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A "Promising" Oscar Vehicle for Naomi Watts

August 28th 2007 05:00
Eastern Promises - a new movie
Naomi Watts most promising vehicle so far
Australian chanteuse Naomi Watts has certainly carved out a solid niche for herself in Hollywood, but she has never exactly seemed to grab for herself the attention that is owing an actress of her calibre. She has never managed to win the sort of roles that has managed to firmly place both Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman on the map as Hollywood royalty, box-office gold and prolific Oscar favourites.

Admitedly she has never been one for conventional movies. She was first noticed in the internationally acclaimed but interminably weird Mullholland Drive. Since then she has played The Ring, Plots With a View, Le Divorce, 21 Grams, I Heart Huckabees, Stay, King Kong and The Painted Veil and has failed to win herself an audience with any of them.
Perhaps this will change with her next major movie. Due for a limited October 25 release Down Under, Eastern Promises is the story of a Russian mafia family in London who are threatened when a young midwife, Anna Khitrova (Watts), begins to delve into the background of a fourteen year-old girl who died in child birth.
Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen
Watts co-stars with the chrismatic Viggo Mortensen and brilliant German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl
Led by Semyon (Academy award nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl, who Australian audiences will best remember as Peter, diabolical father of David Helfgott in the movie Shine), the family slowly flexes its muscles in the form of enforcers Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) and Kirril (Vincent Cassell), who go after Khitrova in an attempt to silence her enquiries and effect a string of murders and deceptions accross London.

The movie is, on paper, a potential Oscar winner, and is fast gaining Oscar buzz as its advertising campaigns heat up prior to its US release. However, it comes with a couple of drawbacks. First: Viggo Mortensen. The Lord of the Rings star has yet to prove himself a hit as anything other than a king of Gondor. Second: director David Cronenberg is popular in arthouse circles and overseas, but he's never hit it big in Hollywood. Furthermore his last crime-drama A History of Violence was, to say the least, underwhelming.
The presence of Armin Mueller-Stahl and Miss Watts, however, says a great deal for this picture. More importantly it has to its advantage a killer trailer and what looks like a series of brilliant performances by a well chosen ensemble cast. With a release on the horizon and an up and coming Australian actress in what could be the role of her career so far, Eastern Promises is worth a look.
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