Looks like that Marvin Gaye movie Lenny Kravitz signed up for isn’t all that it was cracked up to be. According to TMZ reports : Marvin Gaye’s son wants his childhood friend Lenny Kravitz to walk away from the role of a lifetime — playing the Motown legend in an upcoming biopic — and says he’s shocked Lenny signed on for a project he calls “shameful.” Kravitz will play Gaye in “Sexual Healing” (working title) — which reportedly focuses on Marvin’s life in the 80s when he battled drug abuse and depression … before his father shot and killed him in 1984. Marvin Gaye III tells TMZ, “The producers and directors of this film are very wrong and shameful … [They’re] trying to do a film about a low period in his life. They don’t even know the whole story.” Marvin’s son says he and Kravitz were schoolmates — and remain friends to this day — so he wants to “talk to him about why he would do this.” Marvin Jr. tells us he and other family members are meeting with lawyers to try to stop production — and added, “I would hope [Lenny] doesn’t have any idea that we are against this film being done.” Dang, that’s tough. If you were in Lenny’s position what would you do? There’s only so many chances for any actor to get a dream role like this one — but how do you go against a longtime friend, who is also the son of the legend you’ve signed up to play?
George Lucas will take some part in the planned Star Wars: Episode VII planned by new Lucasfilm owner Disney, but it will likely be a minimal role. Speaking at the Governor’s Awards Saturday, he gave some insight on his duties in the next Star Wars installment being guided by Disney. “[If the filmmakers ask],’Who’s this guy?’ I can tell them,” he told Access Hollywood at the event in Los Angeles. “I mean, they have a hundred encyclopedias and things, but I actually know a lot. I can say, ‘This is this and this is that.'” Continuing, Lucas added, “Basically I’m not — I don’t really have much to do.” Lucas recently said in a more official capacity following the sale of Lucasfilm: “… Now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.” He also said he’d like to do “little personal films” going forward . Speculation has continued to swirl over who will direct the next Episode VII , though Lucas’ longtime friend, Steven Spielberg, nipped any rumors he’s in the running recently saying Star Wars is not his ‘genre.’ “I’m pretty sure he’d never want to do that!” Lucas said when asked if he’d give his approval should Spielberg ever change his mind. “I don’t think he’d want to.” Star Wars: Episode VII is slated to hit theaters in 2015. [ Source: Access Hollywood ]
Many have tried and failed to reboot Wonder Woman for contemporary audiences (some rather famously – looking at you , David E. Kelley). If The CW succeeds with “Amazon,” their origin series will envision the Amazonian warrior princess as a tough twentysomething fish-out-of-water named… Iris. According to Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva , a casting breakdown calls for Wonder Woman/Iris (maybe that’s just a code name, let’s hope) who’s at least 5’8″ and looks to be in her twenties; the character “comes from a remote, secluded country and until now has spent most of her life as a soldier and a leader on the battlefield.” Wonder Woman may be a leggy Amazonian goddess who’s handy in a fight, but her journey is so Beastmaster 2 : “Because of relentless brutality of her life at home, Iris looks at our world with absolute awe and astonishment. She’s delighted and just as often horrified by the aspects of everyday life that we take for granted: skyscrapers, traffic, ice cream. It’s all new and fascinating and sometimes slightly troubling to her.” This Wonder Woman is a tactless heroine with no social skills who’s an overachieving idealist who “can tell when you’re lying to her,” although it’s unclear whether that’s because she has a Lasso of Truth or if that iconic accessory has been metaphorically internalized. “Iris is completely unschooled in our world, our culture, our customs,” continues the breakdown. “And she’s completely inexperienced at interpersonal relationships. She has no social filter, does not suffer fools, and tends to do and say exactly what’s on her mind at all times. She’s bluntly, refreshingly honest. She can tell when you’re lying to her. And she doesn’t have time or patience for politics or tact because she’s too busy trying to experience everything our world has to offer. There are too many sights to see and things to learn and people to care for. Hers is a true, noble, and generous heart.” Etc., etc. Avengers director Joss Whedon (who’s also tackling Avengers 2 ) was set in 2005 to write and direct his own Wonder Woman film, which would have also followed a fish-out-of-water approach. Whedon described his version of the Wonder Woman mythos to Rookie Magazine last year: “[Wonder Woman] was a little bit like Angelina Jolie [laughs]. She sort of traveled the world. She was very powerful and very naïve about people, and the fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, ‘None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane.’ And ultimately her romance with [classic Wonder Woman love interest Steve Trevor] was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess, what it’s like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better.” Meanwhile, Warner Bros. is concurrently planning a Justice League movie and Wonder Woman standalone films , which will need to find their own starlet to don that star-spangled onesie and boots. So, let the casting games begin! Shout out your best picks to play “Iris,” AKA Wonder Woman, in the comments below. PREVIOUSLY: Wonder Woman Get-Up Now Slightly Less Sexy Halloween Costume Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Not so much a traditional sequel as a hallucinogenic riff on an entire franchise, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning plays like the fevered fantasy of a die-hard genre fan who requires only the haziest sort of dream logic to connect extended sequences of hand-to-hand, foot-to-ass, machete-to-arm and bullet-to-head combat. There’s something perversely fascinating about helmer John Hyams’ freewheeling yet deliberately paced mashup of noirish mystery, splatter-movie intensity, first-person-shooter vidgame and Apocalypse Now -style surrealism. But it’s questionable whether the pic will develop anything larger than a cult following when Magnet unleashes it as a late-fall VOD and theatrical release. Franchise mainstays Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren are back in action as UniSols, genetically enhanced and fantastically resilient bionic commandos. But they serve more or less as supporting players here, while most of Day of Reckoning focuses on Brit martial artist/action-pic thesp Scott Adkins as John, a fuzzily defined family man who awakens from a nine-month coma with jumbled memories of having witnessed brutal home invaders kill his wife and young daughter. Left with amnesia, John remembers only one thing with vivid clarity: The leader of the killers was a fearsome fellow identified by a helpful FBI agent (Rus Blackwell) as Luc Devereaux (Van Damme). Devereaux, the agent explains while questioning John, used to work for the government, and now is classified as a deserter. But Devereaux himself more likely would call himself a messiah. With the help of comrade Andrew Scott (Lundgren), the seemingly indestructible special op has been methodically recruiting and deprogramming other UniSols, freeing them of control by government-employed overlords and readying them for revenge. John repeatedly encounters an especially ferocious deprogrammed UniSol (Andrei Arlovski) while following a trail of clues that might lead to info about Devereaux — and, just as important, about John’s own forgotten past. Of course, this being a genre pic, that trail brings him to a topless bar, where he meets a beautiful dancer (Mariah Bonner) who claims to know him. Then things get really weird. Hyams and co-scripters Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenhalgh reference a wide range of sources throughout, with Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now being only their most obvious influences. (That Van Damme is made to resemble a leaner, meaner Col. Kurtz certainly isn’t coincidental.) There’s also a plot twist on loan from a classic Twilight Zone segment in which George Grizzard played another man trying to solve the puzzle of his past. To their credit, however, the filmmakers make mostly clever use of their borrowings, and they play fair: That surprise twist is signaled early on by clues hidden in plain sight. In any event, the twisty storyline serves primarily as an excuse to get the aud from one long stretch of mayhem to the next. Adkins may not be the most emotionally expressive of actors, but his formidable physicality serves him well during impressive action scenes that are additionally enhanced by the extra depth of field provided by 3D lensing. The grand finale is a series of what appear to be single-take sequences of bone-breaking, bullet-blasting violence, almost all of it presented with a practical-effects, minimal-CGI approach bound to impress genre devotees. Better still, the climax allows Lundgren to exuberantly deliver a line that, in this context, comes off as the pic’s only moment of comic relief. Even in their limited screen time, Lundgren and Van Damme demonstrate that you can teach old dogs new kicks. Other supporting players, including Arlovski, a Belarusian mixed-martial-arts champ, are adequate to the tasks at hand. For the record, Day of Reckoning is the fourth pic in a series that began with 1992’s Universal Soldier (directed by Roland Emmerich), and continued with Universal Soldier: The Return (1999) and Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009), which was also directed by Hyams and went direct to video in the U.S. There were two unrelated cable spinoffs ( Universal Solider II: Brothers in Arms and Universal Solider III: Unfinished Business , both toplining Matt Battaglia) that have evidently joined the ranks of Exorcist II: The Heretic ,” Jaws 3-D and just about every Halloween pic between Halloween II and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later as sequels that true fans like to pretend never existed. Related: Check out Movieline’s Fantastic Fest Review of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning Follow Movieline on Twitter.
If Lindsay Lohan doesn’t go back to jail as a result of today’s news, I have an idea for a film project for her: It’s a remake of Groundhog Day in which LiLo plays the Bill Murray role and wakes up every day to new criminal charges until she gets her act together. Since Tina Fey is the last person to get a memorable performance out of Lohan, she should write and direct. Harold Ramis , who wrote and directed the original Groundhog Day , could have a cameo as the wise prison warden, and…Jesus, why am I even bothering? I used to actually believe that Lohan had it in her to carve out a great second act in her life and career by stopping the nightclubbing, cutting off her embarrassing parents and devoting herself to work. But after five trips to rehab, the latest critical savaging she received for her performance in Liz & Dick and reports of her arrest Thursday morning and new criminal charges that are about to be filed against her, I think it may finally be time to declare Lohan a lost cause. As you probably know, Lohan was busted around 4 a.m. on Thursday morning after she allegedly punched woman at a Manhattan nightclub. Earlier that night, she’d caught Justin Bieber’s concert at Madison Square Garden, but apparently the good vibrations didn’t carry LiLo through the night. The NY Daily News reports that after exchanging words with 28-year-old Tiffany Eve Mitchell at the Chelsea nightclub Avenue, Lohan slugged the alleged victim in the face. TMZ reported that Lohan, 26, was arrested as she attempted to flee the scene in a friend’s car. “Are you kidding? Oh my God, are you kidding?” Lohan can be heard saying on the video of her arrest that the celebrity site posted. (I’ve embedded it below.) Lohan was issued a desk appearance ticket for misdemeanor assault and faces a Jan. 11 court date, but that’s just the beginning of her troubles. As TMZ reports, “she’ll face a total of four new criminal charges on the same day on different coasts.” In addition to the above charge, law enforcement sources told the website that the Santa Monica City Attorney will also hit Lohan with three criminal charges stemming from her car accident there last June on the Pacific Coast Highway. Lohan’s Porsche slammed into the rear of an 18-wheeler and though she told police she was a passenger in the car, it turned out she had been driving. The charges: Giving false information to a peace officer, obstructing or resisting a police officer in the performance of his duty, and reckless driving. (Meanwhile, Lifetime reportedly may sue Lohan for breach of contract because this incident happened during the shooting of Liz & Dick and the cable network’s insurance policy on the actress forbid her from driving.) Lohan is still on probation for felony jewel theft and TMZ notes that when the actress is arraigned on these charges, probably next week, the judge will revoke her probation and set a hearing to “determine if she will go to jail for a long period of time.” I can already see a tearful Lohan pleading for leniency, but will the judge, or anybody, be moved? At this point, it’s hard to feel any empathy — or even pity — for a 26-year-old actress who has squandered what should have been the most productive and exhilarating years of her career. Lohan could have been wowing us with her acting talent, but instead she chose to amuse and, ultimately, bore us with her bad behavior. [ TMZ , New York Daily News ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Kathryn Bigelow’s angular thriller Zero Dark Thirty begins and ends with events that have been seared into public memory — the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, two incidents that bookended a decade in which America’s sense of security and place in the world were radically shaken. The film presents the story of what happened in that dark space between. Using a combination of whatever details screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal could turn up in his research and cautious fiction, Zero Dark Thirty details how the U.S. was finally able to track down and kill the elusive head of the organization responsible for the worst terrorist attack on our soil. But at almost two and a half hours long — an epic running time that never seems excessive but makes you feel the stretch of the years being chronicled — the film also teases your attention away from those known events, and brings it to the gritty, exhausting and sometimes ugly work being done on the ground and the type of people who engage in it. It’s a curious thing that two of the awards season’s most significant films are stealthy procedurals: Lincoln , which beneath the surface gloss of a prestige biopic is a vivid showcase of the messy, difficult means by which the amendment to outlaw slavery was passed, and Zero Dark Thirty , which is an examination of how contemporary warfare has so much more to do with information than with sending troops out into battle. Both reveal the strenuous, time-consuming and ethically complicated efforts behind their well-known achievements. While Steven Spielberg’s film uses these exertions to bring animation, prickliness and warmth to characters that could have been wax-museum distant, Bigelow’s consciously holds its emotions at arm’s length, where they’ll be less likely to interfere with the work being done. Such is the choice made by its heroine, known only by her first name, Maya, and played by Jessica Chastain as a crisply dedicated but green CIA analyst with few other interests in her life other than tracking down bin Laden — a target she comes to fixate on as she builds experience and confidence. Zero Dark Thirty plays out in the shrouded and unpretty backstage of the War on Terror: embassy cubicles, dusty military camps and black sites where detainees undergo “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the film does not soften. Maya arrives fresh from D.C. to witness a prisoner being worked on by Dan (Jason Clarke, slipping easily from sardonic to savage). Sleep deprivation, waterboarding, confinement boxes and beatings — Maya doesn’t take easily to these techniques but doesn’t shrink from them either. Soon she’s ordering them herself as she searches for information about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, rumored top al-Qaeda courier and the man she thinks is key to finding bin Laden. The early fuss by Obama opponents who claimed the film (originally slated for an October release) would be a propagandizing election tool is laughable in context. The story starts long before Obama’s arrival on the presidential stage, and his on-screen presence in a single scene, in which Maya and her colleagues watch his televised speech about America not engaging in torture, is representative, in a wincingly complicated way, of how the new administration’s stance will complicate and slow what they’re doing. Zero Dark Thirty eschews the personal by design. We know nothing about Maya’s background, she has little enough of a life to explore outside of her work and doesn’t take to others easily. Our sense of her emerges slowly by way of Chastain’s elegantly steely performance. Maya doesn’t tend to let down her guard in front of others, and so our ideas about her inner life come from glimpses around its edges and through those moments when she lets things slip — from the warmth that bleeds into her interactions with her coworker and eventual friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) or the way she takes to writing the number of days of bureaucratic inaction on important information she uncovered on the door of her boss George’s (Mark Strong) office. Maya is suited to this life, as draining and dangerous as it is, and Chastain’s physical delicacy provides stark contrast to the character’s strength. She’s an unconventional action heroine with an amusingly atypical (for a female lead) interest in making nice with those around her. Like Jeremy Renner’s bomb tech in The Hurt Locker , Maya hones herself to become the perfect tool for the job at hand. But Zero Dark Thirty is less interested in movie indulgences than its predecessor, which may be why its coolness makes it an easier effort to admire than to lose yourself in. Its periodic action sequences — involving two very disturbing bombings, a shootout and the raid itself, which is staged in urgent darkness and threaded with misgivings about whether or not it’s a mistake — are brilliantly staged, but they’re stations along the journey, to be braved, pushed past or endured. Maya’s true place is at a computer or making her case with growing conviction in a conference room as important men played by Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, James Gandolfini, Mark Duplass and others are confronted by the force of her will, and the SEALs brought in to storm the compound (among them Chris Pratt, Taylor Kinney and Joel Edgerton) eye her with wary respect. Zero Dark Thirty makes you feel every step of Maya’s journey, but it’s her impressive achievement and that of the film itself that we’re left contemplating, not her humanity — a stunningly well-realized whole with few soft spots to latch onto. RELATED STORIES: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’: Strong Women, Ambiguous Ethics Drive Bigelow’s Oscar Pic TRAILER: Jessica Chastain Hunts Bin Laden In Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ CIA, Defense Dept. Sued Over Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama Bin Laden Movie, Naturally Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Christopher Nolan ‘s Batman trilogy has amassed nearly $2.4 billion theatrically worldwide to date, but Wednesday night, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker ( Memento , Inception ) sat down at the Film Society of Lincoln Center giving insight on the nuts and bolts of the series, which ended this summer with The Dark Knight Rises , its classic Bond-esque treatment of terrorism, the late Heath Ledger, and the upcoming Man of Steel . Bat-Beginnings and Evolution Nolan recalled his foray into Batman via the ’60s Adam West television series growing up. He’d, of course, later take on the legendary comic superhero, but not without precedent. The DC Comics figure has taken on various manifestations on the big and small screens, including versions by Joel Schumacher and Tim Burton . But Nolan figured out he had a different take on Batman — something closer to the comics. “If you look at what Tim Burton did, it’s very specific world created with a Gothic vision that’s consistent with Batman,” Nolan said at the Walter Reade Theater in a conversation moderated by outgoing Film Society programmer/critic Scott Foundas. “But, what I felt I hadn’t seen was [what I observed] in the comics which was Gotham as an ordinary world — a place in which we could live. And so, when Gotham sees Batman he’s as extraordinary as he would be in our world. What Tim did is place an extraordinary character in an extraordinary world.” Nolan said he wanted to break down Batman and attempt to explain the trappings and elements that create the figure in his re-telling of the story. “Part of the fun making the film for me was explaining these elements in real terms. Why is he wearing this costume? What does it mean? How does he get the costume? Is it just him and Alfred and the Batcave…? So there was this terrific gap in pop culture history that we got to contribute to and it was great.” Though Nolan made reference to the original comic book version of Batman, he was quick to add that he didn’t consider himself a comic-book junkie, acknowledging that treading into that realm can cause a serious rebuke from die-hards. “It’s dangerous to pretend you’re a comic book fan among a certain crowd because they spot you very early,” he said. Terrorism And The Dark Knight Foundas likened 2005’s Batman Begins to the ’60s-era Bond films as a product of its age. The first in the trilogy came in the immediate post 9/11 period with terrorism at the forefront of the national — and even international — consciousness. Nolan snapped up the compliment being associated with something ‘Bond’ but then gave his interpretation of how the period affected his first installment of Batman . “The Bond films were very specific about the time and [reflected] the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis etc. It was very edgy for the time,” said Nolan. “I think that one of the things about taking on an action film set in a great American city [that’s also] set post-9/11 is that there was no way we weren’t going to [address terrorism] if we were going to be honest.” “It’s tricky to talk about terrorism. I felt a responsibility as a filmmaker to create something that is foremost as entertainment,” he said. “But after there’s some distance, I also feel a responsibility even as an entertainer to be honest about my feelings and honest about my [concerns]. Heath Ledger Tickets to the Christopher Nolan event, which included clips from all three films interspersed with the onstage conversation were snapped-up fast. The 270-seat Walter Reade Theater could have easily been filled two times or more. A waiting list numbered in the hundreds, noted an insider. Still, the atmosphere inside could probably be best described as riveted more than ecstatic. Nolan spoke in a subdued tone throughout the event, though some of the biggest emotional responses came when he spoke about Heath Ledger. In his second to last theatrical release, Ledger won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award posthumously for his portrayal of the Joker in Nolan’s follow-up The Dark Knight . Well before shooting and even before there was a script, Ledger was cast as the villain, though he had initial trepidation about being in Batman . “We casted him before the script was even written, so he had a very long time to obsess over what he was going to do. I sent him some materials like A Clockwork Orange and other touchstones like paintings from Francis Bacon.” After Ledger finally received the script, it was Nolan’s turn to feel fear. By the time he received it, Ledger had already spent a lot of time developing the personality behind what would be one of his finest performances, though “becoming the Joker” did not come instantly. Still, he aced it and Nolan likened the late actor to the likes of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. “When I finally sent him the script it was very scary, because by this time he was so committed and knew what a high wire act it would be, and if he hadn’t liked it I think it would have been extremely bad for us both,” said Nolan. “But he breathed a sigh of relief and I breathed a sigh of relief, and he really felt it delivered what we talked about.” “Like a lot of artists, he would sneak up on something. You couldn’t really sit him down and say, ‘OK, today you’re going to do the Joker.’ You’d have to say, ‘Let’s read this scene, and act it,’ and he’d read it with Christian [Bale] and there would be a line or two where you heard him doing something with his voice that was a little different, or he’d throw in a little bit of a laugh, but meanwhile never saying, ‘OK, this is it!'” Next: Nolan on his Tarantino-esque stable of actors and producing Man of Steel
The Japanese collector who purchased Sam’s upright piano from Casablanca ‘s Parisian flashback for just $154,000 in 1988 is putting the piece of cinematic history up for auction. And as time goes by, movie memorabilia appreciates: On the auction block in December, the Casablanca piano could sell for as much as $1.2 million. Per THR and Gothamist , the piano from one of cinema’s most romantic films of all time appears in the Paris flashback scene as Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) prepare to part ways and he toasts, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Just in time for Casablanca ‘s 70th anniversary , the piano is expected to sell via Sotheby’s on December 14 for “somewhere between $800,000 and $1.2 million.” A hefty price tag for most folks, but for the billionaire romantic out there it’s the perfect conversation piece for raising a glass, pulling a date close, and whispering “Is that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?” It could even be used as a (rather expensive) prop for Casablanca 2 … [ THR , Gothamist ]
It’s hard to imagine Steven Spielberg getting a ‘No,’ but that’s just what happened back in the day when he went sniffing around taking on James Bond . But this was back in the late ’70s and he had yet to make some of his biggest pics. The lure of 007 prompted the Jaws director to ask Bond producers if he could direct an installment. “I went to Cubby Broccoli and I asked if I could do one and he said: ‘No,'” Spielberg told the U.K.’s Daily Mail . But, as legions of audiences know, Spielberg didn’t let the disappointment keep him from bigger and better things. He took on some franchises of his own and is of course in line for an Oscar nomination or two for his latest feature. “I never asked again,” he recalled. “Instead, I made the Indiana Jones series.” Still, he’s a 007 fan and heaped praise on the latest Bond, giving kudos to Sam Mendes’ Skyfall , which has cumed over $790 million worldwide since it first hit release in late October, followed by early November in the U.S. The Oscar-winning director said he will likely even see the latest one starring Daniel Craig as the British operative “again.” Since its initial limited release November 9th, Spielberg’s Lincoln has grossed over $62 million. Over the holiday weekend it played just over 2,000 theaters, grossing over $25 million. The film continues to generate Oscar buzz for the director and its star Daniel Day-Lewis. [ Source: Huffington Post , Daily Mail ]
