Gena Rowlands Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Over at CHUD, they're reporting that acclaimed actress Gena Rowlands was on television recently and mentioned that "her son was originally going to direct an Iron Man movie...he's now instead thinking of doing Captain America." Rowlands' son -- with legendary actor/director John Cassavetes -- is Nick Cassavetes. Nick doesn't really have any projects of this type on his resume, but he was attached to the awesome-looking Iron Man for quite a while before Jon Favreau took the reigns. Not to suggest that Rowlands is unreliable by any means, but for now just chalk this up as a tasty little rumor.

Nick Cassavetes has a pretty diverse filmography. Like his father, he was an actor before he started directing -- you might remember Nick as Dietrich Hassler in Face/Off -- a movie with some of the greatest character names of all time. He started his directing career with smaller films like Unhook the Stars and the interesting She's So Lovely, with John Travolta and Sean Penn. From there, he jumped to more commercial fare like the decent Denzel Washington flick John Q and the favorite movie of pretty much every female I know -- The Notebook. Most recently, he gave us the kinda ridiculous Alpha Dog, which featured an unintentionally hilarious performance by a fat-suit clad Sharon Stone. So the guy can do a lot of different kinds of material, sure. But do you think he'd be a good choice for Captain America? And we still don't have a cast for the thing -- who do you want to see step into the tights? This guy?

If you are a Parker Posey fan, which was the last film of hers that you really loved? I just went down the list, and was surprised to see that the last starring role that was really, really great was her Jackie O in The House of Yes. Of course, she's had some great roles since then, but they were all ensemble pieces -- The Anniversary Party, A Mighty Wind and my personal favorite: her neurotic dog-owning Meg Swan in Best in Show. To me, the recent Fay Grim was her big comeback role, but it's one of those films that requires a certain cinematic taste, and was definitely her putting on her old, quirk hat. On the tails of that we're getting Broken English, which might just give her some better mainstream work than her previous side roles in movies like You've Got Mail and Superman Returns.

Rope of Silicon has posted a trailer to English, which pretty much runs through the plot in its short collection of scenes. The movie is about a 30-something Manhattan woman named Nora (Posey) who is single and cynical about love and unhappy at her hotel job. She's also jealous of her friend Audrey's (Drea de Matteo without the goofy Tribbianis or mobsters) "perfect marriage," and has a mom who keeps reminding her that she's single (Gena Rowlands). Nora goes on a series of dates that include Justin Theroux as a mohawk-headed actor and Josh Hamilton -- who played her brother, Marty in Yes -- as a guy her mom fixes her up with. As with any romance, when all hope seems lost, she meets the alluring Julien from France, who energizes her life. She quits her job, heads to Paris and goes out to experience what French men have to offer. It's Posey without the over-acted quirk, which will make her easier to digest for the masses, but still with the same snark that her fans love. And we only have a little less than a month's wait to see it -- it heads into limited release on June 22.

For the weekend:

• There's a really interesting animated film premiering in France next month, that will hopefully make its way across the ocean and give us some animation that's not about bugs, penguins or any of the other hot, animated creatures of the moment. The film is Persepolis, and you can find a trailer and clips over at Cartoon Brew (It's cute, but unfortunately not in English. However, it's fairly easy to get the gist). The film is adapted from Marjane Satrapi's comic memoir of her experiences growing up in Tehran, and the clips have recognizable pop references from Julio Iglesias to Michael Jackson. To sweeten the deal further, both Catherine Deneuve and Gena Rowlands have lent their voices to the movie. If only we could get more cool rocker chick movies, and less kooky animal ones...
• Sophie Marceau has a bunch on the up and up, so I thought I'd fill you in. While her projects aren't as mainstream as some of her previous work, like Braveheart and The World is Not Enough, she's been clocking time both behind and in front of the camera. She's currently in Cannes for her second directorial feature, Trivial -- a thriller that takes place in and around Deauville's Hotel Normandie, which will hit French screens next week. In front of the camera, she's playing a resistance fighter in the WWII thriller, Female Agents. And once all that is done, she's going to work on her third feature directorial stint. Variety quotes her as saying, or rather purring as they put it: "I don't want only to satisfy other people's desires. I have desires of my own, and making my own films satisfies them." Here, here!
• This September, the U.K.-South Africa co-production treaty will finally be taken advantage of with Anthony Fabian's Skin. It sounds like a pretty interesting story -- it's based on a black girl who was born to white parents in South Africa, who obviously had a heck of a hard time dealing with discrimination under previous apartheid laws. The movie will star Sophie Okonedo, who starred with Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda. I wonder if we'll ever get the story of the black and white twins and some point, too?
  

We reported a few months ago on Anthony Hopkins' painfully personal, ambitious-sounding Slipstream, which he wrote, stars in, directs, and also composed the music for. The movie, which is being made with a small-ish indie budget, is a noir-comedy "about a man, who's caught in a slipstream of time falling back on itself and he remembers his own future," and stems from Hopkins' own "wild thoughts about God, life and death." Hey, I said it was personal.

Already in the ensemble cast with Hopkins are Gena Rowlands and superstar thespian Christian Slater, and that duo has recently been joined by a massive flood of actors, all of whom are apparently eager to work on the weirdest-sounding (apart, maybe, from The Science of Sleep) project of the last year or so. According to today's Hollywood Reporter, all of the following are now caught (ah ha ha) in Slipstream: John Turturro, Camryn Manheim, Jeffrey Tambor, S. Epatha Merkerson, Fionnula Flanagan, Christopher Lawford and Michael Clark Duncan. Whew.

Production began this week in LA; no word yet on a possible release date.

Between bouts of chewing scenery and turning in the occasion great performance, Anthony Hopkins has been working on the screenplay for Slipstream, a movie he not only wrote and composed the music for, but will also direct. The film, which sounds ambitious to say the least, is "about a man, who's caught in a slipstream of time falling back on itself and he remembers his own future." Oh boy. I'm not saying, mind you, that this HAS to be a disaster, but how in the world is Hopkins going to portray that story without it being either incomprehensible or incredibly I Love Life! cheesy? He's also so close to the project that it's hard to imagine he'll be able to see any possible flaws, what with it being loosely based on his own "wild thoughts about God, life and death" and all.

Set to star in the film alongside Hopkins (yes, he's acting in it, also) are Gena Rowlands and -- wait for it -- Christian Slater. That's right, Anthony Hopkins is going to be directing Christian Slater. I bet neither of them every dreamed this day would come. According to Production Weekly, many of the film's stars will be playing multiple roles; production begins this summer.

According to a report in Screen Daily this morning, little Zoe Cassavetes is set to join dad John and big brother Nick as a feature film director. With only a single short under her belt, Cassavetes has lined up an impressive cast to star in her debut, including Gena Rowlands (who she gets to call "Mom"), Parker Posey, and French icon Jeanne Moreau. Entitled Broken English, her film explores the life of a woman in her 30s who "is becoming debilitated by a lack of luck in love." (What on earth does that mean? Like, physically crippled? That seems just a little bit dramatic, doesn't it?)

Despite the impressive cast, the movie's budget is less than $2 million. It's being produced by Andrew Fierberg, Christina Weiss Lurie, and Steven Shainberg (Fierberg produced Secretary, which Shainberg directed) for Vox3 Films, a new independent production house based in New York; in order to succeed, Fierberg believes the studio needs to keep all budgets below $2 million, and that $1 million is ideal. If the money to produce a film cannot be raised within a year and a half, however, he sends writers and directors on their ways, so that their ideas don't die for a lack of funds. Though the company has only completed a handful of projects (including Shainberg's forthcoming Fur, which stars Nicole Kidman), they have six in various stages of development, and hope to "build a library of low-budget films" within a few years.