GALLERY LINKS:
• Romance & Cigarettes: DVD Screen captures – Making a Homemade Musical
VIDEO LINKS:
• Romance & Cigarettes: Making a Homemade Musical
AUDIO LINKS:
Romance & Cigarettes: Making of’s Telephone Conversation with Kate
Tag: romance & cigarettes
2008 Jan 31
“Romance & Cigarettes” DVD goodies
2007 Dec 16
Christmas Edition Contest answers and winner!
Congratulations to Heather, the winner of the Christmas Edition Contest! She’ll be receiving:
• Finding Neverland DVD widescreen edition (region 1)
• Dark Season DVD fullscreen edition (region 2)
Click the link below to know the answers to the contest questions.
Continue reading Christmas Edition Contest answers and winner!
2007 Nov 19
Movie reviews: Romance & Cigarettes
After sitting on a shelf for two years, John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes, a boldly quirky comedy-drama-musical about a fractured marriage in working-class Queens, has danced its way into limited release. If you’re game for something different, it’s worth a few giggles.
Inspired by British dramatist Dennis Potter, whose The Singing Detective had actors lip-synching to songs that conveyed their characters’ feelings, R&C is even loopier in its colorful crudeness and its outrageously silly choreography.
James Gandolfini plays Nick Murder, a bridge worker whose wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon), intercepts a salacious love note from his mistress, Tula (Kate Winslet). The emotional blowouts that follow are both acted out and relayed in song and dance.
Nick takes to the street in front of his small frame house and is joined by garbage collectors as they all sing over Engelbert Humperdinck’s A Man Without Love. Winslet’s hilariously tart Tula is introduced in a flame-colored gown to the music of the Buena Vista Social Club’s El Cuarto de Tula. And Christopher Walken, as the Elvis wanna-be who helps Kitty locate Nick’s girlfriend, arrives on the lyrical wings of Elvis’ “Trouble”.
A Cyndi Lauper song is played behind a montage of dancing pregnant women and the outpatient circumcision of Nick, whose scream merges with Lauper’s on the “I’m” in “I’m just a prisoner of love”. The story is rudimentary: Wife catches husband; wife punishes husband; husband seeks redemption. But getting through the cycle is like riding a roller coaster through a fun house. And everybody is in on the joke.
The large cast includes Mandy Moore, Aida Turturro and Mary-Louise Parker as Nick’s confounded children, Elaine Stritch as his scolding mother and Steve Buscemi as the co-worker loaded with bad advice. Turturro drops the music and the jokes for a soap-opera ending that doesn’t match the rest of the movie, but getting there is a gas.Romance & Cigarettes HH½ Fair Rated: R (language, sexual content) Starring: James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon Directed by: John Turturro Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Playing at: UPST
Source: recordonline.com
Though he cuts a swath quite different from that of your average musical-theater star, James Gandolfini worked hard to improve his hoofing skills for his new movie, Romance & Cigarettes.
But as he’ll happily tell you, it wasn’t easy.
“I would leave the dance lessons going: ‘Holy Christ, I’m so incredibly bad at this,’ ” said the former star of “The Sopranos.” “It was like me doing algebra or something. I had no clue about any of this.”
Judging by the film, he had a good teacher.
Continue reading Gandolfini, Winslet and Turturro — on making a musical
2007 Nov 05
Kate and John Turturro at JFK Airport
I’ve uploaded pics of Kate arriving at New York’s JFK Airport back from Los Angeles, on November 2nd, the day after the BAFTA/LA Cunard Britannia Awards event. It seems she bumped into fellow actor/Romance & Cigarettes director John Turturro.
GALLERY LINKS:
• 2007 Candids: At JFK Airport – November 2
2007 Nov 02
BAFTA names Winslet ‘Artist of the Year’
There’s a telling moment in Little Children when Kate Winslet’s character Sarah Pierce, trapped in a loveless marriage and enmeshed in a messy affair, relates to Madame Bovary during a book club meeting with other stay-at-home moms.
“She can either choose a life of misery or struggle against it,” says Sarah. “She chooses to struggle. She fails in the end, but there’s something beautiful and even heroic in the struggle.”
Winslet’s affinity for struggling, questing characters who refuse to play by society’s rules began with her first feature, Heavenly Creatures, in which she played a murderous fantasist, and continues with her latest, the recently wrapped Revolutionary Road, in which her frustrated suburban housewife suffers from an ennui so acute that quixotic escape is the only option.
2007 Sep 22
Vanity Fair Italy Interview
Kate Winslet
I’m not a model
Ten years ago she reached the global success with DiCaprio (“Thank goodness we didn’t have any love affair”), the press obsession for her weight. Today Kate Winslet is happy “when my daughter squeezes my fat”.
He’s in the corridor of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, in front of the entrance of a suite. For a moment he reminds me of Will Smith, but he’s Kate Winslet bodyguard, the woman that we all remember as the redhead Rose in Titanic (one of her 5 Oscar nominations), Clementine who drove Jim Carrey crazy in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Tula, Gandolfini’s lover in Romance & Cigarettes.
Now Kate is also the new Trèsor testimonial.
“How is she?” I ask to the bodyguard, while waiting for her to arrive. “Super” he answers with a worming smile.
