April 2008 News Archive (Page 13)

Amazon has already started taking pre-orders for the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull soundtrack, despite the movie not coming out for over two months.

A quick overview of the song list on the album - which can be found be clicking on the link above - gives away a few hints about the film's plots. Song titles include "A Whirl Through Academe" and "The Journey to Akator." Wherever those places are.

Following the link above will also allow you to pre-order the CD now. Hurry!

While Shia LaBeouf is receiving never-ending publicity for a pair of blockbusters he's lined up in the future - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Transformers 2 - it's easy to overlook another highly-anticipated flick from this burgeoning star.

On September 26, he and Michelle Monaghan star in the thriller Eagle Eye. Here are a couple of shots from the movie:

Director David Ayer recently sat down with ComingSoon.net to discuss his latest crime thrilled, Street Kings. Here are a couple excerpts from the interview:

CS: Did you see Keanu Reeves' character as a bad cop or someone who did bad things because that's what he had to do in order to get the job done?
Ayer: The whole concept of good cop/bad cop really depends on how you see it. To Internal Affairs or a senior police administrator, a bad cop is anyone who doesn't follow the regulations. To his brother officers, a hard-charging, possibly violent cop who gets the job done no matter what is seen as a asset. It's seen as a positive. So it's really sort of the management street cop divide in LAPD.

It really depends what side of that you're on. Policing requires a certain flexibility because you're given obviously laws and books and regulations that you have to follow, but you're dealing with real people in real situations so there's always room for interpretation.

CS: You've come back to criminals and Los Angeles a number of times now. What keeps bringing you back to the street level of crime theme?
Ayer: It was exciting to do this particular project. One thing you have to realize is that when you're in a career in Hollywood it's not like you're walking into Hometown Buffet and you pick from a variety of projects lying out before you. When this project came along, I really wanted to get back on set.

I had a great experience directing Harsh Times and a brutal distribution experience, but that aside. Here comes Keanu Reeves with a script that's pretty close to camera ready in an arena I'm really familiar with. You've got to keep in mind this is my first studio movie as a director so I'm not going to get hired to do a romantic comedy [and] I'm not going to get hired to do a summer tentpole.

That's just the reality of the business. So here's a wonderful opportunity in a city I know, in a world I know with characters I know and it afforded me the opportunity as a director to not have to focus on the world, but to focus on developing performance.

Read the complete interview with Ayer now.

Based on the following preview, Baby Mama doesn't look like the funniest movie on the planet. But it does star Tina Fey, who we adore.

Check it out now and decide for yourself:

Mila Kunis may currently be best known for her role as Jackie Burkhart on That '70s Show - but that may soon change as the actress who also voices Meg Griffin on Family Guy takes on a number of new film roles.

First up, Kunis will star in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which she plays the object of Peter Bretter's (Jason Segel) post-breakup affection, Rachel Jansen.

Kunis is also currently shooting a video game adaptation of Max Payne opposite Mark Wahlberg. She'll play the character of Mona Sax. Just the name sounds hot.

Reelz Channel recently spoke to Kunis about her work on Max Payne:

"I can't really reveal too much," the actress said of the project. "I play a character named Mona Sax who is based on the video game, but doesn't necessarily come in until [the game] Max Payne 2, if I'm not mistaken. Max Payne loses his wife and goes on this spree to find out why she was murdered.

Continue Reading...

Al Pacino stars in the thriller 88 Minutes, hitting theaters on April 18. Here's a look at the film's official trailer:

Kevin J. O'Connor portrayed Daniel Day-Lewis' "brother" Henry Brandis in There Will Be Blood. With that movie having come out on DVD yesterday, Movie Web caught up with the little known actor to ask him about the experience on set:

How did you first learn of the project and what attracted you to the character Henry Brands?
Kevin J. O'Connor: Well I got the script and I sent in the audition on tape right away. What attracted me was the people involved, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson, obviously, and the character. When I read the character, I thought 'I like this guy,' the way they explain this character, it was even vaguer than the other characters, I thought, and I found it interesting.

This guy shows up out of nowhere and it's sort of frightening. You take a left turn from the movie and you get this other character and story and you want to make sure that it still blends in with the rest of the film... but you're in the hands of Mr. Anderson and Mr. Day-Lewis.

Daniel Day-Lewis just gave a towering performance in this. Could you or everyone else on the set get a sense early on that this was Oscar-worthy right away?
Kevin J. O'Connor: You know what? I guess I wasn't looking at it that way, but I thought, 'Wow. This is such an interesting character.' Since I have scenes with him, I don't get a chance to just watch him, in a sense of just sitting back. I'm with him, like most of the actors, were with Daniel Plainview, so we'd sort of do anything to please him (Laughs).

Read the full interview now.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Mann will be joining Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor in the black comedy I Love You Phillip Morris.

The movie follows a married father (Carrey) who is sent to prison and falls in love with a cellmate named Phillip Morris. Naturally. This love leads him to make several escape attempts. Mann will play Carrey's wife.

Mann, who is married to director Judd Apatow, will next be seen in Seventeen Again opposite Zac Efron.

While a few X-Files 2 spoilers and plot details have been leaked, not too much is known about the film. We can say for certain it comes out July 25 and that the movie is a stand-alone story; it won't be tied into the overreaching mythology of the series.

That's how X-Files creator Chris Carter explained the new film.

"We knew we wanted to do something that wasn't a mythology episode. We'd kind of wrapped up the mythology, to a large extent, in the series. So I think, especially coming back a number of years later, the best thing to do would be to reintroduce The X-Files to its core audience, but also maybe introduce it to a lot of people who haven't had a chance to see it before, who were maybe too young to see it before.

I talk to college kids now who were too young fifteen years ago [when the series began], and if you're 22 years old and in college, you were just a kid. So I think there are lots of kids who didn't see it. "

So, if the flick isn't about the alien/government conspiracy plotline, what is it about? Can Carter give us any details?

"I can't, really, because nobody really wants to know. The truth is everybody wants to go and have a great experience. They want to be surprised and they want to be scared and if the cat gets out of the bag, there's no putting it back in."

Street Kings stars Keanu Reeves, The Game and Hugh Laurie. It'll be difficult for any movie to top that sort of eclectic.

How do these different stars mesh together on screen? That's what we wanted to know. So we spoke to a number of film critics and received the following takes on Street Kings...

- A disappointingly routine policier, a genre item in which the only new element is the degree of corruption and cynicism, building on the tradition of Ayer's script of Training Day and Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, both superior works as dramas and movies. -- Emanuel Levy

- A combination of implausible plot-points, and the miscasting of television's Hugh Laurie as Internal Affairs chief Captain Biggs, hampers a convoluted crime thriller that is nonetheless entertaining for its grotesque action sequences. -- Cole Smithey

- Pic is conflicted, glamorizing gunslinging while crying foul over unnecessary force. -- Variety

- While military man turned director Ayer implicates our culture steeped in violence and the damaging effects of trained killing, whether by police or in war, he's assembled such a deplorable LAPD rogues gallery, it's hard to tell which one is the worst. -- NewsBlaze