I have just managed to see Annette. Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard’s musical adventure. If you haven’t seen it, there may be some minor spoilers in this quick review so you have been warned. .
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When I first heard about Annette I was quite excited and then I found out that it is a musical with a completely sung narrative and I’m afraid I really don’t get along with that kind of musical!
For that reason I have been very apprehensive about seeing this film.
However…… I have to say that I’m glad I’ve seen it. It was beautifully filmed, wonderfully acted and totally surreal! I also have to say that I don’t think I could watch it again.
The film has it’s moments and Adam Driver really delivers an out of this world performance, but there was one moment that really blew me away and that was the duet Adam has with little 5 year old Devyn McDowell in the closing minutes of the film. They sing Sympathy for the Abyss together and OMG! this little girl has got some acting and singing chops! It actually gave me goose bumps.
It also makes you feel quite heartbroken for Henry, Adam’s character, even though he’s actually quite an arsehole the rest of the film.
It’s a very artsy film and I can see it doing pretty well when it comes to awards season next year and dare I say it… there could well be another Oscar nomination coming Adam’s way, but I won’t be going out of my way to watch it again. It just wasn’t my cup of tea. You can’t win them all!!
Could I really be that lucky? Adam Driver’s next film, Annette, is opening the Cannes Film Festival in July, but it has just been announced that it is getting it’s theatrical release in the US on August 6th. UK releases usually coincide with US releases but there is no confirmation yet. This is the kind of film that gets a pretty limited run here in the UK and I would usually have to travel outside of my hometown to a cinema that is showing it…..
However……
I will be in London on August 6th because it’s our wedding anniversary and we are spending 4 days in London!! This will be the perfect opportunity to see it at my favourite cinema, the Picturehouse Central, if they are showing it.
August 6th this year is shaping up quite nicely. Possible trip to my favourite cinema to see a new Adam film and dinner at the Hawksmoor in Covent Garden.
URGH! I have just realised that Adam was just 10 years old when I got married!! My kids are all over 18. One has left home and is currently producing a baby.
As a film fanatic, the last year has been a bit frustrating. Lockdown has seen most completed movies having their release dates pushed back time and time again and any film being shot was put on hold. Cinemas have shut their doors for safety and I totally understand this. Being enclosed spaces where lots of people sit together for hours at a time, they are melting pots for COVID.
In the last 12 months, I have been to the cinema just once! When restrictions had a bit of a relaxation period here in the UK in August, I went to see Tenet. It was disappointing to say the least and then shortly after this, cinemas were forced to close their doors again and haven’t opened since. I have recently streamed Wonder Woman 1984 and I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t actually waste my time seeing this one in the cinema as it was, quite frankly, a total shambles and complete shit.
Anyway!
As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, Adam Driver is my favourite actor and I will admit that I can be a bit obsessive, but he brings a smile to my face for lots of reasons, so I am not ashamed to admit this. Frustratingly he is the worlds BIGGEST recluse when it comes to his private life. It took two years to find out he now has a son!! Who is probably nearer 3 years old now and we still haven’t ever seen a picture of him with Adam or even Joanne!
Adam was in the middle of filming ‘The Last Duel’ with Matt Damon at the beginning of last year and this had to shut down filming as lockdown hit. It finished filming towards the end of the year with lots of safety measures put into place.
I haven’t seen a new Adam film since 2019 when we had.. not one…. but FOUR movies. The Report, The Dead Don’t Die, Marriage Story and The Rise of Skywalker. Adam fans were spoilt and then COVID ripped it all away from us as Adam went into hiding.
He is now filming again but everything is under wraps or behind facemasks. Any sneak peaks we have had are few and far between.
Any photos have been behind the scenes with facemasks firmly in place. The best evidence we’ve had in the last year that Adam is doing well was a socially distanced appearance on the John Oliver show ‘Last Week Tonight’ back in Nov. After John has spent weeks squeezing dubious references of Adam into his shows, Adam was gracious enough to agree to appear in the final show of the season and it was hilarious and Adam was looking really well and very fresh! Let’s just say that his hair care is on point!
However, in a whole year, this is just not enough!! I’m so desperate, I’ve taken to doing 1000 piece custom jigsaw puzzles I’ve had made of Adam. It’s very sad. There’s only so many times you can watch a back catalogue of his movies before needing to give them a break!
Anyway, I am getting more and more hopeful for the coming year. I don’t think things will be easing off with lockdown for a few more months yet, but as the mass vaccination programme is underway worldwide, we should start to see results soon and life should slowly start to normalise again. How that normal will look is anyone’s guess. I have no idea if my local Cineworld will ever open it’s doors again.
BUT…. here’s the exciting part….. Adam now has 5 movies on the go.
1 = ‘Annette’ is complete and should have premiered at last years Cannes Film Festival. It should now be premiering this year instead. Adam plays a stand up comedian in this one and has a 2 year old daughter with a surprising gift. It is some kind of musical in which Adam sings more than he doesn’t!!
2 = ‘The Last Duel’. This is the film that had to postpone filming due to the pandemic. Principle filming is now finished and it is in post production. Hopefully we’ll get this one in October. Adam plays Jacques LeGris and after checking the actual history of the story, this film will not end well for Adam!
3 = ’65’ is currently filming. It’s into it’s last three weeks of filming and is a sci-fi thriller. I heard a rumour today that dinosaurs are somehow involved so it looks like it could be quite interesting! There is no release date yet but at it appears it may be quite heavy on special effects, I’m assuming we can look forward to this one sometime next year.
4 = ‘Gucci’ is in pre-production and Adam is set to work with Lady Gaga, Jared Leto and possibly Al Pacino. Adam is playing Maurizio Gucci and it tells the story of how Patrizia Reggiani (played by Gaga) the es-wife of Maurizio Gucci, plotted to kill her husband, the grandson of renown fashion designer Guccio Gucci. So again, this doesn’t end well for Adam but filming will be taking place in Florence, Italy!! I’m just picturing Adam in all those Gucci suits and strutting his stuff around Italy. All my dreams in one place. Anyway, we will hopefully get to see this one in November this year.
5 = ‘White Noise’ is another Noah Baumbach movie that has been commissioned by Netflix. Plot unknown at present. After the success of Marriage Story (Oscar winning and also starring Adam), Noah has been exclusively signed by Netflix for the foreseable future. It hasn’t been confirmed officially yet but it looks like Adam is set to star. Again, there is no release date for this but Adam has got a pretty full plate again this year when it comes to filming so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Quite a mixed bag. You certainly can’t accuse Adam of being type cast.
So, there you have it. Another excuse for me to blog about Adam squeezed out. I will ‘hopefully’ blog about him more and more over the coming months with more substantial photographs and maybe even some trailers to keep me going until I get to see the movies themselves.
Finally! A new year and let’s hope this one is a little kinder to us than the last one.
It hasn’t been the greatest of starts for us however. My husband, Ian, is a shielder. The medications for his Psoriatic arthritis makes him immunocompromised which makes him more vulnerable to infections at the best of times. On Weds he started to feel unwell and this was accompanied by a cough. He managed to get a Covid swab at 10am on Thurs and we are now waiting for the result. This means that I can’t go to work until we get that result and I should have started a long day shift just over an hour ago!
I wasn’t too worried yesterday. Ian tends to get chest infections at this time of year anyway and he also doesn’t leave the house unless it is to drop one of the girls at work, so he doesn’t even get out of the car. I was expecting the result to come back negative. However, he can barely move this morning and spent the night coughing up a lung. He’s had his flu jab for the year but his symptoms are all flu symptoms so I’m getting a little worried that his result might be telling us something else.
The worrying thing is, if his result is positive, it means that either myself or one of the girls have brought it into the house. Anyway, no point panicking until we get that result. It could be a long day!
Ian didn’t even see the new year in last night as he fell asleep, so I saw the new year in with Marjorie and Dharma.
At about 11pm, I realised that I was 3 movies away from managing 1 movie for every day of the year, so I cheated a little and watched some Pixar shorts which brought my total to 366 movies for the year. The sad thing is, only 7 of them were actually seen in the cinema with 6 of them all before March.
I have REALLY missed my movies this past year. Having said that, the drought has made me go back through my old movies and watch some that I haven’t watched for years, so I haven’t exactly missed out.
I have missed seeing any new work from Adam Driver though. There was nothing from him at all last year and he spent the majority of last year in isolation with his family. As a fiercely private man , he did what he does best and simply dropped off the map for a while. He disappeared in March when filming for ‘The Last Duel’ with Matt Damon was halted due to the pandemic and he finally made an appearance again in October to wrap up filming. ‘The Last Duel’ is now set for an October 2021 release. He also has a film called ‘Annette’ that ‘should’ have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May last year. It is hoped that it will now be release at Cannes this year. He is currently filming for ’65’ which is a sci-fi thriller. There is no release date for this one, but being sci-fi, I suspect there may be quite a lot of post production and we may not see it until 2022. After he finishes filming ’65’ he starts work on ‘Gucci’ with Lady Gaga and this one is slated for a November 2021 release. He has also just signed up to do another ‘Noah Baumbach’ Netflix movie. Noah was the director responsible for ‘Marriage Story’ which got Adam an Oscar nomination. It was also an amazing film so I’m hoping whatever this next one is will be just as good.
So, the next year could actually be quite top heavy on the Adam movies!! How I will get to see any of these movies is now the big question. With most of the country now in tier 4, cinemas in the UK have shut their doors. Our local cinema closed it’s doors a couple of months ago and being one of the older cinemas in the chain, I am not very hopeful that it will ever open it’s doors again.
I REALLY missed seeing movies on the big screen last year. As much as I love curling up on the sofa to watch a good film, you really can’t beat seeing a movie, at least once, on the big screen, where it was meant to be!
Anyway, I’m just going to pootle around for the day and get some housework done while I wait for Ian’s result.
I hope you all have a better year than the last one!!
So, it’s been two years ago to the day that we got this happy Adam at the Cannes film festival for the BlacKkKlansman premiere.
Spike Lee managed to create a movie that was tastefully funny, still relevant and shocking. If you haven’t already seen it, what are you waiting for?! Think I may even watch it tonight!
Anyway, this also got me thinking about what we have missed out on this week. This should have been the Cannes Film Festival week and we should have been getting the premiere of Adam’s new film Annette. A musical of all things and one which is sung from start to finish. I have been waiting with baited breath to see this film. Like I’ve said before, as much as I like a good musical, I like a musical that is scripted and interspersed with songs. I don’t generally like musicals that are completely sung as a narrative. Adam is not a professional singer but he can hold a tune. It’s going to be really interesting and raw. I’m either going to love it or hate it, and I am so hoping that I love it!!
Adam has had 5 movies premiere at the last 4 festivals. In 2016 it was Paterson. A quirky Jim Jarmusch movie.
That same year, I actually won tickets to see this film at the Picturehouse Central in London with Adam doing a Q+A afterwards. It was an amazing evening and that very Q+A is on the DVD release!
2017 saw The Meyerowitz Stories released. Adam did not attend this one.
He made up for it in 2018 with not one, but two movies. BlacKkKlansman and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Adam was there and attended the red carpets for both films.
In 2019 he was there for another Jim Jarmusch film, The Dead Don’t Die.
Not the greatest zombie movie ever made, but another quirky Jim Jarmusch film.
So, this year we are left hanging. With the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival because of the world shut down, we have no idea when Annette will actually be released. I just hope it will be worth the wait.
My self imposed, one month, Adam Driver blackout has ended. It’s been an entire month. I can safely say that I won’t be doing that again. I honestly felt like I had a missing limb.
Right, what’s been happening in Adam’s world?
It looks like he will have yet another film premiering at Cannes in May (Corona virus not withstanding!!). Annette has been in post production for a while now, so a May premiere is highly likely.
I am becoming more and more intrigued by this film. It is, apparently, a musical, and the kind of musical where the story is entirely told by song. I have said before, that this kind of musical is really not my cup of tea. I much prefer a script that is interspersed with songs.
However…… Remember these guys?
Ron Mael is the keyboard player and principal songwriter for the band ‘Sparks’ which he founded with vocalist younger brother Russell Mael in 1971.
Ron and Russell have written this film and the music for the film and after hearing Adam belt out ‘Being Alive’ at the end of ‘Marriage Story’, I have no doubt that this film is going to be very interesting.
Anyway, after a bit of a break back home in New York with the Missus, the kid and the pup, and hosting yet another SNL show, Adam is now just a short train ride away in France, where he is filming his next movie, ‘The Last Duel’. (As of today, it’s possible that he is stuck in France for the forseable future, as Donald Trump has just halted travel from Europe to the US because of Coronavirus!!)
The film is set in 14th Century France and tells the story of Knight, Jean de Carrouges (played by Matt Damon) who is ordered to settle a dispute with his squire Jacques LeGris (played by Adam Driver) by King Charles VI. It is the last judicial duel ever held in France.
Some leaked on set photos recently, showed Adam’s co-star, Matt Damon, in costume.
Some photos of Adam supposedly arriving for what is thought to be costume fittings and a hair cut, were also leaked, and to say that Adam was looking a little pensive is an understatement.
I was so worried they were going chop off those luscious locks and give him a bowl cut, and if they had, I would have been seriously pissed off!!
Anyway, a couple of days later some more photos were leaked of Adam on set, and it looks like I didn’t need to worry. The luscious lock are still there, and if anything, it looks like he’s had some extensions! Adam is looking quite intriguing.
Anyway, filming continues amidst the Corona Virus hysteria. To say, I’m a little concerned by the travelling that Adam has to do is an understatement, but at the same time, he’s a healthy man. Adam will be fine.
Other than this, it’s all been a bit quiet on the Adam front. I still enjoy trawling the net for new pictures and news, but this time of year is a little quiet for anything like that.
I have noticed a few more GIFs from ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ appearing.
Credit for the GIF goes to driverdelight.tumblr.com
This one is one of my favourites. Adam tackling some wire work is possibly the most ‘physical’ Adam has had to get in ‘any’ movie so far and I absolutley want to see more!! I love his little Indie movies but I’d LOVE to see him get his teeth into something with a little more action!!
The Last Duel promises to have some good sword fighting, but being set in the 14th Century, I can’t see there being much need for wire work or special effects! No, I want to see him in something requiring a bit more physicality. He’s an imposing figure and can obviously handle physical stuff during filming. Maybe even see a ‘nasty’ side to one of his characters.
Don’t get me wrong… Rick, Allan, Jude, Jamie, Phillip, Sevier, Paterson, etc…. ALL fabulous characters, but…….
……ultimately ‘NICE’ characters. After seeing Adams ‘physical’ abilities in Star Wars, I want to see more!
But then, Adam is ultimately a ‘NICE’ guy in all aspects of life. In fact he’s an absolutely hero to Ben Affleck!
He also has a comical side and this is quite evident when he appears on SNL. So I’ll end this blog with a few of his appearances from January’s outing as host on SNL.
Adam has a wonderfully dry sense of humour.
This is hysterical. You can see the inner Kylo slowly emerging!!
After the amazing year Adam Driver has just had, with a plethora of films being released, I took a look at his IMDB page to see what he’s up to for the next year.
My previous post has already discussed a movie, currently in pre-production, called The Last Duel. However, IMDB also list a film called ‘Annette’, and this one is currently in post-production.
Now, I’ve known about this film for some time, and it’s become a little notorious with the leading lady changing hands several times. Rihanna and Rooney Mara were both cast but both dropped out. Michelle Williams was cast but had to drop out when the project got stuck in development. Kristen Stewart was also offered the lead but thankfully she declined because she thinks she can’t sing. The lead finally went to Marion Cotillard.
I am over the moon that Kristen Stewart declined. I make no bones about the fact that I can’t stand her as an actress and can’t think of a worse leading lady for Adam.
Anyway, I digress. The description of this film has always intrigued me.
IMDB states…..
A stand-up comedian and his opera singer wife, have a 2 year old daughter with a surprising gift.
1 – Adam as a stand-up comedian. 2 – Adam as a daddy is always good.
But last night I was a little bored and I started to read a little bit more. When I got to the trivia section, one statement stood out.
The film features no dialogue, but is instead a sung-through musical.
No, no, no, no, no, noooooooo!!!!!
Now don’t get me wrong, I like a good musical. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Calamity Jane, Singing in the Rain, type musicals. Dialogue interspersed with songs.
What I am not fond of are musicals that are entirely sung, a la Les Mis!
The only thing I am clinging onto now is the fact that after seeing Adam in ‘Marriage Story’, I know Adam can actually hold a tune! He may not be a technically great singer but he can belt out a show tune and actually stay IN tune!
As a stan of Adams, I know I will go and see this film. So far he hasn’t done anything I’ve hated. In fact most of his stuff is quirky and fun or exciting or downright Oscar worthy!
I will hold my view of this film until I have actually seen it. I’m a little bit nervous.
The weather has been absolutely amazing the last few days. I’m currently sat in the coolest room in the house at 8 am and it’s already 28.5 degrees.
I barely slept last night as it was just too hot and sticky, and then this morning we had lovely little thunder storm. I’m not complaining though. It’s nice to finally have a good summer. The last couple of years have been a bit of a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment. I’m just hoping it lasts for when me and Ian go off to London for a few days in just over a weeks time.
Anyway, after the thunder storm had started, there was no chance of a lay in, so here I am, sat on my computer with my morning cuppa and contemplating the day.
I have a lot to do today. It’s payday. I’ve already paid the bills. I now need to do a big shop for food for the week, and then I have to nip into Milton Keynes with one of the kids because they want to check out the new Primark, and then I’m off out for a quick dinner with Ian and Murron before we head over to a pub Murron is gigging in tonight.
I have no weekend this weekend. I will be working 2 x 12.5 hour shifts in a full uniform and on a stifling ward.
So I’m napping a quiet hour to myself now.
I’ve just had a look at Adam Driver’s IMDB page for an update on what he’s up to. If I don’t include Star Wars in December, he has 3 more movies all due for release over the next year.
The Report Adam plays Daniel Jones.
It’s based on fact and set just after the 9/11 attacks. Adam plays a senate staffer who undertakes building a report on any potential abnormalities in how the CIA interrogated terror suspects after Sept 11. He has to deal with millions of documents and takes 6 years to prove major discrepancies and acts of extreme brutality.
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in the year and has garnered some amazing reviews, with The Guardian stating that “Driver is a total natural with often difficult, demanding and intimidatingly wordy material and like the script, he’s similarly unflashy and unquestionably convincing as a man doggedly following through with his convictions with so many of his info-stuffed monologues deserving quiet applause.”
This one is due for release on September 20th here in the UK.
Marriage Story Adam plays Charlie.
This one is in post production and is directed by Noah Baumbach. It has been shrouded in mystery since it was announced and we have only just been given it’s official title and this first official image.
Starring Adam and Scarlett Johansson, it apparently follows a couple going through a divorce. That’s all the info we’ve been given so far!
It is having it’s premiere at the Venice film festival in September, but as yet there are no general release dates for anywhere else.
Annette Adam plays Henry.
This film is in pre-production and actually sounds very different from Adam’s usual style of film.
There are no pictures yet and Adam’s co-star is Marion Cotillard. The story is about a stand-up comedian and his opera singing wife, who have a 2 year old daughter with a surprising gift!
There is absolutely no more info than that and no idea of any kind of release date, but it sounds like an intriguing one!!
But of course, the film I am itchy to see at the moment is Star Wars. The countdown on my blog site has been agonisingly slow and I’m trying not to think about it. I want to savour this one.
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