Dave Portnoy reportedly just splashed out a huge sum of money on real estate.
10.09.2023 - 20:33 / deadline.com
Take a bit of Kafka, throw in some Buñuelian realism, add a dose of John Cheever (circa The Swimmer) and then hand the recipe over to a first-time feature-making Swedish director with fond memories of a childhood spent in IKEA furniture stores, then put together an A-List cast, and you essentially have Mother, Couch.
A World Premiere this weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, this truly surreal, metaphysical mind trip will not be to everyone’s taste, but the cast, including a couple of Oscar winners, will make it go down easier even if some of it more closely resembles a thespian exercise at the Actor’s Studio, rather than a major motion picture. It certainly is watchable, and writer/director Niclas Larsson makes the most of his adaptation of Jerker Virdborg’s book, Mamma I Sofa which centers on a seemingly normal outing to a furniture store but turns into a nightmarish nervous breakdown for 48-year-old David (Ewan McGregor), son of his mother (Ellen Burstyn) who is only identified that way, and who has decided to plop herself on a green couch on sale in a department of the upper floor and will not get up, despite his most valiant efforts to get her to leave. Along the way his siblings, even his own kids, join in including older brother Gruffudd (Rhys Ifans) and unimpressed sister Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle). It all turns into a very dysfunctional family affair with secrets, lies, and revelations galore as the mother admits she didn’t want to have any of these kids, had five abortions to get rid of them and these were the ones, especially David, who hung on to her uterus for dear about-to-be-a-life. Mother is a no-nonsense, heading to senility(???) woman who seems full of regrets, and who, knocking on 90, wears a blonde
Dave Portnoy reportedly just splashed out a huge sum of money on real estate.
Leslie Odom Jr‘s daughter gets possessed in the second trailer for the upcoming horror flick The Exorcist: Believer.
Alissa Simon Film Critic Sometimes films highlight little-known events in their country of origin that wind up catalyzing a re-evaluation of their nation’s history. Finnish director Klaus Härö’s “Never Alone” is shaping up to be that sort of film. It follows the deportation from Finland of eight Austrian-Jewish refugees by the Gestapo during World War II and the work of Abraham Stiller, a pillar of the Helsinki Jewish community, who tried to stop it from happening.
Justin Timberlake has explained why he sang the chorus of the popular *NSYNC song ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ bizarrely.In their 2000 hit, Timberlake sings “It’s gonna be me”, with the last word pronounced as “may”. This part of the ‘No Strings Attached’ single has gone viral and been memeified on social media multiple times over the years.During a recent Hot Ones interview with the reunited boyband, host Sean Evans asked *NSYNC how they felt about the song’s resurgence and where the weird inflection came from.Timberlake revealed that he sang the chorus as such at request from Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin.
Anne Hathaway goes classic in an all-black ensemble for the opening night gala of Metropolitan Opera’s “Dead Man Walking” held at Lincoln Center on Tuesday night (September 26) in New York City.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In my opinion, the two greatest directors to emerge from the nexus of international cinema in the 1990s were both Scandinavian. One of them, Lars von Trier, became quite famous, for reasons both good and bad.
Rishi Sunak has confirmed the weakening of the UK Government's green policies.
EastEnders fans have become curious about new character Nadine who is a "Lola lookalike" as she made her BBC soap debut on Monday evening.
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier will next direct “Sentimental Value,” a family drama starring Renate Reinsve, who won best actress in Cannes for her role in Trier’s Oscar-nominated 2021 film “The Worst Person of the World.” “Sentimental Value” will follow Nora (Reinsve), an actor, and her sister Agnes, who are grieving the loss of their mother while their father Gustav reappears in their lives after a long absence. Gustav, a once-celebrated filmmaker, has written a script for a comeback movie and offered the main part to his daughter Nora, but she categorically refuses the role.
Watching Mountains, which just made its international debut as part of the Toronto Film Festival’s Centerpiece program, I could not help but think of two other landmark films it seems to recall in its own way. One was 2019’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco, a remarkable story of gentrification and its effect on those being edged out of their home that starred Jimmie Falls and launched the career of Jonathan Majors. The other was the 1960 film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s oft-performed A Raisin In The Sun in which Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger played a struggling husband, son, and father with a dream for a new house and a better life for his family.
J. Kim Murphy What happens when an immovable object meets a fatigued force that keeps whacking its head against said object in defeated frustration? That’s the question proposed by Niclas Larsson’s debut feature, “Mother, Couch.” Executive produced by and starring the once-boyish, now often forlorn Ewan McGregor, the film follows David, a frumpy middle-aged family man whose mother (Ellen Burstyn) plants herself on an old couch in the storage room of a furniture outlet, flatly refusing to vacate the premises.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead is opening up about her son with Ewan McGregor.
Sophia Scorziello editor Furniture stores are strange places. The liminal feeling they give off is something like a life-size dollhouse or home you once lived in but can’t remember when. If you’ve ever been into an Ikea, chances are you thought about what it’d be like to spend the night in one of the staged rooms that has a sink with no running water.
Chris Evans is looking forward to his future family with his wife, Alba Baptista. A source tells ET, “Chris has been in love with Alba for a while. They share a special connection and are so happy
Guy Lodge Film Critic Unorthodox family structures yield correspondingly unpredictable drama in “Housekeeping for Beginners,” a vital, febrile multi-character study that further confirms writer-director Goran Stolevski as a talent to be reckoned with. Departing radically from the poise of his folk-horror debut “You Won’t Be Alone” and the gentle intimacy of its swift follow-up “Of an Age,” this study of domestic, romantic and generational conflicts in a crowded queer household instead embraces a spirit of antic chaos, both in subject matter and jagged, hit-the-ground-running execution.
The wedding festivities aren’t over for Chris Evans and Alba Baptista!
A family of Syrian refugees and an English teacher from Afghanistan receive about five minutes of joy in veteran Polish auteur Agnieszka Holland’s otherwise grim and harrowing refugee drama, “Green Border.” As they land in a plane to Belarus, hoping to cross into Poland and eventually Sweden for asylum where refugee status awaits, their eyes beam with optimism as a new land of promise reflects on their smiling faces.
Writer/Director Azazel Jacobs has made a couple of indie pictures I really loved. French Exit gave Michelle Pfeiffer one of her meatiest roles in years and she ran with it in a delicious Paris-set tale. He also provided Debra Winger and Tracy Letts with terrific roles in the sophisticated The Lovers. And now Jacobs shows once again he knows how to attract top actors with well-written characters in the intimate drama, His Three Daughters which stars Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as a trio of sisters gathering in the New York City apartment where their father (Jay O. Sanders) is down the hall (unseen for most of the film) and near death. They have arrived to spend his final days with him, stretched out here to three, but also to renew their own dysfunctional dynamic in what could easily have been made as a play rather than a film, and feels just a bit too stagey for its own good.
Licorice Pizza and If Beale Street Could Talk producer Sara Murphy arrives at TIFF this week with the intimate yet ambitious feature Mother, Couch, the first project produced under Fat City, the production label she launched last year alongside War Pony producer Ryan Zacarias.
Liam Neeson is opening up about the time he and Ewan McGregor got reprimanded by George Lucas on the set of Star Wars.