Also in Thursday morning’s round up of news briefs, French director Leos Carax will receive honors at the upcoming Locarno Film Festival and a pair of actors take lead in upcoming thriller The Machine. Also actors Susan Tyrrell and Richard Lynch have died and Cannes, San Sebastian form alliance with Argentine film market.
French Director Leos Carax to Receive Locarno Fest Honors
Carax will receive the Locarno Film Festival’s Pardo d’onore prize. To mark the occasion, the filmmaker’s five features – Boy Meets Girl (1984), Bad Blood (1986), The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Pola X (1999) and Holy Motors (2012) will screen. The latter screened in competition at last month’s Cannes Film Festival.
Actors Board Sci-Fi Thriller The Machine
Caity Lotz (Mad Men) and Toby Stephens (Die Another Day) will play the leads in sci-fi action thriller the sci-fi thriller directed by Caradog James (Little White Lies), the film is produced by John Giwa-Amu from Red and Black Films. Jamie Carmichael of Content is Executive Producer. Start of principal photography is set for July 23rd in Cardiff, UK.
Around the ‘net…
Universal Readying Jurassic Park 4
Steven Spielberg will produce along with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Rise of the Planet of the Apes writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver will write the fourth version which Spielberg will not direct. The three previous installments grossed over $1.9 billion collectively, Deadline reports.
Spider-Man Estimated to Pass $125M Over Holiday
Starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, The Amazing Spider-Man’s pre-release tracking is showing a six-day opening of $125M, the best of any summer film aside from The Avengers, THR reports.
Oscar-nominated Susan Tyrrell Dead at 67
Nominated for best supporting actress for her role in John Huston’s 1972 boxing movie Fat City, she…
“I done a lot of things, that I ain’t proud of. Hurt a lot of people.” So says a repentant Gerard Butler as real-life ex-con Sam Childers at the beginning of the trailer for Marc Forster’s September curio, Machine Gun Preacher. How can Childers save his crumbling soul? By becoming a born-again missionary helping orphans in the Sudan… and by hurting those who oppose with the aide of a bazooka. What did you expect?
Debuting at the Toronto Film Festival, Machine Gun Preacher has some difficulties to overcome — namely that it’s another myth-of-the-white-savior film coming out so soon after the debate was kicked up by The Help. Of course, Childers is a real-life hero — and he did help build an orphanage in the Sudan that houses some 200 children who would otherwise be homeless or worse — so Preacher has a bit more credibility than what transpired between Skeeter and Aibileen, but still: that poster didn’t help. The trailer might, if only because it presents Childers as a man determined to overcome his past demons. That’s the stuff that works well here; the orphan-saving antics don’t, despite the presence of a pretty badass bazooka.
Other issues: Butler’s indiscernible accent, the always-great Michelle Monaghan reduced to giving pep talks at the supermarket (nice Egg Beaters plug, though), precious little Michael Shannon, and that corny kicker. There’s a good movie in this trailer, but whether Forster and Butler can pull it off remains to be seen.
VERDICT: Not ready to convert.
Head over to Apple to watch the trailer in HD.
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I’m sworn to secrecy regarding my recent previewing of Machine Gun Preacher, director Marc Forster’s forthcoming biopic about Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania junkie ex-con-turned-born-again-orphanage-building-gunslinging savior of Sudan. But there’s nothing that I or anybody else can say about the film that isn’t summed up in its new one-sheet featuring star and co-producer Gerard Butler, which is like whoaaa.
[Click right for full-size image.]
Not to take the easy, cynical way out either — Childers’s real-life story is genuinely mindblowing — but Jesus Christ indeed, pray for this poster. What to even say about it?
· Gerard Butler Packs Heat, Orphan in New Machine Gun Preacher Poster
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: No Condescending Racial Overtones at All, Nooooo
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: Say Hello to Gerard Butler’s Little Friend
· Orange Blood, White Messiah All Over New Machine Gun Preacher Poster
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: Is That an Orphan in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: Have Sad African Child, Will Travel
· Hope For Another Machine Gun Preacher Poster is the Greatest Weapon of All
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: What Kind of Buddy Movie is This?
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: Hand Over the Oscar, and No Sudanese Kid Gets Hurt
· New Machine Gun Preacher Poster: That’s Racist
[via IMDB]
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On this day back in 1966, a baby boy named John Cusack was born in Evanston, Ill. Within two decades, Cusack had moved to Hollywood and was building the foundation for his long-lasting career on a series of ’80s films like Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer and Say Anything. Three decades later, Cusack remains one of our most beloved actors, capable of charming audiences as a lovelorn audiophile, a depressed puppeteer, a neurotic hitman, and a variety of onscreen personas in between. In celebration of the actor’s 45th birthday, why don’t you dust off your copy of Hey Soul Classics and join us below to decide which of Cusack’s cinematic moments is his best.
So many good moments to pick from, ranging from his breakthrough role in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything (below) to last year’s Hot Tub Time Machine. OK, no one is allowed to choose a moment from Hot Tub Time Machine or Must Love Dogs because we have standards at Movieline and we’d like to believe that you do too. But any scene from Eight Men Out, Grifters, Bullets Over Broadway, Grosse Pointe Blank, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity (also below), and the rest of Cusack’s filmography is fair game.
Celebrate the day by sharing your favorite Cusack scene below.
[Photo: Getty Images]
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Vin Diesel has just boarded MGM’s upcoming action comedy The Machine as star and producer. The Fast & Furious actor will play “a human-like machine created in secrecy by the Pentagon as the world’s first true ultimate weapon.” (Please, no jokes about Diesel’s Oscar-worthy fluidity making this endeavor difficult.) The project comes from Night at the Museum scribes Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. [Deadline]
God bless Gerard Butler’s agent, who is nothing if not relentless. Despite a seeming lack of fans and/or likeability, the burly Scottish actor has what seems like an unending stream of generically titled films playing in a permanent loop. Quick: Tell me the difference between The Bounty Hunter, Law Abiding Citizen, Gamer and The Ugly Truth without resorting to IMDb. While you attempt to suss those out, remember that Butler also has Machine Gun Preacher in the works, too. That film was supposed to be a more serious-minded affair: Based on the true story of Sam Childers, a former drug dealing biker who found God and rescued a bunch of Sudanese children. As Marty McFly would say: Heavy. But then why does the first look of Butler-as-Childers on-set look so… ridiculous. Click ahead to answer the age old question: Is that a mullet or not?
For the record, I’ll go with “not.” Butler’s hair looks more like a ’50s greaser by way of Jay Baruchel after not showering for 5 days. Either that or a needs-a-haircut Pat Riley. Thoughts? Leave them in the comments below.
· Gerard Butler Means Business…in the Front [NYP/PopWrap]
