LianaLiberato Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Who would ever thought that David Schwimmer would helm some drama? Between acting gigs like Friends, helming 10 episodes of the hit show, directing Run Fatboy Run, and even picking up 6 episodes of Little Britain USA, he seemed to be completely focused on comedy. Yet now Variety reports that he will direct Clive Owen and Catherine Keener in a new "dark drama" called Trust.

Schwimmer created the story, which Andy Bellin wrote, and it focuses on the effects an online sexual predator has on a family. But it won't be Owen going back to his creepy Closer ways. Owen and Keener will play the parents of a 14-year-old girl who fell victim to an adult posing as a teenager in a chat room. The young Liana Liberato will play the daughter. There's no word on who the predator will be, but consider the lack of sex pronouns, I've got to wonder if it's a woman, or someone we never see.

Shooting will begin really soon -- next month in Michigan. And then we'll see what a dramatic David Schwimmer world is like. What do you think? Are you intrigued by the thought of Ross, online predators, and Clive Owen with Catherine Keener? Is this a new era -o- Schwimmer?

The Last Sin Eater is a weak attempt at recharging the batteries of the drowsy, unsophisticated message machine of today's Christian evangelical set by augmenting it with a few misguided stabs at old-world Tolkien-style mysticism. Set back in olden-times, in the woodsy wilds of North America, the plot revolves around a clan of rough-and-tumble Welsh immigrants, although based on the accents in the film, I have to assume that a few Irish people (and modern-day Americans) climbed into the boat as it was shoving off from Cardiff. When a creepy, bug-eyed grandmother kicks the bucket in the first reel, her simple funeral prompts the arrival of a hooded figure whispered about as the 'sin eater.' This gentleman turns out to be something of an Edward Jesushands who is forced to live a shunned existence on a nearby mountain, but must also occasionally trek down the mountain to perform a ritual whereby he physically removes sins from a person's body. Intrigued by the stranger, young Cadi (Liana Liberato) determines to learn more about him.

The most interesting thing about Cadi is that she has a pre-teen angel for an everyday companion, which might be good grist for a film that was literate in Philip Pullman or other modern religio-fantasy writers who are trying to do the hard work of making dogma fresh and intriguing. The Last Sin Eater, however, is a film that's barely competent in things like camera set-ups, let alone interested in creating a project that's actually meant to be intellectually stimulating. The plot structure builds rapidly towards a Twilight Zone-style payoff, when we learn that this isolated clan of Zeta-Joneses are actually suffering by not knowing -- I guess this would actually occur to the film's target audience -- that this 'sin eater' must be a fraud. A bible-toting preacher arrives somewhere near the one-hour mark to let young Cadi and her clan know that the only real 'sin eater' is a man who ate sins two thousand years ago, and whose record-holding status as heavyweight sin-eating champ is uncontested.