George C. Wolfe Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Movies like Nights in Rodanthe are beyond reviewing, because intellectually analyzing them cancels out their intended effect. This is a weepie, pure and simple. If you're the type that likes crying at the movies, you'll love it. If you loved Richard Gere and Diane Lane together in a thriller like Unfaithful (2002) but you don't like to cry, you probably won't like it. Me, I found a few things to like and much to loathe.

Diane Lane stars in Nights in Rodanthe as Adrienne Willis, a frazzled single mother with a young son and a teenage daughter; the latter has just begun talking back and expressing her universal disdain for everything her mother does. Adrienne's no-good husband (Christopher Meloni), who, we learn, has had an affair, arrives to pick up the kids so that Adrienne can go help her happy-go-lucky pal Jean (Viola Davis, playing a typical movie "best friend") look after a sexy, beach-side North Carolina hotel during its off-season. Unfortunately, the husband now wants to get back together.

Confused Adrienne arrives at the hotel, which is decorated head-to-foot in all kinds of colored, tinkly bric-a-brac and prepares for its one and only guest. Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere) is a doctor struggling with a dark secret, and who has arrived for an equally mysterious errand. The attractive duo eventually warm up to one another and talk, but their dark secrets get in the way. Meanwhile, a huge storm threatens to blow away everything that isn't nailed down. I guess it's not too hard to guess what happens next. (Trivia hounds: this is Gere and Lane's third movie together. Besides Unfaithful, they were in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club together way back in 1984.)

Is it just me, or has Jamie Foxx's stock quietly dropped in the last year? Following his Best Actor Oscar for Ray, the guy went on to star in Stealth, Jarhead, Miami Vice and Dreamgirls. Looking at that list, I guess you can say his role choices have progressively gotten better over the past couple years, but with only one film currently on the agenda (this fall's The Kingdom), the dude will have to pick up some more work before things become a little sketchy. And that's exactly what he's done; The Hollywood Reporter tell us Foxx has signed on to star in Blood on the Leaves for Paramount Pictures and director George C. Wolfe (Lackawanna Blues).

Based on Jeffrey Stetson's novel, Foxx will play a district attorney suffering through all kinds of turmoil when he's brought on to prosecute a black history professor who's on trial for murdering a group of racist white men during the Civil Rights movement. Could this racially-charged legal drama set during the Civil Rights movement be Foxx's chance to get back in Oscar's good graces? You bet your (insert color) ass it is! Foxx, Marcus King and Jaime Rucker King are producing through their Foxxhole shingle, and Paramount is out searching for someone to play the professor on trial. Laurence Fishburne would make for a really great professor (remember him in Higher Learning?), and so if there's a wise direction to head in, that would be it. No word on a release date as of yet, but you Foxx fanatics can check him out this September 28 in The Kingdom.

First we have the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Then Ring of Fire, an apparently very bad Cash musical opens on Broadway. Plus, there's a documentary called Ring of Fire, but that's about a boxer named Emile Griffith, not Johnny Cash. And now Columbia and Paramount are making a fiction film called Ring of Fire - also about Griffith. Man, I'm already confused.

Emile Griffith's story is a tragic, fascinating one, about a man who moved from a career in fashion into the boxing ring, where he eventually killed a man. Griffith's alleged (please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that he's never actually called himself gay) homosexuality was a factor in that deadly fight, as it has been in his life from that moment on - he was beaten almost to the death in the 1990s in what appeared to be an incident of gay bashing - and, given both the riveting nature of his story and the growing acceptance of films with gay themes, it's certainly understandable that a studio would see this as a good time to tell his story.

Ring of Fire was a hit last year's Sundance, and a solid team has been assembled for the big studio, fictional treatment. The screenplay is being penned by playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, and multiple Tony-winner George C. Wolfe (who also helmed HBO's highly-praised Lackawanna Blues) has been tapped to direct.