Reminder: ‘Hallam Foe’ will have its world premiere this Friday at the Berlin Film Festival. The film has already had a market screening and the Hallam team has been busy meeting with potential buyers. The film’s publicist Mat Sanders has been busy these past few days signing up journalists to the interview schedule. Later this week he will be taking David, Jamie and Sophia to the festival’s official press conference, photocall and premiere screening on Friday and running all their press interviews. Read more about the whole preparation going on in Berlin at the film’s offficial blog.

A general UK theatrical release date has yet to be confirmed. LaunchingFilms is however listing August 31. But maybe the presentation at the Berlin Film Festival will get the film an earlier release?!

‘Dracula’ aired on PBS yesterday. The reviews aren’t that good. They didn’t say much about the performances but disliked mostly the lack of subtlety. Reuters:

It’s all suitably chilling and terrifying, and to be fair, it does stay true to Stoker’s novel in much of the plotting. But this reimagining is far more literal and unsubtle than your daddy’s “Dracula,” pushing its monstrous visuals and bloodletting to the forefront in a fashion that’s not captivating so much as overpowering.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to post and discuss at the messageboard!

Unfortunately, the critics aren’t warming to ‘Art School Confidential’. They seem to know nothing else than to compare it to ‘Ghost World’. Well, here’s an article about director Terry Zwigoff’s reaction to all this:

Zwigoff is oddly confidential

As for Sophia Myles’ performance as Audrey things aren’t exactly better:

“Harder to reconcile is the fact that Audrey remains as much a cipher to us as she does to Jerome.”
“Sophia Myles, meanwhile, spends most of the movie mooning over whatever young man is nearest, and posing demurely nude.”

It seems that her character has suffered from the editing and thus remains rather onedimensional.

“Plenty is likewise excised from his original cut of Art School, which is a half-hour longer than the 102-minute theatrical version. Missing, he says, are non-plot-driving moments that help explicate the character of Jerome’s muse, a haughty model played by Sophia Myles.”

Some official Wallpaper

I’ve received some emails about Roger Ebert’s positive review for ‘Tristan & Isolde’. Read it here. An excerpt:

The movie is better than the commercials would lead you to believe — and better, perhaps, than the studio expected, which may be why it was on the shelf for more than a year. Sophia Myles plays Isolde as the daughter of a king, raised by the king’s rules, true to her own emotions but true, too, to her duty. She doesn’t mistake Isolde for the heroine of a teenage romance.

One of the people mentioning this to me was Heinrich who is full of praise for the movie. Read his review at the Judgment Of Paris Forum. He also singles out Sophia Myles for praise:

But by far the most remarkable element in this film is the breathtaking actress Sophia Myles, who–in the role of a lifetime–plays “the fair Isolde” so perfectly that she seems to have been born for the part. The acting is generally quite strong, and admirably subtle. Once again, Sophia Myles provides the standout performance, by creating a character who has tremendous depth of feeling, and is profoundly feminine as well. Sophia’s Isolde exudes passion and ardour, along with irresistible vulnerability, and, most captivating of all, a helplessness before her own desires. Myles presents Isolde struggling to keep her surging emotions in check, creating a tension in the character that involves the audience at the deepest level. In fact, Myles’s Isolde may well be the most archetypally feminine performance that the cinema has ever seen.

And the box office results are out, ‘Tristan & Isolde‘ opened in eighth place:

“The fourth new entry over the weekend, Tristan & Isolde, failed to woo many moviegoers, opening in eighth place with $7.8 million over the four-day holiday. Fox’s PG-13 romantic costume drama, starring James Franco and Sophia Myles, averaged $4,255 at 1,845 locations. The studio claimed the numbers tracked close to expectations, with exec Chris Aronson suggesting that exit polling indicated the largely female audience would “definitely recommend” the film to friends and that might lead the flick to “catch hold” and stick around for several weeks.”

Lastly, the estimated DVD release is June 2006.

I’ve added 2 more filmarticles for ‘Tristan & Isolde’:
• Love Hurts for ‘Tristan & Isolde’
• Franco and Myles on Tristan & Isolde

The first movie reviews are out – and it doesn’t exactly look good, I’m afraid. Here’s an excerpt from a positive review that I found at Vue Weekly:

“Rufus Sewell is spot-on as the tough-on-the-outside-but-soft-on-the-inside Lord Marke, and James Franco and Sophia Myles each do a fine job as the title characters—unlike Lord of the Rings (another bungled epic in which the story is interrupted every five minutes with a crying and hugging session), there is no over-acting or excessive sentimentality. But perhaps the most important thing in directing an epic is the ability to make a particular time and place both vivid and believable for the audience, and Tristan & Isolde succeeds in this: for two hours and five minutes we are transported to a completely different world. Now, if only someone could go and make an equally good King Arthur movie, all drinks will be on me.”