First, Abe Lincoln was a vampire hunter. Now he sounds like he might have been a very early member of the Green Lantern Corps. The 16th president's tough formative years will be explored in The Green Blade Also Rises, which will mark the directorial debut of Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) protege A.J. Edwards who also wrote the screenplay. Malick will produce the film, which despite its sci-fi-sounding title, will depict the hardships that molded young Abe into the man who became one of America's most influential presidents.
Lincoln has yet to be cast, but the filmmakers announced on Friday that Wes Bentley (The Hunger Games) will play the president's first teacher, and Brit Marling (Another Earth) will play Nancy, Lincoln's biological mother. Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds) and Jason Clarke (Public Enemies) are also on board as Lincoln's step-mother and father. Edwards got his start as an editorial intern on Malick's The New World and served as the editor on his most recent film To The Wonder.
Movie events have become deadly little things, highly mechanized gadgets thrown by studio marketing departments into an audience’s midst in advance; then we just stand around and wait for them to explode. The Hunger Games, adapted from the first of Suzanne Collins’ hugely successful trio of young adult novels, was decreed an event long before it became anything close to a movie: More than a year ago its studio, Lionsgate, launched a not-so-stealthy advertising campaign that made extensive use of social media to coax potential fans into convincing one another that they had to see this movie. The marketing was so nervily persuasive that you had to wonder: How could any movie – especially one that, as it turns out, is largely and surprisingly naturalistic, as opposed to the usual toppling tower of special effects – possibly hope to measure up?
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Now here's an image that could inspire a rebellion: Jennifer Lawrence hit the premiere of The Hunger Games in shiny, glowing gold, joining cast mates Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, and more to celebrate the upcoming YA event movie. Well, OK -- that number's not quite bow and arrow, running-through-the-woods killing people-friendly, but JenLaw destroyed everyone else on that black carpet, including guest (and... secret Hunger Games fan?) Sylvester Stallone. Photos after the jump!
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With only three weeks to go until YA adaptation The Hunger Games hits theaters, Lionsgate has released the first actual clip from the Gary Ross-directed film, and it's a memorable moment Hunger Games fans should recognize: Forced to show off her skills for the Capitol's boorish, drunken Gamemakers -- the designers of the Games, headed by Wes Bentley's Seneca Crane -- Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) lets an arrow fly in an act of defiance that finally gets their attention.
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In the vigilante fantasy Gone, Amanda Seyfried plays Jill, a young Portland woman who can’t shake the memory of her abduction a year ago. She managed to slip through the guy’s clutches – he’d been holding her at the bottom of a deep pit in a sprawling local park – but the local cops, after finding no evidence of said hole (it’s a very big park), decided she made the whole thing up. Then one night Jill’s sister (Emily Wickersham) goes missing in a similar fashion: When Jill goes to the cops for help, they eye her warily, all except newbie detective Wes Bentley, who purrs at her creepily, in a red-herring sort of way.
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Another year, another couple hundred entries in the ever-deepening conversational archive known as The Movieline Interview. They're the collective backbone of our site, and in 2011, it was at its strongest. Look back with us now at the highlights, including the luminary likes of Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Segel, Jodie Foster, Paul Giamatti, and a certain honey badger of a director.
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In a huge development for this week's Movieline interviewee Wes Bentley, the actor has landed a high-profile gig in Gary Ross's 2012 adaptation The Hunger Games! The role marks Bentley's first major advancement since bouncing back from career-threatening personal demons, and pits him against the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson as sinister foil Seneca Crane, the Head Gamemaker in charge of devising deadly obstacles for heroine Katniss Everdeen and her fellow tributes. More on Seneca Crane and what this means for Bentley after the jump.
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Rarely do actors reveal as much, as candidly, as Wes Bentley did in a recent conversation with Movieline. Speaking about his latest film, the Roland Joffé-directed Spanish Civil War drama There Be Dragons, Bentley offered a frank window into his life following the crippling, years-long addiction that waylaid what was once one of Hollywood's most promising young careers.
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