyone in particular. I was never a rebel, but I am now. I always wanted to live like Tyler.
And how do you channel that anger? Do you trash hotel rooms?
Yes, of course. I destroy everything (laughs).I like to control my anger and I channel it throug my work. I’m working on something that requires a lot of angerand it’s exhausting (Bel Ami). I can’t be angry all day, it’s exhausting.
Remember Me talks about how frail life really is. Could you say good-bye to this world right now and be satisfied with what you’ve done?
Yes, in many ways Remember Me talks about how you can achieve happiness. Those brief instants when you realize and say: “Right now, I’m happy”, and how you can live that moment. There’s very few moments like that.
Have you had any of those moments?
Of course I have. Sometimes I’m obsessed with the idea. I can almost time each of these moments, until I feel something else. Those are true moments if peace.
Any moment you can share with us?
When my dog Patty was dying, seeing how she lived her last moments with absolute dignity. That unbreakable pride in her, and her love for me made me feel very happy. She was a big part of the family.
Pierce Brosnan says you have a vey good heart and that you’re humble.
Well, thank you. It’s scary, honestly. I never take fame for granted. It’s not a matter of luck, you have to earn. And somehow I feel like I’ll have to make up for it in the future.
Did you enjoy working with Emilie?
Her role was written as a Hispanic girl from Queens, and I had pictured that in mind already. And all of a sudden the blondest most Australian girl I had ever seen walks in. There’s a toughness about her. After her auditions we went to a bar and she had like 25 beers without losing her sobriety. And I thought “this is going to be fun”.
Scans and Translation: TwilightPoison
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
