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Free Malaysia Today
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Free Malaysia Today
‘Being a woman is a violent experience,' says Kristen Stewart
US director, screenwriter and producer Kristen Stewart during a photocall for the film 'The Chronology of Water' at the Cannes Film Festival. (AFP pic) CANNES : 'I can't wait to make 10 more movies,' Kristen Stewart told AFP the morning after making what Rolling Stone called 'one hell of a directorial debut' at the Cannes film festival. Nor can film critics judging from the rave reviews of 'The Chronology of Water', her startling take on the American swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch's visceral memoir of surviving abuse as a child. All the producers who Stewart said passed on her script, saying its subject matter made it 'really unattractive' to audiences, must now be crying into their champagne. Variety called it 'a stirring drama of abuse and salvation, told with poetic passion', while Indiewire critic David Ehrlich said 'there isn't a single millisecond of this movie that doesn't bristle with the raw energy of an artist'. The fact that she has got such notices with what is normally a no-no subject in Hollywood – and with an avant-garde approach to the storytelling – is remarkable. 'I definitely don't consider myself a part of the entertainment industry,' said the 'Twilight' saga star, dressed head to toe in Chanel. And those looking for something light and frothy would do better to avoid her unflinching film. Stewart has long been obsessed with the story and with Yuknavitch's writing, and fought for years to make the movie her way. 'I had just never read a book like that that is screaming out to be a movie, that needs to be moving, that needs to be a living thing,' she told AFP. That Yuknavitch was 'able to take really ugly things, process them, and put out something that you can live with, something that actually has joy' is awe-inspiring, she added. 'Book is a total lifeboat' 'The reason I really wanted to make the movie is because I thought it was hilarious in such a giddy and excited way, like we were telling secrets. I think the book is a total lifeboat,' said Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay. It certainly saved Yuknavitch and made her a cult writer, with her viral TED Talk 'The Beauty of Being a Misfit' inspiring a spin-off book, 'The Misfit's Manifesto'. 'Being a woman is a really violent experience,' Stewart told AFP, 'even if you don't have the sort of extreme experience that we depict in the film or that Lidia endured and came out of beautifully'. Stewart insisted there were no autobiographical parallels per se that drew her to the original book. But 'I didn't have to do a bunch of research (for the film). I'm a female body that's been walking around for 35 years. Look at the world that we live in. 'I don't have to have been abused by my dad to understand what it is like to be taken from, to have my voice stifled, and to not trust myself. It takes a lot of years (for that) to go. 'I think that this movie resonates with anyone who is open and bleeding, which is 50 percent of the population.' Stewart – who cast singer Nick Cave's son Earl as the swimmer's first husband and Sonic Youth rock band's Kim Gordon as a dominatrix – told reporters she was never really tempted to play Yuknavitch herself. 'We are walking secrets' Instead she cast British actor Imogen Poots, who she called 'the best actress of our generation. She is so lush, so beautiful and she's so cracked herself open in this'. 'She has this big boob energy in the film – even though she is quite flat-chested – these big blue eyes and this long hair.' She described her movie's fever-dream energy as 'a pink muscle that is throbbing' and that Poots was able to tap into, channelling Yuknavitch's ferocious but often chaotic battle to rebuild herself and find pleasure and happiness in her life. 'Pain and pleasure, they're so tied, there's a hairline fracture there,' Stewart told the Cannes Festival's video channel. Yuknavitch's book 'sort of meditates on what art can do for you after people do things to your body – the violation and the thievery, the gouging out of desire. Which is a very female experience.' She said 'it is only the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive', and that art and writing helped liberate Yuknavitch and find a skin she could live in. Stewart said Yuknavitch discovered that the only way to take desire back was to 'bespoke it… and repurpose the things that have been given to you in order for you to own them.' 'I'm not being dramatic, but as women we are walking secrets,' the actor said.
South China Morning Post
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Kristen Stewart on directorial debut The Chronology of Water, violence of being a woman
'I can't wait to make 10 more movies,' Kristen Stewart said the morning after making what Rolling Stone magazine called 'one hell of a directorial debut' at the Cannes Film Festival. Nor can film critics, judging from the rave reviews of The Chronology of Water, her startling take on the American swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch's visceral memoir of surviving abuse as a child. All the producers who Stewart said passed on her script, saying its subject matter made it 'really unattractive' to audiences, must now be crying into their champagne. Variety magazine called it 'a stirring drama of abuse and salvation, told with poetic passion', while Indiewire critic David Ehrlich said 'there isn't a single millisecond of this movie that does not bristle with the raw energy of an artist'. Play The fact that she has got such notices with what is normally a no-no subject in Hollywood – and with an avant-garde approach to the storytelling – is remarkable.
France 24
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
'Being a woman is a violent experience,' says Kristen Stewart
Nor can film critics judging from the rave reviews of "The Chronology of Water", her startling take on the American swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch's visceral memoir of surviving abuse as a child. All the producers who Stewart said passed on her script, saying its subject matter made it "really unattractive" to audiences, must now be crying into their champagne. Variety called it "a stirring drama of abuse and salvation, told with poetic passion", while Indiewire critic David Ehrlich said "there isn't a single millisecond of this movie that doesn't bristle with the raw energy of an artist". The fact that she has got such notices with what is normally a no-no subject in Hollywood -- and with an avant-garde approach to the storytelling -- is remarkable. "I definitely don't consider myself a part of the entertainment industry," said the "Twilight" saga star, dressed head to toe in Chanel. And those looking for something light and frothy would do better to avoid her unflinching film. Stewart has long been obsessed with the story and with Yuknavitch's writing, and fought for years to make the movie her way. "I had just never read a book like that that is screaming out to be a movie, that needs to be moving, that needs to be a living thing," she told AFP. That Yuknavitch was "able to take really ugly things, process them, and put out something that you can live with, something that actually has joy" is awe-inspiring, she added. 'Book is a total lifeboat' "The reason I really wanted to make the movie is because I thought it was hilarious in such a giddy and excited way, like we were telling secrets. I think the book is a total lifeboat," said Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay. It certainly saved Yuknavitch and made her a cult writer, with her viral TED Talk "The Beauty of Being a Misfit" inspiring a spin-off book, "The Misfit's Manifesto". "Being a woman is a really violent experience," Stewart told AFP, "even if you don't have the sort of extreme experience that we depict in the film or that Lidia endured and came out of beautifully". Stewart insisted there were no autobiographical parallels per se that drew her to the original book. But "I didn't have to do a bunch of research (for the film). I'm a female body that's been walking around for 35 years. Look at the world that we live in. "I don't have to have been abused by my dad to understand what it is like to be taken from, to have my voice stifled, and to not trust myself. It takes a lot of years (for that) to go. "I think that this movie resonates with anyone who is open and bleeding, which is 50 percent of the population." Stewart -- who cast singer Nick Cave's son Earl as the swimmer's first husband and Sonic Youth rock band's Kim Gordon as a dominatrix -- told reporters she was never really tempted to play Yuknavitch herself. 'We are walking secrets' Instead she cast British actor Imogen Poots, who she called "the best actress of our generation. She is so lush, so beautiful and she's so cracked herself open in this". "She has this big boob energy in the film -- even though she is quite flat-chested -- these big blue eyes and this long hair." She described her movie's fever-dream energy as "a pink muscle that is throbbing" and that Poots was able to tap into, channelling Yuknavitch's ferocious but often chaotic battle to rebuild herself and find pleasure and happiness in her life. "Pain and pleasure, they're so tied, there's a hairline fracture there," Stewart told the Cannes Festival's video channel. Yuknavitch's book "sort of meditates on what art can do for you after people do things to your body -- the violation and the thievery, the gouging out of desire. Which is a very female experience." She said "it is only the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive", and that art and writing helped liberate Yuknavitch and find a skin she could live in. Stewart said Yuknavitch discovered that the only way to take desire back was to "bespoke it... and repurpose the things that have been given to you in order for you to own them." "I'm not being dramatic, but as women we are walking secrets," the actor said.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Eddington' reviews: Ari Aster's ‘brazenly provocative' COVID-era Western earns strong praise from critics
Ari Aster's star-studded new film Eddington has found fans among some of the industry's top critics following its debut at the Cannes Film Festival. 'The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster's Eddington is also the first major Hollywood movie that's been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams,' wrote David Ehrlich in his review for Indiewire. 'Few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required to make a No Country for Old Men riff that hinges on mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd, and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried. But Aster, who's exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there's a good chance those are your neuroses, too.' More from GoldDerby Our 'SNL' hosting wish list includes Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and 8 more A-list celebrities 'Industry' star Marisa Abela on her breakout Season 3: 'It answers many questions about why Yasmin is the way she is' 'Buena Vista Social Club' director Saheem Ali and writer Marco Ramirez on creating 'a joyful experience' out of the 'beautiful' Cuban record Set in May 2020, Aster's new film is focused on a conservative small-town New Mexico sheriff (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who ends up running for mayor against the town's liberal opponent, a tech entrepreneur played by Pedro Pascal. Rather than run away from such hot-button issues as the coronavirus pandemic and its health safety mandates, the outrage over Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, and performative activism, to name but a few culture war issues, Aster uses his movie to interrogate those polarizing subjects. 'That he kicks off his film by skewering COVID protocols, only to lampoon the radical-chic fervor of middle-class white kids, may make you wonder, for a moment, if Ari Aster has turned into some right-wing hipster auteur tossing cherry bombs attached to Fox News talking points,' wrote Variety critic Owen Gleiberman in his review, which ran with a headline that called Eddington 'brazenly provocative.' 'Actually, it's not nearly that simple,' he continued. 'In Eddington, Aster is dead serious about dramatizing what he views as the looking glass that America passed through during the pandemic era. He's targeting that moment as The Great Crack-Up, the moment when the country lost its collective mind. But in the film there are many components to that, drawn from a wide cultural-ideological spectrum. The movie does show sympathy for the increasingly mainstream view that the sense of control that dominated the COVID years went too far. That Eddington, while larger than a small town — it's a place of sprawling streets and buildings — appears to be all but abandoned is something that casts its own eerie spell; it stands in for a nation that's been hollowed out, depleted, robbed of its hope for the future. When a teenage boy is chewed out by his father for having joined in a 'gathering' (i.e., he met up with half a dozen of his friends in the park), we feel the creeping unreality of it.' Co-starring Emma Stone and Austin Butler, A24 will release Eddington in theaters this summer on July 18. Read on for more reviews and social media reactions (some of which were negative). Emma Kiely, Collider: 'Phoenix is the perfect actor to play a man as stupid as he is dangerous, bumbling around like a man who's just been transported from the 1920s, but is still capable of mass destruction. If you're coming for any of the other stars, you'll be left disappointed. In the film's tamest role, Pascal is an effective and calming antidote to Phoenix's hysteria, exposing his range beyond the reluctant father, but he's never given the ground to do anything majorly different. Stone and Butler are particularly underserved, as the way in which their characters connect is one of the script's most compelling side quests, but it's never fully delved into.' Tim Grierson, Screen Daily: 'Ari Aster's fourth feature seeks nothing less than to deliver a definitive snapshot of what America felt like during the height of the 2020 global pandemic. Eddington is a mad vision targeting the myriad ills still plaguing the nation — an addiction to guns, an unhealthy fixation on consipracy theories, a poisonous inability to distinguish between truth and fake news — but the writer/director turns those inspirations into a wan, hyperbolic narrative that offers little insights into the very real problems it identifies.' Nicholas Barber, BBC: 'Just when you're being drawn into the murder plot, Eddington takes another turn. Its low-level strangeness jumps to surreal and gory heights – and it keeps going higher until it hits a peak of gonzo high-adrenaline fun that leaves you reeling and breathless. Many viewers will have had enough of the film long before then, but there is something heroic about Aster's uncompromising determination to go his own way. It's amazing, too, that he has got away with such an unhinged project so soon after Beau is Afraid. The overstuffed nature of Eddington suggests that the US's conflicts in the 21st Century were ultimately too much for him to process. But you have to hand it to him for trying.' Kevin Maher, The Times U.K.: 'We've had The Bubble, Locked Down, Dumb Money and a handful of other movies made during or just after the pandemic that attempted to address, however tangentially, the psychological impact of Covid. This time, from the prestige director Ari Aster (Midsommar) and an A-list cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone, we have a huge, self-conscious 'state of the nation' satire. It's an ambitious contemporary western shot last year yet set in the summer of 2020, and ostensibly aims, in almost every scene, to analyse and ridicule the political obsessions and digital neuroses that dominated that moment. And, well, it's quite the mess.' Sofia Monks Kaufman, The Independent: 'This is Aster's funniest film to date, and makes use of an ever-expanding and shifting cast to dot the 150-minute runtime with well-observed comic details and visual payoffs. These often riff on the deadpan reactions of the Black and Native American characters to Joe and his meathead deputy. Aster's enduring preoccupation with the paranoid universes we build in our minds takes on a less sympathetic, more malign aspect when this self-absorption wears a law enforcement badge and carries a rifle.' Ben Croll, The Wrap: 'Eddington roars to life as the bodies pile up, and once the filmmaker begins riffing on deeper pathologies that long predate the recent past. That a crime site falls on the precise dividing line between state and Native American jurisdictions reframes that idea of concurrent Americas in an interesting and organic way without getting too mired in cerebral acrobatics. This is the part of the film with a bazooka, after all.' Social media reactions: Best of GoldDerby Who needs an Oscar to reach EGOT? 18 best Oscar-winning actress mother performances ranked Dennis Hopper movies: 15 greatest films ranked worst to best Click here to read the full article.
Daily Record
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Euphoria's Sydney Sweeny reunites with co-star in trailer for 'Tarantino-esque' thriller
The upcoming film also stars Halsey Although there's still a lengthy wait for the return of hit HBO series Euphoria, fans will soon be able to see two of its stars reunite on the big screen in the upcoming summer thriller, Americana. Sydney Sweeney, who plays Cassie Howard in Euphoria, and Eric Dane, who portrays Cal Jacobs, are back together in this Western film. Americana premiered at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival in 2023, earning a 'Tarantino-esque' description from critics. Indiewire praised the crime caper, saying it "plays out like an early Tarantino movie." Americana, which dropped its trailer dropped today (May 15), will hit screens on August 22. The teaser shows Sweeney's character proposing a high-stakes heist to a military veteran, played by Paul Walter Hauser. The pair join forces to steal rare Native American artefacts from the black market, drawing the attention of a seasoned criminal, played by Dane, reports the Mirror US. The film's synopsis reads: "A gallery of dynamic characters clash over the possession of a rare Native American artefact in this wildly entertaining modern-day Western. "After the artefact falls onto the black market, a shy waitress with big dreams (Sweeney) teams up with a lovelorn military veteran (Hauser) to gain possession of it, putting them in the crosshairs of a ruthless criminal (Dane) working on behalf of a Western antiquities dealer. "Bloodshed ensues when others join the battle, including the leader of an indigenous group and a desperate woman fleeing her mysterious past." The star-studded cast includes Blink Twice's Simon Rex, Dark Winds' Zahn McClarnon and Grammy nominee Halsey. It marks Tony Tost's first time in the director's chair, having previously penned scripts for TV shows like Netflix's Longmire. The trailer has been met with a wave of positive responses from fans, many of whom are thrilled that the film is finally coming to cinemas. "The first sneak peak of this movie [has been] out 2 years by now. I'm so glad we finally are headed to the premiere! ! ! Can't wait to see Halsey in a role which is finally not just a cameo!" one excited fan posted on YouTube. Others were quick to draw comparisons to Quentin Tarantino's distinctive style. "Crazy, as soon as I said to myself I wonder how this movie would be if Tarantino directed it... the words 'Americana is like an early Tarantino movie' came up lol," one viewer noted. Meanwhile, another fan was delighted to see Paul Walter Hauser back in action. "Godd*** this looks good! I love seeing Paul Walter Hauser getting more work, he was awesome in Cobra Kai and BlacKkKlansman," they wrote.
