Movieblaze

Somewhere, somehow, amidst all the hoopla surrounding the news that Sharlto Copley and Jessica Biel had joined the cast of Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team, as Howling Mad Murdoch and, erm, the army colonel chasing the lovable mercenaries, we missed the news that Patrick Wilson had also joined the cast. Sorry about that… so here goes:

Patrick Wilson has joined the cast of The A-Team. There you go. That feels better.

The Watchmen star will play a CIA operative in the movie, about four resourceful veteran soldiers who go on the run to clear their names after they’re accused of a crime they didn’t commit. Wilson’s presence and character’s occupation could mean that he is – dum de dummmmmm! – the movie’s bad guy, which would make a hell of a lot more sense than giving that role to the frankly far-too-young Biel.

Filming on the movie has already begun, with The A-Team’s van – looking almost identical to the one used in the ‘classic’ TV show – glimpsed and papped in and around Vancouver. No glimpses of The A Team – that’s Liam Neeson as Hannibal, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson as B.A. Baracus, Bradley Cooper as Faceman and Copley – themselves yet, but those paps sure are resourceful. We can wait.

Good news for fans of Shane Black’s wonderful comedic thriller, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – which, of course, should include all right-thinking people (and, frankly, if you’re not a fan, stop reading this, go watch the film, become a fan and then come back here). Robert Downey Jr. and Michelle Monaghan are set to reunite in the new Todd Phillips comedy, Due Date.

Monaghan, so brilliant in Kiss Kiss as Harmony, today signed on to the road movie, which stars Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis as a mismatched duo racing across America in a desperate attempt to make the birth of Downey’s child.

Monaghan will play the pregnant wife, which we hope doesn’t mean that she gets little screen-time with Downey, for the two have more chemistry than Boots.

Filming starts on Monday, with the film scheduled for release next November; after filming wraps, Phillips and Galifianakis will head straight over to The Hangover 2.

Starring: Gerard Butler, Michael C. Hall, Amber Valletta, Kyra Sedgwick, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges

Director: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Writer(s): Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Cinematography: Ekkehart Pollack

Original Score: Robb Williamson, Geoff Zanelli

Running Time: 95 Mins.

Okay, let’s just get this one straight, Gamer is not quite as batshit crazy as Crank 2: High Voltage, in fact it isn’t quite in the realms or Crank crazy, but it IS from the team up of Neveldine and Taylor, the seemingly schizophrenic directors/writers behind those two previously mentioned Statham starring cinematic headf**ks! I call them this with a certain degree of fondness, for as crazy as they may be, and they are certainly cinema at its maddest, they are at a point where you feel you should admire them for their sheer disregard for what is right and wrong in society.

So while not quite at Crank-Crazy level, Gamer treads much the same path, so we have a grunting anti-hero, this time in the much more talented from of Gerard Butler, and a plot that affords a huge amount time to blow things up, kill people and generally cause mayhem and then there is the largely pointless decision to show a total lack of respect towards women, expoitative nudity is fine by me but it needs to at least be in context or have a point, that displayed here has neither. Which is the main problem with Gamer as a whole, large segments seem to have little or no point, particularly those set in “Society”, a real life Sims in effect. It’s within the confines of this, tellingly, that most of the pointless nudity takes place.

Once again the directors inability to keep the camera still is a problem because when a potentially half-interesting action scene occurs it cuts and flashes so much that you can’t actually tell what is happening, let alone who is shooting who, it might be seen as a stylistic flourish for Neveldine and Taylor but for the viewer it is a dull and dizzying experience. With attempt’s to create a coherent plot towards the film’s end, and fundamentally one that actually is trying to make a serious point with regards to society, and the control of technology over it, you are likely to left feeling a bit confused because anything it is trying to say jars against what we have seen before. Meaning it all adds to the general mish-mash of a rather lost story.

If you want to make a point it needs to be carried through, because every time Gamer picks up one strand it seems to be dropped in favour of the next highly implausible one, cliches fly around as if the 80′s action boom never happened and Butler fails to engage despite being a better actor than the Stath he looks as lost as you will watching this.

On the plus side, and it is admittedly a very good plus side, is Michael C. Hall, seemingly the only person who knows where the film should be pitched throughout he remains the most entertaining and rounded character on display. In fact for his Sammy Davis Jr. dance sequence alone the film is worth the admission price! Having never seen Dexter or any other production with Hall in, I could safely say on the basis of this he has a bright carreer ahead.

Having a larger budget here than they did on past films allows for a strrier cast, so a number of character actors pop up, Kyra Sedgewick, Ludacris, Alison Lohman etc. most of them are needless and have a handful of scenes, and once again an attempt to introduce a Children of Men style uprising story is flagged up and shot down that again you will wonder why they appeared at all. Yes Gamer obviously wasn’t designed to be particularly original, but it should have at least had the conviction to keep to a straight story about revenge, instead it tries to be many things and essentially becomes none of them, that it has flopped in America dramatically gives you some indication that even the gore and naked women hungry public have seen it for how weak it is.

 VERDICT

The teaming of Neveldine/Taylor has once again provided us with a rather pointless lesson is MTV film making, but this time it is nothing but a bore that only has Michael C. Hall as a saving grace.

Starring: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Jason Maza

Director: Andrea Arnold

Writer: Andrea Arnold

Cinematography: Robbie Ryan

Original Score: N/A

Running Time: 124 Mins.

The British film industry could, in a rather crude way, be reduced down to two types of film, the gritty kitchen sink drama or the Richard Curtis style rom-com, neither I find particularly endearing though while Curtis’ output is in a lazy way very enjoyable Friday night/Sunday afternoon fodder, you seemingly need to be a critic or a film student to take anything other than depression from the former, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are the big names in this field, and now I can safely say Andrea Arnold falls nicely into that bracket as well. Though for my money she has far more scope and ambition than either of those aforementioned grim directors.

Fish Tank, which is Arnold’s second feature, took away one of the top prizes this year at Cannes, something which  would seem to indicate the market the film will appeal to, in fact that very same market I talked of above, but in truth there is much much more here than the grim interiors of council estates and the goings on inside them, the Fish Tank of the title refers to the estate itself and the environment the lead character exists in, stuck looking out towards a much more appealing and largely better world she skirts around the fringes of in her ”Fish Tank” throughout the film, looking for escape but apparently unable to find one.

Her apparent saviour though seems to come two-fold, in the dancing she locks herself away to practice, with hopes of using it as her way out and the boyfriend of her mother who she can’t quite fathom. It is in the relationship between he (Fassbender, exceptional as ever) and her (Jarvis) that is at the heart of the narrative, though the usual stock characters are present and correct, bratty sister, slutty mother, pikey friends, ir is Fassbender and Jarvis who take their scenes and provide the dynamite of good acting. Jarvis is, quite shockingly, a newcomer (and was chosen by the director after seeing her argueing at a train station with her boyfriend). Yes she can argue with the best of them but it is in the quieter scenes she shares with Fassbender which are quite simply brilliant, acting of this calibre is not commonplace and certainly not from a newcomer.

As the film progresses the relationship between the central pair becomes more and more complex, raising many questions, does she see him as a father figure? Or does she have a crush on him? Is he as genuine as first appears and what are his intentions towards her? Are they father/daughter feelings, or as some instances would suggest, much more? This is not an easy subject to tackle, yet Arnold does so with great dignity, never putting us in aposition where we dislike or judge either person, and never making it seem as black and white as this type of film and situation can become.

The film’s other great strength, and that which suggests Arnold is as good a director as she is a writer is in the depiction of the council estate against the backdrop of the beautiful countryside, and later in the film the depiction of suburbia as somewhere that Jarvis should never have ventured, only here does the film take a somewhat strange turn, piling on the dread as secrets are revealed and steps taken that scare and make you wonder what kind of depressing end we will end up at, thankfully we are provided with a glimmer of hope in a heart shaped balloon rising from the council estate. Somehting that seems to define not just the attempt at something upbeat amongst all the confusion and mess, but also the directors visual prowess.

VERDICT

Director Arnold has assembled something quite special in Fish Tank, proving she is as adept at writing as she is at directing bringing out a stunning performance from newcomer Jarvis. Not as depressing as you might expect but challenging viewing none the less without becoming full of pretense.

Yes it isn’t going to blow the world away for originality or depth but this is a pretty cool if unrevealing poster…just savour the tagline and that big yellow 3 until we get something a little more…substantial!

I’m sad to report that Patrick Swayze has died at the age of 57 from the pancreatic cancer he announced to the world two years ago.

After playing Danny in a Broadway run of Grease, Swayze first came to widespread notice in the early ’80s in the well regarded TV mini-series North and South, and as a member of the so-called Brat Pack, with roles in The Outsiders and Red Dawn. But it was Dirty Dancing in 1987 that made him a household name, allowing him to put his classical training as a dancer to good use as Jennifer Gray’s heartthrob dance instructor Johnny Castle. 

Roles of varying quality followed (best of which was the glorious tosh that is Road House) until the 1990 smash hit supernatural romance Ghost, where he played the deceased Sam Wheat to Demi Moore’s Molly Jensen and Whoopi Goldberg’s medium Oda Mae Brown. The following year he played the zen skydiving bank-robbing surfer Bodhi in Katherine Bigelow’s Point Break, and was awesome. No man in the world watched that film and wished they were Keanu.

The rest of the ’90s weren’t so kind to him (although he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his uncannily convincing role in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar) as he battled alcoholism and broke both legs in a horse-riding accident. But he made a superb comeback in 2000 as the paedophile life guru Jim Cunningham in Donnie Darko, and enjoyed a successful West-End run in Guys and Dolls beginning in 2006.

He announced his illness to the world in the spring of 2008, and battled it determinedly, whilst always remaining up-front about its gravity. He is survived by his wife of 34 years Lisa Niemi, whom he met aged 18 when she was taking dance classes with his mother. The two never had children.

His Outsiders co-star Rob Lowe said last night that he’d “lost a brother”. Jennifer Grey said in a statement “Patrick was a rare and beautiful combination of raw masculinity and amazing grace. It was not surprising to me that the war he waged on his cancer was so courageous and dignified.”

Michael Jackson’s concert were stage shows that offered spectacular choreography on the kind of scale even Cecille B. DeMille would have dismissed as ‘outlandish’. The man may be gone but, thanks to new concert film This Is It, he’ll be back on screens for one final appearance.

Cut from footage shot during Jackson’s rehearsals for this year’s planned tour, This Is It gives one more chance to see the man-with-the-glove in action. Click here for a look at the official trailer, courtesy of BBC News.

This Is It is directed by Jackson’s long-time creative partner (and High School Musical director) Kenny Ortega, who describes the project as “a gift to Michael’s fans” and promises it’ll show Michael “as one of the greatest entertainers in the world.”

This Is It is released in the UK on October 28 for a limited, two-week run.

Officially it’s only a teaser trailer, but this clip hosted at Yahoo is the longest look we’ve had yet at Robert Zemeckis’ digital 3D animated A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey as Ebeneezer Scrooge.

With a story as well known and frequently filmed as this, the pleasure is always going to be in the details, so it’s good to report that those details seem worth turning out for: this manages to look funny and exciting and beautiful, even if the trailer is a bit over-reliant on shots of Carrey’s Scrooge being flung around and going “Aaaaaaaaghhh!” a lot.

There are snippets of choice dialogue (I like “I’d rather not”), glimpses of all the ghosts, and a lot of brief but often stunning shots of the major locations. Scrooge occasionally looks like Albert Steptoe, but the final frames of him blowing a snowflake off his nose are gorgeous, even if he is damn ugly.

A Christmas Carol will premiere in London at the beginning of November, with all ticket proceeds for the event going to the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The breakout star of Inglourious Basterds was unquestionably Christoph Waltz, who basically made the film as Nazi ‘Jew Hunter’ Colonel Hans Landa. Not only did the role land him a Best Actor prize at Cannes (and hopefully will see him nominated for a few bigger prizes come awards season) but it now looks to have landed him the bad guy role in Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet.

Yes, according to Nikki Finke’s Hollywood Daily, Waltz has landed the role of Chudnofsky, the evil nemesis of Seth Rogen’s Britt Reid / Green Hornet. Nicolas Cage was originally cast in the role, but left earlier this month after the “actor and studio were not able to come to terms on a deal”.

 With Basterds just having crossed the $100 million mark, it’s been a hell of a year for Waltz, who celebrates his 53rd birthday next month (quite possibly on set of the already-filming movie). In any case, we have some time to wait for the finished picture: The Green Hornet is not due out until December 17, 2010.

Well, we’ve been teased with a few clips and stills here and there, but finally we’ve got a full trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon online, and it looks better than expected. Sure, the wolves still look like Nintendogs, but the glimpses we get here of vampire nobility the Volturi look richer than anything we’ve seen in the series to date.

This instalment will see Edward (Robert Pattinson) leave Bella (Kristen Stewart) for her own good, believing that she can never be safe while he is around. But when he later believes that she has died, he heads off to get in trouble with the Volturi and essentially kill himself, and the actually-alive Bella has to stop him (it’s not a spoiler; it’s in the trailer).

Amid all this Bella’s friend Jake (Taylor Lautner) is pulling some moves on her, and also pulling his shirt off at every opportunity. Steady, ladies. And you, gentlemen.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon is out on November 20. You might have to wait until November 21 to wait for the stampede of girls to pass though.