JesseBradford Tagged Articles at Cinematical

What do you get when you mix a dude who dined and dated Rory Gilmore (and tricked Logan Echolls), with another who once hacked the planet, and another who got holy with 7th Heaven? You get carnal, beer-drinking hell.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Matt Czuchry, Jesse Bradford, and Geoff Stults have signed onto Bob Gosse's adaptation of Tucker Max's I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Like earlier this year, when I spoke of the original deal, I can't do better than the intro to describe this flick: "My name is Tucker Max, and I am an a**hole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world."

In this particular story, he goes to a bachelor party, threatens the wedding, and gets banned from the nuptials. Czuchry gets the jerky honor of playing Tucker Max, while the other two actors play his best friends. Also added is some female flavor with Keri Lynn Pratt and Denise Quinones.

The flick begins shooting later this month in Louisiana. Are you ready for jerky hell?

There's even more casting news on the Son of Mourning front, which is making this whole flick seem even sweeter. However, before I get to that, the project got itself a name change. In the casting news that went up at The Hollywood Reporter, it's said that the film will drop the "U" and now be called Son of Morning. That's ... a totally different tone.

Anyway, on the heels of a couple Sopranos stars, Jesse Bradford, Steven Weber, Bob Odenkirk, and the ever-wonderful Edward Herrmann have signed on to the satire. The movie stars Joseph Cross as a copywriter who goes home to think over his parent's divorce, and "after a series of environmental disasters, is mistaken for Jesus Christ." How does that work? Does a hurricane hit that has clouds shaped in such a way that they look like this guy? Does he go to a costume party dressed as Jesus when all this badness hits? I don't get it.

Of course, people like Bradford, who plays a Hollywood agent, and Weber, who plays a lieutenant governer, descend upon the poor dude to capitalize on his new-found fame. Odenkirk will play the guy's co-worker, and finally Herrmann will be the new Jesus' father figure and mentor. You can't do much better than that.

While it seems that a Superman sequel is sadly underway, in the meantime, the new man in tights is keeping busy with other fare. Variety reports that Brandon Routh, along with a slew of others, have signed on for an upcoming ensemble comedy that Starz is putting together, called Table for Three. Along for the ride with Routh are Sophia Bush, Jesse Bradford, Jennifer Morrison, Johnny Galecki, and Liza Lapira.

Routh stars as a suddenly single dude with a bad sense of logic -- he invites a perfect couple, played by Bradford and Bush, to share his big apartment. This seems a bit strange, especially since every guy I know who has had to spend a lot of time with, or share space with, a couple has completely hated it, but I guess the thought of being face-to-face with couples is appealing to this guy's now-single self. But then he finds a new romance and things get tricky as they "disrupt his life when they insert themselves into his new romance."

Michael Samonek will direct from his own script, and the film is set to be released later this year.

How did the remake of a wildly popular Asian romantic comedy end up going direct to video? We'll have a chance to examine the wreckage for ourselves when My Sassy Girl, starring Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford, hits DVD on August 26. Grady Hendrix at Kaiju Shakedown comments: "I thought this was a bad idea, but then I saw the trailer. " If you follow that link to YouTube and watch the woe-begotten thing to the end, you are very brave and I salute your adventuresome nature. To be absolutely fair, it could be that the movie is terrific and the trailer is a terrible misrepresentation of its merits, but I wouldn't risk a rental on it.

Though I admit to a knee-jerk suspicion about English-language remakes of foreign-language pictures, in this case I wasn't a big fan of the Korean original, which was a box office smash in its native land in the summer of 2001. It was also a big hit in Hong Kong the following year, and US festival audiences lapped it up (e.g. it won the Audience Award at the first New York Asian Film Festival). Personally, I thought the humor was too over the top and the basic premise too difficult to swallow. (Here's a review I wrote in 2002.) That might make me receptive to a remake, but it doesn't look like director Yann Samuell or scripter Victor Levin licked the problems I saw in the original.

Last week, director Yam Laranas announced on his blog that Amelia Warner would star in his next film, The Echo, alongside Jesse Bradford. Then, he inexplicably yanked the post down from the page and has yet to offer an explanation or a further update. The blog post was live long enough for several outlets to pick it up. In any case, the casting makes sense in light of what Amelia told me when I spoke to her last week. She said she was in talks for a small film and that if she came on board, her work would begin in September -- The Echo is a low-budget film that begins production in New York City in September. So I contacted Amelia's reps over the weekend and told them I was running with this casting by a certain time unless they told me it was bogus. They haven't replied yet, so I'm going with this. If it turns out that some snafu caused her to pull out of the project, then we'll report that too.

Bradford's casting was announced by Hollywood Reporter on June 12, and he'll be playing the part of an ex-con who moves into an apartment building and finds out that his neighbor is a crazy policeman who likes to beat up his wife and daughter. Some kind of curse is placed on his character when he gets involved in their business. If that sounds familiar, it's because this is a remake of the Filipino thriller Sigaw, which was also directed by Laranas. It's unclear who Amelia will be playing in the film, but I assume it's the daughter role and love-interest of Bradford's character. We'll keep you posted with additional details on this project.

I know, I shouldn't harp on an actor's old role, and I should pay attention to the work in-between then and now, but I just can't seem to do that with Jesse Bradford. The years keep adding up, and no matter what role he takes on, from interesting films like Dancing at the Blue Iguana and Heights, to flicks we could do without, like Clockstoppers and Swimfan, I always see him as Joey Pardella. Who? The ADD, smoke-fiend computer wiz from Hackers. I mean, we've all jumped from those days when Angelina wrote Jonny's name on her wedding shirt in her own blood, to her being a huge actress, adoption addict and ambassador ... Yet I still see Jesse like this.

Maybe this will be his ticket to wiping Pardella away -- Bradford has just signed on to star in The Echo, the remake of Sigaw, an acclaimed Filipino thriller that Jessica Barnes posted about last year. The movie stars Bradford as a young ex-con who moves into an old apartment building. His neighbor, a police officer, beats his wife and daughter, so Bradford's character tries to help the women and gets trapped in a curse. Isn't that always the way? You don't mind your business, trying to help someone out, and you land yourself in a messy curse. This time around, Yam Laranas, who co-wrote and directed the original, is going to helm the feature, which was written by Eric Bernt. At the very least, I hope that this does better than Swimfan, which was Bradford's last "dramatic" thriller. The film will start shooting in the late summer in Toronto, and I imagine will hit theaters next year.

I've come to notice a trend with the production company Vertigo Entertainment. Even more than they like to make remakes of foreign horror films (The Ring; The Grudge; The Eye), they really seem to favor the recruitment of foreign filmmakers. Here is a rundown of some of the acclaimed directors they've hired: Walter Salles, from Brazil; Alejandro Agresti, from Argentina; Oliver Hirschbiegel, from Germany; French duo David Moreau and Xavier Palud; Yann Samuel, also from France; Swedish duo Joel Bergvall and Simon Sanquist; Victor García, from Spain; Yam Laranas, from Philippines; and Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Nakata and Masayuki Ochiai, all three from Japan. I guess Jim Sheridan, from Ireland, counts too. It is weird, because sometimes a filmmaker is brought out to remake his own film, like with Shimizu and The Grudge and with Laranas and The Echo, and other times a filmmaker will be assigned the remake of someone else's film while his own original film is being remade by another acclaimed director, like with Nakata and Salles and Dark Water.

The sad thing is that many of these great directors have ended up making awful movies for Vertigo. The reason is probably coincidental, and we still have yet to see if Samuel can bring his fantastically romantic vision appropriately to a pic starring Jesse Bradford and Elisha Cuthbert or if the work Hirschbiegel did on The Invasion (before being replaced -- allegedly not fired) holds up to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough. But just in case there is a curse (how fitting) on the company to ruin these foreign filmmakers, then I am glad that the latest recruit, Spain's Daniel Calparsoso, is not actually that widely respected. Actually, I'm not familiar with him at all, but his most recent film, Ausentes, has a super-low rating of 3.9 on the IMDb. Not even The Grudge 2 rated that badly. So, he certainly can't do any worse with his film for Vertigo, a trapped-in-a-loony-bin-during-a-thunderstorm-set horror film called Incident at Sans Asylum (do asylums even exist anymore??). Another thing it has going for it: it isn't a remake. The script is an original, by chef-turned-cinematographer-turned-writer Craig Zahler, who also penned Vertigo's upcoming western The Brigands of Rattleborge. Zahler was also one of Variety's "10 Screenwriters to Watch" last year.