Posts Tagged ‘michelle williams’
Opening This Week: New in Town, The Uninvited, Taken, Plus a Film You Might Actually Have to Think About
What a perfect storm of new releases this weekend:
--Wendy and Lucy, a terribly timely and terribly depressing slice-of-life about a broke 20-something with a dead car and a lost dog. Starring Michelle Williams and her Dorothy Hamill-meets-No Country for Old Men hair.
--Taken, a thriller co-written by Luc Besson that stars Liam Neeson as a retired Jason Bourne. The setup's a little clunky. (It goes something like: "Daddy, can I go to Paris for the summer?" "No, it's too dangerous." "Please?" "You'll be in danger!" "Pretty please?" "Oh OK, but call me every five minutes." Then, who could have guessed it, the girl and her friend are in France not an hour before getting kidnapped.) But really, it's all about the action anyway, and that part's surprisingly entertaining. Who knew Neeson had an inner badass?
Heath Ledger, a Year Later
It was about this time a year ago today that I learned of Heath Ledger's death. Like the rest of the world, I was stunned.
Unlike the rest of the world, however -- and I'm only guessing here -- I still find myself affected by it, welling up whenever I try to watch his E! True Hollywood Story or see him being granted yet another award for his final full performance as The Dark Knight's Joker. (How sad the cosmic timing of his Academy Award nomination announced today, bumped from the usual Tuesday unveiling because of the inauguration.)
Mostly, though, I think of him when I can't sleep. While Ledger was filming The Dark Knight, he sat for an interview in which he seemed tweaked, exhausted, and uncomfortable. He talked about how sleepless nights plague him, how a couple of Ambien were only good for a couple hours' rest: "I couldn't stop thinking," he told the New York Times. "My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."
