The re-release of The Phantom Menace opens with that exhilarating blast of John Williams's famous theme, the Star Wars title zooming off into the distance in 3-D before the familiar text crawl creeps across the starry backdrop, revealing the words we've all been longing to see back on the big screen:
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She can put “Bond girl extraordinaire” on her resume and describes her character in the forthcoming Dark Shadows as a “bawdy Barbie,” but between those two roles Eva Green is a woman holding on for dear life during a global pandemic in Perfect Sense. In David Mackenzie’s romantic drama, Green plays an epidemiologist struggling to track and contain a series of mass-scale maladies. Acute emotional states like unexplained sadness cause the human race to gradually lose the ability to taste, smell, hear and see, leading to more than a few mood swings.
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The brilliant haute spy character Modesty Blaise – created by British author Peter O’Donnell in 1963 and kept alive, through 2002, in a series of comic books and novels – has been botched on film so many times that those of us who love this urbane, intuitive temptress (with a flair for hand-to-hand combat) have mostly given up hope. Joseph Losey first missed the target with the 1966 Modesty Blaise; Scott Spiegel took another wobbly shot with the 2004 direct-to-video My Name Is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure. But the spirit of Modesty lives, by another name and in a different sort of story, in Stephen Soderbergh’s stylish, quietly exhilarating Haywire, which features mixed martial-arts star Gina Carano as a hit person with a smoldering, deadpan gaze and nutcracker thighs. She also, as it happens, looks killer in a cocktail dress.
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Watching mixed martial artist Gina Carano fight on television, director Steven Soderbergh was struck by inspiration: Why not build an action movie around the lethal (and yes, gorgeous) athlete to show audiences what a real action heroine could look like? Forget Angelina Jolie in Salt, or any number of actresses who’ve unconvincingly flitted their way through the genre. Carano was the real deal, a woman who can dole out punches with bone-shattering believability, leap between buildings, and battle Hollywood’s best leading men with aplomb, as evidenced in this week’s Haywire.
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MMA star Gina Carano makes her action heroine debut this month in Steven Soderbergh's spy revenge pic Haywire, which bone-crunched its way into moviegoer hearts during AFI Fest. Can't wait to see Carano put a beat down on just about every leading man (Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender) whose path she crosses? Submit a 10-word review of any Soderbergh film to enter to win a pair of tickets to Thursday's Los Angeles premiere.
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I don't know if you can tell by its freakishly quirky title, but Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is freakishly quirky. Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, and a suddenly super-droll Kristen Scott Thomas star in what appears to be a Middle Eastern-set romcom with kooky supporting characters. There's also a chance that it's an Eat, Pray, Love for downtrodden white men, which would be despicable. You figure it out.
The fairytale action subgenre gets another entry next summer when Bryan Singer's CG-fantasy take on the Jack and the Beanstalk tale hits screens, with fresh-scrubbed Nicholas Hoult in the lead. That officially makes it "from the director of X-Men," starring that one kid who was in that other X-Men movie -- no, not X2. Or X3. The other one. Get your flaming tree catapults and Jurassic Park moment after the jump in the new trailer for Jack the Giant Killer.
Don't let singer-songwriter Johnny Nash anywhere near the new trailer for the Ewan McGregor movie The Perfect Sense, because it's a Contagion-style disaster film where everyone loses their senses one by one until they can't see, hear, smell, taste or -- I guess -- touch anything. It's a little hokey and a little hilarious, but with Eva Green (the best Bond girl of all time, period) in tow, there may be some genuine hope for this one. If only I could see or hear it!
Since our friends at Next Movie totally went there, why not bat this one around Movieline HQ? It's Friday! Live a little. In honor of Michael Fassbender's infamous display of total nakedness in this week's Shame -- emotional and physical, to be fair -- Next Movie ran down the nine greatest "penis moments" in the movies. Yes, Ewan McGregor. You made the list.
AFI Fest's "secret" screening of Steven Soderbergh's Haywire wasn't so much a showcase for the AFI darling as it was a coming out party for MMA bruiser-cum-action heroine Gina Carano, whom Soderbergh glimpsed fighting one night on TV and subsequently built a star-studded spy thriller pic around. But it's hard to say if first-time actor Carano will branch out in a film career beyond the often lo-fi action experiment. Is she a hybrid of Angelina Jolie and Steven Seagal, as Soderbergh suggested Sunday night? Or is there more of a Cynthia Rothrock quality to Carano's steely gaze and powerhouse physicality?
January isn't exactly the time of year when you want your film to hit screens, but maybe Steven Soderbergh's Haywire will defy the "dumping grounds" curse! After all, in addition to starring MMA fighter Gina Carano as a double-crossed covert ops specialist, it's written by Lem Dobbs (The Limey) and has folks like Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano, Ewan MacGregor, Michael Fassbender, and Michael Douglas filling out the cast. Mmm, Fassbender. Yup, we're in. Relativity will release the film January 20, 2012. [Press release]
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