All posts by Tim Lammers

Interview: Seth Grahame-Smith talks ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’

February 5, 2016 Tim Lammers Leave a comment

In today’s zombie culture, there’s no question there’s a danger of over-saturation, especially given the massive success of the TV series “The Walking Dead,” its companion series “Fear the Walking Dead,” and a slew of feature films — some scary and some funny, hence the subgenre the “zom-com.”

Fortunately, best-selling author Seth Grahame-Smith was at the forefront of the new-wave zombie movement in 2009 with his smash novel “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” which is a mash-up of the zombie culture and Jane Austen’s literary classic about the intertwining romance between men and women from different social classes in England in the 1900s.

In a recent phone conversation, I told Grahame-Smith the first time I heard the title of his novel, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” I exclaimed, “Oh, my God, is this guy a genius or what?” Grahame-Smith, however, said, other reactions to his work were not as enthusiastic.

“Most people stopped at ‘Oh, my God,'” Grahame-Smith said, with a laugh. “To this day, I think there are people who still don’t know what to make of it.”

The reason he thinks the book endured, and ultimately was adapted into a feature film of the same name, new in theaters nationwide Friday, is because the novel came out when the proverbial iron was hot. As for why the iron was hot before he struck it, Grahame-Smith said he’s not sure.

“I can’t attribute the book’s success to anything else than good timing,” Grahame-Smith observed. “We just happened to have the right book at the right time, and hit the zeitgeist in the right way. I wish I could figure out why it worked, because I’d be able to replicate it every time out, but for some reason, that one idea struck a chord in people at that time.”

Given the proliferation of zombies in pop culture, it’s hard to say how “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” (Quirk Books) would be received as a new novel today. But if the film version is any indication, my guess is that it would be perceived as fresh as the day the ink dried on the first copy of Grahame-Smith’s novel. The film — which stars Lily James (“Cinderella,” “Downton Abbey”) as the novel’s legendary heroine, Elizabeth Bennet — has a narrative as naturally captivating as Austen’s original classic, but is enhanced by the inclusion of a growing zombie army.

So, no matter the number of the new zombie projects to lumber in the public’s view, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” still towers head and shoulders above any flesh-eating wannabe gnawing at its ankles.

Grahame-Smith, whose big-screen credits include the screenplays for director Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” and the Burton-produced “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (based on his own novel), said he took very seriously the idea of infesting a classic like “Pride and Prejudice” with zombies for his novel (director Burr Steers adapted the film’s screenplay), which is why characters like Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy play it straight in the midst of all the bloody madness. One thing’s for certain: neither the novel, nor the film, are parodies of the original source material.

“What I try to do each time out, not only with my books, but TV and movies, is try to give an A-level of execution to a B-genre concept,” Grahame-Smith, 40, explained. “To me, the more audacious the title or concept you’re trying to get across is, the more you really have to put in the work, the research, the time to make it unexpectedly make sense. When I wrote, ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,’ on its surface, it was a very ridiculous proposition.

“But I also did my due diligence and researched Lincoln’s life — his speeches, his letters, his personal correspondence — learning not only about the things you don’t necessarily learn in American history class in high school, but really becoming a mini-Lincoln scholar so I can really understand the man, who he was and the times he lived in, and try to make this ridiculous book seem plausible,” Grahame-Smith added. “The biggest compliment I can get from a reader time and time again, is that they say they forget while they are reading the book that it never happened and it’s absolutely absurd. That’s really the fun for me, to pull a book-length sleight-of-hand trick on the reader.”

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Needless to say, Graham-Smith devoured all things Austen while preparing to write “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

“With ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,’ it was not only about reading and re-reading the book in depth, but reading everything I could get my hands on that Austen wrote, and everything about her, her life and her time,” Grahame-Smith said. “I needed things to seem authentic so I could to the best of my ability mimic the voice of one of the most gifted writers of her time.”

Now that Austen’s voice has been reconstituted once again, this time in cinematic form, Grahame-Smith hopes that “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” doesn’t get pegged by potential audiences as a chick flick. He’s pretty confident that the word “Zombies” in the title will make guys more amenable to take a date to the film, and once they get there, they will discover that there’s something for both him and her.

“I’ve been telling people it’s the ultimate date movie,” Grahame-Smith enthused. “Guys are going to go and they’ll love the bad-assery of it and watching these beautiful women kick zombie ass, and in addition to the girls watching their fellow women kick zombie ass, they’re also going to love the fact that it hews pretty closely to all the same romantic overtones of the original ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ We’re not actually taking anything away from ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ we’re simply taking that original story and adding zombie mayhem to it.”

Grahame-Smith, whose most recent novel is “The Last American Vampire” (Grand Central Publishing), said he’s done with the script for Burton’s hotly anticipated “Beetlejuice” sequel, but a start date for the production is yet to be determined.

Film, Movie Reviews

Movie reviews: ‘The Fifth Wave,’ ‘Anomalisa’

January 22, 2016 Tim Lammers Leave a comment

By Tim Lammers

“The Fifth Wave” (PG-13) 2 1/2 stars (out of 4)

Yet another chapter has been opened in the young adult novel-turned-teen movie genre with “The 5th Wave,” a familiar feeling alien invasion thriller that’s only saved by an interesting beginning and a good cast.

Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Cassie, a high school teen whose life changes dramatically in a day when a monolithic alien ship suddenly appears over her hometown in Ohio. After hanging silent over the city for 10 days, all hell breaks loose when the ship attacks the planet with an earth-shattering electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, which all but destroys the power grid. Dubbed the “first wave” of attacks, the situation only gets worse, as the second wave brings earthquakes and tsunamis that wipes out the coasts, and the third wave brings a lethal, mutated version of the bird flu, which decimates the population.

Those immune to the flu survive to experience the fourth wave, where the unseen aliens – dubbed “The Others” — begin to take over the bodies of some humans and use them as hosts. Worse yet, the surviving children and their parents are separated in the chaos, leaving the kids in fear of The Others and in some cases, each other, since it’s believed the fifth wave of attacks will be the one that ends it all.

The foundation of “The 5th Wave” is interesting when you consider that the first three attacks, in particular, are based on plausible events feared by today’s populous. There’s no question the shutdown of the power grid would cripple the nation, if not the world, and result in chaos. In addition, we’ve all seen how deadly earthquakes and tsunamis can be, and a global pandemic (think Ebola virus) is a fear that no one wants to even think about.

“The 5th Wave” begins to stumble with the fourth wave, however, when The Others, who managed to wipe out a good portion of the world’s population with relative ease from their mothership, seem to take on the trait of human stupidity when it comes to inhabiting earthlings’ bodies. They were certainly prepared in their efforts to take over Earth, yet clearly didn’t think out the endgame.

Hoping somehow to replicate the success of such YA movie hits as “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” series, “The 5th Wave,” like its predecessors, clearly borrows from other well-established source material. In this case, the movie was clearly influenced by such sci-fi hits as “District 9,” “Independence Day,” “Deep Impact” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” with a little bit of “Alien” thrown in for good measure.

Fortunately, like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” sagas, “The 5th Wave” benefits by having a great lead with Moretz, a burgeoning teen actress who burst onto the scene with a controversial turn as the foul-mouth pre-teen superhero Hit Girl in the dizzying action-adventure “Kick-Ass.” She maintains a steady presence in “The 5th Wave,” and she has a stable of veteran co-stars including Liev Schreiber, Ron Livingston and Maria Bello to balance out the cast. The film mainly, though, focuses on Moretz and her younger co-stars, including impressive turns by Nick Robinson (“Jurassic World) and Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) as two of Cassie’s allies in the fight against The Others.

The survival of the series clearly will depend on the film’s performance at the box office, which will be interesting to see play out, since there wasn’t the usual amount of YA fanfare surrounding this film going in. If it does succeed, an open ending clearly will see “The 5th Wave” expand into something bigger – and hopefully better. As it stands now, this wave isn’t that big of a catch.

“Anomalisa” (R) 2 1/2 stars (out of 4)

Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Being John Malkovich”) brings his unique vision to the stop-motion animation realm with “Anomalisa,” a groundbreaking yet bizarre drama about Michael Stone, a famous author suffering a midlife crisis. The groundbreaking aspect is that it’s an R-rated use of a medium usually reserved for family films, and the bizarre part is that it’s, well, driven by an off-the-wall Kaufman narrative. Duke Johnson (“Moral Orel”) co-directs, while David Thewlis stars as the voice of Stone and Jennifer Jason Leigh voices the title character, a young woman who has a strange effect on him.

Film, Interviews

Interview: Screen legend Diane Ladd talks ‘Joy’

January 16, 2016 Tim Lammers Leave a comment

By Tim Lammers

Screen legend Diane Ladd does double-duty, in a sense, in director David O. Russell’s critically acclaimed dramedy “Joy,” both as the wise grandmother of the title character, Joy (Jennifer Lawrence), and as the film’s narrator. The amazing thing is, Ladd’s enlightened sense of storytelling — which establishes a larger-than-life presence of her character throughout the film — wasn’t originally in Russell’s plans.

Ladd, who was already done with filming “Joy,” said she actually got the call from Russell just as she was wrapping up her upcoming film, “Sophie and the Rising Sun.”

“David put the producers on the phone and they said they tested the picture,” Ladd said in a phone conversation this week. “They said, ‘Without question, everybody adores Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper. But after testing the picture, we need more light in it, and you are everybody’s favorite character in the movie because you constantly give Joy hope. Because of that, we want you the narrate the whole picture.'”

Now playing in theaters nationwide, “Joy” is based on the true-life tale of Joy Mangano, a divorced mother of two who defied the odds in the early 1990s with her invention of the Miracle Mop, a product that helped the burgeoning inventor lay the foundation of what would become a business dynasty. “Joy” also stars Robert De Niro as Joy’s hard-edged dad, Rudy; Virginia Madsen as her sheltered mother and Rudy’s ex-wife, Terry; Bradley Cooper as QVC executive Neil Walker; Edgar Ramirez as Joy’s ex-husband and loyal advisor; and Isabella Rossellini as Rudy’s new wife and Joy’s principal investor, Trudy.

Ladd stars in the pivotal role of Mimi, Joy’s faithful grandmother.

The actress, who earned Oscar nominations for her work in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Wild at Heart” and “Rambling Rose,” said narrating “Joy” was the hardest work she’s ever done because she had “already put the character aside” to work on her role in “Sophie and the Rising Sun.”

“I went off and created a whole new character, so when I came back, David was quite incredible in guiding me,” Ladd said. “He helped me lower my voice three octaves so I would sound older, and give off more wisdom and age. To prepare myself, I would do a bit of method acting, or more specifically, method narration. I would sit in meditation and put myself in a state of unconditional love so I would never judge (the people that wronged Joy).”

Ladd, 80, added that the image Russell gave her to narrate the film was Clarence from the Frank Capra Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“It was almost if Mimi was an angel and not a human. Maybe her soul had come in ahead of time so she’d be there to help Joy and this family,” Ladd observed. “Maybe she was there to help because if Joy succeeded and fulfilled her destiny, she could put a minimum of 500 people to work, and the people she picked were Spanish and Latin people who needed jobs. Suppose she hadn’t been there to fulfill her destiny, like George Bailey did in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’? What would have happened to those people, and a lot more now? The spiral goes on and on.”

As far as her character’s physical presence in “Joy,” Ladd said she absolutely loved how Russell and co-writer Annie Mumolo created a strong Bond between a grandmother and her grandchild. As the mother of two-time Oscar nominee Laura Dern, Ladd knows the bond between generations very well.

“I told David right away that American Indians have a saying: ‘The soul of a grandchild’ lives in the heart of a grandmother,'” Ladd said. “As a mother, it took five friends of mine to help tell Laura what to do. But if my mother, Mary, said something to Laura, she was right there. They had such a connection.”

Now, Ladd says, she has the same sort of relationship with Dern’s daughter.

“Once Laura and her daughter had a fight and Laura went off, and I said, ‘Come on, Jaya,’ and I think she thought I was going to preach at her. But instead I took a blanket and we went outside, and we laid on the ground and looked up at the trees and the sky — and in a little while Jaya was telling me all of her feelings,” Ladd recalled.

Having lived those vital, real-life roles, Ladd said she’s developed a clear understanding of how the grandmother and grandchild dynamic works, and was more than happy to bring that knowledge to her work with Lawrence in “Joy.”

“I think grandmothers see clear because responsibility isn’t always on us,” Ladd said, laughing. “A grandparent can pull back and relax more, and have a little more detachment. The parent’s on the line, man. God’s got your backside pinned to the wall.”

Film, Interviews

Interview: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson talk ‘Anomalisa’

January 16, 2016 Tim Lammers Leave a comment

By Tim Lammers

Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has daringly explored the corners of his unique brain with such inventive cinematic gems as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” so it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the filmmaker finds a unique way to tell his unique tale about an author’s complex mind with his latest tale.

Teaming with stop-motion animation great Duke Johnson (“Moral Orel”), Kaufman has assembled, without question, one of the most unique films of the year with “Anomalisa,” which nabbed a Best Animation Feature Oscar nomination Thursday. Kaufman and Johnson co-wrote the screenplay and co-directed the film, which is based on Kaufman’s stage play of the same name.

In a phone conversation with the duo earlier this week, Kaufman said filming the movie in stop-motion animation — where puppet characters’ motions are literally filmed one frame at a time — didn’t even occur to him after the stage production wrapped up more than a decade ago.

“I had no intention of doing anything with it,” Kaufman said. “It was long over, but then (producer) Dino Stamatopoulos and Duke asked me if they could make it into a stop-motion movie. At the time, it wasn’t important for me to do it in stop-motion, it was important for me to get it made.”

Before too long, however, Kaufman said using the under-appreciated art form was the way to go.

“As Duke and I started to think about it, it became clearer to both of us that doing it in stop-motion was the right form for it,” Kaufman said. “It creates a dreamlike sort of element in the look of the film, and there’s vulnerability with the puppets because there’s a sense they’re being controlled by outside forces. We made sure to leave in all the fingerprints of the animators to indicate they were being controlled by outside forces. The combination of those things created the tone of the movie that we were hoping for.”

Now playing in select theaters across the country, “Anomalisa” stars the voice of David Thewlis as Michael Stone, a best-selling author and customer service guru, who ironically suffers from social ineptitude. While on a business trip to speak at a seminar in Cincinnati, Michael — feeling trapped by marriage and fatherhood — becomes enchanted by Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman inspired by the author’s work who came to see him speak. And while Michael completely falls in love with the modest woman, whom he dubs “Anomalisa,” it doesn’t take long before his misery creeps back into his psyche.

“Anomalisa” started as a grassroots effort for Johnson, who launched a Kickstarter campaign to set the project in motion. After all, stop-motion feature films are very rarely produced by major Hollywood studio — only about one or two features in the medium are produced a year, and generally those are done by independent production houses – so the co-director was happy for any help the film could get.

In all, the crowdfunding effort raised about $400,000, Johnson said.

“Kickstarter was invaluable in that I don’t think the movie would have gotten off the ground,” said Johnson. “That got the attention of (producer) Keith Calder, who funded the lion’s share of the movie. It wasn’t fully a Kickstarter project, but it was instrumental in the movie happening.”

As an independent production, Kaufman and Johnson had the benefit of exercising some creative freedom with “Anomalisa,” which is groundbreaking in many respects including the film’s mature, R-rated content. Without question, there are many adult scenarios — including a sex scene — that audiences have never seen in a stop-motion feature film.

“When we set out to make this film, we tried to forge our own path with regard to the aesthetic and the approach to the animation,” Johnson said. “We looked at a lot of live-action references and tried to make the film more cinematic.”

While the characters in “Anomalisa” are puppets, it would seem with the success of the film would lend itself to some potential action figures. But can we expect any collectibles of Michael and Lisa to venture into the “Star Wars” action figure universe anytime soon?

“I think that would be fun,” Johnson said with a laugh. “But I find it extremely hard to believe that anybody would do that.”

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All posts by Tim Lammers

Interview: Seth Grahame-Smith talks ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’

Movie reviews: ‘The Fifth Wave,’ ‘Anomalisa’

Interview: Screen legend Diane Ladd talks ‘Joy’

Interview: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson talk ‘Anomalisa’

Original Interviews, Reviews & More By Tim Lammers