Brian Cox Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Wanna make your comic miniseries-turned-feature film into a big-buzz event? Jam it full of interesting actors. It all started with Bruce Willis. Then Morgan Freeman entered the project, followed by Helen Mirren, John C. Reilly, and Mary-Louise Parker. So where do we go from here? The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision Blog reports that Julian McMahon, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Dreyfus, and Brian Cox are all in negotiations to board the project.

As we know, Bruce Willis will play a retired black ops dude who faces off against "younger, more high-tech assassins who show up to kill him." Turns out Mr. McMahon will be the center of this conspiracy, playing the "Vice President with a dark side." Meanwhile, Borgnine will take on "the keeper of the CIA's darkest records," Dreyfus will play a wealthy dude making a mint on government contracts, and Cox will be a baddie once again, playing "a former Cold War spy and nemesis of Willis." As Elisabeth mentioned in the earlier posts, Summit is definitely taking the safe and secure road with casting, but with all these names, that isn't seeming like such a bad thing.

Ernest frickin' Borgnine. That's enough for me! Are you ready to see Red?

Trick 'r Treat is the holy grail of Halloween themed horror films. Not because of the notoriously long path writer-director Michael Dougherty's film has had to take to finally get released (a refresher: TrT was finished and first shown back in 2007 and, despite an overwhelming reaction to its first public exhibition, proceeded to be locked away in a vault at Warner Brothers for unspecified reasons), though that did turn it into a rare find to be coveted. No, Dougherty's film is such a treasure because it is Halloween. It just had the misfortune of being born a decade too late, of being born into a time when studios only care about remakes or sequels and certainly not about anthology films. Dougherty had, as far as a studio is concerned, the audacity to finely craft, gasp, an original, American horror film.

Wrong-decade misfortune that may be, however, it's great to be able to say that Trick 'r Treat will still be watched on Halloween for decades to come. Those who love it, like I, will still be watching it with great devotion. Those who merely liked it will not be able to help themselves from putting it on as background to their Halloween parties. And those who hated it, well, those who hated it don't exist. They can't exist. To hate Trick 'r Treat would be to hate the entire spirit of Halloween, a spirit Dougherty apparently has complete domain over.

Read the rest over at Horror Squad

Mike Dougherty's horror anthology film Trick 'r Treat has been bumped back by Warner Bros. for going on two years now, since its premiere at Austin's Butt-Numb-a-Thon back in December of 2007. We wrote up a piece last December wondering where it was, and we shant need to write one up this December, because not only is TrT scheduled for a home video release in October, but it's working up to a roadshow run starting in July.

According to Bloody Disgusting, the film will hit several genre festivals -- from FanTasia to Fantastic Fest (squee!) -- and hopes to be booked in other theaters along the way. Those who know of any ideal venues to show the film have been encouraged to contact Dougherty himself through either his Twitter account or his MySpace page.

Now, I know several colleagues who loved or at least liked it, though one cautions not to get our hopes up too high. I'm all for keeping expectations in check, but if anything, I'm slightly more for supporting apparently good and genuinely original horror offerings. It's like my equivalent of asking you to prevent forest fires, only instead of forest fires, we're talking Prom Night sequels. Ya dig?

(Trailer's after the jump...)

Don't mess with a man's best friend! I'm borrowing that phrase from our own Eric D. Snider, who used it to describe the plot of Red, a thriller starring the great Brian Cox as a man on a mission to avenge the death of his beloved dog at the hands of a bunch of teenage punks.

As Eric noted, Magnolia Pictures picked up distribution rights for the movie and planned a late summer release. Well, it must be later than we thought, because Dread Central now tells us that Red will be unleashed to theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, August 8, followed by a "slow rollout" to more theaters nationwide.

"An emotionally gripping if slightly overwrought drama," is how Eric described Red in his review from Sundance, where the film premiered. Later he called it "a solid B-minus effort, and Cox's performance makes it eminently watchable." In addition to Cox, the cast includes Tom Sizemore as a bad father, Kim Dickens as a TV reporter, and Robert Englund and Amanda Plummer as white trash parents of one of the juvenile delinquent kids responsible for the death of the titular dog.

I've loved Brian Cox in many roles (Braveheart to Manhunter to 25th Hour to X2: X-Men United to Zodiac), so I have to believe he's a major plus for audiences looking for something a little different in August. How about you? Do you have any interest in seeing the Cox-avenging Red?

Back in January, Paul Dano signed on to play a crazy healer who gets taken under the wing of Brian Cox in The Good Heart. Now Just Jared has got some shots from Dagur Kari's production, as it gears up in New York. To the right, you can see Dano in hospital whites, playing frisbee. I guess Cox isn't the only one in the film who hangs in the hospital. (There's another picture over at Just Jared of both of them in their whites.)

The movie is about a man named Jacques (Cox) who runs a deadbeat bar in New York, "like a bar in a Eugene O'Neil play." Dano, meanwhile, is a young homeless man with healing powers who comes to the bar and heals all the men there -- including Jacques, who "is always in the hospital, nearly dying." In thanks, the homeless man is taken under Jacques' wing, to take over the bar, but things get tricky when a Hungarian air-hostess creates a triangle between the two men.

And then, at some point, they must find themselves committed. They're certainly not in a normal hospital if they're walking around on their own and playing frisbee. Whatever the case, the mixture of Dano and Cox sounds excellent, and it should be worth the crazy, healing, dramatic adventure.

I told you a couple weeks ago how THINKFilm had picked up the gritty prison thriller The Escapist, and how the film, which stars Brian Cox, was the last thing I saw at Sundance this year. Well, I actually had a double helping of Cox that January night, because right before The Escapist I watched Red, another film boasting a terrific Cox performance -- and now it's headed for theaters, too.

Via The Hollywood Reporter we learn that Magnolia has picked up Red, with plans to release it late this summer. The film (which I reviewed here) is a thriller along the lines of Death Wish, only instead of avenging his wife's murder, the Cox character is going after the punks who killed his dog. (Do not mess with a man's dog!)

The very last film I saw at Sundance this year, at a lively 10 p.m. screening and seated next to the dapper James Rocchi, was The Escapist. It was a perfect ending for the festival, and a great "guy movie" to boot (Rocchi and I are nothing if not burly, rugged men): Brian Cox leads a bunch of Limey blokes, including Joseph Fiennes, on a daring escape from a British prison. Familiar premise, but well executed with a few twists. Rocchi's rave review is here.

The flick was well received during its world premiere at Sundance, and yet somehow it didn't get picked up by any distributors before the fest ended. Now, finally, THINKFilm has come to the rescue. Variety reports that the distributor has paid about $1 million for the film and plans to release it in October, starting small and expanding over the course of several weeks.

Our post-modern age makes it easy (indeed, possibly too easy) to find takes or spins or twists on traditional stories or genre films; what's often harder is finding well-executed examples of those genres in the first place. (Put more bluntly, we've all seen plenty of recent ironic crime films or teen comedies -- but how few of those actually work as crime films or teen comedies?) The British film The Escapist, which made its North American debut at Sundance this year, not only works as a brilliant, twisting existential expansion of the traditional prison break film; it also works as a crackerjack example of the traditional prison break film. Brian Cox stars as Frank, a convict serving a life sentence; after hearing of his daughter's second overdose, he determines that he has to get out, he has to see her: "I have to make things right."

As played by Cox, Frank's hard to understand, but easy to like -- and the other way around, too. Cox is one of our best actors -- he's great in both high art and high trash, and The Escapist offers him a chance to work both ends of that divide. We watch, riveted, as Frank tries to break through the metaphorical wall around his feelings; we watch, riveted, as Frank tries to break through the literal walls keeping him from the outside. Frank's demeanor is pure prison -- a hot-forged alloy of defiance and resignation tempered by time -- but he's also more than just that facade.

Paul Dano's name might not be on the tip of tongues, but you're sure to have seen him, and liked him -- he played Klitz in The Girl Next Door, Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine, and most recently, Paul and Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood. (If you haven't seen these, you should. And if you don't like him, why the heck not?!) Now, along with Explicit Ills, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Stanford Prison Experiment, MTV reports that he's going to be acting in the upcoming film, The Good Heart with his L.I.E. co-star, Brian Cox.

MTV talked with Cox at Sundance, and he said this new project, to be directed by Dagur Kári, is "a crazed film about a guy who runs a bar, called Jacques [Cox], in New York. It's a bar where all these deadbeats hang out, like a bar in a Eugene O'Neil play." How does Dano fit in? "This young homeless man comes in, and he has these extraordinary powers of healing; he can heal all the guys in the bar. He also heals my character, this guy who has these heart problems. The old man is always in the hospital, nearly dying." After healing the bar owner, Dano's character is taken under his wing so that he may take over the bar when Jacques passes on. Things get complicated when a "Hungarian air-hostess" comes to work in the bar and a triangle forms.

On the one hand, this sounds great. On the other, I can help but think about what it would be like with the previously-rumored stars -- Ryan Gosling and Tom Waits.

It took me years to get that horrible Natalie Imbruglia pop song out of my head, and now the singer/actress might be about to return to the spotlight. According to The Herald Sun, the Aussie-born actress was recently in Sydney to film a "secret screen test" for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which is gearing up production as we speak. No further information was available on exactly what kind of part Imbruglia was testing for, but one can only assume the 32 year-old beauty was up for the female lead. Imbruglia has recently re-focused her career on acting and back in October we noted that she was playing the lead in the Australian drama Elise, about a missing child. She also appeared in a 2003 action comedy called Johnny English, which was unseen by me but was apparently not very good.

Earlier rumors had Maggie Q latching onto a lead female role in X4, but nothing has been confirmed yet and there's always a possibility that there could be a female villain in the mix. Liev Schreiber is also supposedly circling the role of young Stryker, but we recently passed on the news that Brian Cox is also putting X4 on the resume he's currently sending around, so that adds to the confusion. One of our commenters recently pointed out, however, that the film may be going in the direction of acknowledging that Wolverine is a very old character, which would necessitate the young and old Strykers both being in the film. Makes sense, right?