I’m not sure what to make of this. Only hours after Joe Carnahan reasserted himself with the release of The Grey (my positive review is here), the director was announced as the writer and director of a remake of Death Wish.
Originally released in 1974, Michael Winner‘s Death Wish is a pretty slight film that nevertheless hit a nerve as fears of urban crime started to escalate. Charles Bronson plays Paul Kersey, an architect whose wife is killed during a home invasion that leads to rape; his daughter is caught up in the same event and is institutionalized as a result. Re-introduced to firearms during a business trip, Kersey takes to the streets of New York as a vigilante. Walking around alone at night, he deliberately invites criminal acts, then shoots the perpetrators.
Death Wish has been on the table as a remake or reboot over the past couple decades. What will Joe Carnahan do with it now? Read More »
.
Please Recommend /Film on Facebook
In another time, The Grey would have been considered a b-movie, but it would have been the best sort of b-movie: one made with a clever craftman’s skill, pulsing with an insistent tension and featuring familiar characters that grow beyond stock types as they reveal their true personalities.
The temptation now is to simply refer to The Grey as an action movie. The film is about a man named Ottway (Liam Neeson) who, with a crew of roughnecks on their way back to civilization from a remote oil field job, crash lands in the Alaskan wilderness, where a pack of wolves stalks the survivors to the last man.
As directed by Joe Carnahan, however, The Grey is also the antithesis of the action-movie template. Most action films exist explicitly to reject death — consider “death-defying stunts,” that clichéd huckster’s pitch — and in doing so define an existence in which reality and death are marginalized by the expression of a blind, inextinguishable will to live.
Carnahan’s last film, The A-Team, was very much cut from that broad action-movie mold. This one, however, could not be further removed from The A-Team‘s bluster and bravado. Here, Carnahan employs a fine-tuned instinct for revealing character through action, and directs with a feeling of stability atypical to most action movies. But amid this movie’s thrilling beats he places scenes characterized by serene compassion. The Grey is an exiting movie that captures the roughnecks’ walk through an icy valley of the shadow of death. It is also a film that accepts human fragility, and suggests that finding faith is a natural step in facing our inevitable end. Read More »
January movies are usually terrible. It’s a time studios generally reserve for films that are either not good enough to compete during awards seasons or not exciting enough to play during the summer. Every once in a while, though, a really great one slips through the cracks and that happens this month with Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey. In a way, though, it does fit the January mold though because it’s not quite an awards film, but too heady for the summer. Plus it’ll make you feel really cold.
The Grey follows Liam Neeson and a group of blue collar workers whose plane crashes over Alaska. They’re then forced to survive in the freezing wilderness along with a pack of vicious wolves. The film blends elements of action, horror, drama and even romance in an all-together satisfying and bad-ass package. I mean, did you not see the trailer with Neeson fighting wolves with broken bottles on his hands?
/Film spoke to the film’s writer/director Joe Carnahan about the origins of that scene (hint: Wolverine) as well as parallels between the film and Neeson’s real-life tragedy, working with a small, up and coming distributor and how online media is changing the way filmmakers make movies. Read about it all after the jump. Read More »
Joe Carnahan‘s new film The Grey opens this week, and the movie is a return to the early promise of Carnahan’s movie Narc, which was released in 2004. The Grey is a solid little movie that combines familiar characters with tense action and survival situations, and it should do pretty well with audiences. And if the movie does click with the public, we might see it back in theaters late this year, the better to position it for possible awards. Read More »
Joe Carnahan‘s adventure/survival film The Grey opens this week, and a new red-band trailer has shown up to promote the movie in the final days before the movie hits. You probably know most of the basic info about the movie: Liam Neeson plays one of a group of roughnecks heading back to civilization from a remote Alaskan job who has to confront a hungry and vicious pack of wolves when a plane crash strands the men in the middle of nowhere.
The film became internet-famous for the teaser trailer’s shot of Liam Neeson taping broken bottles to his knuckles in preparation for a battle with one of the wolves, but there’s more to the movie than that. I liked The Grey quite a lot — it is a solid, satisfying B-movie that has just enough subtext to overcome the fact that the attacking wolves are, well, a little dodgy.
This red-band trailer will give you a taste of the film’s full spectrum of intensity and violence. Check it out below. Read More »
One of the perks of being a film fan is there’s always something to look forward to. We wait and wait for a project to come together and, once the credits roll, we’re immediately looking forward to the next thing. Sometimes it’s what’s coming out next week, other times it’s a sequel and in the case of our favorite directors, it’s whatever they choose to do next. Two directors who fit into that category, who’ve both recently finished films, have just dropped significant hints of which projects they plan to tackle next.
David Fincher‘s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo came out last month and talk almost immediately began about the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, being greenlit. And while that’s likely the case, it’s looking less and less likely that Fincher will return. Reports are that he’ll finally make a movie he’s been attached to and developing for some time, a 3D remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Joe Carnahan‘s latest, The Grey, opens in two weeks so he too is eyeing his next project. Like Fincher, his name has been attached to a bunch of different projects but in a new interview he suggested he’ll do the Pablo Escobar drug-drama Killing Pablo next, possibly followed by the crime noir White Jazz.
Read more about all these projects and more after the jump. Read More »
Posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 by Angie Han
What do Bridesmaids and The Devil Inside have in common? Not a lot, except that both performed even better than expected at the box office, and execs are now eager to get going on terrible-sounding sequels. After the jump:
- Melissa McCarthy refuses to do Bridesmaids 2 without Kristen Wiig
- Mark Wahlberg reports that The Fighter 2 is looking for a new director
- Joe Carnahan discusses the (non) possibility of an A-Team 2, and more interestingly, the possibility of a Narc 2
- The Devil Inside exec producer Steven Schneider says he’d “love” to do a sequel
Read More »
The teaser trailer for The Grey, Joe Carnahan‘s man vs. wolf survival action story starring Liam Neeson, concluded with an epic showdown featuring Neeson getting ready to fight a wolf with broken mini-bar booze bottles taped to his hands. Basically, it was amazing. This brand-new theatrical trailer ends the exact same way but, before it gets there, we’re given a much better sense of the scope of the story and fear that the characters played by Dallas Roberts, James Badge Dale, Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, Nonso Anozie, and Joe Anderson must face. It open January 27, 2012 and you can watch this full theatrical trailer after the jump. Read More »
Cool Posts From Around the Web:
