PaulDano Tagged Articles at Cinematical

All this week we'll be highlighting some of our favorite scenes from Oscar-winning films and performances leading up to this year's Academy Awards on Sunday night.

Yeah, I'll say it: Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood is not only one of the best we've seen in the last couple of decades, but I'll go as far as to say it's one of the best performances by a male actor that I've ever seen. Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar last year for his role as oil-hungry entrepreneur Daniel Plainview in this film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Most people love to replay the final moments from this flick -- which include that oh-so-memorable line about drinking milkshakes -- but there's something about this scene below that I just adore. Something about the little mind games Plainview and Sunday (Paul Dano) play; the lies, the deception, the greed, the anger, the heartbreak -- it's all just brilliant. Of course this scene means a whole lot more when you watch it in context, but I also believe this scene by itself makes for a great preview of the overall themes and plot of the entire film. Check it out below ...

There Will Be Blood
Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon | Read Jeff's review

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Explicit Ills, a film which has taken home at least two Audience Awards (SXSW, Gen Art Chicago) during its festival run in 2008. And when a film snags more than one Audience Award, that means audiences kinda dig it, like, a lot. Featuring the directorial debut of actor-turned-filmmaker Mark Webber, Explicit Ills stars Rosario Dawson, Paul Dano, Naomie Harris and Lou Taylor Pucci, among others.

From Scott's positive SXSW review: "Brief, honest, and admirably to-the-point, Explicit Ills follows a group of seemingly unrelated South Philadelphia folks who try to lead normal, happy, anonymous lives -- but their station on the lower rung of the income scale means that even the most basic requirements remain frustratingly out-of-reach." It's a pretty impressive debut for Webber as writer-director, and a film that will unfortunately hit home for a lot of folks during these tough economic times. But there's a strong message and a point, and you'll wanna set aside some time to watch Explicit Ills when it hits theaters on March 6th (In NYC), March 13th (in LA) and March 20th (in Philly).

Click the image below to view the full poster.

Cinematical has received this exclusive poster for the film Gigantic, starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel and John Goodman (check out the full-sized version in the gallery below). Co-written and directed by Matt Aselton, Gigantic follows a depressed mattress salesman (Dano) who, while on a quest to adopt a Chinese baby, is sidetracked when he falls in love with a girl named Happy (Deschanel). Completely bizarre plot, but I have no problem whatsoever watching Deschanel in anything, and it's damn good to see our buddy Dano back up on the big screen (that yellow on the poster remind you of anything?). Oh, and I should mention that Ed Asner and Jane Alexander co-star. Right on! Click on the image below to see the full poster.

Gigantic hits theaters (in limited release) on April 3. Check out a full synopsis after the jump.

Hearing that Kevin Kline is starring in a new film always sets off my alarm, eagerly hoping for something like The Anniversary Party or A Midsummer Night's Dream (and not Trade or The Pink Panther). And this just may be it... Variety reports that Klein, Paul Dano, John C. Reilly, and Katie Holmes have signed on for an adaptation of Jonathan Ames' The Extra Man. Shari Springer Berman wrote the script with Ames, and will direct along with American Splendor director Robert Pulcini.

The book follows a troubled young man (Dano) who gets a teaching job in New York City and ends up living with an "elderly eccentric" (Kline) who spends his time as "the extra man" for rich old women on the East Side. (Ouch. The thought of Kline as "elderly" truly saddens me...) While the old man teaches him some tidbits about city living, like how to sneak into Broadway plays, the younger roommate struggles with his uncertain sexual orientation with cross-dressing and forays into "New York's transvestite underworld."

There is no word on who Reilly or Holmes will play, but maybe one of the book's fans could shed some light on character possibilities? Not that it really matters -- just the thought of Kline, Dano, and Reilly together is enough to sell me, and I'm dying to see what Dano and Kline do with their roles. And who knows? Maybe this will mean a big comeback for Holmes as well (as a big-screen actress) -- she was wonderful in the last film she shared with Klein -- Ang Lee's The Ice Storm.

When Demetri Martin joined the cast of Taking Woodstock, it was set to begin production in late August. In a nice change of pace, the movie is still on schedule, and will begin shooting at the end of the month, SAG strike be damned. But that isn't the only reason to anticipate Ang Lee's project. Variety reports the ensemble cast has been set, and it's insanely good. Get ready for a film that includes the likes of Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Eugene Levy, Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Dan Fogler, Mamie Gummer, Henry Goodman, and Jonathan Groff.

Martin stars in the memoir adaptation as Elliot Tiber, a closeted gay man and aspiring interior designer who gives up his Big Apple dreams to run the family business in a Catskills motel. In 1969, he offered the hotel as home base for Woodstock organizers while his neighbor Max Yasgur (Levy) offered his farm. Staunton and Goodman play Tiber's parents, Groff will be festival organizer Michael Lang, Hirsch will play a Vietnam vet just back on American soil, Schreiber is in talks to play a transvestite named Vilma, Morgan will be a closeted married man having an affair with Tiber, Dano and Kazan play a hippy couple going to the concert, Fogler will be the head of a local theater troupe, and Gummer will take on the role of Lang's assistant.

I have a feeling this will be so very, very good.

Back in January, Paul Dano signed on to play a crazy healer who gets taken under the wing of Brian Cox in The Good Heart. Now Just Jared has got some shots from Dagur Kari's production, as it gears up in New York. To the right, you can see Dano in hospital whites, playing frisbee. I guess Cox isn't the only one in the film who hangs in the hospital. (There's another picture over at Just Jared of both of them in their whites.)

The movie is about a man named Jacques (Cox) who runs a deadbeat bar in New York, "like a bar in a Eugene O'Neil play." Dano, meanwhile, is a young homeless man with healing powers who comes to the bar and heals all the men there -- including Jacques, who "is always in the hospital, nearly dying." In thanks, the homeless man is taken under Jacques' wing, to take over the bar, but things get tricky when a Hungarian air-hostess creates a triangle between the two men.

And then, at some point, they must find themselves committed. They're certainly not in a normal hospital if they're walking around on their own and playing frisbee. Whatever the case, the mixture of Dano and Cox sounds excellent, and it should be worth the crazy, healing, dramatic adventure.

When a movie shows up and takes a clear political stance, I find it's easier to judge its successes and / or shortcomings than when a flick dips a toe into the pool of social commentary and just waggles it around for a few minutes -- which probably explains why I both enjoyed and respected Mark Webber's Explicit Ills, an Altman-esque indie drama that has something to say about poverty, health care, and the importance of basic human kindness.

Brief, honest, and admirably to-the-point, Explicit Ills follows a group of seemingly unrelated South Philadelphia folks who try to lead normal, happy, anonymous lives -- but their station on the lower rung of the income scale means that even the most basic requirements remain frustratingly out-of-reach. (In one key scene, an excellent Rosario Dawson is denied asthma medicine for her sick little boy -- because she cannot afford the $55 price tag.) Alternate plot threads involve a pair of young druggies in love, a mega-clean couple who aim to open a health food store, and a cocky adolescent who (slowly) learns how to treat a lady.

After spending 2006 having the crap scared out of him by Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Dano could probably stand to work on something just a little more light-hearted. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Dano has signed to star in the independent romantic comedy, Gigantic. Dano will star alongside Zooey Deschanel, and plays a mattress salesman who falls in love with a young woman at the store where he works. I can only assume that Deschanel, fresh off of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, will play that young woman.

So far, no other cast has been named other than Frank Harts (Miracle at St. Anna). The relatively tiny cast leads me to believe that the film is going to be a pretty small affair. Although now that Dano still has some of that post-Oscar buzz surrounding him (despite being snubbed for a nomination), it could raise the profile of the film ever so slightly.

Gigantic will be directed by first-timer Matt Aselton, who also helped to write the script alongside Adam Nagata (also making his feature debut). Production is set to begin this March in New York, but a date has yet to be confirmed. After Dano finishes up work on Gigantic, he's off to work on another indie film, The Good Heart. Heart will reunite Dano with Brian Cox (the two worked together on L.I.E. back in 2001) in a story about an older man who befriends a young homeless man and makes him is protégé. Well, so much for Dano making more happy-go-lucky flicks. Gigantic is expected to be released later this year.

Paul Dano's name might not be on the tip of tongues, but you're sure to have seen him, and liked him -- he played Klitz in The Girl Next Door, Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine, and most recently, Paul and Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood. (If you haven't seen these, you should. And if you don't like him, why the heck not?!) Now, along with Explicit Ills, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Stanford Prison Experiment, MTV reports that he's going to be acting in the upcoming film, The Good Heart with his L.I.E. co-star, Brian Cox.

MTV talked with Cox at Sundance, and he said this new project, to be directed by Dagur Kári, is "a crazed film about a guy who runs a bar, called Jacques [Cox], in New York. It's a bar where all these deadbeats hang out, like a bar in a Eugene O'Neil play." How does Dano fit in? "This young homeless man comes in, and he has these extraordinary powers of healing; he can heal all the guys in the bar. He also heals my character, this guy who has these heart problems. The old man is always in the hospital, nearly dying." After healing the bar owner, Dano's character is taken under his wing so that he may take over the bar when Jacques passes on. Things get complicated when a "Hungarian air-hostess" comes to work in the bar and a triangle forms.

On the one hand, this sounds great. On the other, I can help but think about what it would be like with the previously-rumored stars -- Ryan Gosling and Tom Waits.

One of the best moments in There Will Be Blood comes when oilman-misanthrope Daniel Plainview first meets preacher Eli Sunday, after having already met and done a business deal with Eli's identical twin brother Paul earlier in the film. The camera lingers on Plainview's face as he examines Eli, trying to ascertain whether this is some kind of scam and if the person he's talking to is really Paul, passing himself off as the new brother for some nefarious reason. Some have speculated that this scene and the whole identical twin device P.T. Anderson uses has a lot of resonance because it shows what a disadvantage Plainview typically finds himself in when trying to know the mind of another person. (It's a problem that he deals with again in the film when a man arrives claiming to be his long-lost brother.) But it seems that we may be reading too much into it -- in a new half-hour Fresh Air interview, Paul Dano, who plays both Eli and Paul, says his casting in the roles of both brothers had a much more mundane genesis -- another actor was originally cast as Eli and then let go.

"Somebody else was cast in that role and replaced with you?" the NPR interviewer asks Dano, to which he replies "Yeah. For what reason I'm not sure. I don't care to know, or I didn't want to know." Dano says that the unknown actor had already been filming for a short while when Anderson approached him about taking over the role and he had less than a week to prepare for the part. "We looked at some scenes and talked about the part a little bit and he said 'I'd like you to do this part' and they'd been filming for a little bit already, so I said 'Okay, that's great. It's a little bit of a shock.' And he said 'And why don't you still play the Paul part and we'll just make them twins?'"

Dano also talks at length about how he views Eli, saying that "he's somebody who I think made himself up. He invented himself. I think he's quite a bit of an actor. He created this persona at a very young age once he saw what religion and his curiosity with religion could do for him." If you want to hear the rest of the interview, and I recommend it, get yourself to NPR and click on the recent Fresh Air programs.