Festival premieres have already come and gone, and not my thing anymore anyways. Both open proper in July, but I'll likely spend the next six months searching for bootlegged screeners. Anyhows, yeah... Nico, 1988 has been pending for more than 15 years and gone through a number of directors and casting potentials--originally, Tilda Swinton was to play Ms. Päffgen. Based largely upon James Young's The End (aka Songs They Never Play on the Radio), there's bound to be lots of fit-throwing and one-sided conversations in which Nico just glares at the pesky interlocutors. Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley? She's not Natasha Richardson, but she actually resembles Shelley a good deal more. And it's a few years too late for Elisabeth Olsen to play a 17 year old. Mostly covers her life up to the composition of Frankenstein, as have pretty much every other cinematic or television depictions, but that's ok, I suppose. She lived a long and fruitful life, actually, but her post-Frankenstein existence was largely devoid of all the zany madcap adventures, so it generally works better in the books anyways. No trailers yet. Anyone else as "excited" about all this as I am? I know I'll be disappointed in the Nico film--Trina Dyrholm doesn't really capture her speech habits--but I gotta see it regardless. And it will hopefully erase that dreadful, and wholly erroneous, portrayal by someone?! in Oliver Stone's stupid Doors movie for good. Weirdly, I was almost in that film, but thankfully was not. The Shelley pic likely won't disappoint, but I think it could have been (coulda' shall be, rather) a whole more interesting had Sofia Coppola directed.
