Great moments in junket history #2743: Eva Green, star of Casino Royale, turns to Ed Douglas from Coming Soon and says, “You’re kind of a pervert, aren’t you?”
She’s beautiful, she’s sassy and The Dreamers proved that there’s no aspect of her body she won’t let us look at. She’s also quite good in Casino Royale, and I think she might have a heckuva good career ahead of her, if she makes the right choices. The latest choice she has made seems right to me – she’ll be starring in an adaptation of In the Country of Last Things, based on the Paul Auster novel of the same name. It’s a dystopian, post-apocalyptic (but not quite) novel about a young woman who comes to an unnamed city looking for her brother. The city has been ravaged economically and is run by street dwellers, squatters and murderous vagrants. It’s essentially New York City if the 1970s economic woes hadn’t been stymied.
This is just one of three major dystopian films that have been announced in recent weeks, all about some form of the end of civilization. Last week it was announced that Cormac McCarthy’s newest novel, the post-nuclear holocaust book The Road, would be getting made into a movie by The Proposition director John Hillcoat. A few weeks before that came word that Jose Saramango’s magnificent book, Blindness, about a sudden wave of sightlessness that takes out society, would be made into a movie directed by Fernando Meirelles. And then there are the ones that have already come out the gate – earlier this year we had V For Vendetta, which isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic story but is dystopian like what. Later tonight I’m finally seeing Children of Men, a movie about a world where people have stopped being able to have babies.
There’s definitely some crazy post-millenial tension going on, and I bet that even the Democratic control of Congress won’t be making a difference. You can look at the horror and science fiction films of any given era and get an understanding of what headspace people were in at the time; the torture horror and dystopian scifi of the first decade of the 21st century really shows just how freaked out we are.