The Screengrab : othello

Going Soft with Chiwetel Ejiofor

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

If Gaby Wood's longish profile-interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor is any indication, the star of Redbelt and Talk to Me has got the equilibrium thing down pretty well. Ejiofor was in the New York area for his role in Philip Noyce's Salt, a thriller that also stars Liev Schreiber and Angelina Jolie, of whom he says, "She is very beautiful, but you know, you get used to it." Born in London in 1974 to Nigerian immigrants, Ejiofor's breakthrough movie role was in Stephen Frears's 2002 Dirty Pretty Things, in which he played a Nigerian immigrant--a former doctor--living under the radar in London. His other recent roles include that of Thabo Mbeki, who would go on to become president of South Africa, in Endgame, a TV drama about political negotitations during the dying days of apartheid. Wood writes that it "was the second time Ejiofor had been to South Africa. It took him a while to get over the first, a trip he made in 2004 to shoot the film version of Gillian Slovo's book Red Dust. In that, he played a torture victim, and was, as he now says, 'slightly traumatised'. He explains: 'I just wasn't expecting... I don't know, it was crazy not to have been expecting to come across a really complicated racial situation...There were people in our crew who had burned down villages in Zimbabwe, for example. You know, if you have a torture scene and somebody in the room says: "Yeah, that's exactly how you do it", it's a complicated set.'"

Ejiofor attended the National Youth Theatre, where as a teenager he played Othello, a role he played onstage two years ago to great acclaim. "I always thought of the play as a sequel to Romeo and Juliet," he saya. "I think Shakespeare's so astute in his understanding of people being vulnerable, you know. And that love is so easy to corrupt. I think so many of Shakespeare's plays are about how fragile love is - how perfect and beautiful it is, but also how terrifying and easy to manipulate it is." Wood kept an apartment in New York for a while but deemed living in the city too "claustrophobic." Now he keeps places in London and Los Angeles. Of the latter, he says, "I think for a little while I maybe wanted to loathe it, but actually it turned out that I was just lying to myself, and I was having quite a good time!" he laughs. "You know, you're there thinking: 'Where's the fire? What exactly is the problem here? Oh yeah, it's too nice. I'm going soft.'"

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

Morning Deal Report: I Fought the Law and I Won

Peter Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Josh Brolin will play Dan "Twinkie Defense" White, the disgruntled ex-cop who murdered Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone in 1979, in Gus Van Sant's Milk.

That Ed Norton twins comedy, Leaves of Grass (?), is written and will be directed by Tim Blake Nelson, the director of that high-school Othello adaptation O and the actor from O Brother Where Art Thou. Curiouser and curiouser.

Angelina Jolie to play sexy spy.

— Peter Smith