Guy Pearce Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Bomb squad. War zone. Malfunctioning robot. In the opening sequence of The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow expertly sets a tone of anxious, sweat-soaked drama. The film has been playing in New York and Los Angeles, expands to selected cities this Friday, and then goes wide on July 24. You can watch the first eight minutes online at Hulu (or after the jump).

And if that doesn't grab you, I don't know what will. I saw The Hurt Locker at SXSW, and that opening sequence pinned me to my seat. Guy Pearce leads a bomb squad that includes Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. They're already suited up in protective gear as the scene begins, wisecracking and otherwise demonstrating an easy camaraderie. A small wheeled robot has a minor mechanical malfunction, requiring Pearce to walk into harm's way to fix it. The team's wary conversational bravado continues, even as they shift into high alert on the mostly empty street. Civilian bystanders could be friendly -- or they could be waiting to trigger the bomb.

Jeremy Renner, who turns up a little later in the picture, stars as a new member of the squad. He's a confident expert, but his reckless methods cause the others to question whether his devil-may-care attitude is needlesssly endangering their own lives. Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly also appear in small roles. I fully agree with James Rocchi, who wrote in his review: "You'll want to see it at a theater near you, in fact, on the largest possible screen with the best possible sound." Don't miss it.

Guy Pearce just doesn't do enough movies for my liking. It's not as though he's vanished, but he seems to maintain a fairly low profile every time he blows everyone away with a big, meaty part like L.A. Confidential or Memento. But he has a lot of great projects coming up (the most exciting of which has to be The Road), and he's added a very intriguing one to his slate: the remake of 1973's telepic Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Pearce and Bailee Madison have joined Katie Holmes in Troy Nixey's remake. It's a fairly loose adaptation of the 1973 original, which was centered around a couple, Sally and Alex, who inherited an old mansion from Sally's grandmother. Sally accidentally uncovers a hellish portal that allows a bunch of demons to escape and wreck bloody havoc. Naturally, no one believes her, and is convinced she's having a nervous breakdown thanks to all that home repair. Because it was the 1970s, it didn't even end well for Sally who just wanted a new fireplace. For those tired of seeing "remake" tacked onto everything, and for fans of the original, you'll be happy to know that the new Dark isn't so much a remake as a story "inspired by" those demonic creatures of old.

Check out the rest of the story at The Horror Squad

Based on journalist Mark Boal's real experiences following bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker isn't just a welcome return to big-screen action from director Kathryn Bigelow (who has wrung both fame and infamy from her art with Near Dark, Strange Days and Point Break). It's an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it's an 'apolitical' film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war. Even so, plunging us into the thick of things alongside the highly-trained men (and they're all men here) who defuse bombs for the Army, Bigelow and Boal avoid the speeches and postures and long, contemplative talks of home front films like Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah by staying in Iraq, and they shun the loopy, loony formal experiments of Brian De Palma's Redacted. Boal and Bigelow stay laser-focused on one group of men with a singular mission, and make us live in the constant possibility of death. Viewed from half a world away, a bomb is a political concern; viewed from less than a foot away, a bomb's just a high-stakes exercise in problem-solving, where making a mistake means a final, terminal education in the physics of expanding gases.

The Hurt Locker follows three soldiers -- bomb tech James (Jeremy Renner) and his subordinates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) into the jaws of death; it's all last names in The Hurt Locker, as seen on patches and heard in urgent radio dispatches. Early on, Bigleow establishes that people will be killed in this film -- with a bravura sequence that depicts a bomb's detonation on the macro and micro level, billowing bursts of smoke and pressure and flame intercut with gravel and dust leaping choreographed in lockstep by the pressure wave, as if God had slammed his fist on reality hard to make a point -- and while Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are fine actors, they're also unknown enough to subconsciously let us know that they aren't safe from what may happen.

If you're like me, stuck at home, reading about all the great films playing in Toronto, and wondering, "When can I actually get to see the darn things?," I have some good news. Two "big buzz" titles have been acquired for distribution: Steven Soderbergh's Che, starring Benecio del Toro in the title role, has been nabbed by IFC Films (not Mark Cuban) for North America, and Summit Entertainment has secured US rights to Katheryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, featuring Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes.

IFC will release Che for a one-week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December, according to an official statement received by Cinematical. It will then open in January via the company's "IFC in Theaters" platform, which means it will be available in select theaters and "on demand" through cable and satellite systems the same day. Ever since Che's world premiere at Cannes in May (where James Rocchi reviewed it), there has been speculation about how the film would be presented. Che is comprised of two stand alone parts -- The Argentine and Guerilla -- and the total running time is more than four hours. Now we know we'll some of us will be able to see the whole thing at one time. *

As with most any other genre, pitching a thriller seems to go that much more swimmingly once one finds an ideal blockbuster reference point with which to do half of the leg work. It's 'Die Hard meets this', 'Speed on a that', and, when in doubt, just say the damn thing is 'Hitchcockian'.

Post-2001, the likes of TV's '24' and 'Sleeper Cell', and film's Jason Bourne franchise, have tapped into both our political climate and pop culture zeitgeist, into a globe-trotting, gun-toting fear of the here and there and always now. Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Traitor feels like the first film that has itself been directly spawned in the wake of those successes, as opposed to merely being bolstered by it, and while it may overtake, say, Vantage Point in terms of plausible plotting and worldly knowledge, it remains a film that is good enough to grasp the bar and yet not quite enough to raise it.

Last year, bit by bit, we got casting notices for the uber-drama Winged Creatures, which collected a powerful group of actors -- Forest Whitaker, Kate Beckinsale, Jennifer Hudson, Dakota Fanning, Jackie Earle Haley, Guy Pearce, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Now a trailer has finally hit the Internet, which you can see above.

As the trailer outlines, the film follows a group of people who suffer post-traumatic stress after a random shooting at a Los Angeles diner. Talk about a soul-sucker. The trailer alone should steal some of the wind from your happy sails, but it looks like it will be in the most worthy way. Initial buzz at IMDb has pegged the film to be a 9.1/10, so this could be one of those heavy, challenging dramas worth our time and energy. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, but a release date is yet to be set.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Death Defying Acts, starring Guy Pearce, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Saoirse Ronan and Timothy Spall. The film follows famed magician Harry Houdini (Pearce), who, while on a tour of Britain in 1926, enters into a passionate affair with a Scottish psychic (Zeta-Jones). Ah, but this psychic has plans of her own, and, along with her daughter (Ronan), attempt to con the magician by using the one event that's plagued him for many years: the death of his mother. Back when Death Defying Acts premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, our own Scott Weinberg said it was "lovely to look at and packed with some solid doses of charm and wit ... this is full-bore Hollywood fantasy all the way."

Death Defying Acts arrives in theaters in NY and LA on July 11.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Traitor (click to enlarge), starring Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. Based on an idea from Steve Martin (who you usually don't see take on this sort of high-stakes drama), and a script from Jeffrey Nachmanoff (who also directed), Traitor finds Pearce playing a straight-edge FBI agent who heads an investigation on international conspiracy, where all clues lead back to former U.S. Special Operations officer, Samir Horn (Cheadle).

The first trailer for Traitor is now live over at Yahoo, and I have to say I'm really enjoying the film's fast-paced edge. Cheadle looks pretty badass in this, and I don't believe we've seen him this tough on screen in quite some time. Pearce (who's always reminded me of a more disturbed and intense Val Kilmer) is on his game as usual, so I expect good things from Traitor. I like a film that makes the audience work a little and think a little. You?

Traitor is set to hit theaters on August 27.

I'm about 50 pages away from finishing The Road, and all I think about when I'm reading it (apart from praying the two stumble across another can of peaches -- just one more can of peaches, please!) is what director John Hillcoat is going to do with this sucker. It has the potential to be absolutely amazing, from a visual standpoint, and should make for an interesting comparison to Hillcoat's last film, The Proposition -- which, like The Road, was full of empty land and empty people. Needless to say, I cannot friggin' wait for this film to arrive in the fall.

Which brings us to this first image from The Road, courtesy of Row Three. The photo shows Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the father and son who attempt to head south across a post-apocalyptic United States, toward the coast. Along the way, they'll hide from cannibals, search for more food, clothing -- anything to keep them alive, really. The film, which is due out November 26, is based on the book by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) and also stars Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron.

[via JoBlo]

UPDATE: We've been asked to take down the trailer as it hasn't been approved for distribution yet.

Note: You might want to kick up the speakers a bit here; this one comes in a tad low.

Above you will find the first trailer for the film Traitor, starring Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce and Jeff Daniels. The wild thing about this film is that Steve Martin (yes, THE Steve Martin) came up with the idea for Traitor, though he left scripting duties to writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff. Based on what we see above, Traitor seems like one of those "have fun figuring it out" types. Pearce plays a straight-edge FBI agent who heads an investigation on international conspiracy, where all clues lead back to former U.S. Special Operations office, Samir Horn (Cheadle). Thus begins what appears to be a dangerous cat and mouse game between the two -- with Daniels playing a veteran CIA contractor with his own agenda.

What I'm liking about this one is that Cheadle looks pretty rough, tough and ready to rumble -- and we don't get to see him much in roles where he can beat the living hell out of anyone within shouting distance. Go Don Cheadle! That guy always gives a tremendous performance, so no matter what I believe Traitor will be worth the watch just to see Cheadle in action. But let us know what you think.

Traitor hits theaters on August 29.