The latest project to fall into the laps of prolific hoarders Amanda Seyfried and McG is a movie based upon Sabrina Rudin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article The Girl Who Conned the Ivy League. I’ve just read the original story to get a handle on what the movie would be about, and in basic terms, it’s this: Esther Reed steals a series of identities, eventually becoming Brooke Henson and getting admitted to Columbia University under false pretenses, not to mention a false identity. Detectives looking for the real Brooke Henson, who was a missing person, track the fake Brooke down but before they can nab her, she hits the road and vanishes. At this point, police detective Jon Campbell takes on the hunt as easily his biggest case to date, and the chase is on.
There’s more than a whiff of Catch Me If You Can about this, I think you’ll agree.
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The Tourist, the romantic thriller starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie that remakes the French film Anthony Zimmer, has been shooting for a while after taking a very long and winding road to set. Now director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) has two new actors to work with: Paul Bettany and Rufus Sewell. We don’t know their roles at this point, but this is slowly looking less like an over-cooked studio disaster. [Variety]
After the break, Amanda Seyfried and others join the already impressive cast of Albert Nobbs, while Emma Stone could join Steve Carell on screen. Read More »
Almost a year ago Catherine Hardwicke signed with Warner Bros. and Appian Way to direct The Girl with the Red Riding Hood, a “gothic retelling” of the Little Red Riding Hood story. There hasn’t been much public movement on the film since then, but Hardwicke is still attached, and the studio now has a lead actress in mind to get the film moving: Amanda Seyfried. Read More »
The latest, definitely NSFW trailer for Atom Egoyan’s Chloe comes from France where they’re reputedly a lot happier about nudity and ’sensuality’ than in the US. You can see for yourself after the break. It will probably leave you with the impression that the French are quite happy about women kissing each other too. I wonder if they’ll be happy with this remake of one of their local hits, Nathalie… which starred Emanuelle Beart, Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant in the Amanda Seyfried, Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore roles respectively.
I’m a longtime fan of Egoyan’s, since Family Viewing knocked me upside the head half a lifetime ago. He’s an ace with tense and unnerving thrillers about fraught relationship tangles, so I expect to find that he absolutely nailed this one to the post.
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The common trailer complaint is that they always give too much of the movie away. Which is funny, because that’s actually not the case nearly as often as you’d think, and after being able to compare many movies and their trailers, I would have long ago hoped that people would realize the truth of it. In the case of Letters to Juliet, however, things are different. When I saw the trailer in front of the New Moon screening two days ago I couldn’t help feeling a great sense of relief that I’d never have to sit through the entire feature, because I’d just seen it all in the trailer. Now you can, too, after the break. Read More »
Two years ago, screenwriter Diablo Cody made a huge splash with her big screen debut Juno, which was praised by critics, and was ultimately met with backlash by those who arrived on the backend of the hype. An Academy Award and two years later, Diablo is back in Toronto with something to prove. If you hate Cody, I doubt Jennifer’s Body will do much to change your mind. There are sure to be a lot of naysayers with a vocal agenda who will likely never give this film a real chance.
For me, Jennifer’s Body was a lot of fun. The movie feels more like the teen horror films that I grew up with in the 1980’s than the contemporary slashers produced by Platinum Dunes or Dimension Films. Actually, it plays more like a teen comedy than a horror film, and that’s not a bad thing. The laugh to jump ratio is probably 50:1.
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FilmSchoolRejects has posted some new photos from the Diablo Cody-scripted teen horror film Jennifer’s Body. The photos were were apparently scanned from Empire Magazine. After the jump I’ve included the new images which feature Megan Fox as a cheerleader and a man eating blood covered possessed demon, along with a dirty and bloody Amanda Seyfried. Head on over to FSR for the high res scans.
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Zack Snyder has lost two more Sucker Punch cast members: Evan Rachel Wood and Emma Stone have both dropped out due to “scheduling conflicts”. This comes one month after it was announced that the film’s lead Amanda Seyfried was forced to leave the project, also due to “scheduling conflicts”. Am I the only person that finds it strange that half of the announced cast have been forced to drop out due the scheduling issues? The cast was announced before Watchmen’s underperformed at the box office. And while I have absolutely no proof what-so-ever that the events are connected, my gut is telling me that they are.
Seyfried, star of Big Love, Mamma Mia, and Mean Girls was replaced with Emily Browning, whose credits top out with a bunch of crappy horror flicks (The Uninvited, Standed, Darkness Falls, Ghost Ship). And tonight Stone and Wood’s replacements were announced: Jamie Chung (Dragonball Evolution) and Jenna Malone (Into The Wild, Donnie Darko). Malone is a great catch. She’s definitely a talented and underused actress but it’s hard not to see a pattern: Warner Bros is trading down, casting considerably lesser known actresses which most likely will save them considerable cash on the budget side. Could it be that Warner Bros is concerned about the profitability of Snyder’s R-Rated $100 million fantasy film?
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Zack Snyder just lost his leading lady. According to Entertainment Weekly , Amanda Seyfried (Jennifer’s Body, Mama Mia) won’t headline Snyder’s action fantasy film Sucker Punch after all due to “scheduling conflicts”.
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Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Amanda Seyfried (Jennifer’s Body, Mama Mia), Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical), Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss), Evan Rachel Wood (The Wrestler, Across The Universe), and Emma Stone (Superbad) are in talks to join the all-female cast of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
Snyder has called the film “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”, an R-Rated $100 million budgeted 1950’s-period action movie which tells the story of a girl named Baby Doll (Seyfried) who is confined to a mental institution by her evil stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While imprisoned, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain. In this fantasy world, where she needs to steal five objects to help her out before she is deflowered by a vile man. Hudgens (”Blondie”), Cornish (”Sweet Pea”), Wood (”Rocket”), and Stone would play Seyfried’s fellow inmates who also travel into the alternate reality.
The film is gearing up to begin principal photography in Fall 2009, with an October 8th 2010 release date already announced by Warner Bros.
