I’m hugely fond of the headline accompanying this Expendables 2 “Comic-Con poster” (just what the movie needed, seriously, because surely none of the thousands of culture obsessives in San Diego will know anything about it ) on Ain’t it Cool News: “This EXPENDABLES 2 Comic-Con Poster Has Enough Booms, Badasses, Barrels To Humble Even The Most Uppity Of Geeks!!” Yes, it certainly does. You know what else it has? Hilarity. Somehow this all makes me envision Sylvester Stallone wolfing down a testosterone taco a few years past its sell-by date and then racing to the nearest Kinko’s and evacuating every last granule of his meal inside a color copier whose lid comes crashing down and short circuits and sputters and churns out a boomtastic accident likely intended for an imminent Chinatown bootleg DVD sleeve yet is just tasteless enough to qualify for Comic-Con signage. The man is good! Or at least he will be once his stomach settles. Better, anyway. [ Ain’t it Cool News ]
The Fifty Shades of Grey movie is moving forward, with two big names now on board. To produce it, that is. Still no word on who will play Christian and Ana . Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti, the team behind The Social Network , will produce the movie version of E.L. James’ novel, giving it a credibility boost. In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Universal co-chairman Donna Langley said of the film: “At its core, Fifty Shades of Grey is a complex love story.” “It requires a delicate and sophisticated hand to bring it to the big screen. Mike and Dana’s credits more than exemplify what we need in creative partners.” The books, about an innocent college girl drawn into the world of bondage and S&M by an attractive billionaire, have already sold 31 million copies worldwide. As for the details everyone’s most curious about – who will play Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey – we may have to wait awhile, according to E.L. James. “We are so far away from casting the Fifty films,” the writer tweeted last week. “No one has been ruled out… no one is ruled in. Just so you all know.” Names like the Vampire Diaries ‘ Ian Somerhalder, Alex Pettyfer, Matt Bomer, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum have been floated … who do you have in mind? Vote in our polls after the jump! Who should play Christian? Who should play Ana?
Star U.S. soccer goalie Hope Solo failed a drug test recently, but was let off with a warning after claiming she had no idea a prescription drug she took for “pre-menstrual purposes” contained a diuretic on the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited list . She will be eligible to compete in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. “Once informed of this fact, I immediately cooperated with USADA and shared with them everything they needed to properly conclude that I made an honest mistake, and the medication did not enhance my performance in any way,” Solo said. A sample of Solo’s urine collected June 15 tested positive for canrenone, a prohibited diuretic. But when Hope’s prescribed medication was found to contain canrenone in therapeutic doses, she was given a public warning, not a suspension. “As someone who believes in clean sport, I’m glad to have worked with USADA to resolve this matter and I look forward to representing my country at the 2012 Olympic Games in London,” the Dancing With the Stars alum said. Solo is one of 14 American athletes to receive a sanction under United States Olympic Committee’s anti-doping policies this year, according to the USADA. She is one of only three athletes to avoid suspension as a result. [Photo: WENN.com]
With all the casting chatter surrounding Catching Fire – Jena Malone! Philip Seymour Hoffman ! – let’s not forget about the movie that started it all. The Hunger Games comes out on DVD August 18, and the following teaser for the release takes fans behind the scenes with the film’s stars and teases the three hours of bonus footage you’ll receive if you purchase the box set. Watch now:
Channing Tatum hopes all the movie’s ‘awesome’ dances make it to the Special Features section of the DVD/Blu-ray. By Kara Warner Channing Tatum in “Magic Mike” Photo: Claudette Barius/ Warner Bros.
To say there’s nothing on the contemporary movie landscape like Alex Kurtzman’s People Like Us is to suggest that the picture is a groundbreaking work with special effects unlike any we’ve ever seen, that it’s fresh and original in its use of characters or situations from old movies (or even older comic books), that its 3-D wow factor rivals that of Avatar . But People Like Us is something odder: This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That’s more of a rarity on today’s landscape than it should be. Twenty or thirty years ago, you might have called a movie like People Like Us pedestrian, something not very special – it isn’t, for example, nearly as acidic or pointed as Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon . And still, People Like Us , despite the fact that it’s been given a title that dooms it to failure (more on that later), seems to be motored by a quiet urgency. The picture gives off the sense that there’s something at stake here, and there is. What big studio wants to bankroll this kind of movie anymore? Who wants to see this sort of thing? It’s all just feelings, and who needs them? We’ve got foreign movies and indie movies for that stuff. But I love the way People Like Us so defiantly carves a space for itself in a genre that no longer exists, the mainstream fractured-family drama. The picture has flaws: It could have used a great deal of pruning, especially in the last half. But Kurtzman — who co-wrote the script, with Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert — has structured the movie as a gentle mystery, and though it does have a genuine surprise ending, it still allows for the biggest mystery of all: Why do people we love sometimes behave in indefensible ways? People Like Us doesn’t pretend to have the answers; what it does suggest is that there’s honor in handling your own disappointment like a grown-up. Chris Pine plays Sam, a corporate failure who, as the movie opens, isn’t having a particularly good day. It gets worse when he arrives home and his girlfriend, Hannah (Olivia Wilde), springs some bad news: His father has died suddenly, which means he’ll have to head to Los Angeles from New York right away. Sam’s response to the news is oddly passive; in fact, he seems to want nothing to do with his father, an old-school record producer, who, until he died, was a living legend. And when Hannah finally gets Sam to Los Angeles, his mother, Lillian (Michelle Pfeiffer), greets him with a literal slap in the face. “The linens are in the closet upstairs,” she says icily. She waits a beat and then says, in the same dry, flat voice, “I’m glad you’re home.” It turns out Sam has been estranged from his father — and by association, his mother — for years. His reasons are at first vague, but they become more comprehensible as the movie goes on. Now that the guy’s dead, Sam is at least hoping for some kind of payoff: Instead, his father’s lawyer (played by the always-marvelous Baker Hall) hands him a Dopp kit containing a roll of bills — $150,000, to be exact — and a mysterious instructional note that leads him to the door of a single mom, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks), and her bright but too-precocious son, Josh (Michael Hall D’Addario). If you’ve seen the trailer for People Like Us , you already know the nature of the relationship between Sam and Frankie. That’s a shame – whatever happened to the idea of letting an audience discover a movie for itself ? – but it doesn’t necessarily mar the picture’s modest but potent pleasures. For years Kurtzman and Orci have been writing Hollywood blockbusters, big, fat moneymakers like Transformers , Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek . People Like Us is their attempt to make something quieter and more personal, and in places the experiment is wobbly: Kurtzman knows what to put in, but doesn’t always seem to know what to take out, and the score, by A. R. Rahman, is too syrupy for the subtle earth-tremor emotions Kurtzman teases from his actors. But the performers keep the picture moving, even through its sloggy patches. Sam’s dad has left him no money, but he has bequeathed him a killer record collection: Carefully categorized and shelved, this precious stash of vinyl covers the walls, floor-to-ceiling, of a magical man cave. (Anyone who has ever loved vinyl will sigh at the Ali Baba-ness of it all.) Pine, for such a young actor, has an old-soul kind of face. Sam is closed off at first, and Pine plays that repressed anger as a kind of recessiveness, a retreat into blankness. His dad’s album collection is, at first, a legacy that just pisses him off, chiefly because it’s not money. But later, as he comes to know Josh, and sees both how bright and how lost the kid is, he remembers that music can be a portal into a better world, one that’s somehow easier to cope with. He admonishes Josh against stealing from a local CD shop: “You can’t shoplift from a record store, it’s like kicking a dead man.” And he gives the kid an essential listening list that includes Gang of Four, the Clash, the Buzzcocks and Television. Pine plays Sam as a man who needs to reconnect with his old enthusiasms, his old self, and he has just the right amount of gravity to make that believable. He’s got the right degree of surliness, too: There are moments where Sam doesn’t appear to be the nicest guy, and you wonder if his complaints about his father are of the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” variety. Banks, so often a crazy-wonderful presence in the movies, is more grounded than usual here, but she shows more depth, too. And Pfeiffer, looking beautiful in a way that’s believable for her age, is terrific. Pfeiffer embraces rather than recoils from the steeliness of her character, and her fearlessness makes all the difference. Everyone in People Like Us comes through with the goods. Which brings us to our last question: What’s with the movie’s stupid title? In a recent New York Times article , Stacey Snider, one of the principals at Dreamworks, explained that the title was changed from its original Welcome to People (a reference to a ’70s kids’ pop-psychology record album featured in the film) because, Snider said, “ ‘Welcome to People’ didn’t suggest anything to anyone.” She added, “It told you nothing about the content of the movie, the size of the movie, the genre of the movie.” So thanks, geniuses, for giving the movie a new title that tells us nothing about anything and which is almost impossible to remember. Who in their right mind would run, not walk, to see a movie called People Like Us ? Not people like you and me, that’s for sure. But if there were ever a time to defy a studio’s crap marketing strategy, it’s now. People Like Us is about all the ways in which our parents fail us – and about how one of the loathsome chores of adulthood is having to get over that, and over ourselves. That’s either not a big enough subject to fill a whole movie, or too much ground to cover in one picture. Welcome to people: They’re completely horrible, except when they’re totally awesome. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Those marketing gurus at Fox are going to make sure you keep talking about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus all summer, as a new viral video has been unveiled that highlights, testimonial-style, how awesome it is to work for the good folks at Weyland Corp. The way this scientist chick talks about Weyland’s envelope-pushing embracing of new technologies makes it sound like the best corporation to work at since Pixar, only with more semi-feeling anthropomorphic robots running around the place making sh*t happen. The viral teases a recruiting event at next months’ Comic-Con in San Diego and links out to ProjectPrometheus.com , though the site has yet to be updated with information. What could it mean? (Besides DVD/Blu-ray promotion for Prometheus ?)
In 2008’s B-movie hit Taken , Liam Neeson cracked skulls across Europe in search of his kidnapped daughter. In October’s Taken 2 , director Olivier Megaton and producer/co-writer Luc Besson set out to achieve something rare — An actual continuation of story! Multi-film character development! Unexpected moral examinations! — a proper sequel, in other words, as evidenced by the first trailer viewable after the jump. The concept for Taken 2 was already promising on paper: The daughter Neeson saved in the first movie (Maggie Grace) must now help save her parents from the vengeance-seeking gangster father (Rade Šerbedžija) of the baddies Neeson murdered in his fatherly rage. The film’s new trailer delivers on this front, demonstrating what few sequels or reboots or re-jiggered whatchamacalits these days bother to do properly: Expand on their predecessors in new and interesting ways. Neeson’s ex-operative Bryan Mills seems to be the same guy he was in Taken , but the plot turns his righteous actions in the first film on their head; another father out there is mourning, and wants bloody revenge. Who’s to say Šerbedžija’s paternal pain doesn’t warrant its own reckoning? Is this a mindless action sequel or a meditation on the cycle of vengeance and a parent’s drive to protect their children at any moral cost? Meanwhile, Grace (whom Besson attempted to turn into an action star earlier this year in the Guy Pearce vehicle Lockout ) has the opportunity to morph her victimized daughter character into a heroine. Look at the way she leaps over rooftops like a lady Jason Bourne! Turning Kim into an action hero not only makes up for how wimpy and naive she seemed (a perception magnified by my residual resentment of Grace’s turn as the useless Shannon on LOST , I’ll admit), it could turn Taken into a bona fide franchise instead of, as too many hit films become, a series of diminishing, direct-to-DVD quality returns featuring declining marquee actors/C-listers/WWE stars. And we haven’t even seen the fighting potential of ex-wife (and now-kidnap victim) Lenore, though the lethal potential of Famke Janssen’s thighs is a historically documented cinematic fact. Taken 2 is set for release on October 5. Let’s hope it lives up to the potential. Thoughts?
In 2008’s B-movie hit Taken , Liam Neeson cracked skulls across Europe in search of his kidnapped daughter. In October’s Taken 2 , director Olivier Megaton and producer/co-writer Luc Besson set out to achieve something rare — An actual continuation of story! Multi-film character development! Unexpected moral examinations! — a proper sequel, in other words, as evidenced by the first trailer viewable after the jump. The concept for Taken 2 was already promising on paper: The daughter Neeson saved in the first movie (Maggie Grace) must now help save her parents from the vengeance-seeking gangster father (Rade Šerbedžija) of the baddies Neeson murdered in his fatherly rage. The film’s new trailer delivers on this front, demonstrating what few sequels or reboots or re-jiggered whatchamacalits these days bother to do properly: Expand on their predecessors in new and interesting ways. Neeson’s ex-operative Bryan Mills seems to be the same guy he was in Taken , but the plot turns his righteous actions in the first film on their head; another father out there is mourning, and wants bloody revenge. Who’s to say Šerbedžija’s paternal pain doesn’t warrant its own reckoning? Is this a mindless action sequel or a meditation on the cycle of vengeance and a parent’s drive to protect their children at any moral cost? Meanwhile, Grace (whom Besson attempted to turn into an action star earlier this year in the Guy Pearce vehicle Lockout ) has the opportunity to morph her victimized daughter character into a heroine. Look at the way she leaps over rooftops like a lady Jason Bourne! Turning Kim into an action hero not only makes up for how wimpy and naive she seemed (a perception magnified by my residual resentment of Grace’s turn as the useless Shannon on LOST , I’ll admit), it could turn Taken into a bona fide franchise instead of, as too many hit films become, a series of diminishing, direct-to-DVD quality returns featuring declining marquee actors/C-listers/WWE stars. And we haven’t even seen the fighting potential of ex-wife (and now-kidnap victim) Lenore, though the lethal potential of Famke Janssen’s thighs is a historically documented cinematic fact. Taken 2 is set for release on October 5. Let’s hope it lives up to the potential. Thoughts?
The film: Red Scorpion (1988) Why It’s an Inessential Essential: Co-scripted and produced by Jack Abramoff, Red Scorpion is a starring vehicle for Sweden’s own living action hero, Dolph Lundgren. Being the modest gentle giant that he is, Lundgren has nothing but good things to say about the film during the interview segment he shot for Synapse Films new release of the movie. But that says more about Lundgren’s personality than it does the crackerjack B-movie. As self-styled Lundgren expert Jeremie Damoiseau remarks in his annotated(!) liner notes, Red Scorpion nearly ruined Lundgren’s career (more on this shortly). Lundgren plays Lieutenant Nikolai Rachenko, a Russian “killing machine” that is tasked with murdering the leader of a group of rebel insurgents leading a coup in Africa. The Russians want the rebels stopped so they hire Rachenko to cozy up to the rebel leader’s advisor, now imprisoned by the Russians. In spite of repeated warnings from a smug, four-letter-word prone American journalist (M. Emmett Walsh, scowling up a storm), the rebel leader’s advisor grows to trust Rachenko, who in turn starts to see the murder and destruction caused by his comrades. Rachenko inevitably changes sides and becomes a hero, but only after being tortured by needles, attacked by scorpions, shot at, assaulted by a tank, thrown onto a moving motorcycle and berated repeatedly by the inimitable Walsh. How the DVD/Blu Ray Makes the Case for the Film: In his liner note, Damoiseu gives a stirring and comprehensive history of Red Scorpion that reveals how the film’s freaky production history helped to make it a memorable role for the charismatic–look at him pout!–athletic–thighs as big as a Rob Liefeld comic book character!–and smart–has a master’s degree in chemical engineering!–Swede. According to Damoiseau, Red Scorpion was a vanity project for Abramoff, who Lundgren describes during his supplementary interview as “patriotic,” and, “fiercely anti-Soviet.” Case in point: the film’s budget more than doubled from its original $8 million. Furthermore, production on the film continued even after the New York Times reprinted a story that revealed Abramoff and director Joseph Zito were disrespecting the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 by shooting in South Africa. That article stirred up considerable controversy, like when, to quote Damoiseau, “Sweden’s own Isolate Africa Committee called for a boycott of all films starring Dolph Lundgren.” The controversy surrounding Red Scorpion, which got a meagre first-run domestic release in America of 1,200 screens and grossed $4 million in its first two weeks, also made it difficult for the Lundgren-starrer The Punisher to be released in American theaters one year later in 1989. But at the same time, what makes Red Scorpion so fun is the fact that everyone was clearly throwing caution to the wind when they made it. The film could have been shot anywhere but instead it was shot in the desert, causing the film’s shooting schedule to distend from its original 2 1/2 months to 4 1/2 months. The film’s crew similarly used real guns and real dynamite for stunt-work. And while Tom Savini’s make-up effects certainly wasn’t real, Lundgren did many of his own stunts. Several live black scorpions were let loose on his back in one scene (their stingers had rubber tips put on them) while a P.O.ed hyena took a bite out of Lundgren after the filmmakers shot a deleted scene that’s not featured in Synapse’s release but is alluded to in Damoiseau’s essay. Other Trivia: Lundgren is such a generous and kind raconteur that it’s pretty funny listening to him reflexively trying to defend some things that any other star else would either conveniently gloss over or dismiss. He praises Sylvester Stallone’s detail-oriented direction of Rocky IV but also commends Red Scorpion director Zito for his zeal: “Zito was very postitive and had full momentum all the time rather than focussing on the individual scenes.” Furthermore, Lundgren’s not even sure why he did some of the stunts that he did for Red Scorpion , saying about a stunt where he jumps onto a speeding motorbike: “I don’t know if I was just stupid or if Zito wanted it.” He added, “Crazy! I would never do that today.”
