Archive for August, 2009

Susan Sarandon

Actress Susan Sarandon is in final talks with 20^th Century Fox to be in Oliver Stone’s next film Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, a sequel to his 1987 film Wall Street. Her role will reportedly be to play the mother of young Wall Street executive Jacob, played by Shia LaBeouf. Michael Douglas will also reprise his role of Gordon Gekko. Production is scheduled to begin next month in New York City.

Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps is scheduled to release on April 23^rd, 2010.

Source: Variety

Das weiße Band / The White Ribbon

German director  Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon is being submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to be considered for nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category. It was selected by an independent jury part of German Films, the country’s promotion organization.  Sony Pictures has bought the U.S. distribution rights, and is scheduled to release the film nationwide come February.

Oscar consideration is possible because, although the U.S. release date is in February, they beat the October 1st deadline for submission to the Academy.

“The drama recounts a series of disturbing events and examines the malevolence of human nature.” –Variety

The Academy will release its list of the final five nominees for Best Foreign Language film on February 2^nd. The Academy Awards will air March 7^th.

Source: Variety

Director: Kathryn Bigelow (Mission Zero, K-19: The Widowmaker)

Screenwriters: Mark Boal (In the Valley of Elah)

Cast: Jeremy Renner (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 28 Weeks Later), Anthony Mackie (Eagle Eye, We Are Marshall), Brian Geraghty (I Know Who Killed Me, We Are Marshall)

Length: 2h 11m

Synopsis: Staff Sergeant William James is a cavalier bomb specialist who seems to live for defusing bombs in Afghanistan.  During his thirty-nine-day tour in Bravo Company, he clashes with his fellow soldiers, but also grows closer to them as time goes on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Actor dives into ‘Ocean Paradise’

Associated Press

Jet Li in "Once Upon a Time in China"/"Wong Fei Hung" (1991)

Jet Li is returning to Chinese film with a reportedly non-kung fu movie after three Hollywood productions, a publicist said Tuesday.

Li is due to start shooting the movie – tentatively called “Ocean Paradise” in Chinese – Edko Film publicist Zhang Hongyan told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday. The film, due to be released next year, will be directed by a newcomer, Zhang said, declining to give further detail before the official announcement at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

Hong Kong-based Edko Film is the Chinese distributor for the movie.

The Chengdu Shangbao newspaper reported Tuesday that Li will not fight in the movie, but Zhang declined to confirm the report, only saying, “It’s a movie that’s very different from his previous movies.”

Li’s last three films were all American productions. His two most recent releases are “The Forbidden Kingdom” – which marked his first on-screen collaboration with Jackie Chan – and “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.” The 46-year-old action star just finished shooting the action thriller “The Expendables.”

A former national martial arts champion in China, Li first made his name in the Hong Kong film industry with the “Once Upon a Time in China” series before moving on to Hollywood, where his credits also include “Lethal Weapon 4,” “Romeo Must Die” and “Kiss of the Dragon.”

Source: Variety

Elizabeth Banks

Actress Elizabeth Banks is in final negotiations to star in Paul Haggis’ next feature The Next Three Days. The Lionsgate project is said to be a remake of the 2008 French suspense/thriller Pour Elle, directed by Fred Cavaye.

Banks’ character Laura is a woman who allegedly commits a crime but fights to deny the accusation. Russell Crowe will play her husband who tries desperately to prove her innocence.

Shooting is scheduled to begin next month.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

DiCaprio, Nolan

Director Christopher Nolan’s newest film Inception, which stars an ensemble cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy and Michael Caine, has a new teaser trailer that has just been released by Yahoo! Movies.

Inception, also written by Nolan, is said to be a complex sci-fi/action film that will play with the minds of audiences (CommingSoon.net).

Commingsoon.net seems to have the best video quality of the teaser, which you can access here.

Inception is set to release July 16, 2010.

Quick Opinion: The complexity and ambition of 2000′s Memento, which put Nolan on the map, is considered by most critics to still be his best film. If Inception is of the same level of intricacy and ingenuity then critics and audiences alike ought to feel satisfied with Nolan’s continuing pursuit to surpass his already impressively documented potential. The real test however, if the film is a success, will come during Oscar season where many of Nolan’s fans believed he got snubbed over 2008′s The Dark Knight.

Carlos Fresnadillo

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, director of 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, has been penciled in to direct the video game adaptation of Bioshock. Universal Studios bought the rights to the story from game producer Two-Take Interactive and have a completed script ready to go, written by John Logan (The Aviator, The Last Samurai).

Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, was slated to direct but was forced to back out due to budget and schedule complications. Verbinski is set to direct the animated feature Rango starring the voice of ex-pirate Johnny Depp, due to release March 18, 2011 (also written by Logan).

Fresnadillo’s official attachment to Bioshock is contingent on Two-Take’s approval.

Source: Variety, IMDb

For those who have not yet seen the History Channel’s documentary “Star Wars: A Legacy Revealed,” it is perhaps the most comprehensive look on the entire Star Wars saga. The 2 hour long show delves deep into the world’s mythology, religion, philosophy, and social impact in an attempt to articulate the tremendous attribution that the series’ author and director George Lucas owes while simultaneously praising him for creating such a timeless fairy-tale.

The documentary progresses by examining in detail each one of the main characters and what archetypal roles they fill, often resembling Greek gods, mythical beings, or legends of literary fiction. Symbolism has always been thought to be huge in the Star Wars universe, but at last this is a venue which explains symbolism and representationalism in an extremely approachable way. It is an engaging and well thought-out program.

The Emmy Award winning program first premiered back in 2007, but if you haven’t yet seen it and are at all interested in the Star Wars universe it is well worthwhile to look up.

Unfortunately it is not yet available on Netflix, but is available to view online in its entirety on the History Channel’s website. May the force be with you.

Gus Van Sant

Academy Award winning director Gus Van Sant is in talks with Imagine Entertainment and Columbia to take over and direct the screenplay of Restless, written by first-time screenwriter Jason Lew. Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and his daughter Bryce are set to produce.

After being shopped around to Ron Howard (via his daughter Bryce who attended New York University with Lew) and Imagine, the still unfinished script eventually ended up in the hands of Van Sant, whom Grazer believes is a perfect fit for the project. Grazer and Van Sant worked together on 1998’s remake of Psycho.

The story is a “contemporary take on young love” that is planned to be shot for around $15 million in Van Sant’s beloved northwest.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

The Thing

When released on June 25th, 1982, director John Carpenter’s The Thing made a little bit of noise with critics, but did little else to make a name for itself. That little bit of noise was not even positive however, as critical consensus was that the film gave away too much and yet harbored very little. Packed with gore effects of a quality that made even the most hateful reviewers concede to their brilliance, it was nevertheless those very effects which caused those reviewers to look upon the film with disdain and disgust. Since its lousy release, though, The Thing has slowly become more critically renowned and is a prideful source of entertainment and reverence for many horror and sci-fi audiences. It proves that in some cases, like some people, some films are simply made outside of their times.

The Thing (1982) is a quasi-remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World, but is more so, as claimed by Carpenter himself, an aspirant adaptation of their source material, which is the short story titled “Who Goes There?” (1938) by writer John W. Campbell Jr. Hawks’ version had long since been revered by fans and critics alike when Carpenter’s film was made, and by that very token could have ostensibly doomed any hopes that Carpenter might have had about making his film more successful on all levels. But Carpenter himself is an admitted fanatic of Hawks’ film, with Howard Hawks being one of his favorite directors of all time. So then, why do a remake? Carpenter’s version, written by screenwriter Bill Lancaster, is unlike Hawks’ in that the thing itself (i.e. the monster/alien) is not a man in a suite parading around like an alien (Hawks) but is actually as it is described in Campbell’s story; an organism that possesses the ability to occupy and imitate life forms of any shape and size (Billson, p.14-16). This differentiation in the makeup (that is, the physical and philosophical makeup) of the alien being is what Carpenter hoped would make his film much more frightening. Read the rest of this entry »