David OHara Tagged Articles at Cinematical

After the record-breaking success of Night Watch and Day Watch (and an early film for B-movie maven Roger Corman, Arena), Khazakstan-born, Russia-based director Timur Bekmambetov makes his English-language big-studio debut with Wanted, a bruising, brawny action film starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie. Bekmambetov spoke with Cinematical in Los Angeles about making the jump to big-money moviemaking, the hidden world of secrets behind Wanted's look, the action-film apprenticeship of James McAvoy, working with Angelina Jolie and how " .... we (film makers) are all vampires. ..."

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When Wanted was announced as the opening night film for the Los Angeles Film Festival, there was a mild outbreak of head-scratching over the choice; why start a film festival loaded with independent and foreign film with a big-studio action movie? The fact is that the opening-night LAFF premiere of Wanted -- directed by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, loosely based on a series of comics by a Glasgwegian Scot, starring America's most notable movie starlet opposite a Glasgow-born lead actor and shot with Prague standing in for Chicago -- doesn't say much about the LAFF as a film festival and doesn't say a single thing about L.A. as a real city, but it says plenty about L.A. as a company town with a global span. Wanted's a corporate product, but, thankfully, it's an excellent one -- the two-fisted, double-barreled high-octane guilty pleasure summer action movie you've been waiting for. Wanted is speedy and spiffy and shiny as a bullet, and it's got about as much actual weight when it stops moving.