Jessica Biel likes to play her action heroes with a touch of femininity. Movieline pal Grace Randolph hit a special New York screening of Total Recall on Thursday night and chatted with the actress on the red carpet. Biel plays the resistance fighter Melina and asked what quality she likes to bring to her action roles, tells Randolph that she aims to portray a character “who feels like a real woman,” not “someone who’s so tough that you can relate to [her] but someone who is feminine and has an emotional arc as well as a physical arc.
The screening was hosted by The Peggy Siegal Company and InStyle magazine, which features the beautiful Biel on the cover of its August issue. After the screening, guests headed to Meatpacking District nightclub No. 8 to compare notes and Len Wiseman’s remake with Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 original starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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At one point, Kate Beckinsale remembers, director Len Wiseman thought of tapping her for a cameo as a three-breasted hooker in his Total Recall remake. Luckily for the actress, Wiseman (who directed the British beauty in Underworld and Underworld: Evolution — and happens to be her husband in real life) instead cast Beckinsale in the much juicier role of Lori, the adoring wife of factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) whom Quaid discovers is actually an undercover agent hellbent on killing him. Consider that a divorce, indeed.
Expanded considerably by scribes Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback as an amalgam of Sharon Stone’s duplicitous Lori and Michael Ironside’s ruthless Richter from Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version, Beckinsale’s Lori — her first onscreen villain — is baddie Cohaagen’s (Bryan Cranston) loyal right-hand woman, embittered by the humiliating role she’s been assigned, but relishing in her dogged pursuit of Farrell’s Quaid with glee. (She also boasts unfailingly fantastic hair, in keeping with Beckinsale’s action cinema filmography.)
Beckinsale sat for a chat with Movieline about Total Recall, Lori’s inner psyche, how marriage lends insight to her working relationship with Wiseman, and how she resolves her “Kate Beckinsale” public image/action heroine reputation with her literary roots and lesser-seen work.
This version of Total Recall is quite different from the Verhoeven original in many ways, including its emphasis on a more geopolitical commentary. But the Lori character in particular, which is vastly expanded here, is a sharp, strong woman who literally rejects this domestic role that she’s been given, playing wife to Douglas Quaid at the behest of her employer.
I think she’s an extremely highly trained, highly intelligent, and very much at the top of her field operative, and the detail that…
The Colin Farrell-starring sci-fi remake Total Recall is readying for release this weekend (read Movieline’s review here) and while Len Wiseman’s adaptation of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven film that mixes up bullets, muscles and abstract notions of Cartesian dualism and the specious present isn’t the worst thing in the world, it is hardly memorable. (A bit of an unfortunate situation, as the whole thing is about memory.) Still, it’s important that we don’t present ourselves as the type of dweebs who get all hung up over sci-fi remakes. Sometimes, they’re damn good, as this list of ten shall prove.
10) War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg, 2005
No masterpiece, but a thrilling piece of work with some genuinely shocking imagery. Despite the four year gap, this was the first major mainstream film that was able to take 9/11 imagery and have it make sense in an entertainment context. It lacks the cheeseball zip of the 1953 version, but it certainly works on a visceral level.
(It is not my top adaption of the H.G. Wells story, however. That will forever go to Jeff Wayne and his 1978 prog rock opera. The dorks in the back know what I’m talkin’ about.)
9) The Omega Man, Boris Sagal, 1971
Charlton Heston is so secure in his house he’s not going to pay those cloaked mutant zombies no never mind!
A quick shot of a vaccine prior to the deployment of biological weapons in a Russian-Chinese war keeps Heston alive, but his wits keep him safe. When he discovers he’s not the last person alive, he takes the fight direct to the horrible clan of beasts.
The Omega Man is a remake of The Last Man on Earth, but also based on the novel I Am Legend. This…
Full Story »Yes, there is a triple-breasted hooker in Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake.
If you happened to have missed the news posts and Comic-Con appearances (it was a lot of publicity for a three-line role), please rest assured that a futuristic working girl does indeed flaunt her unusually augmented bosom for Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), just as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. It’s one of the few callbacks to the hallucinatory nature of Paul Verhoeven’s wild-eyed, schlocky, terribly fun 1990 blockbuster, few other qualities of which this redo shares. The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre.
Instead of Earth and Mars, this Total Recall world is split between the United Federation of Britain and the country formerly known as Australia, now called the Colony. (Reportedly the two were originally Euroamerica and New Shanghai, but in the spirit of the rest of the film any potential political commentary seems to have been neutered.) Most of the world has been rendered uninhabitable by warfare, and the remaining population clusters in and threatens to overrun these two cities, which are joined by a giant transportation device that travels through the center of the Earth and is called The Fall.
The Fall, half space shuttle and half commuter rail, is the film’s most interesting idea, uniting the oppressive UFB and its head of state Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) with the have-nots in the Colony — as many of the latter, including our hero, travel to the more industrialized nation each morning to serve as cheap labor. Quaid shares an all-concrete studio in the Colony with…
Full Story »Friday’s Total Recall reboot trades heavily on brand enthusiasm for Paul Verhoeven’s original 1990 dystopian sci-fi actioner, but its makers had to be careful not to invoke too much of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. And cool as it would’ve been to see the former Governator pop up in the new, grittier reimagining starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Biel, Kate Beckinsale, and Bryan Cranston, director Len Wiseman (Underworld, Live Free or Die Hard) explained to Movieline why he chose not to indulge his inner fanboy.
“There was talk about it very early on, and the kind of teenager in me fan was very tempted by it,” Wiseman said of the possibility of a Schwarzenegger cameo. “But the further we got into production on it, I just thought it would be too gimmicky. I wanted the movie to be its own movie.”
The tonal difference between the original Total Recall and Wiseman’s is one reason why such a wink-wink nod might have distracted audiences too much. “I had to kind of check myself,” he continued. “How often had I seen that happen where I really thought it worked well? I haven’t, actually. It refers to itself in such a gimmicky way that I think it just takes you out of the movie.”
Another would-be stunt cameo that almost made it into the Total Recall reboot was a brief appearance by Ethan Hawke, who was widely reported last year to be contributing a mystery performance to the film. Hawke even filmed his scene, which was said to include a five-page monologue.
[KINDA-SPOILER ALERT] Producer Toby Jaffe spilled the beans, revealing that Hawke had been brought in to play a version of Farrell’s…
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Again with this “teaser for a trailer” business. If you cannot wait until Sunday to get a glimpse of the actual trailer for Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake, here are thirty seconds of Colin Farrell driving flying cars and jumping off of balconies and Kate Beckinsale looking hot. I’m still holding out for evidence that Wiseman kept the three-boobed lady in his version, which will determine if this rehash of the 1990 sci-fi gem gets my ticket dollars or not.
I mean, at least the ridiculously short 15-second Breaking Dawn Part 2 teaser trailer teaser had pecs and hands and Edward Cullen and stuff. Show me the alien boobs, Wiseman!
The full trailer will air on ABC on Sunday during the first half of the Celtics-Heat game before an extended version debuts online at Apple.
The official synopsis for Total Recall — “inspired anew” by Philip K. Dick’s source short story:
Total Recall is an action thriller about reality and memory, inspired anew by the famous short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick. Welcome to Rekall, the company that can turn your dreams into real memories. For a factory worker named Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), even though he’s got a beautiful wife (Kate Beckinsale) whom he loves, the mind-trip sounds like the perfect vacation from his frustrating life – real memories of life as a super-spy might be just what he needs. But when the procedure goes horribly wrong, Quaid becomes a hunted man. Finding himself on the run from the police – controlled by Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) – there is no one Quaid can trust, except possibly a rebel fighter
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Full Story »Director Len Wiseman may not be taking Colin Farrell’s Doug Quaid to Mars in his “realistic,” more Philip K. Dicksian Total Recall remake, and his version may be “a hard PG-13” instead of the original film’s R-rating. But rest assured, he’s staying true to the best part of Paul Verhoeven’s Arnie-starring 1990 classic: The three-breasted woman. “You can’t make a Total Recall without certain things,” Wiseman told Collider at Comic-Con. Indeed. [Collider]
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Surprise! Ethan Hawke has signed on to make a cameo appearance in Len Wiseman’s Total Recall, joining Colin Farrell and Bryan Cranston in the cast. No word on what role Hawke will play, though — judging from the original — perhaps he’ll have something to do with Kuato. Of course, since this Total Recall dispenses Mars for Euromerica and New Shanghai, who knows what direction the latest adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It for You Wholesale will take? [THR/Heat Vision]
Also in this Thursday edition of The Broadsheet: Robert Zemeckis hopes to take Flight… a No Strings Attached breakout star lands another role… Chris Colfer, writer… and more ahead.
· Were the reboot of Total Recall taking place on Mars, Kate Beckinsale would be getting her ass there. Maybe. The actress has been offered one of the two leading female roles in the Colin Farrell-led remake: that of Lori, the duplicitous wife made famous by Sharon Stone in the original. No word yet on whether Beckinsale will accept, but considering her husband Len Wiseman is directing, let’s just say the chances are probably good. [Deadline]
· The last live-action film Robert Zemeckis directed was Cast Away in 2000, so fingers crossed this one gets off the ground. (Groan!) Zemeckis is in talks to direct Flight for Paramount with star Denzel Washington “loosely attached.” Whoever winds up leading Flight will play an airline pilot who safely crash lands a malfunctioning plane, is hailed a hero, and later revealed to have been under the influence of drugs and alcohol while flying. Yikes. At least he wasn’t also watching Cleaner? [Deadline]
· Nothing like good casting news to brighten your morning. Jake Johnson — who, along with Greta Gerwig, helped form the only tolerable couple in No Strings Attached — has been added to the cast of 21 Jump Street. [Variety]
· Scream 4 reunion! David Arquette and Adam Brody (Seth Cohen, 4eva!) will co-star in Hemlock Drive for first-time director — and David’s sister — Roseanna Arquette. Oscar winner Susan Sarandon has also been added to the film, which follows a dying mother who assembles her children…
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