I don’t think I knew this was coming and looks like we’re already getting a teaser. With Idris Elba!
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I don’t know what the hell this is, but I will show up for it!
looks like Aladdin ???
Deadline has an interview with George Miller – a smaller scale project Miller did in-between Fury Road and the upcoming Furiosa based on a short story he liked and has been wanting to adapt for a while and finally decided to do so.
Here’s the description of the story, from that article:
Miller has described Three Thousand Years of Longing as the “opposite” of Fury Road — an “anti- Mad Max ” — and in many ways, he’s correct. It is dialogue-driven; a lingering two-hander in which a scholar on a trip to a speaking engagement in Istanbul inadvertently summons a Djinn who details his long journey through fantasy and history as he endeavors to tempt this scholar — who claims she wants for nothing — to make her three wishes. Tilda Swinton plays Alithea, the scholar, and Idris Elba the Djinn.
But the director of Mad Max: Fury Road does scale in his sleep, and Three Thousand Years of Longing doesn’t just tell us about the Djinn’s complex journey to a modern-day hotel room in Istanbul. It shows us, too, bringing us into the courts of the Queen of Sheba and the Ottoman rulers, the bedroom of a 19th Century Turkish slave courtesan, and all the way to present-day London; despite the film having been entirely shot in Australia during the pandemic. There is magic, and there is war. Mythical creatures and conquering armies all conjured in exquisite detail. It is a chamber piece in the George Miller mold, which is to say that it flatly refuses to be confined to a single chamber.
That’s hot.
You had me at “George Miller”.
I’m so in.
Also, apropos of probably nothing, I think my favorite Hollywood term is “two-hander.” I don’t know what it means and I kinda don’t want to, because like Paul Simon said, what ever it is couldn’t match my sweet imagination.
It’s going to be hard to pull off a work of art that promises to be 30 times better than One Hundred Years of Solitude.
That sounds amazing.
Ha, that looks totally nuts.
I have coming up on 3000 minutes of wanting to see this movie.
I enjoyed this a lot! That said, I just watched the trailers and I think I would’ve been pretty disappointed had I seen those first. Not only did they give away some turns I didn’t see coming, they also paint it as being more wild and crazy than it actually is.
I like it too! But there are a parts I need to see again, especially the scene where Alithea asks the djinn to love her. That felt abrupt to me, and I’d like to track Alithea’s emotional state more closely to find the continuity there
I had the same reaction in the moment. In hindsight, I think the track was laid, but I’d like to watch it again with that in mind.
Loved this movie in retrospect, even though it was a bit of a chore to watch? So many moments of sheer
magic, some just visual but some by well-earned emotional payoff. Certainly had plenty of George Miller about it.
I think this is intentionally abrupt-- for two reasons: one, it reflects that Alithea doesn’t really have the self-awareness of her own suffering; two that close to the end Alithea realizes it was a mistake and attempts to undo it, which is kind of the crux of the whole movie.
My wife spent her early childhood in Istanbul, so the gorgeously photographed locale and the Turkish really added to the appeal for her.
The movie really made me want to look up the A. S. Byatt short story from which it was adapted.
I loved the first half, or maybe 2/3rds, and couldn’t understand the low review scores. But once the stories stopped and just the modern day remained, it kind of lost both momentum and direction. It provoked a lot of discussion, but mainly because none of us could understand the meaning of the story was and ended up arguing about it.
Worth watching, but didn’t live up to the promise.