Posted on Wednesday, April 10th, 2013 by Angie Han
For the past several weeks, the casting of Jane Got a Gun has played like an extra-handsome version of musical chairs. First Michael Fassbender and Joel Edgerton were in, then Fassbender departed and Edgerton took his place. Jude Law was brought in to take Edgerton’s old slot, but then he left too. Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Jeff Bridges were eyed as potential replacements for Law, before Bradley Cooper finally booked the part.
But one seat has remained steadily empty throughout the process, until now. Noah Emmerich will round out the cast of the Gavin O’Connor-directed Western as Natalie Portman‘s husband, whose betrayal of his gang sets the rest of the plot in motion. Hit the jump to keep reading.
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Posted on Monday, April 8th, 2013 by Angie Han
Odds are you’re already plenty familiar with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, who’ve been kicking around the pop cultural landscape for the better part of a century. And you probably also have a fairly good idea of what Gore Verbinski‘s done with the characters in the upcoming The Lone Ranger film, thanks to all the promos and stills we’ve seen so far.
But in case you want to get even more up close and personal with the iconic Western duo, Disney has just released a pair of character posters featuring Johnny Depp as the off-kilter Tonto and Armie Hammer as the mysterious Ranger. Check them out after the jump.
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Posted on Monday, April 8th, 2013 by Angie Han
The all-star lineup for Jane Got a Gun is changing again, hopefully for the last time. Bradley Cooper has just joined the Gavin O’Connor-directed Western in the villain role vacated last month by Jude Law — who was himself a replacement for Joel Edgerton, who switched characters when Michael Fassbender departed.
The troubled Western has seen some serious shakeups over the past few weeks, most famously when original director Lynne Ramsay quit by simply not showing up on the first day of production. O’Connor was quickly brought in to take her place. The one major player who’s remained steadily in place throughout is Natalie Portman, who plays the title character and also serves as a producer. Hit the jump to keep reading.
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For every regular movie watcher, there’s a genre or two that gets, if not a free pass, at least an automatic look. Heist movies and westerns fill that column for me. So I’m predisposed to be interested in Dead Man’s Burden, which documentarian Jared Moshé (Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel) directed as his dramatic feature debut. That the film boasts genre-appropriate 35mm cinematography and a good cast (Barlow Jacobs, David Call of Nobody Walks, and Clare Bowen of Nashville) doesn’t hurt.
This trailer sets up a simple but classic premise: family strife, exacerbated by the return of a long-absent brother. Yet as detailed as the beginning of the trailer is, I’m not at all sure where this one goes. There’s a strong current of familiar genre imagery here, including quite a heavy dose of The Searchers, but that seems to inform the look and staging, rather than how it all plays out. Check out the trailer below. Read More »
Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, Drive) has employed images of serious violence in the past; his first team-up with Ryan Gosling featured both intimidating threats and gory action. Now we’ve got the first footage from their second film pairing, Only God Forgives, a violent revenge-thriller “western” set in Bangkok.
Gosling plays a boxer and drug smuggler pressed into vengeful action when his brother is killed. This trailer isn’t terribly gory, but it is laden with the heavy air of things just about to go really, really wrong. The color in the images, combined with the music and a sense of floating, suggest that this is a story that descends into the same psychological space as Bronson. This time, however, Refn has more resources at his disposal.
And yet, more than anything else, it’s the opening dialogue from Kristen Scott Thomas, playing the mother of Gosling’s character, that gives me chills. Compared to that, Gosling’s invitation at the end of the trailer seems almost polite.
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We’ll see a new trailer for Jerry Bruckheimer‘s The Lone Ranger soon as Disney plans an April 17 event to show off twenty minutes new footage accompanied by a Q&A and other bells and whistles.
But for now the studio has dropped a fiery new image. It’s a stark, appealing pic that could be from just about any western shot in the past decade. In that respect it’s pretty good, and we’ll hope the forthcoming footage has enough promise to match this and the sense of weirdness we get from Johnny Depp‘s serious, bird-headed appoach to Tonto. Read More »
Having now seen Django Unchained, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jamie Foxx in the title role. The Oscar-winner gave a transformative performance, starting as a meek, clueless slave and slowly growing into a fearless, gunslinging bad ass. However, many readers likely remember that Foxx wasn’t writer/director Quentin Tarantino‘s first choice for the role. His first choice was Will Smith. Since turning down the role, Smith has pretty much remained mum on the details behind his decision.
Smith has now begun promoting his new movie, M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, and said the reason he didn’t take the role was because he didn’t think Django was the main character. Read More »
The Jane Got a Gun story keeps getting more complicated.
The outline of the story, as we know it, is that the indie western produced by and starring Natalie Portman was set to begin shooting this past Monday, but that Ramsay didn’t turn up to direct on the day. Producer/financier Scott Steindorff spoke out via Deadline, saying he was “shocked” at the director’s behavior. He quickly hired Gavin O’Connor (of Warrior, which also starred Jane Got a Gun cast member Joel Edgerton) as a replacement director. Now Steindorff is looking for an actor to replace Jude Law, who had recently been hired for the film, but dropped out following Ramsay’s departure.
But the bigger story about the film is still in between the lines. Suggestions are emerging that Ramsay had actually quit the weekend prior to production start; if that is the case, then the big statements and assumptions made this week have to be re-evaluated. In the meantime, however, there is a new casting effort to report. Read More »
