Barrie Osborne Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I don't know about you, but when I'm faced with a heap of laundry, I throw on some weaponry and become The Laundry Warrior. Okay, not at all. I actually throw loads into the machine, and distract myself with video games. Regardless, I'm fairly intrigued about any flick that pops up with a name like Sngmoo Lee's fantasy film, The Laundry Warrior. Variety reports that it's an English-language hero film currently getting ready to film in New Zealand on November 12.

But it isn't some totally obscure flick with a cast you wouldn't know. Under Lord of the Rings producer Barrie Osborne, the picture has collected a cast that includes Geoffrey Rush, Kate Bosworth, and Jang Dong-gun. With a $45 million budget, Laundry follows a fugitive Asian warrior played by Jang, who hides "in the American badlands, where he encounters the town drunk (Rush) and a beautiful, but troubled woman." Now, Variety doesn't have a nice, helpful paranthetical note for Bosworth, but I imagine she's the troubled gal that they mention.

After teaching at the New York Film School for a handful of years, this will be Lee's directorial debut. Producer Michael Peyser says: "We draw on two great milieux, the Samurai movie and the Western. We will deliver a stylized, partly anime feel, with the techniques of 300, but a look that is brighter." So, a Western Samurai movie shot like a bright 300 -- yay or nay?

I'll admit that the sum total of my knowledge of motor sports is from the movies -- actually three movies -- Heart Like A Wheel, Days of Thunder, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. When The Hollywood Reporter announced that a biopic of Formula One racer Bruce McLaren was going into production, I needed to do a little investigating into the racing legend. McLaren was a native Kiwi who drove, designed, engineered, and invented some of the best F1's in the world. He overcame crippling childhood joint problems to become the youngest winner of a Formula One race, and the McLaren Mercedes Racing team continues to rack up wins 37 years after his death.

McLaren, who was killed in an auto testing accident in 1970, was posthumously inducted into both the International Motorsports Hall of Fame and the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America. Lord of The Rings producer Barrie Osborne announced this $100 million project during the A1 Grand Prix race in New Zealand over the weekend. The film will shoot on location in New Zealand, Monaco, and the U.K. later this year, and will showcase some of McLaren's original cars. Hopefully, this film will be my chance to expand my knowledge of racing beyond Will Ferrell screaming, "help me Tom Cruise!" in his underwear.

Hoping to tap once again into the giant audiences that flocked to their The Chronicles of Narnia, Walden Media has acquired the rights to Peruvian novelist Isabel Allende's Alexander Cold trilogy, a popular series among young adult readers. The first installment, City of the Beasts, is set in the Amazon, where the 15-year-old Cold is spending the summer with his grandma - she just happens to be an "archaeologist...in search of mythical animals." Cold, along with his 12-year-old companion, is kidnapped by "the People of the Mist and enter[s] a mountain to discover the mythical city of El Dorado and the enigmatic Beasts." Good lord - that's quite a summer.

Clearly, Walden has high hopes for this series - the books are best-sellers that the company not accidentally describes as "thrilling fantasy epics...in the grand tradition of The Chronicles of Narnia." Not leaving anything to chance, however, they've gone again to HarperCollins (the publisher of the Narnia series, with which Walden collaborated extensively on promotion) for source material, and have hired Barrie Osborne to produce. Why Barrie Osborne? Well, among his credits is a trilogy you might have heard of - does The Lord of the Rings ring any bells?