January 18, 2012
Five Favorite Films with Gina Carano
History is littered with the corpses of sports champs whose bids for movie immortality have been dubious at best; for every Hong Kong martial arts superstar and Austrian bodybuilder there are scores of straight-to-video beefcakes lacking the onscreen charisma to match their real-life skills. Rarer still is the successful female action hero crossover, but this week -- with the somewhat unlikely help of genre-shifting filmmaker Steven Soderbergh -- a new one arrives in the shape of Gina Carano, former Mixed Martial Arts fighter and now star of her very own spy thriller, Haywire.
The story goes that Soderbergh caught one of Carano's fights on TV one evening and couldn't believe the talented -- and visually striking -- fighter wasn't headlining her own movie. So, with the help of screenwriter Lem Dobbs (The Limey) and a supporting cast of thespian eye-candy that includes Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Michael Douglas, he set about putting together an action vehicle for Carano, in which the fledgling actress plays a CIA-trained assassin on the loose and out to avenge those who double-crossed her. With its minimalist plot, punishing (yet expertly-staged) fight choreography and throwback thriller cool, Haywire is the kind of film that seems almost too good to be true in the movie release graveyard of January -- and, if fate smiles upon it, should make a new action hero of its leading lady. We had the chance to chat with Carano about the movie recently; but first, she ran through five of her all-time favorite films.
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October 13, 2011
Chloë Moretz on Texas Killing Fields, Hugo and Why Audrey Hepburn is Her Idol
At the venerable age of 14, Chloë Grace Moretz is both something of an acting veteran -- she's been performing since she was six -- and poised on the cusp of a very promising film career. Having quite literally blasted her way into movie fame as the colorfully-tongued vigilante Hit Girl in last year's Kick-Ass, she followed that up with a chilling, emotionally impressive performance as an age-old vampire in the unexpectedly great Let Me In. Things are just getting started for Moretz, however: next month she'll star in Martin Scorsese's much-anticipated 3D fantasy, Hugo, and she recently wrapped production on Tim Burton's horror melodrama, Dark Shadows (playing Michelle Pfeiffer's daughter, no less). This week, Moretz stars alongside Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in (daughter-of-Michael) Ami Canaan Mann's Texas Killing Fields, an atmospheric police thriller in which she plays an adolescent drifter at the center of the hunt for a mysterious killer. We had the chance to chat with Moretz earlier this week.
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April 18, 2011
Matt Reeves Heads Up The Passage
Matt Reeves will direct Fox 2000's adaptation of the Justin Cronin bestseller "The Passage," about an apocalyptic future when vampiric mutants have nearly wiped out the human race.
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October 1, 2010
Critics Consensus: The Social Network Is One Of The Year's Best
This week at the movies, we've got Internet pioneers (The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake), a juvenile vampire (Let Me In, starring Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee), and a cree (Case 39, starring Renée Zellweger and Ian McShane). What do the critics have to say? In only a few short years, Facebook has morphed from a campus-wide phenomenon to revolutionizing the way that we communicate and share information. If The Social Network offers an embellished account of the site's genesis, critics say it's still a remarkable piece of filmmaking -- David Fincher's virtuoso direction and Aaron Sorkin's brisk, intelligent script make the Certified Fresh The Social Network on of the best-reviewed films of the year.
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September 29, 2010
Deconstructing the Vampire
With "Let Me In" arriving in theaters this week, here's a list of other films that took the vampire genre and gave it their own unique spin.
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August 2, 2010
Matt Reeves Talks Let Me In
What can we expect from Matt Reeves' remake of "Let the Right One In"? Will there be a "Cloverfield" sequel? Matt Reeves answers these questions and more in a new interview with Collider.
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October 1, 2009
Let the Right One In Remake Gets Its Cast
Matt Reeves' American remake of the Swedish vampire film -- economically titled 'Let Me In' -- has announced its cast. Kodi Smit-McPhee ('The Road') will play Oskar and Chloe Moretz ('500 Days of Summer') will play Eli. Richard Jenkins ('The Visitor') has also been cast.
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