The Screengrab : paul greengrass

Morning Deal Report: Bourne Again

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With James Bond back in theaters, it’s only a matter of time before that other superspy who shares his initials makes his way back to the big screen. E! Online reports that “Universal has just inked a deal with Robert Ludlum's estate for exclusive rights to the Jason Bourne character and first look at his other novels.” Matt Damon “has already signed on to a fourth installment to be directed by Paul Greengrass, who helmed The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Supremacy. It's not known whether Damon will play the role beyond the next film, or whether producers will go the Bond route and keep recasting.” Here’s a guess: Shia LaBeouf.

Speaking of The Boof, he’s already following in Damon’s footsteps with his latest project. Damon starred in the John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker, and LaBeouf is set to play The Associate. Per Variety, he’ll play “a Yale Law School graduate who is forced by nefarious figures from his past to take a job at a top legal firm to pass on top secret information about a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. It is based on the book of the same name which will be published in January - Grisham's first legal thriller since 2005's The Broker.” I could have sworn there was already a Grisham book called The Associate – it’s such a memorable and distinctive title!

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s – Paper Man? “The coming-of-middle-age comedy chronicles the unlikely friendship between a failed author (Jeff Daniels) and a Long Island high school girl (Emma Stone) who teaches him about growing up, all under the disapproving eye of his long-suffering wife and imaginary superhero friend,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

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Morning Deal Report: Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci Shacked Up at “Love Ranch”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Taylor Hackford (Ray) is seeking domestic distribution for Love Ranch, “the independently financed drama he directed in which Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci star as the proprietors of Nevada’s first legalized brothel,” Variety reports. “Their characters are loosely based on Joe and Sally Conforte, who ran the Mustang Ranch, where prizefighter Oscar Bonavena was gunned down after being suspected of having an affair with madam Sally.” Aside from a small part in The Good Shepherd, Pesci has been absent from movie screens since 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4.

An unusual contender has emerged as a potential director of The Trial of the Chicago 7 for Dreamworks. Although Steven Spielberg has long considered helming the project himself and Paul Greengrass was also considered, The Hollywood Reporter notes that the “latest well-known director who has met on the project is Ben Stiller; while the discussions for Stiller to helm the film are very much at the exploratory stage, the actor and DreamWorks are mulling whether such a pairing would work for both parties.”

“Javier Bardem will star in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, the Mexican helmer's first project after his much-publicized bust-up with former screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga,” per Variety. “Pic is about a man embroiled in shady dealings who is confronted by a childhood friend, now a policeman.”

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A Decade Too Early? Bourne 4

John Constantine — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:26:00 GMT

While it’s still a few years off, it looks like Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass are going Robert Ludlum with the Bourne film franchise. The star and director have both committed to a fourth installment in the most loved movie with over two billion edits per scene. With the exception of Lethal Weapon, the trend in action movies over the past quarter century is to have three successful films and then wait for ten plus years to go back to the well (see: Star Wars, Rambo, Die Hard, etc.) Even Matt Damon thought that was going to be the way for Bourne. As he said in a Daily Show interview, “I think the way you could do a number four is to do it in, like, ten years.” It’s too early to tell if this is a good or bad idea but those movies are pretty awesome so far.

The Rock IS "The Tooth Fairy" and Other Worst-Case Scenarios

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

As soon as Jon Stewart bid us goodnight and told us to drive home safely, the powers that be in Hollywood breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, they could put all of this "quality filmmaking" nonsense behind them and open the crapgates for another load of sequels, remakes and high-concept star vehicles.

Leading the parade is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who will play an ordinary Joe who takes over the Tooth Fairy's duties in, well, The Tooth Fairy. Yes, it's basically The Santa Clause all over again, and appropriately enough, it will be directed by Michael Lembeck, who helmed the two Clause sequels. The concept might also ring a bell for those who have closely followed Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. As Entertainment Weekly reported in 1992, The Man Who Would Be Governator had his choice of several projects, including "Sweet Tooth, an action comedy about a U.S. Marine who finds out at his father's deathbed that he's inheriting the family legacy — the job of tooth fairy." (He opted for The Last Action Hero. We'll call this one a draw.)

In other news, despite their claims to the contrary, it appears that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are both on board for a fourth Bourne adventure. (If they're looking for a title, may we suggest Bourne to Be Wild?) We've enjoyed all the jittery suspense as much as anyone, but surely these guys have better things to do than go to this particular well one more time.

Finally we have the latest in unwanted and unnecessary horror remakes. The duo behind the fourth and fifth Saw installments (Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who scripted Feast for Project Greenlight) have been hired to resurrect Hellraiser, while Dylan Walsh of Nip/Tuck will attempt to fill Terry O'Quinn's shoes as The Stepfather. We're trembling with fear already.

Morning Deal Report: Amy Ryan on a Hot Streak

Peter Smith — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Amy Ryan is doing well these days, with parts in Dan in Real Life and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and a highly acclaimed performance in Gone Baby Gone. (I just finished watching her fine work in Season 2 of The Wire, to boot.) Now she and Greg Kinnear are joining Matt Damon in a Paul-Greengrass-directed thriller based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction Iraq chronicle, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. This also marks a reunion of Damon and Greengrass, which any Bourne fan knows is a good thing.

Jessica Biel costars with Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas in the Noel Coward adaptation Easy Virtue.

Boys Don't Cry and Stop Loss director Kimberly Pierce wants to adapt Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. It's always interesting when a serious, realism-minded director steps into sci-fi. Let's hope this happens.

Revisiting Diva

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Diva may have been the first foreign-language film I ever saw. I don't remember well enough to say for sure, but I do recall that it shared space with The Tin Drum and Mephisto on my hometown video store's shelf of foreign films. (When I say shelf, I mean that literally — the entire collection amounted to less than a dozen videotapes.) When I was sixteen, Diva's vision of a Parisian mailman who rides around the city on a motorbike, chased by thugs and hanging out with a waif who shoplifts jazz records, seemed impossibly hip. Just re-released in a new print by Rialto Pictures, it now seems slow and sedate compared to Paul Greengrass and Tony Scott's recent films.

In the '80s, Jean-Jacques Beineix was lumped in with Luc Besson and Leos Carax as one of the creators of the 'cinéma du look.' Diva had the misfortune of being ahead of its time for about six months, until MTV went on the air. Coincidentally, Blade Runner, made around the same time, is also being re-released now. The two films share several points of contact, especially a nostalgia for film noir and an indulgence in style that manifests itself in blue-tinged cinematography and impossibly detailed production design.

After initial failure, Blade Runner has gone down as a classic; Diva is largely a footnote in French cinema history. Yet Ridley Scott was essentially an Anglo proponent of the 'cinéma du look'; he just happened to be working from better source material and with more talented collaborators. Diva's 'exercise in style' sensibility still has its merits — the motorbike subway chase scene is exhilarating, and the characters' lofts are spaces to luxuriate in — but as a narrative, its crime story seems unwieldy and out of place. (With Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann has finally accomplished what Beineix and Besson had often set out to do.) I'd rather see a film about the same people and places in which they sat around smoking cigarettes, taking nude photos and talking about opera rather than throwing awls at each other and tossing thugs down elevator shafts.

Diva has often been cited as a case of style over substance, but now that twenty-six years have passed, it's clear that Beineix had something on his mind: the conversion of art, as represented by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins' refusal to record her voice, into a commodity. The late French critic Serge Daney castigated Diva as an example of the influence of advertising upon cinema, but both media have moved on since 1981. The 'cinema du look' finally produced a masterpiece, Leos Carax's 1991 Les Amants de Pont-Neuf, but by that time, Beineix's career had entered free fall. Luc Besson figured out how to beat Hollywood at its own game; Beineix's films could never pass for American genre fare in multiplexes, as Besson's The Fifth Element did. His follow-up to Diva, The Man in the Gutter, was an interesting, ambitious failure that resembles Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle and early '80s Francis Ford Coppola. I haven't seen any of Beineix's subsequent films; few Americans have.

Diva doesn't fit comfortably into the 'classic French film revival' slot that Rialto has created so successfully for itself. I don't think the middle-aged or elderly crowd that supports Jean-Pierre Melville re-releases would go for it, and I'm not sure that contemporary teenagers would find anything attractive about its quasi-punk posturing. But I'm thankful for the opportunity to test whether this vision that helped define the '80s has stood the test of time. — Steve Erickson