JimSheridan Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It has taken me a long, long time to warm up to Daniel Day-Lewis. Despite first meeting him in the tender and gentler characters he played in A Room With a View and The Age of Innocence, he was always that terrifying Method guy who sharpened knives on set and ate his own kills. I don't want to say I was scared of him, but I found him brilliantly off-putting, which is why I never saw The Boxer until this past weekend.

Directed by Jim Sheridan, The Boxer delves into the last gasp of the Troubles in Ireland. Former IRA member Danny Flynn (Day-Lewis) is released from prison on the verge of the 1998 peace treaty. He simply wants to get back to his life, resume a boxing career, and live in peace. But his former IRA allies are busy plotting last ditch efforts of violence, and they're furious at his neutrality. To make matters worse, he meets up with Maggie (Emily Watson), the girl he left behind, and who is now married to his imprisoned best friend. As a prisoner's wife, Maggie is held to a high standard, and their fragile relationship endangers them both.

This is a tragic, tense, romantic, and underrated movie that has really fallen through the cracks in lieu of Day-Lewis' flashier performances in The Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood. Naturally, this film had Day-Lewis dropping everything to become a boxing expert, but it's his performance out of the ring that's really stunning. Danny is a kind and uncertain man, just trying to do the right thing in a situation that's politically and personally fraught with danger. Also, he's sexy as hell in it. You can't say that about Daniel Plainview, can you?

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Daniel Craig may have his own limited edition popsicle, but he's having a tough time choosing his next film role. After branching away from Bond with Defiance (a lot less 007 than most people give it credit for) and Munich, his next effort at ducking typecasting might be Jim Sheridan's Dream House. Might.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Craig is in early talks to star in Sheridan's psychological thriller, which would steer him clear of "Whatever, all he plays are vigilantes" talk. House centers on a family man who moves the wife and kids to an idyllic small town, and obviously the perfect house of the film's title. But you know what happens when you move to those dreamy small towns and those perfect Victorian houses ... they're haunted! Our hapless hero finds himself contending with the former occupants of the house, who hang around thanks to being brutally murdered.

As Craig decides whether Sheridan and Dream House is a proper departure from 007 territory, he'll be appearing on Broadway in A Steady Rain and is rumored to be interested in Kevin MacDonald's Eagle of the Ninth. (Would he be replacing Channing Tatum?) Should any one of these ventures fail, perhaps Craig will sigh, shrug, and just play Steve McQueen already.

There are those moments in a darkened theater that make you feel like you can take on the world. For me, those moments are why I go to the movies, to be so wrapped up in the story that I'm not just a spectator anymore, I'm a participant; and the 1993 true life political drama, In the Name of the Father, has one of the moments.

Jim Sheridan's film about a group of young Irish that were wrongfully convicted of an IRA bombing, is a brilliant film for plenty of reasons (not the least of which are the acting talents of Daniel Day Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite, and Emma Thompson) but what amazes me is that by the time the film is nearing an end, your nerves are raw, and your sense of righteous indignation reaches a fever-pitch -- and that's when Thompson gets to shine. In one short scene, she manages to give a voice to everything that the audience is feeling, and that release is what makes this film so memorable. It isn't an easy story to tell, but Thompson brings it all home...plus I still get goose bumps when she yells to the heartless Inspector "...and by god, you got you're blood!" -- Tell it sister! See what I mean? I get all pumped up just thinking about it.



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Whitey Bulger has been around the cinematic block. In 2006, the story of associate John "Red" Shea was picked up for the feature treatment, by Mark Wahlberg, who then went on to star in a different Whitey-influenced film, The Departed. This past December word hit that another associate, John Martorano, was picked for a film. Inevitably, we're led to this moment, and Variety's news that Whitey is finally getting a film to call his very own.

Jim Sheridan, the man behind My Left Foot and In America, will be adapting the Bulger biography Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob with Nye Heron, and then direct it. This book has actually been floating around Hollywood for a while now. It was originally optioned by Miramax for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, then picked up by producer Brian Oliver, who had to wait for The Departed to come and go.

One of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted, and a focus of America's Most Wanted a whopping 14 times, James "Whitey" Bulger led the Irish-American Winter Hill Gang in Boston -- getting busy with drug trafficking, murder, and all that gangster stuff. As Sheridan describes it: "This is a story of a corrupt system and about how an angry guy became the second most wanted man after Bin Laden." Presented by a man with the talents of Sheridan -- the project has promise, and should definitely give Martorano a run for his money.

Are you ready for more dips into the world of Whitey?

I love when Hollywood remembers to adapt (or re-adapt, in this case) a classic. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Relativity Media has picked up the rights to Robert Graves' brilliant novel I, Claudius for Jim Sheridan to direct. He'll also be writing the adaption, along with his usual collaborator Nye Heron.

I, Claudius purports to be the secret autobiography of Claudius, the fourth emperor of Rome, who used his wits and intelligence to survive his murderous family and become one of Rome's greatest emperors. Fans of HBO's Rome will love it, as it features four strong and manipulative women who manipulate their men in and out of power, peace, and war. Seriously, read it. It's the perfect read for fall.

A new adaptation has been kicking around Hollywood for a year or more -- last year, producer Scott Rudin won the rights, and attached Leonardo DiCaprio and William Monahan to the project, but the deal ultimately fell through. Given that DiCaprio has the busiest pre-production schedule in the world, it's just as well, and it's fallen into good hands now.

I'm quite attached to Graves' work, and the literature nerd in me hopes that Claudius could spur a revival of interest in his works. I would love to see a biopic of the man himself, as he was -- as one of my favorite professors delicately put it -- "a very, um, interesting man." I, Claudius came about because Graves dreamed the emperor himself came to him in a dream and told him to write it -- and then he later decried them as just a moneymaker. And that's not including his White Goddess, and the lover who believed she was a witch. Pick up Goodbye to All That or Miranda Seymour's biography along with I, Claudius -- you'll thank me. I'm going to dig them out of my basement myself.

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.

Considering that Jim Sheridan has made some great films over the years, it's a relief that the last film we'll get from the Irish director won't be Get Rich or Die Trying. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Sheridan is in talks to direct a remake of the Danish wartime drama Brothers for Relativity Media. The original film was released in 2004 and starred Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Connie Nielsen. The story focused on two brothers whose close relationship is tested when the younger brother goes off to war in Afghanistan.

Writer David Benioff has been chosen to pen the remake and will work off the original script from the film's writer/director Susanne Bier. Plus, a serious family drama might be a nice counterpoint to the Wolverine flick that he has been working on. Benioff has done some good adaptation work in the past with 25th Hour, which bodes well for the project. Sheridan is probably best known for his films with Daniel Day Lewis and the partnership seemed to work well for both. Day-Lewis won an Oscar for My Left Foot, and Sheridan was twice nominated for In The Name of The Father and Left Foot. Word is that having Sheridan's name attached to the project will help land a few A-list stars for the film in the coming weeks. So while she might not be A-list, since Nielsen's stint on Law and Order: SVU looks to be wrapping up, at least she already knows her lines.