The new, permanent address is www.pocketfilms.com/blog – so update your bookmarks, blogrolls, etc. – we’ve tried to make it prettier and easier to use, and have what should be a fully-functioning RSS feed up and running to boot. Hope you like it – and any questions/suggestions, let us know in the comments over there.
Thanks all!
De Niro’s concentration on comedy in recent years has been depressing for fans of his earlier work, so this week’s The Good Shepherd – which he directed as well as cameos in – has been something of a relief even if it isn’t as good as it should have been. Thankfully, with loads of films in the pipeline, quite a few are set to involve straight acting for a change.
Next up is an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman fantasy novel Stardust, with a supremely impressive cast that includes the likes of Peter O’Toole, Ian McKellen, Rupert Everett, Ricky Gervais, Sienna Miller, Michelle Pfeiffer and Clare Danes. Then there’s New Orleans, a thriller about police corruption, with De Niro investigating with the help of his new partner, played by rapper 50 Cent, before hooking up with the rather more talented George Clooney for the crime drama 36.
Then it’s back to comedy for Hollywood expose What Just Happened?, based on the book by Heat and Fight Club producer Art Linson (who also wrote the screenplay), with De Niro playing a film producer having a tough time getting funding, with co-stars including the likes of Bruce Willis, Sean Penn and John Turturro. After that it’s more drama, starring alongside his erstwhile Taxi Driver co-star Jodie Foster for her latest directorial effort, Sugarland, about two lawyers fighting to end the exploitation of migrant sugar labourers.
Then more drama – and a return to familiar territory – for The Winter of Frankie Machine, with De Niro playing a retired mob hit man, lured back into his former profession for one last hit. Finally, he’s set to star as the husband of Meryl Streep female President of the United States in the political comedy First Man, which sounds promising – as does the computer game version of Heat, assuming De Niro, Al Pacino and Val Kilmer all sign on to do voice duties, as they’re currently only in negotiations.
Everyone’s favourite fantasy figure Angelina Jolie may be wasted in this week’s The Good Shepherd, and may have been seen in the tabloids more often than on screen in the last couple of years, but that’s hopefully set to change.
She’s next up doing full-on “proper” acting in A Mighty Heart, following the efforts of the wife of murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl to find out precisely how her husband ended up being beheaded on camera by Islamist fanatics back in 2002. then she’s on voice duties as the voice of the mother of the monster Grendel in the much-anticipated adaptation of the Dark Age poem Beowulf, starring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and a host of other top-notch actors, with more voice duties following in the animated comedy Kung-Fu Panda, alongside Jack Black, Jackie Chan, Dustin Hoffman and Lucy Liu, before switching back to drama for the Ayn Rand adaptation Atlas Shrugged, possibly alongside her real-world lover and father of her ultra-famous baby, Brad Pitt.
Damon’s been doing stupidly well of late, with only the disappointing The Brothers Grim and Ocean’s Twelve acting as blips on his career during his last few outings. Though this week’s The Good Shepherd may not be as great as could have been hoped, he nonetheless puts in a tip-top performance which suggests that it’s only a matter of time before he lands an acting Oscar to go with the one he got for writing Good Will Hunting with best buddy Ben Affleck back in 1998.
He’s already finished filming Margaret, revolving around Anna Paquin’s young girl who witnesses a bus crash, though it is not yet set for release, and has also wrapped Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen – promising that it’ll be much better than the last sequel to the fun Ocean’s Eleven when it’s released in June. Then, in August, we can expect to see him in another sequel, this time in his really rather superb Jason Bourne franchise, with The Bourne Ultimatum promising to answer all sorts of questions about his amnesiac assassin.
He’s also lined up to star aongside Tim Roth in Francis Ford Coppola’s inter-war period piece Youth Without Youth, and alongside his The Departed co-star Mark Wahlberg in 1980s-set boxing drama The Fighter, as well as providing the voiceover for the documentary Running the Sahara, following three men who want to be the first to run coast to coast across the Sahara desert.
Comedian Carrey’s gone for another deep and meaningful serious performance with this week’s The Number 23, following his tip-top straight turn in the modern classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a couple of years back. He’s currently – and oddly, considering his fame – only got one project on the go, providing voice duties for the titular elephant Horton in the animated Dr Seuss adaptation Horton Hears A Who, following his previous Seuss-inspired success with How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Steve Carell, best known for The 40 Year Old Virgin and the US version of The Office, will co-star.
Director Schumacher, still best known for his disasterous Batman and Robin, has tried his hand at deep and meaningful with this week’s Jim Carrey-starring psychological thriller The Number 23. He’s got another thriller up next, the occult Nazi mystery revenge piece Town Creek, set in small town America, and starring Prison Break‘s Dominic Purcell and Desperate Housewives‘ Jesse Metcalfe. Then it’s Centricity, starring The Matrix trilogy’s Monica Bellucci, the plot of which remains somewhat mysterious at the moment, before he takes on another psychological piece with The Crowded Room, based on the true story of a psychophrenic robber and rapist with no fewer than twenty-four different personalities. Twenty-three might be more appropriate, given his current movie, but you can’t have everything…
Nominated for Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for this week’s Letters From Iwo Jima (it’s also up for best screenplay and best sound editing, with the American half of Eastwood’s Iwo Jima double bill, Flags of Our Fathers, up for sound editing and sound mixing), it’s Eastwood’s fourth time being nominated for Best Director – all of them coming after he hit the age of 60. Not bad going for an old timer.
Next up for 76-year-old Eastwood is, erm… a well-deserved rest, by the look of things. Having just done two highly-praised films back-to-back, he’ll be taking a bit of time off to work on his golf. He has, however, lent his distinctive voice to the computer game version of his cult 1971 film Dirty Harry, set to be released for the Xbox360 and PS3 sometime later this year, and he has supposedly bought the film rights to the authorised biography of Man on the Moon Neil Armstrong, which could be a nice follow-up to 200’s Space Cowboys.
Having been a big name star in his native Japan for years, only recently has Ken Watanabe started making a name for himself in Hollywood – first came The Last Samurai, then Batman Begins, Memoirs of a Geisha, and now this week’s Letters From Iwo Jima. He’s now going from strength to strength.
Next up, and shown at Cannes last month, is A Dream of Red Mansions, a love story set during China’s vicious Cultural Revolution and co-starring Kate Hudson, which could prove intriguing (despite this ongoing obsession of America-backed films of casting Japanese actors as Chinese and vice versa). Then there’s (possibly) another Chinese epic, this time for Hong Kong master John Woo’s much-anticipated ancient Chinese epic The Battle of Red Cliff. Watanabe’s casting has yet to be 100% confirmed, but if he does join the cast it’ll be pretty impressive, including as it does Hong Kong megastars Tony Leung and Chow-Yun Fat, in their first joint venture since Woo’s 1992 classic Hard Boiled. Finally, Watanabe is rumoured to be cropping up as the Silver Samurai in the X-Men spin-off Wolverine, due out next year.
Everyone’s favourite oddball Southerner, doing his best to fill the near-legendary Terry-Thomas’ shoes in this weeks School for Scoundrels remake, has another comedy up next, starring as the titular sadistic gym teacher Mr Woodcock opposite Seann William Scott and Susan Sarandon. He’s rather good at doing deeply unpleasant yet somehow entertaining characters, so this tale of the old childhood fear of a hated teacher getting it on with your mother is bound to be one of those amusing yet uncomfortable flicks when it hits our screens on 11th May.
Also on the way – completed, just not yet set for release this side of the pond, is drama The Astronaut Farmer, with Billy Bob a retired astronaut who decides to build his own rocket on his farm in his desperation to get into space. Early reports are promising – assuming you don’t mind such sentimental premises, that is… After that he’ll play a father whose family face off against a gang of local thugs in an adaptation of the Leif Enger novel Peace Like A River, which should shortly be going into production.
He’s still best known as dweeb king Napoleon Dynamite, and this week’s School For Scoundrels is yet another nerdy role, but it looks like Heder is quite happy doing comedy, even at the risk of being typecast.
Next up is speed-skating comedy Blades of Glory, due 6th April, where he’s starring alongside Will Ferrell as one of a pair of arch-rival ice skaters stripped of their Olympic medals for cheating who find a loophole allowing them to compete as a team. Then there’s more sport – albeit animated – as he goes on voice duties for the penguin-based comedy Surf’s Up, revolving around (as if you can’t guess) a penguin surfing championship.
After that it’s back to slacker/loser territory for Mama’s Boy, with Heder as a 29-year-old living at home with his mother (played by the tip-top Diane Keaton), whose life of ease looks set to be ruined by the arrival of a new suitor, the excellent Jeff Daniels. Heder’s also completed a supporting turn in low-budget romantic comedy Moving McAllister, but that is as yet not set for release.
UK release date: 14th February
Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright — the team behind zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead — return for this gleeful pastiche of American action movies. Pegg stars as a top London policeman transferred to a crime-free village where all is not as it seems.
What begins as a very funny, very British murder mystery eventually mutates into an ironic action spectacular that blows up half of Somerset. Armed with a Who’s Who of home-grown acting talent and a surfeit of gags, Hot Fuzz also showcases the continuing comic partnership of Pegg and co-star Nick Frost. Their mismatched cops play out every buddy movie convention imaginable while discussing subjects as diverse as ice-cream “brain freeze” and the homoeroticism of action thriller Point Break. More smart than silly, this is self-confident comedy that’s proud to be British.
UK cinema certificate 15
Review by Jamie Russell
Former Shaun of the Dead and Spaced star Pegg is, with this week’s Hot Fuzz, making yet another strong case that he’s the first British comic with a real chance to make it big in America since Peter Sellers – but will he be able to maintain the momentum?
He’s certainly got a fair few more in the works – from a planned new sitcom about a pub quiz team (with his Spaced, Shaun and Hot Fuzz co-star and real-world best buddy Nick Frost), La Triviata, due some time this year through to the animated stoner comedy Free Jimmy, for which Pegg wrote the English screenplay (it was originally Norwegian) about a junkie elephant on the run and provides voice duties alongside the likes of Woody Harrelson, Kyle MacLachlan, Samantha Morton, David Tennant, Emilia Fox and Phil Daniels.
But there are also some bigger projects on the way, like the romantic comedy The Good Night, with Martin Freeman, Penelope Cruz, Danny DeVito, Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Gambon, or former Friends star David Schwimmer’s directorial debut Run, Frat Boy, Run, with Pegg starring alongside Thandie Newton and The Simpsons‘ Hank Azaria.
By far the most promising, however, is Pegg’s starring role in a big screen adaptation of Toby Young’s bestselling memoir of life at a high-end New York magazine, How to Lose Freinds and Alienate People – to be directed by Robert B Weide, best known for his work on the cult comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. That could well be enough to get Pegg into the Hollywood comedy A-list…
The Hot Fuzz director, much like his co-writer/star Simon Pegg, seems on the verge of great things. He’s already completed his next project, the Jack Black-starring conspiracy theory comedy Them, based on the book by Jon Ronson, which (once it gets a release date set) could prove promising. Then – surely one of the highest accolades for a cult director – he’s contributed a fake trailer to the much-anticipated Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriquez B-movie double bill that is Grindhouse.
Then come two comic book adaptations – though not quite the standard superhero fare that has so inundated our cinemas in recent years. First comes Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, from the cult 2004 comic about a slacker twentysomething who ends up in supernatural kung-fu battles with the ex-boyfriends of the girl he has a crush on. Could be intriguing… And after that will come an adaptation of Marvel’s Ant-Man – sort of like Spider-Man, only not as well-known. Or good. But considering Wright is also penning the screenplay – with The Adam and Joe Show‘s Joe Cornish – it’s a fairly safe bet that this isn’t going to be a straight-faced take on the character. With the little information currently available, this could show promise as well…
UK release date: 16th February
Less accessible than his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director/screenwriter Michel Gondry’s pretentious sci-fi vanity production is an overly whimsical, infantile affair.
Gael García Bernal plays a graphic artist who returns to Paris after his father’s death. Will he ever realise his neighbour Charlotte Gainsbourg is the soul mate he’s been searching for? Or will he continually dream he’s the host of a one-man TV chat show starring a swirling melting-pot of his desires?
With its makeshift “Blue Peter”-style special effects (constructed from egg boxes, clay and cellophane), the consistently juvenile approach soon becomes wearing and the whole self-indulgent mess is a complete waste of Bernal and Gainsbourg’s charms. Resembling Gondry’s Bjork rock videos strung between surreally presented concepts of romantic angst, this fey fantasy is frustratingly hollow. The “one second time machine” is the single clever laugh.
UK cinema certificate 15
Review by Alan Jones
The oddball French director behind the tip-top Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and this week’s quirky The Science of Sleep has a fair few more, equally bizarre, projects in the pipeline.
Next up is the movie reference-laden Jack Black-starring comedy Be Kind Rewind, set in a video store run by one of Black’s friends where all the tapes get wiped by Black’s magnetised brain, forcing the pair to recreate such Hollywood classics as The Lion King, Robocop and Back to the Future for the shop’s clientelle. With co-stars including Mos Def, Danny Glover and Mia Farrow, it should prove at the very least interesting, much like Gondry’s other work, and with Black in the lead should prove another Eternal Sunshine-style hit.
After that it looks like a leap back into Gondry’s personal obsession of space, time and human perception for Master of Space and Time. Based on the novel of the same name by Rudy Rucker, it revolves around a couple of (as yet uncast) mad scientists who find a way to control – as if the title isn’t clue enough – space and time. rumours are circulating that Jack Black could again be set to star, but it’s still early days, and isn’t due until next year anyway. Could be fun, though…
Pocket Films Blog 