Posts Tagged ‘Benicio Del Toro’

Short Take: It's main message is nothing new, but at least the plot varries from the original 1941 version.

Director: Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Jurassic Park III)

Screenwriters: Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven, Sleepy Hollow) and David Self (The Haunting)

Cast: Benicio Del Toro (Che: Parts 1 and2), Anthony Hopkins (Beowulf), Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria), Hugo Weaving (V for Vendetta)

Length: 1h 42m

Synopsis: It is 1892. Lawrence (Del Toro), a well off American thespian, is beseeched to come home to Wales after his brother had been mauled by a mysterious creature. His brother’s fiancé, Gwen (Blunt), seems inconsolable, and his father (Hopkins) appears abnormally composed. Nearby gypsies are being blamed for the horrible incident, but soon everyone is forced to deal with the truth that no human of any level of insanity could do or be what they witness. They are cursed with an unnatural beast, with an insatiable thirst for blood.

Analysis: The story is based from the 1941 film The Wolf Man starring the great Lon Chaney Jr., however there are enough differences between the two to keep The Wolfman from being a point-by-point remake. I shant divulge every disparity here, but suffice it to say that the plot takes considerably different turns on the way to its climax. Those things being said, the emergence of remakes don’t typically come about arbitrarily. The Wolf Man was released during a time when gothic horror was still somewhat popular (even though Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff broke down that door a decade prior), and traditional, animalistic monsters were the staple of the American horror genre. In the 2000s, American horror has primarily been focused on domestic villains, serial killers, ghosts, and reintroducing human-like monsters (Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and soon Freddy Krueger). The Twilight films may have started a re-emergence of gothic monsters – beginning, like before, with vampires – and The Wolfman could indicate the beginnings of a trend (Daybreakers is a debatable member of this trend, as it incorporates vampires but contains almost no other gothic stamps). Read the rest of this entry »

Publicity photo for Johnston's "The Wolfman"

Director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, October Sky, Hidalgo) spoke with FilmJournal.com about his upcoming movie The Wolfman starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving, which opens February 12th, as well as some ideas regarding is next movie The First Avenger: Captain America.

Regarding The Wolfman: Johnston had only three weeks of pre-production, he says, because the studio “had already spent so much money and had gone down this road with Mark Romanek, and said, ‘We have to start shooting the movie at this point.’ I think a lot of it involved possibly actors’ contracts and a release date. Fortunately for me, Mark Romanek [the film's original director] made a lot of good choices. He cast some great actors”—the three leads were all aboard by this point—“I was able to cast a few more good ones, and I was able to change a few of the locations that I didn’t think were great.”

Concerning Captain America: “We’re in prep,” Johnston says. “Rick Heinrichs is production-designing and we’re set up down in Manhattan Beach [California]. It’s the part of the process that I love the most,” he enthuses. “We have eight or ten really talented artists, and we all just sit around all day and draw pictures and say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this?’ It’s that phase of the production where money doesn’t matter: ‘Let’s put all the greatest stuff up on the wall and [then later] see what we can afford.’” The film, he says at this early stage, will begin “in 1942, 1943″ during World War II. “The stuff in the ’60s and ’70s [comic books] we’re sort of avoiding. We’re going back to the ’40s, and then forward to what they’re doing with Captain America now.”

To read more (which we recommend) see the full article.