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Bran Nue Dae 9.10

Never Let Me Go 9.15

The American 9.1

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps 9.24

The Town 9.17

The residual heat...

A little nervous because...

The residual heat...

Looking forward to...

The residual heat...

A little nervous because...

Looking forward to...

The residual heat...

A little nervous because...

The Director’s Guild may have some explaining to do after the release of Joaquin Phoenix’s return to the silver screen. Namely, who in hell told Casey Affleck he could direct a movie. Well, more like a running video gag with its only laugh belonging to Mr. Phoenix and Mr. Affleck if anyone pays to see it. Then again the laugh may be ours, watching these two go down in glorious, money wasted flames.

So there’s an elevator see, and it’s in one of those corporate skyscrapers where lots of people with screwed up lives and nefarious secrets ride it, and a particularly nasty lot wind up getting in together, except instead of going to their selected floor - wait for it - they’re all going straight to hell! Proof that M. Night Shyamalan, (like the notorious Mr. King) watched The Twilight Zone just like we did.

Please step away from the Box-Office!

the Last take.

You Again 9.24

If you meet a dark stranger in this movie they’ll likely bore you to death - but then what are you doing in this movie? Never mind. If you still go to Woody Allen movies you’ve got to be immune to excitement by now. For the rest of us who long for Woody’s genius to reemerge, get out the Annie Hall & Sleeper DVDs and have a party. Seeing a current Woody movie is just too sad.

There’s very little to be nervous about. This is a small and intense story with Clooney perfectly cast among faces and places that won’t feel Hollywood. Fans of both Clooney and smart character driven thrillers will head to theaters on opening weekend and the rest of you will get curious no later than the Golden Globe announcements.

About a year ago this was a movie with Betty White... now it’s a Betty White movie. When you sign Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis to play reacquainted high school rivals (to their daughter’s similar circumstances), you pretty much figure you’ve got a cast you can market. Add Kristen Bell, a few other fresh faces (Odette Yustman, Christine Lakin) and a few television star veterans (Cloris Leachman, Patrick Duffy, Victor Garber) and Betty White seems like solid character casting. Until the 88 year old Ms. White comes off of Saturday Night Live as hot as Travolta came off of Saturday Night Fever and there’s suddenly real heat behind your chick flick comedy.

OMG! No, please - not this! Cannibal zombies, vampires on a rampage, deadly soul sucking viruses, ax wielding mutants, relentless savage hunters from another world... we’ve survived it all, but how can we hope to survive... chain letters? NOOOOO! Worse yet, they’re even coming through your cellphone. What can you do? Well, one character in the trailer has an idea - “I just delete ‘em as soon as I get ‘em.” Done. Roll end credits.

The residual heat...

A little nervous because...

Which leaves Oliver Stone... teamed with three other writers and coming off a film you either hated or tolerated in 2008’s W, Stone’s most recent work had him singing the praises of Hugo Chavez in the documentary South of the Border. Can he still handle mainstream? Even in his heyday, the answer was maybe. But we don’t think he likes to.

Nerves are all about managing expectations. This is after all just a silly concept comedy and director Andy Flickman has in the past been responsible for the dud Disney redux of Race to Witch Mountain (’09) and Reefer Madness: The Musical (’05, be glad you had no idea there ever was such a movie). Those credits significantly lower our expectations so we don’t expect this to be Ms. White’s finest hour.

If you were the nervous type you could just say the whole thing might suck, there’s a lot that you could go wrong here and sink the story into melodrama. But then why go through the trouble of casting such talented actors? We’ll be optimistic and say see it.

It’s not like there’s a lot to go on to judge just what kind of experience is in store here, but we loved the trailer for this film from the very first, and that was some time ago... debuting in its native Australia just over a year ago, it’s taken this long for a U.S. release date. We think it will have been worth waiting for.

Three young Hollywood stars bringing an acclaimed novel to life. It doesn’t seem unusual to read a great novel that leads to anticipating its movie adaptation. It’s a little more surprising when a movie inspires a desire to read. In the case of Never Let Me Go, just watching the trailer has got us interested in picking up Kazuo Ishiguro’s (Remains of the Day) novel and diving into a story that combines a fatalistic future with the ever hopeful blossoming of a love story.

Here’s the pitch: A guy is trapped in a box, buried alive deep in the ground, he’s got a lighter and a dying cell phone with no signal. Aside from the obvious question of “where do you put the camera?”, the more important question to ask is - how the f@*# are you going to make a movie that happens, by the very nature of the plot, in pitch darkness. A condition apparently shared by the filmmakers.

Previews

The Expendables released August 13th. Opening weekend N.A. box-office: $34.8 mil.

For most, the only recognizable name in the credits list is Geoffrey Rush who has turned in wonderful work in projects as diverse as Elizabeth: The Golden Age (‘07), Intolerable Cruelty (a favorite from ’03) and the Pirates of the Caribbean series (in which he’ll be joining Johnny Depp for a 4th voyage next year). The rest of Bran Nue Dae’s cast is for the most part native Australian and those new fresh faces are part of why this film appears to be so naturally ebullient. Hopefully Mr. Rush will be the anchor that sends U.S. audiences out to catch what we think will be an awards sleeper.

Geoffrey Rush and an Australian celebration of life. There seems to be something Hollywood doesn’t know about making an unabashedly deliberate (read innocent) life celebrating movie that some foreign filmmakers seem eager to embrace. In a trailer that can’t help but recall shades of Academy Award winner Slumdog Millionaire, this Australian film by director Rachel Perkins spins an aboriginal tale of coming home again against a musical backdrop that is nothing less than charming fun.

Bank robber movies can lapse into formula faster than the cops can arrive on a crime scene but Affleck seems to have a knack for the material and he’s set things on the familiar turf of Boston, where both his visual sense of location and ease with a Boston accent may help his first effort at directing himself on film. We sense this guy wants to be Eastwood behind the camera and we think he may have found his niche.

Sure, Sigourney was in that 3 billion dollar earning sci-fi thing, and yeah, Kristen Bell is one of the hot new rom-com queens... but hey, Betty White is in this thing, and there’s no doubting it - right now this lady has clout. With television roles in NBC’s Community and TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland, it’s easy to forget she was a contributor to Sandra Bullock’s 2009 hit The Proposal which brought in a worldwide take well over $300 million.

The residual heat...

This project “is” Sly Stallone and his mates (both old and new) and the list is nothing but an action director’s propane fueled wet dream. Along with Schwarzenegger, the list includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis. If Mr. T wouldn’t have generated too many A-Team comparisons, we figure he would have at least been a cameo. With this cast, do the merits of past credits even matter? What’s really sort of brilliant about the whole project is that there had to be great camaraderie on the set, which we expect has had to translate to a fun if not smart movie.

Looking forward to...

Big. Summer. Action. It seems appropriate that the last big summer action flick be a swan song of sorts for some of the guys who invented the modern version of the genre in the first place. Together in the same film for the first time, fans of the genre have reacted with feeding frenzy intensity to the very idea itself. Who but Stallone would be audacious enough to believe he could pull it off while writing the script, directing the on set mayhem and lending his star power to the cast? And all this while landing the Governor of CA to make his first film in six years.

A little nervous because...

Then again, if Stallone was smart enough to make it happen, he may just have gotten it to happen right. If The Expendables can walk the thin line between cartoonish and just stupid and nails its cast busting genre, this is a hit that should blow out the final weeks of a sluggish summer.

Ben Affleck getting comfortable with his second turn behind the camera. Sorry, Good Will Hunting didn’t impress and we’ve never thought of Ben Affleck’s films as must-sees. In fact our favorite Ben Affleck reference is the Pearl Harbor song (“The End of an Act”) in Team America. That said, it’s clear that Affleck knows his way around the mechanics of writing a screenplay and he truly impressed the first time he got behind the camera in ‘07 to direct his own work.

Poster Gallery

That first directing outing was his collaborative writing project (with Aaron Stockard) in adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel Gone Baby Gone. With a cast that included his brother Casey and A-listers Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris, Affleck proved up to the task to turn in a taught and suspenseful drama. With this outing he teams again with writer Stockard, along with Peter Craig to adapt the novel “Prince of Thieves” by Chuck Hogan. And once again, Affleck gets the benefit of great casting with Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner (last year’s The Hurt Locker), Oscar winner Chris Cooper (2002’s Adaptation) and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.

Greed used to be good but can Gecko repent and still dazzle?. There are a lot of reasons we’re anxious to see the long awaited sequel to Wall Street (1987) - Michael Douglas reprising one of the most famous film characters of the 80s, Oliver Stone returning to arguably his most mainstream film for a second chapter, Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan as Gekko’s estranged daughter, and Shia LeBeouf, finally directed by a man who isn’t known for coddling hot shot young movie stars (or anyone else for that matter).

We’ve already mentioned this month that Carey Mulligan is sporting Oscar nom credits from last year’s An Education. Shia Lebeouf may still be a ways off from getting mention at the Academy Awards but he did just get named the most profitable star in Hollywood who, up to now, has pulled in more than $80.00 for every $1.00 he is paid in salary. His last outing, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen earned more than $830 mil worldwide. Then there’s Michael Douglas who, while not minting box-office gold, turned in an interesting, layered and nuanced performance with last year’s Solitary Man. How can you not want to see how Gordon Gekko has aged?

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George Clooney is all about heat, particularly entering into awards seasons. He can do supporting ensemble bits like ’07’s Ocean’s Thirteen, voice over offbeat animation like ’09’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, display deadpan deft comic timing as in ’08’s Burn After Reading, be dramatically flat-out riveting as in Michael Clayton and don nicely worn charm as in last year’s Up In The Air. And he does them all at a level that regularly wins statues and nominations.

George Clooney as a deadly serious assassin. Clooney has become an actor to talk about every time he appears in a new movie. He’s also become a predictably strong performer who knows how to chose predictably strong projects (ok, we’ll just forget all about that staring at goats thing, though he was the best part of it). What is also amazingly predictable is how effortlessly he can make the switch between debonair and charming to troubled and dangerous.

In young Hollywood terms, the cast is a hit list. Keira Knightly felids the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Atonement (’07) and an Oscar nom for ’05’s Pride & Prejudice. Carey Mulligan fields an Oscar nom for last year’s An Education and makes our Sept. list twice with her appearance in Wall Street 2. And Andrew Garfield will appear next month in the much talked The Social Network on his way to becoming the screen’s next web-slinging superhero in the highly anticipated reboot of Spiderman. Supporting the young cast here is veteran actress Charlotte Rampling and Golden Globe winner Sally Hawkins (‘08‘s Happy-Go-Lucky).

the September list Stars and Stories usher in a calm before the Awards storm.