Why not more advance word yet on Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster and releasing on September 14 from Warner Bros.? It’s playing at the Toronto Film Festival,
I gather (their official play list releases August 21), but one
would’ve thought that some long-lead, sow-the-fields screenings in Los
Angeles would have started to take place. Maybe they have, I don’t know.
The film’s trailer, meanwhile, is also fairly solid; powered by a fantastic score from Dario Marianelli, it puts a tonier spin on all those Ashley Judd movies of revenge and empowerment. But the end touch… “I want my dog back”? I almost spit my coffee out. Seriously, you can’t end the trailer on that.
Naveen Andrews, the ubiquitous Terrence Howard — who costars in the excellent forthcoming The Hunting Party — and Mary Steenburgen also appear in the film.
Circle of Iron,
also known as The Silent Flute, has
over the years gathered some cultish acclaim, chiefly since it was a
labor-of-love project that was to be Bruce Lee’s English-language breakthrough.
While Lee was still a struggling actor and martial arts dayplayer, he and
friends James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant (the Oscar-winning writer of In the Heat of the Night) developed a
mystical epic about the quest for enlightenment and peace; it blended thick
religious symbolism, surreality, complex location shoots and, of course,
head-cracking action. It was also abstruse and un-filmable.
In the intervening years, Lee went on to international
acclaim in Enter the Dragon, and when
his friends raised the necessary capital to lens their passion play, a haughty
Lee informed them that they could no longer afford him. (So much for that
all-for-one, one-for-all dream…) Five years after Lee’s mysterious death,
however, the vision would finally be realized, though this time with David
Carradine as its star.
The movie — about a young man named Cord (Jeff Cooper, above right, possessing
one of the largest, most unusually shaped craniums I’ve ever seen) searching
for clarity via a “book of enlightenment” and occasional conversations with a
wise old blind man named Ah Sahm — is still a wildly mixed bag of
Eastern-tinged esoterica, action and weird humor. Eli Wallach (above left), for instance,
pops up as a man in a large pot in the desert who is trying to dissolve his own
testicles in hot oil. Still, Carradine’s multiple performances (he co-stars as
Ah Sahm, Monkey Man and Death) and some simply gorgeous location shooting makes
for riveting retro-showcase theater for appreciative zen-martial arts fans, if
not mainstream audiences.
The superb supplemental extras on this special edition DVD
also elevate the release from Blue Underground, their second treatment of the
title. They include an audio commentary track with director Richard Moore, the
film’s theatrical trailer, an alternate title sequence, a mini-documentary
tracing the project’s strange history to the screen, the first draft of the script
on DVD-ROM and a fantastic new interview with Carradine in which he reminisces
about the film and its special place in his heart — he rates it “probably his
favorite,” especially for the ideas it espouses. Hmmm… okay. C (Movie) A- (Disc)
Relaxing at the recent press day for Stardust in a
T-shirt emblazoned with an iconic photograph of the famous meeting between Andy Warhol
and Bob Dylan, young actor Charlie Cox had plenty of time to reflect on his
meteoric rise from near-obscurity (he’d appeared in Casanova prior to being plucked for the lead role in Stardust by director Matthew Vaughn) as
well as his next movie, Stone of Destiny.
Written and directed by nebbishy actor Charles Martin Smith (The Snow Walker, Air Bud), the film is a rooted-in-truth caper comedy, in which Cox stars
opposite Kate Mara (We Are Marshall, Shooter), Billy Boyd and Robert Carlyle.
“I playing a guy called Ian Hamilton who’s a real guy,
still alive, and he’s amazing,” says Cox, who on his arm sports a butterfly tattoo
comprised of two skulls, created by New York
tattoo artist Scott Campbell. “It’s the story of him and three of his mates
during their university years in the 1950s, 1951 actually. They drove down to Glasgow
from London in the middle of the
night on Christmas Eve, and they stole a very famous Scottish relic out of
Westminster Abbey. …It’s called the Stone of Scone, but
it’s better known as the Stone of Destiny. I’ll tell you what
it was — Jacob had his vision of the ladder where he fell asleep with his head
on this stone. And so the stone become the throne of Scotland,
and the Scottish monarch would sit on it. So what happened was, when the
English got rid of the Scottish monarchy, they took it away and they placed it
under the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, therefore symbolizing by
Scotland’s own rule that whoever sat on the throne of England was sitting on
the throne of Scotland as well. So it was kind of a massive gesture to steal
it.”
“But it’s actually very funny as well,” Cox continues. “I like to call it
the worst successful heist of all time, because it’s so badly thought out and
everything went wrong, but they did it. Somehow they broke this big stone, they
lost it — all sorts of things went wrong. But they still pulled it off.”
UPDATE 8/16: In regards to the comment below, there was a slip of the tape, and it was somewhat mangled. I assumed “Field” was a nickname, but upon further review, I tend to doubt that. I believe it was just “Ian,” garbled. Ergo, corrected above…
In light of her recent, rumored casting in Paul W. S. Anderson’s remake of Roger Corman’s Death Race, originally reported by The Hollywood Reporter last week, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on some of Joan Allen’s comments regarding her career and the path of women in Hollywood in general at the press day for The Bourne Ultimatum a few weeks back. To wit:
“I feel fortunate because I’ve gotten to do some interesting things in the past four or five years. But it’s not like I’m getting 50 scripts
a week and turning down all of them, or 49 of them — it’s really not like that,” says Allen.
“I’ll go through periods where I get a few scripts a week and then I go no, this
isn’t the right thing. So it’s not like the choices are voluminous. But within
that I still have gotten enough to satisfy me. I have a 13-year-old daughter, I
can’t work back-to-back, I can’t be away from her that much. It’s kind of great
for me if I do one film a year or even one film every two years, or year and a
half. Because I spend all my time with her then. I save my money and I put
it away and I don’t overextend myself, and I’m sort of personally gratified that
way.”
“And I’m noticing a trend that’s changing with women in
television series, with Glenn Close and Holly Hunter and Kyra Sedgwick, and I
think that’s very exciting, because I think a lot of them are more interesting
parts for them,” continues Allen. “I see that as opening up more, for women of a certain age to
have another… employment opportunity. Because sometimes the roles you get
are someone’s mom, and it’s not very interesting, or you’re getting dumped by
your husband so he can go off…”
Or sometimes those roles are in Death Race, you know? Allen supposedly joins Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson and Ian McShane in what seems to be an exceedingly well cast piece of Hollywood rib-nudging, however desultory it may turn out to be. (After all, Rollerball didn’t exactly wow dystopian futurists.) It remains to be seen whether the film can top or add anything to the social commentary provided by Daniel Minahan’s Series 7, which came out six years ago, seven by the time Death Race sees the light of day.
The film’s trailer, meanwhile, is also fairly solid; powered by a fantastic score from Dario Marianelli, it puts a tonier spin on all those Ashley Judd movies of revenge and empowerment. But the end touch… “I want my dog back”? I almost spit my coffee out. Seriously, you can’t end the trailer on that.
Circle of Iron,