bachelorette - Qatar Tribune

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Sammy’s Adventure 2 (3D) English (Animation)
Total Recall English (Action)
The Bourne Legacy English (Action)
The Dark Knight English (Action)
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Mr. Marumakan Malayalam (Drama)
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Kirsten
Dunst
Lifeline
BROOKS BARNES
NYT SYNDICATE
BACHELORETTE
is a smart, chainsaw-edge
comedy
about friendship
and partying past
your prime that features an
exceptional Kirsten Dunst as
the wedding-party equivalent
of Hannibal Lecter. It’s darkly
hilarious, and you’ll love it.
Bachelorette, written and
directed by Leslye Headland,
is a snotty, unfunny mess, a
crass attempt to force-feed
Bridesmaids to an art-house
audience. Gay guys will
probably like it (gee,
thanks, Variety), but film
fans with taste will recoil.
So which is it? Big studios
are in the business of
parading pretty cinematic
floats: safe, uncontroversial,
consumable on a
global scale. But independent
films – those
like Bachelorette that
cost about $3 million to
make and showcase a
specific artistic vision –
are supposed to be
fought over. Starting a
“cultural conversation”
not only gets
you noticed, it’s also
a crucial part of what
directors are trying to
achieve; messy is OK
as long as there are
strong ideas to chew on.
Bachelorette, which co-stars
Lizzy Caplan and Isla Fisher,
had its premiere at the
Sundance Film Festival this
year. Would Headland have
preferred universally gushy
reviews? Probably.
Bachelorette is her baby. But is
this first-time director also at ease
with the acutely mixed reception it did
receive? Totally. “The point is to start
a discussion, not solve a problem,”
Headland, 31, said over lunch. “Look
at Virgin Suicides. Look at Fight
Club. You don’t think back on those
movies and think, ‘Aww, everyone just
loved and adored them.’ There were
people who absolutely hated those
movies. And that’s fine because it
means they challenged the audience.”
She added, “I wanted to make a comedy
that was really confrontational right out
of the gate, which is going to make some
people uncomfortable.”As is often the case
with Sundance movies, she has also had
the chance to make changes, including reediting,
and fleshing out the characters.
The frustration, Headland said, hacking
into a fried green tomato, involves the
manner in which cultural discourse is
increasingly boiled down to sharp
blacks and whites.
RottenTomatoes.com, the review
aggregation site, declares movies
“fresh” or “rotten,” with no middle
Startalk
Police seeking Bieber, Gomez
THE LOCKHORNS
PAGE 35 | PLAYHOUSE PAGE 35 | PLAYHOUSE
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
“I kept getting told that
none of my characters
were likable. Likable? That
had never occurred to me.
Yeah, these women do
some bad things, but I
like them. And even if
they weren’t likable, why
does that make them
uninteresting?”
ground and sometimes only a critic or two
making the difference. A growing number
of moviegoers skip professional reviewers
altogether in favour of their Twitter feeds,
where nuance is next to impossible.
“See it. Skip it. See it. Skip it,” Headland
said, tucking her streaked hair behind both
ears and making a face. “Depressing.”
Her unruffled demeanour about the
Sundance reaction may reflect how grateful
she is for what Bachelorette has already
brought her. She wrote it as a play in 2007
– four years before the release of
Bridesmaids, ahem – and, under the direction
of Trip Cullman, the production
became a smash hit Off Broadway in 2010.
Hollywood doors have already opened; Will
Ferrell and the veteran screenwriter Adam
McKay produced the film version of
Bachelorette and are working with
Headland to develop other television and
movie ideas.
“We love that Leslye is this great big ball
of energy: intrepid and wicked smart, with
a loud and powerful comedic voice,” McKay
said.
Only a few years ago Headland, a motormouth
with a warm, thunderous laugh, was
working as an assistant to Harvey
Weinstein, when he was running Miramax.
(She playfully lampooned him in a play,
Assistance, which had a successful run at
Playwrights Horizons this year.) On Friday,
Weinstein’s new label, Radius-TWC, will
THE Los Angeles police reportedly want to speak to singer Justin
Bieber and girlfriend singer Selena Gomes, following the brawl that
took place between Bieber and a photographer in May. The brawl happened
when the photographer accused Bieber of hitting him when he
tried to take a picture of the teen sensation outside a mall at Calabasas
Shopping Centre, Los Angeles. The photographer filed a complaint but
by the time the police arrived on the scene, the celebrated couple had
left. The police have not yet spoken to either of the singers.
DENNIS THE
MENACE
simultaneously release Bachelorette in 20
cities and via cable and satellite on-demand
systems.
Radius released Bachelorette in mid-
August on iTunes to start building buzz,
and the comedy quickly became the online
store’s No 1 movie rental.
It centres on the reunion of four friends,
one of whom, the zaftig and humdrum
Becky, is getting married. Becky (Rebel
Wilson, who played one of Kristen Wiig’s
weird roommates in Bridesmaids) is progressing
deeper into adulthood, but her
prettier, more put-together friends (at least
on the outside) are stuck somewhere
between college and their 10,000th line of
cocaine. James Marsden, Kyle Bornheimer
and Adam Scott star as randy groomsmen.
“Girls don’t normally get to act this way
on film,” Dunst said in a telephone interview.
“The drug use in particular is unusual.
So that’s one reason I wanted to do it.
Plus, it was really fun to play the bitch for
once.” Dunst’s character gets high, has sex
in a strip club bathroom and fires insults
with machine-gun efficiency.
Headland’s unvarnished depiction of
women comes amid a boomlet of similarly
themed movies and television shows. Aside
from Bridesmaids, which took in more than
$288 million at the global box office, there
was Diablo Cody’s Young Adult, starring
Charlize Theron as a spoiled, alcoholic
writer. HBO has Girls, the raw dramedy
I hate exercising: Longoria
Did you know?
GOING to gym and sweating it out to maintain her body is not on Eva
Longoria’s priority list. She admits that she has to “force” herself to work
out every morning. I work out in the mornings when I get up. I have to
do it then - if it’s after 11 am, it just doesn’t happen. I have to get it
done while I’m still on autopilot because I hate exercising. I have a gym
in my house and a personal trainer who comes over. I tried Pilates, but I
couldn’t deal with it. Longoria tries to watch what she eats but can’t
resist French fries. I don’t really eat a lot of carbs (carbohydrates).
Kirsten Dunst is a fan of the
television show The Office (2001)
and admits she is a huge fan of
Ricky Gervais.
A dark, unvarnished
depiction of women
Leslye Headland the writer and director of the film Bachelorette.
A still from the film Bachelorette.
about four Brooklyn women and their
friends. But the backers of Bachelorette
don’t love those comparisons, in part
because they worry it makes Headland’s
movie come across as derivative and narrow.
“It ghettoizes us in an unfair way,” said
Tom Quinn, co-president of Radius. “I can
relate to Leslye’s movie in a way I couldn’t
relate to Bridesmaids.” Quinn and his
Radius counterpart, Jason Janego,
acknowledge Bridesmaids as one comparison,
but also point to movies like The
Hangover and Heathers as reference
points.
People who saw the stage version of
Bachelorette may have a hard time picturing
Headland’s material as a movie at all.
The play was set entirely in one room and
functioned mostly as a dark character
study. “I never would have imagined it as a
movie,” said Scott, who saw the stage version
during its New York run. “Now it doesn’t
feel like it was ever written as a play.
Usually you can tell when material is adapted,
but Leslye really opened it up.”
How did Headland, who studied directing
and acting at New York University, go
about reworking Bachelorette as a movie?
“This makes me sound a little gross,” she
said, “but I actually wrote them simultaneously.
The play would have made a terrible
movie. Even in the first incarnations of the
screenplay it was about making something
very different.”
An agent told her that she needed a sample
screenplay and so, as she was writing
the play, she also worked on a cinematic
version, adding more male characters,
warming up the humour and moving plot
more front and centre. For instance the
movie has a lengthy chase-type sequence
involving Becky’s soiled wedding gown and
the efforts of her self-absorbed friends to fix
it. In 2008 Headland, living in Los
Angeles and working at a video rental
store, learned that her Bachelorette
screenplay had made the Black List, an
independent ranking of the year’s best
unproduced scripts. Headland, raised by
strict religious parents in Maryland and
Connecticut, became known overnight in
Hollywood for a foul-mouthed, drugfuelled
movie project.
“The resounding response was ‘great
voice, very funny, no one is ever going to
make it,”’ she recalled.
It wasn’t because the film was too R-rated
or even because it was R-rated and about
women – or at least that’s what studio executives
told her.
“I kept getting told that none of my
characters were likable,” Headland said.
“Likable? That had never occurred to me.
Yeah, these women do some bad things,
but I like them. And even if they weren’t
likable, why does that make them uninteresting?”
With independent financing from BCDF
Pictures and Ferrell and McKay’s producing
clout, Headland was able to bring her
deeply flawed characters to the screen as
she envisioned, despite her lack of directing
experience. Now audiences get to decide
how much likability matters.
“Visceral responses are good,” Headland
said, circling back to her earlier theme. “Go
for it! Fight it out amongst yourselves!”

Beetle Bailey
Blondie
Popeye
Spiderman
Zits
Dennis the Menace The Lockhorns
ARIES
[march 21 - apr19]
This is an excellent
day at work,
because you have
tons of mental
energy.
Now is the time
to make your
pitch to others.
TAURUS
[apr 20 – may 20]
This could be a lively,
creative day for your
sign! It’s great for
sports, writing, the arts
and anything having to do
with the hospitality
industry. Enjoy playful
times with children.
GEMINI
[may 21 – jun 20]
Tackle home repairs
that are obvious today.
Family discussions
definitely will be lively.
You feel that you want
to move furniture
around or change
things for the better.
YESTERDAY’S ANSWER
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STAR TALK
CANCER
[jun21 - jul 22]
Because your powers
of persuasion are so
strong today, you can
sell, market, teach,
act or convince anyone
of anything.
It’s a great day for writers
and editors as well.
LEO
[jul 23 – aug 22]
Act on your intuition
when it comes to
financial matters
today. You’re full of
great ideas about how
to boost your income
and cut your costs.
You’re in the zone!
PLAYHOUSE
VIRGO
[aug 23 – sept 22]
People will enjoy talking
to you, because you’re full
of lively mental energy.
State your case about
anything that interests
you, because today
others will sit up
and listen.
LIBRA
[sept 23 – oct 22]
If you work alone or
behind the scenes today,
you will be unusually
productive. Not only are
you eager to begin things,
but you have the
necessary energy to
follow through as well.
SCORPIO
[oct 23 – nova 21]
All group activities
will be upbeat and
positive today, because
you have lots of mental
energy! You can explain
to others what you
want and get them to
jump on board.
By King Features Syndicate, Inc.
SAGITTARIUS
[nov 22 – dec 21]
Bosses, parents and
VIPs will be impressed
with your style of
communication today.
You really sound like
you know what
you’re talking a
bout. Yay!
CAPRICORN
[dec 22 – jan 19]
This is a great day
to study or make
travel plans, because
you have the patience
and mental energy to
explore new ideas.
Religious or political
discussions will be lively!
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
www.qatar-tribune.com 35
LEARN ARABIC
Mufawad
Negotiator
Hezb
Party
Khedaa
Deception
Diplomasi
Diplomat
Rayees
Chief
Murashah
Candidate
Hoy en la Historia
September 5, 1972
The Olympic Games was
shattered when Arab terrorists of
the Black September movement
attacked an Israeli dormitory in the
Olympic village at Munich
1698:
1995: France carried out the first of a
series of underground nuclear tests
at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific,
provoking worldwide condemnation
1997:
2008: Tropical Storm Hanna claimed
over 500 lives in Haiti, almost all in
the port city of Gonaïves
AQUARIUS
[jan 20 – feb 18]
You might be in the
winning seat if you
have a debate with
someone about shared
property or a disputed
inheritance. Very few
will resist your dazzling
presentation.
PISCES
[feb19 – mar 20]
Enjoy lively exchanges
with partners and close
friends. This is not a
day to go alone.
Mix it up with
others, because you
have something you
want to say!