It’s no great stretch to think of Michael Shannon as a hitman. Or Ray Liotta as a hitman’s boss. But “The Iceman,” based on a true story, has a hitman’shome life (Winona Ryder plays the wife), Josh Lucas as an associate and James Franco as a guy who is appears the hitman decides not to whack. Looks like an interesting variation on a weary movie “type” and much-explored theme, the morality of a hired murderer.
Lots of supporting players have signed on the dotted line for the big screen version of “Hercules” that Dwayne “The Once and Future Rock” Johnson is set to star in. There’s Ian McShane and John Hurt, Rufus Sewell and Joseph Fiennes and Rebecca Ferguson.
And now this younger guy from “The Lovely Bones,” Reece Ritchie is to be in “Hercules: The Thracian Wars,” which comes out in July of 2014.
One’s a sci-fi picture in which Tom Cruise finds out if Joseph “Tron” Kosinski has a little blockbuster magic left him in his tank — a ruined planet, a conspiracy to keep news of who might still be “down there” and alive.
The other’s about an unhappy man (Colin Firth) who fakes his death and takes off with Emily Blunt, who’s also on the run from her past.
The American Dream, in other words.
He doesn’t look like the images of the character from comic books. He has a blueish glow for the next “Amazing Spider-Man” movie, due out in 2014.
But it’s an arresting look, and the hoodie lends him a certain currency that costumed hero and villain pictures need.
It’s due out May 2, 2014. More pictures? Go here.
The first rule of any baseball movie is that the guys cast to star in it have to look like they can play. And in “Home Run,” Scott Elrod had the build, the swagger and the sweet swing of a big leaguer. That makes him and this thin tale of twelve step redemption credible and watchable, if nothing else.
Elrod, a character actor who played a hunk hired to perform the fake film script in “Argo,” is a big league slugger with alcohol problems and daddy issues.
The booze we can see in his everyday routine, dumping out the soft drink, filling the cup with vodka. And the daddy problems we’re shown in a prologue, when a young Cory Brand had to “be a man” and take fastballs from his drunken, abusive father.
It all blows up that day he’s drunkenly called out after hitting what he thought was an inside-the-park home run. The tirade he tosses injures a batboy, his own nephew, it turns out, and earns him an eight week suspension.
That forces his agent (Vivica A. Fox, terrific) to get creative. She packs him off to his hometown. But another screwup — a DUI — adds to the mess.
“Why don ‘t you just SHOOT Bambi, next time?” she wants to know.
Now, he’s got to go to 12 step “Celebrate Recovery” meetings. And he has to coach his brother’s Little League team.
There’s a disapproving sister-in-law (Nicole Leigh), a few star struck Little League parents, and a fellow coach (Dorian Brown) who happens to have been Cory’s high school sweetheart.
And she has a son (Charles Henry Wyson) in need of a father figure.
“Home Run” is an utterly conventional faith-based film built around Cory’s coming to grips with his demons, making amends for his wrongs and finding religion. The cast does what it can to enliven that, but the twelve step meetings are too familiar to play as fresh and the film’s leaden pace only makes us wonder how long it will be before we hear “The Serenity Prayer.”
You know it, I know, and if you’ve ever seen a movie about recovery, you can recite it from memory.
“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,” etc.
The trouble with that over-familiarity is it robs Cory’s journey of any emotional punch it might pack. The script lacks on-the-field drama as well, with Cory have no real nuggets of wisdom to teach the kids about America’s Passtime.
But the scenes between Elrod and Fox crackle, and the movie never goes far wrong so long as Cory’s going wrong — on and off the field. It’s too bad the muted “Home Run” didn’t take its own advice about being daring and inventive.
“Nothing great happens when you hold back.”
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some mature thematic material
Cast: Scott Elrod, Dorian Brown, Vivica A. Fox
Credits: Directed David Boyd, written by Brian Brightly, , Candace Lee, Melanie Wistar,Eric Newman . A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:33
Paris-Manhattan” is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen. First-time writer-director Sophie Lellouche has taken bon mots from Allen’s movies and used them to create nothing less than a philosophy of life for her heroine,
This has to be the most promising popcorn/comic book/fanboy film of the summer. Not to limit its possibilities or anything.
Now we’re talking…
And this just in, Microsoft Internet Explorer has set up a “Hunger Games” info explorer, just for fanatics. Details are in this Variety story.
Quentin Tarantino made her the most famous stunt woman alive. But Zoe Bell, now 34 and years removed from her breakout in “Grindhouse,” is looking beyond the tumbles, crashes fights and falls.
Even though “You’d be surprised how many people actually do this to a ripe, old age,” she’s concentrating more on the acting thing these days. She has a supporting role in the new Tom Cruise sci-fi film “Oblivion.” And she’s both producer and star of “Raze,” a two-fisted genre thriller about kidnapped women forced to fight to the death that has its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival April 21.
For “Raze,” she liked the challenge of finding that “visceral” place that would “make a woman want to kill. Because I don’t think it’s in our make up.” And she liked trying her hand at producing, “at being in those meetings, having a voice in the big decisions. When I’m a stunt woman on a movie, I’m strictly a ‘Yes sir,’ girl. They ask, I find a way to do it. But acting puts more in your hands, and producing gives you more control still.”
“Oblivion” was a straight acting job, the chance to be a face in a big budget film “even though we stunt people kind of like the anonymity of our work.” She was overwhelmed at the scope of the sets, and star struck. “First time Tom Cruise came on the set, I heard him before I saw him. And I was like, ‘I’ve known this guy since ‘Risky Business.’ Only I don’t know him. Everybody called him TC. I tried it once, but I just couldn’t.”
Bell grew up in New Zealand, training first as a gymnast and then as a martial artist. When the TV series “Xena: Warrior Princess” arrived to begin production, Bell found her calling. She’d double Lucy Lawless in the fights and falls. She’d become that rare stunt woman in film.
A documentary featuring her titled “Double Dare” was made, and Quentin Tarantino came calling. He started “training me to be an actress in ‘Kill Bill’ (she doubled Uma Thurman), asking me questions about motivation, ordering me not to take acting lessons.” When “Grindhouse” (2007) came along, he put her on camera, acting, fighting and clinging to the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger, a movie that was “Tarantino’s love letter to Zoe Bell,” says Tim Anderson of the horror fans website Bloodydisgusting.com. Suddenly, Bell was famous.
The acting jobs have turned up, here and there — a lot of them like “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” — she’s in heavy makeup and costume, and she’ there to take a beating. “The most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” she says.
Injuries? Only two “soul searching ones,” she says. The first, a back injury on “Xena” when she was 19 taught her that “I’m not invincible.” The other, breaking her wrists when she was shot out of a trailer in an explosion in “Kill Bill.”
“For a year, I couldn’t crawl.”
She says she’s learned what her limits are (“No motorcycle stunts.”) and hopes that even as she branches out into producing and acting, that she’s overcome the worst fear facing anyone working in Hollywood, in front of or behind the camera.
“It’s always scarier saying ‘No.’ As an actress, I can say ‘Yes’ to more. But sometimes, as a stunt-woman, I have to say ‘No.'”
