Maybe it's my hairline, but I've always been partial to John McClane's brand of bald (and smirky) heroism. So, it's good to see my favorite hairless hard-ass Bruce Willis shooting up Russia with his cinematic son Jai Courtney (Spartacus) in the latest trailer for A Good Day to Die Hard. I'm not sure how I feel about Courtney as a potential heir to the McClane Yippie Ki Yay legacy. (For one thing, the kid has got way too much hair.) Then again, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over this because a Die Hard movie without Willis is not a movie I want to see. more »
Go ahead and tell me you didn't see this coming: The Russian government is underwriting a biopic of the late-19th/early 20th-century ballerina and tsarist "femme fatale" Mathilde Kschessinska, and its cultural ministers have enlisted Paul Schrader to write the screenplay for "an internationally acclaimed director to be announced soon." OK, fine — I didn't see it coming, either. Read on for full details, by which I mean an explanation from all involved.
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Now here's a trend I can get behind: "[U]p to December, there hadn't been a single Russian film in the top 20. The film expected to create a bombastic box-office crater -– war epic Burnt By the Sun 2, at $40m the country's most expensive production ever –- fizzled out embarrassingly when part two was released in May. A few years ago, Russians learned to stop worrying and love the blockbuster as they began producing SFX-laden spectaculars like Night Watch; now they're learning about the flipside -– the car-crash pleasures of rubbernecking a box-office flop." [The Guardian]
You think the Oscars selection process gets political here? Just imagine sitting in the room when Russia's national Oscar committee grudgingly voted for Nikita Mikalhkov's enormous critical and commercial bomb, Burnt by the Sun 2: Citadel (Utomlyonnye solntsem 2: Predstoyanie), to become the country's official foreign language selection. Filmmaker and committee head Vladimir Menshov so strongly opposed the pick of the $45 million flop that he's now lobbying publicly for the film's director to pull out of the race.
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Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, 12 Rounds) is not the first director -- or the second or third or heck, the 20th -- you'd expect to direct a serious movie about a recent political conflict that resulted in numerous human rights violations, civilian deaths, and tenuous relations between Russia and neighboring Georgia. But that's just what the genre veteran did in the Aug. 19 pic 5 Days of War, telling The New York Times he "wanted to shift to films that he said would 'allow me to look at myself in the mirror' in the morning." Congrats, Renny! You're that much closer to making up for Cutthroat Island. [NYT]
