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From ZERO to 6 ♥s. 100% ad-free. Run on pure love for movies, documentaries and TV-series. June 2025: Countdown to: Top 10: Best horror comedy movies - Upcoming review: There's Still Tomorrow (2023)
Eagerly anticipating this month ... (6-25)
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (2025)
Showing posts with label Vendian Entertainment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vendian Entertainment. Show all posts
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the gentle title character on a sleek poster for Oliver Stone's Snowden
Snowden is the 20th fiction feature from great New-Yorker filmmaker Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July (1989)). It is written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman (2014)), based on two novels: Luke Harding's (WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011)) non-fiction The Snowden Files (2014) and Anatoly Kucherena's (We Cannot Do Without Bloodshed (2003)) fictionalized Time of the Octopus (2015).
Edward Snowden, a precarious but deeply dedicated young American male, finds out that he can best serve his country by using his prodigal computer skills, working for the NSA and CIA. Over the course of several years, he is increasingly distraught by the covert tactics of his government, leading up to his becoming a whistle-blower for The Guardian in 2013.
Stone, once again, succeeds with a controversial, highly relevant and political current issue, - namely that of Edward Snowden and the mass surveillance and privacy infringement and espionage perpetrated by the US government. His film is arguably more important, inflammatory and needed than any other he has done in decades. As such, it is this year's The Big Short (2015); a thrillingly substantial outlaying of outrageous recent history; eye-opening and assured in its conviction: That Snowden is no suspicious expat that deserves decades behind bars or to rot in his involuntary refuge in Russia, but is, in fact, an American hero, a brave friend of the common man and an excellent citizen.
Cinematically, Snowden isn't as innovative as Big Short. But it's solid all-around, deftly illuminating the problems of mass surveillance in the digital age while letting us ever closer to its title protagonist and his struggles as a loyal citizen with increasingly burdening knowledge and feelings of complicity.
Thanks to a stellar cast that Stone has managed to gather, the film becomes a riveting encounter: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (10 Things I Hate about You (1999)) has a smugness that peaks through his otherwise impressive performance; he really embodies Snowden credibly. Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars (2014)) is, once again, excellent, here as the very normal, loving girlfriend. Rhys Ifans (Another Me (2013)) and Nicholas Cage (Drive Angry (2011)) appear and are great in minor but pivotal parts, and the cast is full of exceptional actors; young up-and-comers like Scott Eastwood (Diablo (2015)) and Ben Schnetzer (Pride (2014)) and more seasoned actors like Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood (2004-06)), Joely Richardson (101 Dalmatians (1996)), Tom Wilkinson (RocknRolla (2008)), Zachary Quinto (Star Trek Beyond (2016)) and Melissa Leo (Flight (2012)).
Don't go into Snowden expecting a break-neck paced conventional thriller. - Its hero is a geek, and it's about technology and the real world, which is thrilling in another way. - But no less thrilling, mark you. Snowden is a must-see.
[Snowden premiered September 9 (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 134 minutes. Stone was working on a film about Martin Luther King's last years with Jamie Foxx starring when he started getting contacted about Snowden and eventually went to Russia and met him. Stone allegedly paid 0.7 mil. $ for the rights to Harding's book and 1 mil. $ for the rights to Kucherena's, scrapping the King biopic. Financing proved tough: Stone and his producer financed the film themselves until 8 days before production, when French and German financing came through: Probably due to its controversial content, it was not possible to get American financing for Snowden. The film was shot in 62 days from February - April in Munich, Germany, Moscow, Hawaii, Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong. The budget was so tight that when Stone's mother passed away, he had to miss her US funeral, because the production couldn't afford any delay. Fears of surveillance and hacking by the NSA made the cast and crew adhere to special precautions during production. Gordon-Levitt, who had also gone to Moscow to meet Snowden and his girlfriend to prepare for his part, donated his entire salary to the production. The release was pushed out from a December 2015 release until the fall of 2016. The film opened #4, behind Sully, Blair Witch and Bridget Jones' Baby, to an 8 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spend its 2nd week in #5 and then left the top 5 and has to date grossed just 18.8 mil. $. The film has yet to open in several important markets like France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Italy and Japan, and hopefully it will still gather the much larger audiences it deserves, and avoid becoming a major flop. Snowden is fresh at 63 % with a 6.3 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
Elle Fanning looks glamorous, sprinkled in gold on a poster for Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon
The Neon Demon is the 10th film from Danish master co-writer/co-producer/director Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher II (2004)), who has written it with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham (Eleanor (2015), short). Jesse is a young, beautiful girl who has traveled to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a supermodel. But she meet a ferocious, cynical world there that's gonna chew her up and spit her out, if she doesn't make sure to take care of herself. Neon Demon is a bit of a disappointment. It doesn't live up to the heights of Refn's recent spectacles like Valhalla Rising (2009), Drive (2011) or Only God Forgives (2013). For me it's his weakest since Bronson (2008), which I've never been able to really like. But as an avidRefn fan, I still liked Neon Demon, which is as appropriately vacuous (for a film about the modeling world), slow and periodically transgressive as to succeed in getting people to inevitably form opinions about it, (as Refn's movies usually do.) There are many things to critique about it: It's first of all too slow, I think. The long periods of faces in lights and music, (Cliff Martinez (Drive) has once again created a spine-tingling, cool, electro-score), often don't contribute enough to justify their length, and this time they bog the film down. - I'm sure I'm not alone in having wished for more story and action instead. We get very little knowledge about Jesse, and the demonic aspect (illustrated by a mysterious triangle and crystals, which seem to signify the attraction of beauty and attention that gobble up our protagonist in the course of the film) is also understated to put it mildly, (underdeveloped if you want the harsher version.) The film references The Shining (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and is a slow, artsy meditation/very dark satire of different beauty standards, ideals and methods today, until it picks up a bit of pace and becomes more of a horror film.
A retro-styled poster for Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon
Elle Fanning (Somewhere (2010)) does well in the lead, who is innocence arriving to be corrupted, it seems, but perhaps also an innocence that is already tainted from home? SPOILER As Jesse's ego-centrism and megalomania begins to become grating, she gets killed off, and the film thus seems to come to a very sudden finish. SPOILER - But there is more, and especially the pool scene that finishes the film was an effective gross-out cap, I thought. Jena Malone (10 Cent Pistol (2014)) gives an eerie performance with maximum yuck factor; Bella Heathcote (In Time (2011)) is an effectively icy über-bitch; Abbey Lee (Gods of Egypt (2016)) is chilling; Desmond Harrington (Dexter (2008-13)) is good as probably the most sympathetic character; Alessandro Nivola (The Eye (2008)) makes a fine, arrogant fashion designer, and both Keanu Reeves (Street Kings (2008)) and Christina Hendricks (Dark Places (2015)) are good as two of the city's regular scumbags, although we get precious little of them both here, regrettably. The Neon Demonhas cool photography by Natasha Braier (The Rover (2014)) and moves around in the thematic waters of narcissism, perception of beauty, youth vs. aging, dominance-subordination and abstinence vs. carnality.
Cost: 7 mil. $ Box office: Not known yet = Unknown [The Neon Demonpremiered May 20 (Cannes) and runs 117 minutes. The film was shot in LA from March 2015 onward. Its American distribution rights were acquired by Amazon Studios. The film was shown in competition in Cannes, where Martinez won an award for his music in it. The film will open in most of its markets in the course of the summer. The Neon Demon is rotten at 47 % with a 5.8 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
