Kate Beckinsale Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The most telling component of how misguided and laboriously mediocre Whiteout, the latest film from Gone in 60 Seconds director Dominic Sena, is can be found within the manner in which its heroine, United States Marshal Carrie Stetko, is introduced. The camera tracks the back of Stetko, played by the aesthetically immaculate Kate Beckinsale, through the winding corridors of her station at a research lab on Antarctica before she arrives at her personal quarters. Beckinsale then begins to slowly remove every layer of her clothing in preparation for a remarkably unnecessary shower sequence.

Now, before that begins to sound like a prospect that may make Whiteout worth your time or money, keep in mind how unabashedly pointless this extended scene is. It's not showing us how savage the conditions in Antarctica are, as Beckinsale looks like she just emerged from a week at a health spa. It's not showing us how mundane her job is, as the camera spends a fraction of the time on her badge as it does her dwindling layers of clothing. No, the only purpose of this sequence is to show off the sole allure this film has: Kate Beckinsale. And Sena is brazen in treating her like a commodity.

This shouldn't come as a surprise from the man who captained the film that paid Halle Berry a bonus $500,000 for her bare bosom (note: Beckinsale does not actually go the Berry/Swordfish route), but it is the first sign of how tonally incongruous the entirety of Whiteout is. Preceding this strip-down is an opening flashback to fifty-years prior in which a poorly rendered CGI Soviet plane crashes under mysterious circumstances during a poorly rendered CGI snow storm. Following the shower sequence is the establishment of a murder mystery so convoluted it comes as no surprise that four different people share a screenwriting credit on top of the author of the graphic novel upon which the 'first murderer in Antarctica premise' is based.

I realize that different movies receive different marketing campaigns to emphasize different elements for different audiences in different territories, but these two Thai posters for District 9 (courtesy of IMP Awards) are selling something different from what's in the actual movie.

If Exhibit A on the left is to be believed, the film features one city-destroying robot and multiple motherships. It's like Transformers meets Independence Day, and if it were actually the case, it'd guarantee beaucoup baht at the box office. The other poster, our Exhibit B, adhere to the one mothership present in the film, but then suggest that there are multiple man-sized robots running amok -- again, selling the idea of a robot rampage that is simply not in the film.

(Hell, that robot suit doesn't even factor in much before the last twenty minutes; how disappointing might that fact be?)

This is simply the most misleading piece of marketing I've seen in quite some time. The worst thing going on Stateside at the moment is a trailer for Whiteout that implies a monster movie is in the cards for anyone going to see their serial killer thriller. Now, I ask you guys and girls to share: what are some of the most egregious trailer and poster deceptions that you've experienced at the movies?

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...

The political drama has a good friend in Rod Lurie, who makes intelligent, earnestly liberal movies that are meaty and watchable, if not always great. He has a thing for strong female protagonists, too. He was first noticed for The Contender, about a female vice-presidential candidate being grilled about her past, and he created the lady-president TV drama Commander in Chief for ABC. His latest, a spiritual sister to The Contender, is the arbitrarily titled Nothing But the Truth, in which thorny ethical dilemmas once again mess up the life of a woman.

She is Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), a Washington D.C. newspaper reporter who learns that America's recent missile strike against Venezuela may have been unjustified. It was done in retaliation for that country's supposed involvement in an assassination attempt against the U.S. president, but Rachel has learned that a CIA agent filed a report indicating Venezuela was not to blame -- a report that the president ignored, ordering the military strike anyway.

Rachel's news story makes waves in Washington, not just for its damning evidence against the president, but for outing the CIA agent who made the report. She is Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga), the wife of an ambassador and supposedly just an ordinary soccer mom. Her undercover profession as a government spy is over now, of course; nobody wants a spy whose name has been plastered all over the news.

Now the question is which high-level government employee leaked Erica's identity to the press? A special prosecutor named Dubois (Matt Dillon) is appointed to find out; Rachel refuses to reveal her sources; Rachel is held in contempt of court and sent to jail; stubbornness and principle-upholding ensue.

TITLE: Nothing But the Truth
DIRECTED BY: Rod Lurie
STARS: Kate Beckinsale, Vera Farmiga, Alan Alda, David Schwimmer, Noah Wyle, Angela Bassett, Matt Dillon

WHAT IT'S ABOUT: A political reporter (Beckinsale) writes a story about a government scandal, revealing the name of a covert CIA operative (Farmiga), and ends up behind bars when she refuses to divulge her source. The story parallels the real-life drama surrounding CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose status as a covert operative was outed after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times charging the Bush administration with manipulating intelligence information to justify a war with Iraq.

WHY WE'RE EXCITED ABOUT IT: A solid ensemble cast and a script written and directed by Lurie should keep this real-life drama firmly out of dreaded "movie of the week" territory. Alda, as the lawyer who fights to keep the reporter out of jail, should have plenty of opportunity for brow-knitting and dramatic courtroom scenes, and we can't wait to see Dillon's turn as the prosecutor who goes after Beckinsale -- his performance was the best thing about 2005's Factotum. We're loving seeing him reinvent his career as a solid indie actor.

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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.

Whiteout finally gets to come off my "Whatever happened to ... ?" list. According to ShockTillYouDrop.net, the Antarctic thriller finally has a release date of September 19th.
The movie stars Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Tom Skerritt, Columbus Short and Alex O'Loughlin.

The film is based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka (and I love that they mimicked Frank Miller's cover for the poster at right). It follows Carrie Stetko, a U.S. Marshall working at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and her investigation of a murder that takes place there. The location is what makes this murder mystery good and tense, as she has to investigate around the deadly climate of Antarctica, and find the killer before Antarctica is plunged into its six months of darkness.

I saw the teaser at last year's ComicCon and thought it looked like a good thrill ride -- and I actually managed to hold the opinion despite seeing it played twice in a row. It's a little odd that it has been delayed so long, as it was obviously finished as of last summer. I'll hold out hope, though, because Beckinsale is one of my favorite action chicks, and she was hilarious at the Whiteout panel, handling the sleazy comments with aplomb. Hopefully, we'll get to see that teaser on the Internet soon. I will probably watch it and wonder why I thought it looked good. Oh well.

This is really a cast that I could never have predicted. Variety reports that Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell have all been set to star in Everybody's Fine.

Rewritten and directed by Kirk Jones (director of Nanny McPhee and Waking Ned Devine), Fine is a remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's film Stanno tutti bene. Miramax just snapped up the rights to the film, which will reportedly start shooting later this month in Connecticut.

De Niro plays a widower who realizes that he was only connected to his children via his wife. He decides to take a road trip to reestablish his relationship with his grown kids, and discovers that their lives are anything but fine. A few shades of About Schmidt there -- and hopefully it is along those solid lines, and not total syrup.

With each picture since his 2000 debut George Washington, David Gordon Green has taken at least a small step backward. That gradual regression becomes a full-fledged precipitous decline with Snow Angels, a film in which the director (working from a novel by Stewart O'Nan) flails about in search of poetry, and comes up with only trivial stylistic flourishes that compound his story's overwrought faux-naturalism. Considering the lyrical grace of his heralded first feature, Green's devolution from one of American cinema's most promising talents to his current status as just another middling indie lightweight is tough to fathom. Yet with his latest, Green misses the mark in so many respects -- from a multi-strand plot devoid of insight, to performances that are generally overcooked, to a mise-en-scène that comes up largely empty in the department of inspired grace and beauty -- that it makes one wonder if his upcoming foray into director-for-hire work (with this summer's raunchy stoner comedy The Pineapple Express) isn't a shrewd attempt to escape his own increasingly faulty auteurist instincts.