Mr. Nobody Early Hype Thread (Sort of out now!)
I just wanted to make a thread to talk about my most anticipated movie of 2008, Mr. Nobody. It's wrapping up filming this month, so there probably won't even be a trailer for a while, and there's not a lot of buzz going on yet, but I'd be shocked if this movie isn't amazing. The synopsis:
Quote:
The present day, more or less. Nemo (Jared Leto) is 35, an ordinary man, married to Elise (Sarah Polley), with three children. But life's turning strange : billboards flash messages addressed only to him; on the streets, he passes strangers with his face; behind the facade of a half-constructed building, he sees helicopters lifting enormous blocks of the ocean... Nemo wakes to find himself trapped in his car, drowning. He wakes again and is shot by an unknown assassin. He wakes yet again... by a swimming pool in the grounds of an opulent mansion. With a new wife and new children.
It's the year 2092. Mars is the number one holiday destination; science has rendered natural death obsolete. In hospital, as the world's media and population look on, a 120-year-old man is dying. Nemo, the last mortal on earth. Under hypnosis, fragments of his past begin to emerge. Nemo is 3. Occasionally, he dreams of the future, and occasionally his dreams come true. In his home-town live three little girls, Anna, Elise and Jean. Life offers an infinite variety of possibilities, and as long as Nemo does nothing, anything can happen. But when his parents split up, he is forced to choose. It's impossible, and his life divides in two. The boy plunges headlong into a chaotic world, where nothing happens by chance, yet nothing can be foreseen. A universe where the beating of a butterfly's wings in Japan can cause storms on the other side of the globe.
So Nemo remains with his father, and parts with his mother. Years pass. In England, 16-year-old Nemo dreams of love, of disaster, of life on Mars.
He falls for Elise, and when she rejects him, pursues Jean. Halfway across the world, the other Nemo falls in love with Anna, daughter of his mother's lover. The love of a lifetime. Their clandestine affair is joyous, their days and nights blissful, until his mother and her father part and Anna vanishes from Nemo's life.
Apparently told as an odd mosaic of memory and fantasy spanning over 100 years, as the dying Nemo tries to piece together the memories of his life. An ambitious concept for a romantic comedy, but given the pedigree, I'm sure they will pull it off.
1) It's written and directed by Jaco van Dormael, a strong contender for the best director you've never heard of. It's his first movie in over a decade, but his first two movies are beautiful, creative, vibrant pieces of filmmaking. I can watch Toto the Hero a million times and never get sick of it.
2) Jared Leto rules. The guy's got real talent, and the cast in general is looking pretty solid. Of course Van Dormael was able to teach a guy with Down Syndrome to act well enough to win a Palm D'Or for best actor, so getting good perfomances from this cast is not going to be an issue.
3) It's being given the time and budget it needs. Van Dormael has wrestled with budget issues before (a good chunk of Toto the Hero was set in the year 2040, but he had to nix the sci-fi imagery because he was working with nothing), but this is the most expensive Belgian movie ever produced.
Some concept art:
http://www.culture-cafe.net/images/mr_nobody2.jpg
http://www.culture-cafe.net/images/mr_nobody3.jpg
http://www.culture-cafe.net/images/mr_nobody4.jpg
