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There’s nothing better than going into a movie knowing nothing about it (Warning: Do not even look at the movie poster. It gives away such an important plot device that the person who made the poster should be out of work). That’s right, I’m talking about “Awake.” Yes it’s that movie that has a dismal 17 percent rating on RottenTomatoes.com. But don’t believe that percentage. Just go and see this movie.

“Awake” stars Hayden Christensen (“Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith”) as Clay, a rich kid who has taken over his father’s company after his somewhat controversial demise. Clay has a heart problem and needs a transplant. He has a best friend, Dr. Harper (Terrence Howard, “Crash”) who is the only person he trusts to perform the transplant surgery. Clay is also head-over-heels in love with a person he shouldn’t be, named Sam (Jessica Alba, “Fantastic Four”). Sam isn’t in Clay’s tax bracket, and his mother (Lena Olin, “Alias”) would never approve of them getting married.

Clay is stuck in the world of ‘old money’ and high society. He would desperately give up everything just to be with his girlfriend Sam, who he’s been hiding from his mother. When the time comes for Clay to get his transplant surgery, he insists that Harper does it, which is against the wishes of his mother. She has picked out a surgeon of her own, a man who has actually “had his hands inside of presidents.” His mother is overprotective, and Clay, even though he loves his mother, goes against her wishes and has his friend perform the surgery.

After the surgery starts, a series of events unfold at break-neck pace which I will not begin to describe here because it would spoil the fun. The only thing anyone who goes to see this movie needs to know is Clay experiences a phenomenon known as anesthesia awareness in which a person is paralyzed by the anesthesia but can hear and feel everything going on. Imagine being able to feel a bone saw cut open your rib cage.

Christensen is fantastic as Clay, Alba is surprisingly not awful, and Howard brings another great performance to the screen, which he does in every movie he’s in.

“Awake” is the most suspenseful show I’ve seen in a long time. It’s only 78 minutes long, and every single one of those minutes is filled with suspense. “Awake” is a well-crafted thriller which will miss the masses of America. But a few will go and see it, and hopefully, like me, they’ll love it.

Grade: B+

Popularity: 2% [?]

Detailing the rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick – the blazing mid-sixties superstar, the “It Girl,” the muse to eccentric artist Andy Warhol – the unrated director’s cut of Factory Girl comes to DVD on July 17 from Genius Products LLC. and The Weinstein Company.

Powerful performances from Sienna Miller (Alfie, Casanova) and Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential), combined with a riveting multi-media collage of actual footage including archival tapes, still photos, and scenes from Warhol’s movies, Factory Girl brings to life Sedgwick’s ascension to the quintessential icon of American pop culture. Branded by Warhol as a counter-culture heroine when the counter-culture was everything, the film delves into the underground artistic and sensual universe bursting with sex, drugs, style, rock ‘n’ roll, and the mad rush for fame and fabulousness that was destined to spin out of control. Deeply intimate and sexually revealing, Emmy® Award winning* director George Hickenlooper’s Unrated Director’s Cut features steamy footage not seen in theaters.

Factory Girl also features performances from Hayden Christensen (Star Wars prequels, Shattered Glass), Jimmy Fallon (Saturday Night Live, Fever Pitch), Shawn Hatosy (Alpha Dog, The Cooler) and Mena Suvari (American Beauty, Beauty Shop). With over 15 minutes of footage not seen in theaters, the unrated director’s cut of the DVD features audio commentary, featurettes, a deleted scene, audition tapes and more.

In the 1960s, no star burned brighter than original “It” girl Edie Sedgwick (Miller). Factory Girl follows Edie’s meteoric rise from art student to the top of the New York fashion scene. As the muse of pop artist Andy Warhol (Pearce), Edie paid a steep price for fame. An intoxicating journey through pop-culture history, Factory Girl takes us inside Warhol’s legendary studio, where the worlds of art, film, fashion and celebrity all collided.

Special Features
-Audio commentary by director George Hickenlooper
- Deleted scene with optional audio commentary
- Making FACTORY GIRL featurette
- The Real Edie featurette
- Sienna Miller cast audition
- The Guy Pearce Video Diaries
- Theatrical Trailer

Source: Starpulse.com

Popularity: 2% [?]

Viewing George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl a second time on the DVD which will be released Tuesday, my opinion has gone up a few notches. It’s not so much because the restored material — a few snippets — does a great deal to let the movie breathe. Instead, I found myself reading between the lines of the insightful director’s commentary, in which Hickenlooper takes pains to point out to the viewer exactly which parts of the movie were the results of his original cut, and which parts were introduced at the whim of Harvey Weinstein. Invariably, it’s the Weinstein-mandated changes that slow the movie down and make it sometimes seem commonplace and uninspired. (Hickenlooper is carefully to say how great the Weinstein-changes were, even as he’s dutifully pointing them out.) One big problem is the ‘Warhol montage’ near the beginning that takes great pains to point out to us that there was a guy named Andy Warhol who was a great pop artist of the late 20th century — as if anyone in the film’s audience wouldn’t know that.

Another unwelcome element is the Gia-like ‘Edie in a mental hospital’ bookends — a drastic stylistic departure from the fast-paced, Oliver Stone-like cutting rhythm of the rest of the film. A lot of exposition is proffered during these moments, but to what end? Do we really need to know more about Edie’s homelife than we’ve already learned during the A-story? I don’t think so. There are a few other Weinstein-elements scattered throughout, and having seen the film twice now, I think we can conclude two things: Hickenlooper is a genuine talent who made a good film under unbearable pressures and he would have made a substantially better one if not for the heavy-handed studio honcho standing on his head. His visual chops are, while a little too close to his admitted mentor, Oliver Stone, still very sharp. He has a masterful knowledge of camera minutia and spends much time during his commentary talking about how he chose certain camera grains and lenses in order to complement the tone of a particular scene.

The DVD isn’t exactly overflowing with extra features, but the ones it does have are well-chosen. I’ve mentioned the director’s commentary, which is informative and funny — Hickenlooper mentions several times that he’s legally prevented from admitting that the harmonica-playing folk singer played by Hayden Christensen is actually you know who. There’s also Sienna Miller’s audition tape, which we get some background about in the commentary. Miller apparently got off a plane, drove straight to the audition and did a cold reading, having never seen any pages before having them thrust in front of her. If that’s what we’re actually seeing in the tape, then it’s pretty remarkable. The Edie accent isn’t in place yet, but many of the beats she finds in the reading are the same as what ends up in the finished film. The DVD also contains a Guy Pearce video diary and a standard ‘making of’ featurette. Finally, there are some talking-head style interviews about the real Edie that were created back when Hickenlooper was planning a more experimental docudrama approach for the film.

Factory Girl remains a flawed film, of course; the Weinstein ‘improvements’ coupled with a lot of poor pacing choices make it hard for the viewer to really immerse themselves in Edie’s increasingly desperate situation, and as Hickenlooper himself points out in the commentary, the cliche of Edie’s death before age thirty by drug overdose is hard to work around. We’ve seen that particular story so many times that we’ve become kind of hardened to it. Still, the film contains two spot-on performances, with Sienna Miller embodying her ‘poor little rich girl’ character completely and fully, and Guy Pearce swinging for the Oscar fences with an eerie channeling of Andy Warhol. How could this possibly the same actor who did Ex Exley? That Pearce wasn’t awarded an Oscar nomination for his role can probably be attributed to the film’s rushed release, and the same could possibly be said for Miller as well. I predict that as Miller, Pearce and Hickenlooper go on to do good work in other films, history will be a little kinder to Factory Girl.

Source: Cinematical.com

Popularity: 2% [?]

If not for Sienna Miller’s engaging portrayal of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl would have little to offer.

Miller raises the level of this superficial biopic with the force of her intense portrayal of the charismatic but troubled pop-culture icon.

Sedgwick, a socialite who became part of Andy Warhol’s boho artsy entourage, had her moment in the 1960s as a fashion trend-setter and “It” girl, before succumbing to drug addiction.

The film posits that Sedgwick’s downward spiral (initiated by her millionaire father’s abuse of her as a child) switched into high gear when she met Andy Warhol and his glamorous and strange “Factory” of would-be artists and filmmakers.

Warhol, intriguingly played by Guy Pearce, remains enigmatic, but his detachment from Sedgwick is depicted as cruel and manipulative.

If we are to believe this rendering, which is more like a music video than a narrative, Edie gave up the love of her life, a Bob Dylan-like folk rock star, because of her loyalty to Warhol. Warhol is painted as a man who was more about courting fame than creating meaningful art.

The Dylanesque character is played by Hayden Christensen, and the pair have an erotically charged sexual encounter that stands out among Miller’s several nude scenes and the manic re-creation of New York during that time.

Though there is an intriguing energy to the film, it drifts structurally and tacks on some documentary-style talking heads in a slapdash attempt to probe Sedgwick’s psyche. It also raises the question of her significance to pop culture, without answering it.

In a sequence that is repeated, in a too-obvious attempt at pathos, Sedgwick and Warhol discuss how they will be regarded after their deaths. Sedgwick laughingly describes herself as “creating chaos and uproar wherever she went” while trying to escape a dysfunctional family. Warhol focuses dismissively on her physical beauty.

Warhol and his hangers-on are cast as the uncaring villains largely responsible for Sedgwick’s demise. But you get the feeling there must have been more complexity to her short life that the filmmakers failed to explore.

Source: USA Today

Popularity: 2% [?]