When news came that Chris Pineis (maybe) the new Jack Ryan, all I could think of was that he’s just not a big enough star. Sure, he was in a hit movie this summer, but Star Trekis not enough to propel anybody into stardom. Should William Shatner have gone on to play Indiana Jones after Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Of course not. Nobody would have seen that. Okay, I would have definitely seen that, but not for positive reasons.
The thing about the Jack Ryan character is he’s kind of boring, so he needs someone like Harrison Fordto play him. Or, it has to be made at a time when adults go to see good movies like The Hunt for Red October without need for a big star (though Sean Connery’s face didn’t hurt that film). I liked The Sum of All Fearsokay, but not even a semi star like Ben Affleckcould carry it sufficiently. I don’t buy that Pine can carry the next one.
Unless he has help and the trust of the studio. For the character to work, Paramount needs to find an actor who they’ll stick with and who will stick with the role. Otherwise moviegoers are not going to think of it as a familiar franchise. With only four films the Jack Ryan series is already gaining quickly on the number of actors that played James Bond, to whom Ryan should be looking up. Ryan should be like the domestic answer to 007 and should equivalently have an iconic look, some trademarks (a kind of vehicle and favorite drink, for example) and maybe even a catchphrase.
I know, this all sounds like bad news, mainly because such things shouldn’t be forced or they’re liable to be corny. But if there’s no writers smart enough to make it work they should just abandon it.
Let’s see what other film bloggers think of the casting after the jump: …Read more
After moving the film’s release date from 2008 awards season to spring 2009, Paramount has taken The Soloistout of its opening night slot at AFI. The festival is expected to announce a new opening night film today.
Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch, starring his wife Helen Mirren as a brothel owner and financed by ThinkFilm sister Capitol Films, is in search of a distributor. The director is shopping it to studios himself in the hopes of repeating the good fortune he found with Ray. “Directors have to be realistic about this process because people are so frightened right now,” he said.
Alec Baldwin will replace Rose McGowan as celebrity co-host of The Essentials, the Saturday night showcase of superclassics on TCM. His episodes will start airing in March.
In the 16 months or so since it first became possible to distribute full-length feature films in single viewing windows embedded in a blog post, there’s been a lot of talk as to how a film presented in this matter might function. For Four Eyed Monsters, the first feature film made available legally in a single stream on YouTube, the embed functioned as a meme spreader for the FEM brand (and the page the embed code came from served as a revenue generator for Spout.com). At Telluride last month, Annette Insdorf talked about the embed’s value as reference point within online criticism, which is something we’ve done here on SpoutBlog, most recently with Steven’s post last week on DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. Also last week, Anne Thompson suggested that Wayne Wang’s Princess of Nebraska, recently made available for streaming in full on YouTube, can serve as a marketing tool for the film Wang made concurrently, A Thousand Years of Good Prayer, which is currently in theaters. In pieces in the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, John Horn and John Jurgensen both suggested that free streaming solutions for features are performing a kind of public service; Horn commended SnagFilms, the portal for ad-supported embeddable documentaries, for their ability to bring “important movies to audiences that otherwise might never have known the films existed,” while Jurgensen focused on Hulu and YouTube’s potential to help relieve the “glut of movies jockeying for theater screens.”
This is all well and good, but in most cases, up until now an argument could have be made that the “better” place to see the film in question would be on a big screen, and/or with an audience, because the assumption has been that the natural home for cinema is in a cinema, that distribution via embed is an alternative option when theatrical distribution doesn’t work out. The same can not be said for The End of America, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s non-fiction adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s book and ensuing lecture tour, which debuted on SnagFilms today. This is the first film I’ve seen that seems ideally suited to be seen as a blog embed, and not just because a good deal of the footage within was pulled from web video sources. Essentially a Top Ten list followed by a How To, it’s the first film I’ve seen that seems to have internalized the structure of the traffic-baiting blog post.
Before the Hamptons Film Festival this weekend, I wrote a post aboutThe End of America, a documentary based on Naomi Wolf’s book of the same name, which I was interested in not least because of its unusual distribution strategy: it will premiere on SnagFilms tomorrow, before debuting theatrically in New York in December before becoming available on DVD in January. I’ll have a more review-y take on the film tomorrow. In the meantime, an anonymous (but angry!) SpoutBlog reader commented on his/her experience at the film’s first screening in the Hamptons:
First, the film was late to arrive and so we sat for an hour listening to live commentary from Alec Baldwin and Naomi “Preach to You” Watts [sic]. Then the film played and we had to hear it all over again. Naomi is out for one thing… to sell books.
I can’t speak to the motives of Naomi Wolf *or* Naomi Watts, but I can confirm that some aspect of this comment is accurate: the screening did start late, because there was an accident on the highway between Manhattan and East Hampton, and the master tape was stuck in traffic with co-director Annie Sundberg. But most of those in attendance seemed to get some value out the improvised program which preceded the movie, in which Alec Baldwin moderated a conversation about The End of America’s themes with Wolf, co-director Ricki Stern, and ACLU rep Jameel Jaffer. I was there, and I recorded the bulk of the conversation and had it transcribed. That transcript, edited for clarity, can be found after the jump.
Forget about Don Cheadle replacing Terence Howard as James Rhodes / War Machine in Iron Man II, which smells a lot like the “we’ll threaten to replace Tobey Maguire with Jake Gyllenhaal” tactic that Sony used for Spider-Man II –– Hollywood has been doing this for years. It was bad enough back in the days of television with Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched, but now it’s becoming pretty commonplace for producers to replace actors in iconic roles. Although now it’s more common due to monetary concerns, which seems to be what has taken Howard out of the War Machine suit, it’s also common to see an actor ankle a role because they don’t like the source material, or the direction the character is taking. We’ve put together several different re-castings, which all happened for a variety of reasons: money, dissatisfaction with the script, test audience reactions, and actors just growing tired of playing the same character. Check them out after the break.
Though Pineapple Express had a better per-screen average and walked away from its first five days with a more than adequate $40 million, it couldn’t block The Dark Knight from nabbing its fourth consecutive weekend box office title. Currently at $441 million, the Batman sequel is expected to overcome Star Wars as the number 2 domestic grosser of all time.
Entourage star Adrien Grenier is making a documentary about the 14 year-old paparazzo (unnamed in this Hollywood Reporter report) with whom he’s developed a friendship. Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, Eva Longoria, and Rosie O’Donnell will make appearances in the film, which is said to “interweave the relationship portrait with philosophical interviews in the style of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life.”
The drift away from R-rated horror is already starting to pay off for Lionsgate. Thanks to a combination of factors––home video successes like Rambo, theatrical moneymakers like The Forbidden Kingdom, the surge in hotness of TV titles Mad Men and Weeds––their total revenue was up 50% in the first fiscal quarter.
We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.
Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Gunsand played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.
Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.
So much for Alec Baldwin’s previously stated ambition to quit acting and “do something better” with his life. He’s signed on to play a supporting role in a Dane Cook comedy called Bachelor No. 2, which starts shooting next week in Boston. Baldwin is also expected back on the set of his NBC sitcom 30 Rock later this month.
WB has hired an executive producer of The Shield to direct a “noir-style” remake of the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon.
Variety’s Marc Graser has an assessment of the entertainment options available on the new Virgin America. “Airline charges $8 per pic — a somewhat steep price to watch Spider-Man 3…on a nine-inch screen. At least the pics are unedited.”
One of my favorite docs from Sundance 2007, Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, will simultaneously debut in theaters and on video-on-demand via IFC’s First Take program. Expect to see it on your cable menu in early November.
***Lionsgate will distribute a still untitled doc about religion, shot partially in Israel and around the middle east, directed by Larry Charles (the TV vet who wrangled Borat) and featuring comic/blowhard Bill Maher. Charles and Maher promise Variety that it’s a comedy, but let’s hope the jokes are better than this clunker from Charles: “Nietzsche said God is dead, but he didn’t see the grosses for Passion of the Christ.” Ooooh, topical!
***Scott Foundas takes a look at Shortcut to Happiness, the long-delayed movie Alec Baldwin doesn’t want you to see. “Filmed in 2001, then waylaid by investor bankruptcies and other infernal torments, the result, like so many troubled A-list productions, is less compelling than all the behind-the-scenes Sturm und Drang.”
***Dig out that sequined, halter-top, parachute-pants jumpsuit–Xanadu is back! Variety says the Broadway spoof of the eyesore 80s musical is riding good reviews to box office glory. Not bad for a production featuring almost wall-to-wall ELO, but I’ll have to see it in order to believe that it’s got anything that can top the tight rope dance from the original (starting at about the two minute mark on the clip embedded above).
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
When news came that 
After moving the film’s release date from 2008 awards season to spring 2009, Paramount has taken The Soloist out of its opening night slot at AFI. The festival is expected to announce a new opening night film today.
Before the Hamptons Film Festival this weekend, I wrote 
Though 
We’re less than a week away from the release of 
