JohnMalkovich Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Indie Roundup invites you to relive the last seven days and look forward to the near future in the ever-diverse indie film world.

Deals. A big buzz title at Toronto was the most notable deal of the week. Aaron Schneider's Get Low, starring Bill Murray, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Lucas Black, sold to Sony Pictures Classics for distribution in North America, according to our friends at indieWIRE. Scott Weinberg called it "an excellent little dramatic piece that's awash in humanity, warmth, insight, and wit." Details on several other deals that were made, all related to the Toronto fest, can be found at indieWIRE.

Online / On-Demand Viewing. Even less-publicized fest films are getting out into circulation. Hailing from Chile, Scrambled Beer (Malta Con Huevo) premiered at SXSW in 2008, and is now available for free streaming exclusively at Babelgum. It's described as "a delirious black comedy and bizarre story about two friends named Vladimir and George who move in together and begin to see reality differently. Vladimir lives a supernatural tale of time travel, while Jorge grows obsessed and embarks on a twisted adventure." In other words, possibly the perfect movie for the beginning of fall.

Fests. My favorite festival ever, Fantastic Fest, starts tomorrow night. Unfortunately, I'll only be able to pop in over the weekend to savor a small taste of the cinematic banquet that will be served over the next seven days. Look for much more coverage right here at Cinematical.

Actors in period costume, multiple shots of rum, and foreign cities -- all after the jump!

Get ready for the sports waterworks, folks. Back in June, Jenni Miller wrote about the latest horse racing drama to cook up -- Secretariat, with Diane Lane attached to play the thoroughbred's owner, Penny Chenery. Now the major players are in place, and there's no doubt that Disney is prepping this is a big sports drama. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Dylan Walsh, John Malkovich, and Scott Glenn have joined the production, which began shooting this week.

Secretariat was the horse that broke a 25-year Triple Crown dry spell, setting world records and winning the final Belmont Stakes with an eye-goggling 31-length win (in other words, so far ahead that the horses behind look teeny). He's pretty much the horse amongst race fans, and is known for having the biggest recorded heart (22 lbs). But it all started with a coin toss.

THR says Glenn will play "a southern-bred aristocrat who loses the horse in a coin toss," although that's not quite how it plays out. Glenn must be Ogden Phipps, and as the story goes, there were coin tosses to discern who would get what horse. Phipps won the toss, but Penny Chenery scored an unborn foal in the deal who turned out to be Secretariat. Walsh will play Penny's husband, "a successful attorney who is accustomed to his wife being at his beck and call," and who is, undoubtedly, in line for a wake-up call. Finally, John Malkovich will play a trainer who underestimates the horse's power (Lucien Laurin?).

And they're off!

If a movie is really only as good as its villain, the summer of 1993 proved it with the double-whammy of In the Line of Fire and The Fugitive in July. Everyone else had Jurassic Park fever, but I was swept up by these two excellent, evenly-matched bouts. The latter, The Fugitive, reveled in some gray areas; Tommy Lee Jones's character wasn't all bad, but in In the Line of Fire, John Malkovich was pure bad. (They were both nominated for Oscars, and Jones won.) Malkovich plays Mitch Leary, a former military man who feels the need to assassinate the current U.S. president (Jim Curley -- who looks a bit like John McCain). Clint Eastwood plays aging Secret Service Agent Frank Horrigan, who blames himself for allowing JFK to be shot, and is determined not to let it happen again. Mitch knows all about Frank's history and leaves him clues, taunting him and even talking to him on the phone. Frank, of course, is no slouch and can taunt back, causing Mitch to tip his hand, revealing just a hint of the years and years of anguished buildup that brought him to such a fate.

Note for note, the film itself is little more than a superbly made thriller -- directed by Wolfgang Petersen -- but its relationship between pursuer and quarry is something truly great and altogether rare in films. My definition of a truly great villain is one that can sit down for a cup of coffee with the hero. (It's like that old Warner Bros. cartoon in which the coyote and the sheepdog go to work together and punch the time clock before they get down to business.) Technically opposites, these two actually live in similar worlds and acknowledge each other as co-workers and colleagues. It's a very effective way of measuring the hero's humanity and making him far more interesting. Most movies settle for sneering, cackling villains who are nothing more than pure, distant evil. But the greatest enemies are kept close, closer even than friends.

Check out the clip after the jump: first we get Mitch demonstrating his evil, and then a full-blown phone confrontation with Frank.

"At the end of the ice age, a machine came. It came from outside. It came from space. It came with one purpose -- to change man into mutants..."

Those are very much the first lines of Mutant Chronicles, and it's a fair indication as to just how seriously our filmmakers are going to take their silly story. "Have faith" is a recurring mantra (hell, it's even the tagline), but speaking as someone who could get behind the genre-blending likes of Doomsday and Outlander, it's keeping the faith that the ambition of Chronicles may defeat its limited budget that proves a struggle mightier than that which our heroes face.

Warner Bros' Jonah Hex gained some really interesting casting today (yes, realThe Hollywood Reporter casting, no April Fool's stuff). According to , Will Arnett and Michael Shannon are joining the cast, which already includes Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, and Megan Fox.

Arnett will be playing a Union soldier named Lieutenant Grass who enlists Hex to kill Turnbull, Malkovich's Confederate voodoo practitioner. Per an old casting notice, Grass is a man who's blindsided by the dirty fighting style of his enemies, a man more interested in new styles of warfare than really understanding his enemy. The role isn't meant to be funny, so Arnett will be toning down his style. Even when he's funny, he's got a bit of the creep about him (no offense, Mr. Arnett) which seems perfect for Jonah Hex, where everyone is a little ... off.

Shannon, fresh off his Oscar nomination, will be playing Doc Cross Williams, the bizarre ringleader of a brutal gladiator / circus event. Williams' is one of Hex's recurring nemesis in the series, whose finest achievement is making Wild Bill Hickok into a zombie. THR says he's likely to appear in sequels which is the first time anyone's mentioned a Jonah Hex franchise. While we're still a long ways away from being able to say "Hell yeah, bring it on", it's little touches like Wild Bill Hickok zombies that makes Jonah Hex such an enticing project.

Megan Fox knows how to please her fans -- and it isn't by trying out for edgy indie fare, romantic comedies, or soul searching dramas. It's by sticking to the "boy movies" based on comic books or transforming cars.

So it should come as no surprise that Fox has signed for not one, but two comic book properties. The first is Fox Atomic's long-rumored Fathom, which casts Fox in the lead role of Aspen Matthews. The film doesn't have a director yet, though it once attracted James Cameron. Jordan Mechner (creator of the video game Prince of Persia) is writing the script. To Fox's credit, she's been a fan of the comic since its start in 1998, and is helping to develop and shape the big screen adaptation. Will her ex-fiancee Brian Austin Green stay on as producer, as listed in The Hollywood Reporter?

Fox is also set to join Josh Brolin and John Malkovich in Warner Bros' Jonah Hex -- which brings a really promising project down a notch or two in my eyes. (Hey, she's perfect for Fathom. But I would have preferred Hex steer cleer of such pandering.) Fox will play Leila, a gun-wielding beauty and love interest for Jonah. I don't believe she ever appeared in the original series, though Hex's mythology is so uneven that she very well might be a current character. (There was a female supermodel who claimed to be Jonah Hex, maybe she's inspired by that.)

But hey -- THR reveals that Malkovich's Turnbull will be a voodoo practioner who is trying to raise an undead army of Confederate soldiers. So not even the gratutious inclusion of Fox and her smoking guns can really dim my enthusiasm. Who knows? She might even end up cool as well as hot.

Wanna convince Josh Brolin to be in your movie? Just let him cast it himself and he'll be putty in your hands!

You might remember that Brolin was having a hard time deciding whether he wanted to do Jonah Hex back in November. He was; he wasn't; he wasn't sure; he couldn't decide. Brolin said: "It's so ridiculous. But once I started putting people in my mind and saying what if I put Malkovich in this role then what does this movie become?" It might have been musing back then, but three months later, it's a reality!

Variety reports that John Malkovich will play Turnbull in the film, a rich plantation man mourning the loss of his son Jeb by Union soldiers in a whole complicated ordeal. Naturally, he blames Hex, Jeb's best friend, and enemies are made. Oh lord, bring on the tongue in cheek wonder! It sounds like Brolin is getting just what he wanted -- a fun movie with some acting chops.

Brolin tempted me towards this project, but with Malkovich has definitely been piqued. I just keep imagining Dr. William Block and Osbourne Cox locked in a room together. Add Danny Trejo as El Papagayo and I think I'd die in delight. How about you?

I'm a big enough person to say when I'm wrong, and sometimes, I'm also a big enough person to say 'I told you so'. The new R-rated trailer for Simon Hunter's Mutant Chronicles up at IGN, and while it was nice to get a glimpse of carnage from the sci-fi actioner; I have to be honest with you; it still isn't that much better than the last trailer we got our hands on.

Mutant Chronicles is set in the year 2707, when natural resources are at an all time low, and humanity has gone 'steampunk'. When mutant creatures descend, Thomas Jane (as the leader of a Marine Platoon) becomes the last line of defence before we all pack it in and abandon the earth. Throw in some quality CGI, and a cast that includes Ron Perlman, Devon Aoki, and John Malkovich as a bad guy, and you should have had something, right?

Chronicles has earned a paltry 20% approval rating over at Rotten Tomatoes, but I guess it's the optimist in me that wants to believe the rating is the result of only a few people having seen it. Then again, even those who have weren't too thrilled with it either. Chronicles will have a limited theatrical release on April 24th, and then the film will head straight to the Sci-Fi Channel for a March premier.

So, have we all been just a little too hard on Mutant Chronicles? Are we all expecting too much? Or is there a very good reason why this film has made such a bad first impression. Take a gander at the trailer and sound off below...

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for The Great Buck Howard, which premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, and is gearing up to hit theaters on March 20th. Starring John Malkovich, Colin Hanks, Tom Hanks and Emily Blunt, The Great Buck Howard tells of a has-been magician (Malkovich) who stages an unlikely comeback thanks to his new assistant (Colin Hanks). Last year at Sundance, Scott Weinberg called Buck Howard a "smoothly, strongly appealing comedy" that's also a "a feel-good movie that doesn't make you feel stupid for feeling good." Check out the full size poster by clicking on the image below.