Dennis Quaid Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Really good sci-fi horror flicks don't come along too often. Pandorum may be burdened with the unfair stigma of "not screened in advance for the press" (at least in my area), but it proves to be a superior picture, expertly establishing and maintaining a charged atmosphere of unhinged ferocity.

Director Christian Alvart displays an assured grasp of visual storytelling and provides a solid framework for Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid to let loose with intense, uninhibited performances. Four years ago, Alvart made the powerful Antibodies, a haunting serial killer movie that neatly subverted expectations, and he has delivered another impressive genre-buster. He even made me sit on the edge of my seat a few times, an inclination which I nearly always resist.

Foster and Quaid are apparently the first two members of their mission team to awaken from hyper-sleep on the spaceship Elysium. They're both badly disoriented; hyper-sleep is supposed to induce brief memory loss, but they look like they've journeyed through all nine circles of suffering in Dante's Inferno, which might feel like a picnic in the park compared to their situation.

The ship appears abandoned; no one is present to greet them, the power has been shut down, and they're locked in a chamber with impregnable metal doors. They can barely remember their names, much less their mission or even their own qualifications. Just wait until they find out they're not alone. And whatever is out there is very fast, very ugly, and very hungry.

When the red-band trailer for Legion appeared online, the responses ranged from "What the hell?" to "How can angels go bad?" to "I don't like the look of that at all." All the footage is very dark, demonic, and confusing and we have to wait until January 2010 to figure out why all hell (or heaven) seems to be breaking loose.

But guess what! You don't have to wait that long if you're insanely curious about it. IDW Publishing announced that Scott Stewart and Tom Waltz have penned a four issue miniseries that will serve as a prequel to Stewart's upcoming holy war. Legion: Prophets will introduce you to the Theologians, the Guardian, the Codebreaker and the Voice, five very different and unlikely individuals who become humanity's only hope in surviving the Apocalypse. (Here we thought it all rested on the well-built shoulders of the ex-angelic Paul Bettany.) "There were a lot of cool and scary characters and situations that I wasn't able to include in the main narrative of the movie, so I'm very excited to be able to expand the Legion universe beyond the film and explore those other stories through the comic book series," says Stewart.

Legion: Prophets hits comic store shelves in November, just in time for the holidays and to make you look a little askance at the angels glittering on every holiday decoration. If you're still into the movie after reading the paper prequel, Legion comes to the big screen on January 22, 2010.

[via io9]

(Cinematical Rewind is a new column that showcases some of our favorite posts from the past few years. Here's Jeffrey M. Anderson's famous Cinematical Seven from 7/22/08)

Occasionally Hollywood cobbles together random members of the A-list to play family members on film, even if their genes obviously come from opposite ends of the earth. If the actors are good enough or if the chemistry is there, sometimes the combo can work, such as Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in Cassandra's Dream. Other times, it stretches credibility, such as Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited. My all-time favorite oddball casting is in Sidney Lumet's Family Business (1989), with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick playing grandfather, father and son. (Huh?) At the same time, there are actor combos out there who just scream to be paired up in a family capacity. Remember Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick in Something to Talk About? Well, neither do I, but that pairing was perfect. Here are a few others that could work:

1. Christian Bale & Samantha Morton

I don't mean to harp on that old "Bad British teeth" thing, but both Christian and Samantha have front teeth that seem to curve slightly upward in the center, so that their pearly whites tend to disappear under their top lips when they speak. As a result, both speak with ever-so-vague sibilant 'S'es -- Christian more so than Samantha. (It's fairly inconvenient trait for a Bruce Wayne trying to maintain his secret identity.) But aside from that, they both have dark, intense eyes and they certainly both project a similar, singularly dedicated mood onscreen. (Christian is the big brother, three years older than Samantha.)

Oh, the irony of ironies when the Dennis Quaid serial killer mystery The Horsemen had a tagline that said "Come and see," only to receive an unceremonious dump on something like 75 screens in early March and its first formal review just this week in Variety (and they had to catch it in Paris, apparently!). Box Office Mojo can't even claim any exact figures for what the thing grossed in its very limited run.

In similar straits was the Diane Lane/Mickey Rourke thriller, Killshot, which was formally dumped in Arizona and Arizona alone at the end of January. $18,000 on five screens -- way to capitalize on that Wrestler buzz, Weinsteins. But soon, scarcity will matter not for either film, as Fangoria says that the former film will get its DVD release on July 14th, while Amazon claims a May 26th bow for the latter.

There's no word on special features for Killshot yet, which makes me wonder if we'll see any sign of Johnny Knoxville's reportedly excised character... but maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Recreating well-known political figures has been pretty popular lately. We've had the surprising casting twist of Josh Brolin as Dubya, plus a whole slew of other political figures in W. We've seen Paul Giamatti become a Founding Father. Frank Langella got to take on good ol' Nixon. And now, we're getting Bill and Hillary, and the famous Clinton duo is not being played by Darrell Hammond and Amy Poehler. It's a pair you'd probably never guess.

Variety reports that Dennis Quaid is set to star as President Clinton, with Julianne Moore taking on Hillary in an upcoming HBO film called The Special Relationship. While, at first glance, this might seem like a tale that will discuss certain forays in the Oval Office and risque behavior with cigars, the piece will look at an entirely different relationship -- the "sometimes turbulent political relationship" between Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- who will be played by Michael Sheen.

You might remember that Sheen already played Blair in both The Deal and The Queen, so this will be old hat. (Helen McCrory, who played Cherie Blair in The Queen, is also set to reprise her role.) He was also the Frost to Langella's Nixon, and Frost/Nixon playwright Peter Morgan wrote the screenplay to this project and is hoping to make his directorial debut with the feature, should it get greenlit.
Can you imagine Dennis and Julianne as Bill and Hillary?

Austin was celebrating film this week before the SXSW crowds even arrived. On Thursday night, Austin Film Society held its ninth annual Texas Film Hall of Fame awards gala at Austin Studios, honoring Texans and "honorary Texans" in the film industry. It's a fundraising event for filmmaker grants and educational programs, and attire ranges from the glitziest cocktail dresses to blue jeans and cowboy boots. Thomas Haden Church emceed the ceremony, revealing surprising depths of bizarre-yet-enjoyable humor. Really, I think someone should consider him to host the Oscars next year, although I don't know what his singing and dancing talents might be.

Thirteen and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, shown above, received the Ann Richards award for someone in film who "who breaks barriers and forges new creative paths." Her award was presented by Brendan Fraser. The Star of Texas award for an exceptional film made in Texas went to Rushmore, which was filmed in Houst -- Luke Wilson accepted the award. Linda Gray, who nearly goosed Thomas Haden Church onstage, inducted her Dallas co-star Larry Hagman into the Hall of Fame. Keith Carradine inducted Powers Boothe. Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater shared a tribute to Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, a Hall of Famer who died earlier this year. And Dennis Quaid presented the Tom Mix Honorary Texan award to his The Alamo co-star Billy Bob Thornton, who explained to us how he was more of a real Texan than an honorary one, anyway.

We've got photos of the event's honorees in the gallery below (as well as a few other familiar-looking attendees); check 'em out.

The tricky thing about both trailers and sci-fi flicks is that you might feel that you've already gotten the gist of either in under two minutes. After watching this here teaser for September's Pandorum, I feel torn between a look that reminds me of Event Horizon (could be worse in my book) and a story that is rumored to be more akin to I Am Legend (yeah, now Horizon sounds good, huh?), but we'll know in a couple of months whether or not amnesiac astronauts Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster are in as much danger as this trailer from Film School Rejects suggests.

I didn't see director Christian Alvert's first film, Antibodies, and nearly no one has seen his still-shuffled follow-up, Case 39, though there's no writing credit on that one to haunt him. Hopefully, this thing will be more atmospheric than derivative -- if it's even either; this isn't even two minutes here! -- but again, we'll find out in due time. Pandorum opens on September 4.

It's football season, which means it's also the season for at least one heartwarming and inspiring movie about the sport. This year the film comes from Universal -- The Express, a biopic of Ernie "The Elmira Express" Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman trophy, back in 1963. However, the movie divides its time between Davis and his coach at Syracuse University, Ben Schwartzwalder, and shows the ways in which the two characters changed one another (for the better, natch).

The movie opens during the notorious Cotton Bowl game of 1960, when Davis (Rob Brown) was a running back on the Syracuse University team that played The University of Texas, which had not yet allowed black varsity team members. It's a rough game, but Davis is handling himself until all hell breaks loose ... and then we flash back to Davis's childhood in the 1940s and see how he learned to handle nasty racist situations even at an early age. He's stubborn and he's speedy, and eventually decides to use those assets to strive for his goal of playing professional football. His idol, Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, advises Davis to play for his alma mater Syracuse because Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid) is such an excellent head coach. But Davis encounters difficulties in the ways Schwartzwalder handles the black team members. The coach's primary goal is to avoid "trouble," so they're warned away from the white female students, and worse yet, at certain Southern games they're not allowed to score touchdowns. The real action culminates when the film returns to the Cotton Bowl game in Dallas.

Comedies don't have an obligation to be particularly insightful, but you'd think an indie aimed at an adult audience would have something to say about its characters. Smart People stars Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, and Thomas Haden Church; the cast and the multitude of laughs scored at the expense of easy targets might justify a rental, though I liked it much less after I started thinking about it. I'm in the minority -- James Rocchi expressed all kinds of love in his review. The DVD, out on Tuesday, includes an audio commentary by director Noam Murro and writer Jude Poirier, deleted scenes, bloopers / outtakes, and "the smartest people," which I'm guessing is a "making of" feature. It's also out on Blu-ray.

Also out on Tuesday, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer has been described as "a comedy about three generations of Mexican-American women enjoying their sexuality." I heard all kinds of good things about it when it had some festival play a few seasons ago. America Ferrera, Elizabeth Peña, and Lucy Gallardo star. The DVD looks bare bones, but distributor Maya Entertainment has more about the film on their site.

An appealing romantic comedy set in and around a citrus grove in Sicily, The Orange Thief (pictured) played several film festivals, including Woodstock and AFI Dallas, and is now out on DVD. I'm not going to claim that this low-key charmer is some kind of lost classic, but it's amusing, looks gorgeous, and has the benefit of an incredibly restful, bucolic setting, which make it worth a rental. The DVD from Lightyear appears to feature only the movie.