John Cusack Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The 20th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray and DVD of Say Anything came out yesterday, and to mark the occasion, numerous men with lots of free time dressed up in trench coats and hoisted boomboxes above their heads and marched throughout New York City serenading people with the strains of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," and a cover version of the same song by The Lloyd Dobler Effect. Check them out in the gallery below.

Damn, that movie came out 20 years ago? That makes me feel incredibly old. The first time I saw that movie will be forever burned into my brain since it was my first and only date with the captain of the women's volleyball team in high school. However, the movie on Blu-ray looks better than it ever did back in theaters, circa 1989, and hopefully it'll inspire legions of Lloyd Dobler fans for years to come that will fare better than I did.

The Blu-ray version of the movie is a 1080p high-definition upgrade of the original DVD release from 2002, along with a newly remastered 5.1 audio mix. In addition to the upgraded image and sound, this includes all the features from the previous version (commentary from Cameron Crowe, John Cusack, Ione Skye, deleted scenes, and more), along with three new featurettes. The best of the bunch is "An Iconic Film Revisited: Say Anything... 20 Years Later" featuring new interviews with Crowe, Cusack, Skye, John Mahoney, and Nancy Wilson.

We've already explored the history of 2012 here on Cinematical and what you need to know to see the movie (hint: the world might blow up!), but here's what 2012 stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, and Woody Harrelson and director Roland Emmerich have to say about the end of the world. Do they believe the world will end with a whimper or a bang, T. S. Eliot-style? Will we go out in fire or in ice? Do they even believe the world will end in 2012? Let's find out.

Roland Emmerich: It's always great if you find some sort of belief people have and put it in your movies, as fantastic as they may be. For example, Independence Day, I used Area 51 and centered my whole story around Area 51 because I found out in my research that people really believed in it. And in this movie, as we discovered the phenomenon of 2012, because some culture, the Mayas, gave the end of the world a date. An exact date. The 21st of December, 2012. And that's just so incredible and so interesting that a lot of people are fascinated by it and there's believers; there's people like you [who] just find it fascinating. I hope it will not happen. But when you research it a little bit deeper, you kind of find a lot of other cultures [that] believe the same thing. They only don't put an exact date to it, but they have other predictions which all point to 2012. It's quite eerie...

Perhaps you've seen the ominous ads for Roland Emmerich's latest disaster film, 2012. Here you can see just one example of Sony's viral campaign, which I spotted outside of my apartment building a few months ago. The Mayans warned us? Why is the URL at the bottom ThisIsTheEnd.com? Enter that into your browser, and you'll find a site "run" by one of the characters in the movie who believe the world will end in 2012, which is just what seems to be happening in Emmerich's upcoming blow-'em'-up. (Incidentally, the website looks pretty much like lots of the real 2012 websites and books out there.)

But what is 2012? Why do people – lots of people, in fact – think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012? It's a fairly popular conspiracy theory, as these things go, right up there with Nostradamus. (And definitely more popular than the guy who believes the world is run by lizard people.) Back it up and let's take an all-too-brief look at the Mayan civilization and religion and why the date 12/21/2012 has got some people nervous.

Who Were the Mayans?

The Mayans were a technologically advanced Mesoamerican culture that lived in the Yucatan Peninsula and parts of Central America. The Mayans truly flourished in the Classic period, which was around 600 years between AD 300 to AD 900. During that time, the Mayans developed a more complex social order, as well as city-states with prosperous trade. There were also plenty of impressive palaces, pyramids, and ceremonial structures, but perhaps the most significant aspect of the Mayan civilization is their discoveries about science and astronomy, which led them to develop a sophisticated series of calendars. One of those calendars just so happens to end on December 21, 2012.

I'd like to buy a drink for whoever coined the term disaster porn, which describes the essence of the last half of 2012 director Roland Emmerich's career, and I'd like to buy two drinks for the folks at White Colours Studios, who took the recent five-minute clip from Sony's 2012 "roadblock" promo stunt and edited it down to a lean one minute and twenty-six seconds showcasing precisely what everyone wants to see from a disaster porn movie about the destruction of Earth and everyone on it: the acting. That's right, gone are all those pesky explosions, falling buildings, crashing cars, diving planes, and sinking Californias. All that's left in the clip below are the reaction shots of the film's corporeal stars, in this particular case Amanda Peet and John Cusack.

Not only is the clip the most amusing bit of fan-editing I've seen since Shia LaBeouf's "No-no-no-no" montage, it's actually an interesting little experiment that distills precisely how much substance there is to big-budget disaster films (and by substance I mean yelling). If Sony's 5-minute promo is indicative of the rest of the movie, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, 2012 consists of about 20% acting, 80% disaster porn, which is honestly a higher proportion of things going boom and then falling into the ocean than I expected.

If you read Cinematical enough, you're already familiar with a bizarre upcoming comedy called Hot Tub Time Machine, and how it could very well be the most awesomest hot tub time machine-related film ever made in the history of hot tub time machine films. Starring John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Rob Corrdry, Chevy Chase and more, the film tells of a group of foul-mouthed, boozed-up gents who discover they can travel back in time via their ski lodge hot tub. Hilarity ensues.

MGM just sent us the first teaser/clip from the film, which is totally filthy and extremely R-rated, so be warned before heading after the jump. The scene itself shows the guys talking about time machines and Terminator, and I don't think I've ever seen John Cusack use the word 'f*ck' that many times in one scene. In an exclusive chat with Cinematical recently, Hot Tub Time Machine writer (and Cinematical fan) Josh Heald told us the following: "Hot Tub Time Machine is probably the greatest gift anyone's ever given the world. Time will show that it ranks up there with the Statue of Liberty and free Internet porn."

Watching this clip and, well, I think I agree, sir. Check it out after the jump. Hot Tub Time Machine attacks theaters on February 26, 2010.

It's funny, but I've been watching Kevin Smith movies for a long time now, but it was only as I was reading through Total Film's list of the Best & Worst: Kevin Smith, that I realized something that I never really thought all that much about before -- and what was my big epiphany? Well, I finally discovered that Smith's films in the end are just rom-coms with poop jokes. Smith may have been considered a foul-mouthed stoner for most of his career, but now that I've looked beyond his shtick, I've finally come to the conclusion that the guy is a big old softy. Which got me thinking: Is there such a thing as romance for boys?

Now if you're the observant type, you've probably noticed I'm not a dude, so what do I know, right? But I've been told time and again that I'm not the 'average girl' (whatever that means) when it comes to my movie tastes, so I'm going to put that theory to the test, and get in touch with my masculine side to create a list of romantic movies for men.

After the jump; My 5 picks for boy-friendly romance...

Let me make this clear: when I say that I'm compiling a list of the most contrived rom-com scenarios, I'm not saying that they're automatically the worst -- although a glance at the titles doesn't exactly stray far from that correlation. Tomorrow's The Proposal finds Sandra Bullock forcing Ryan Reynolds into marriage for the sake of holding off immigration authorities and keeping her/their jobs (I guess it's not too soon to remake Green Card and Picture Perfect after all), so we're talking about seven plot points along those lines of high-concept, close-quarters thinking, with some (dis)honorable mentions along the way...

Back in December, I told you about a new film that was about to go into production under the title Hot Tub Time Machine. You agreed with me that Hot Tub Time Machine is a fantastic title for a movie. You also loved the premise: three grown-up guys visit the hot tub where they once partied, discover it is now a time machine, and travel back to their raunchy heyday. The film's writer, Josh Heald, even contacted us to vouch for the awesomeness of his screenplay. Remember all this? Of course you do.

And now we have an update! According to Production Weekly -- actually, to be specific, according to Production Weekly's Twitter feed (welcome to 21st-century journalism!), the three leads have been cast. Dipping into the H.G. Wells Jacuzzi will be John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson (best known as Darryl on The Office). Corddry and Robinson have popped up recently in films like Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. But has Cusack ever really done a raucous R-rated sex comedy? I'm intrigued.

The film was originally announced with co-directors Sean Anders and John Morris (who made last year's underseen Sex Drive) attached, but Production Weekly's Tweet says it's now being directed by Steve Pink, who made 2006's Accepted. We'll look into that. Either way, as long as it's called Hot Tub Time Machine, and as long as Josh Heald wasn't lying hack when he promised it was funny, it sounds promising. Filming starts in April in Vancouver.

Not too terribly long after Sony Pictures decided to shuffle rom-com The Ugly Truth back a couple of months from April to July, we get word from the Hollywood Reporter that they've opted to similarly relocate disaster flick 2012 from its July date to a mid-November spot. Were Roland Emmerich and his tidal waves scared off by Gerard Butler and Katherine Heigl's opposites-attract antics?

No, probably not, but while Sony insists that the film could've been completed as originally scheduled, they're willing to capitalize on the weekend that served their Bond franchise so well in its past two outings. (Hey, who wouldn't kill to have four more months of post-production on their effects-heavy film?) One's willing to interpret the dual moves as the studio's efforts at making the most of a slate left light by that writer's strike a while back, just as Warner Brothers had by moving back Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from last November to this July.

Starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, and Oliver Platt -- it's a Martian Child reunion, y'all! -- 2012 is now scheduled to open on November 13th (until it gets moved back once more to the actual year of 2012, in what may either turn out to be the best or worst marketing move of all time).

A whole slew of new (and old) images have found their way into a gallery over at The Los Angeles Times as part of a 2009 preview, and among the big blockbusters and comedies, we have our first look at I Love You, Beth Cooper (pictured above), starring Hayden Panetttiere as Beth Cooper. If you go by the popular book (which is pretty awesome), Beth Cooper has the potential to become one of those classic one-nighters, a la License to Drive, Adventures in Babysitting or any other teen-esque comedy that takes place over the course of one wild and crazy night. The films tells of a valedictorian who, during his big speech, professes his love for the hottest and most desirable girl in school, Beth Cooper. And when he and his friend get a chance to hang with Cooper and her gal pals on graduation night, things just spiral out of control. Definitely looking forward to this one -- it hits theaters on July 10.

Below we have another image from the Where the Wild Things Are adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, which hits theaters on October 16. Check out some more images after the jump ...