When it comes to sifting through all actors responsible for portraying the most powerful man on the planet, there's no shortage of options. John Travolta did a great Bill Clinton impersonation in Primary Colors and Timothy Bottoms delivered a near-perfect imitation of George W. Bush in both D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis and That's My Bush! Neither one comes across as particularly flattering, so presidential nominee Barack Obama has chosen a safer bet: At a recent party in Los Angeles, Obama revealed that he prefers Jeff Bridges' conflicted commander-in-chief in The Contender. Granted, he may have said this simply to keep his audience happy -- in this case, Contender director Rod Lurie, one of the attendees who was willing to plop down $28,000 for the event. "'I just plugged your movie," Obama told Lurie, according to a report the director sent to Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells.

Still, when you're under the kind of intense scrutiny that Obama currently endures, Bridges actually seems like a pretty safe choice. Choose Anthony Hopkins in Nixon and it sounds like you're endorsing the bad guy. Choose Kevin Kline in Dave and you come across as disingenuous. Choose Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and somebody will call you incompetent. Bridges, on the other hand, plays a fierce leader bound to his moral convictions. Of course, Obama also expressed sympathy over Lurie's short-lived television show Commander-in-Chief, which featured Geena Davis as the first woman president. Perhaps it's no coincidence that he and Hillary have publicly made amends.

Considering the amount of flack Nicolas Cage received over his last time-bending flick, I am a little surprised that he decided to come back for Alex Proyas', Knowing. Coming Soon is now hosting some on-set photos from the sci-fi thriller starring Cage and Rose Byrne. Sources managed to snap the pics on location in Geelong, Australia, and while there are no shots of Cage or Byrne, at least we get to see some stuff blowing up.

Knowing centers on a time capsule buried in 1958 that was chock full of doom and gloom prophecies. When the capsule is dug up 50 year later, it lands in the hands of a young boy and his professor father (Cage) who becomes obsessed with decoding the messages and preventing all-out destruction.

The production has had a long history in Hollywood, ever since the film was first set up over at Columbia. There have been a few directors attached over the years, notably Richard Kelly and Rod Lurie. Proyas came on board in 2005, and after a few rewrites, the film went into production in 2007. As if a long and troubled production history wasn't enough of an obstacle, it is no secret that Cage's 'shine' has been slowly diminishing over the years (thank you very much, Ghost Rider), so Knowing could be a hard sell to audiences who might still be ticked over shelling out their hard-earned dollars for Next.

Knowing is scheduled to arrive in theaters in 2009.

I'm excited enough that Rod Lurie is returning to politics with Nothing but the Truth, a film loosely associated with the story of Valerie Plame. But I'm becoming more excited that it will feature a wide range of talented actors, from Kate Beckinsdale to Alan Alda to Matt Dillon to Vera Farmiga to David Schwimmer to Edie Falco to Harry Lennix to the just-announced Angela Bassett and Noah Wyle. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Basset and Wyle join the ensemble as supportive figures. Bassett is to play editor-in-chief to Beckinsdale's reporter and Wyle is to play the lawyer defending Beckinsdale's character, who ends up in jail for not revealing a source.

More than 13 years after being nominated for an Oscar (for What's Love Got to Do with It), I'm happy to see Bassett getting more meaty roles. In addition to this part, which will probably be too small to garner too much recognition, she is set to star opposite Don Cheadle as the titular wife in the biopic Toussaint, and she's sure to be seen by millions and millions in Tyler Perry's next movie, Meet the Browns. Wyle, too, is deserving of making his mark on the big screen now that he's done playing Dr. Carter on E.R. Coming up for him is a father role in the 1963-set coming-of-age film Boy of Pigs and his directorial debut, a romantic comedy titled Prince Test.

The interesting thing about Nothing but the Truth is it somewhat seems to combine Lurie's The Contender (possibly my favorite political film ever), which also focused on a woman under heavy scrutiny, and his recent box office disappointment Resurrecting the Champ, which similarly dealt with the world of journalism. For the sake of this great cast, I hope Nothing but the Truth is closer to the success level of the former.

Never one to sidestep controversy, writer/director Rod Lurie recently caused film purists to perk up their ears when he seemed to suggest during an interview that his upcoming remake of Sam Peckinpah's revenge thriller Straw Dogs would be tantamount to a moral improvement over the original film, since it would purposefully not rehash the ultra-controversial moment from the Peckinpah original when Susan George, playing the wife of Dustin Hoffman's character, begins to express pleasure during a brutal rape sequence. Lurie was more than ready to expand on his statement and explain exactly what he meant when I spoke with him recently -- he's out promoting his new sports journalism drama, Resurrecting the Champ, which opens in theaters today. During the course of our conversation, we talked about that film and what it says about the state of journalism today, we talked about his career path and how he wants to alter it, and I got his thoughts on the decline of the print film critic and the rise -- for better or worse -- of the Internet film critic. Here's the interview.

Cinematical: What are you up to today?

RL: Today's the day before the release of my film, so I'd like to say I'm just chilling out, but really we're watching all the reviews come in and all the box-office tracking and all that. It's a tense day, to say the least.

Cinematical: I wanted to ask, did you catch that article in the American Journalism Review this month, about film critics?

RL: No, I didn't.

Cinematical: Pretty interesting. It talks about print critics being offered buyouts or being simply let go at a lot of places, in favor of coverage from the wire services and all that. The underlying premise, I think, was that the trend was escalating.

RL: You know, I think about it a lot, because you know, I was a film critic for many years.

Cinematical: Right.

RL: There but for the grace of God go I, sort of thing, Ryan. You know, the Internet is a wondrous thing. It's the space travel of our time. By that, I mean it's the sort of thing that, twenty years ago was sort of unfathomable and it's done a lot of wonderful things, but it's also destroyed a lot of things. Print journalism is going to disappear, obviously, in the not too distant future. And part of the war of attrition on print journalism is getting rid of the non-essentials. Not that movie criticism is non-essential, but movie critics are, in the sense that there are plenty of wire services and we use Roger Ebert's reviews in 400 newspapers and the Associated Press and Reuters. It's a little sad, because I think it's nice for every town to have its own critic, its judge, its representative, its own community standards held up by the candle of that particular critic. So that's definitely going away, and it's too bad -- it really is.

Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is an extremely divisive movie. While some people view it as one of the finest explorations of violence and the nature of man on film, others find it offensive and misogynistic. Famed critic Pauline Kael famously dubbed it "the first American film that is a fascist work of art." The 1971 film stars Dustin Hoffman as a mild-mannered professor living in the English countryside with his attractive wife (Susan George). A gang of locals harasses them both, graphically rapes the wife and attacks their home. Hoffman fights back with great vengeance and furious anger.

I saw the movie again very recently in its excellent Criterion edition and found it to be just as powerful and gripping and challenging as I had remembered. As Christopher told you in March, Rod Lurie (director of The Contender and Resurrecting the Champ, which opens Friday) plans to direct a remake of Straw Dogs. Lurie recently spoke with ComingSoon.net about it, calling Peckinpah's work on the film "a little lazy" and the film itself "very imperfect." He says, "It's sort of a classic film in the sense that it's infamous. It's a good not great film by a great director."

"It's an interesting film, isn't it?" Lurie adds. "But it was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she's not going to be smiling in the rape in my film." If you ask me (and you didn't), a huge reason the 1970s is referred to as a golden age of cinema is because the films were gritty and uncompromising. They didn't tie everything up with a pretty bow; they left questions. And often, as is certainly the case with Straw Dogs, the questions don't come with easily acceptable or digestible answers. Straightening out the film's politics, making the film clearer morally -- that doesn't strike me as a particularly great notion. What do you guys think? Is Lurie blaspheming here? That "two-second moment" he's referring to is a major reason that people still heatedly debate the film to this day. Will Lurie de-fang the movie by taking that away? Or is he setting things right?

Update: Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere takes issue with Lurie's statement about the rape scene.

In just over a month, Rod Lurie is Resurrecting the Champ, he has got a remake of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs on the way and now he's gearing up to direct another script of his -- something more like The Contender and less like raping violence. The film is called Nothing but the Truth (get the reference?), and it's a drama about a Washington D.C.-based female reporter who outs a CIA agent and is sent to prison for not revealing her source. Now that should definitely sound familiar -- the film is paralleling the case of Valerie Plame, whose CIA agent status was exposed after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion piece that criticized the Bush administration.

While the cast has not been finalized, a number of actors are in talks -- a collection of which would make a sweet pot of political drama. If all of the talks work out -- Kate Beckinsale would be the journalist, Matt Dillon would step up as the prosecutor, Vera Farmiga would be the CIA agent, Edie Falco would be the editor of the paper that publishes the story and as a wonderful cherry to the selection, Alan Alda would play the attorney trying to free Beckinsale from jail. That's more than enough to hook me, and I'd love to see more serious Beckinsale, free from the action and thrills. The question that remains -- will we get a commutation-gathering Scooter Libby in a sequel?

I'm glad that I didn't know anything about Resurrecting the Champ before studying its new poster (apologies to Martha for not reading this post or this one last year) This way, I was able to look at the thing objectively and judge its worth as a marketing tool for the film. From what I could figure out, the movie is about boxing, it stars Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett and the latter's character has a son, making it as much a family drama as a sports drama. Oh, and according to the tagline, it is based on a true story, though a true story about a lie. So, my guess, again just from the poster, would be that Hartnett is the boxer, Jackson is his trainer, and the lie, maybe about how good the boxer is, is told to Hartnett's son. Sure, it doesn't sound that interesting, but the one-sheet isn't that interesting either.

So, how did I do? Well, aside from the boxing, and the obvious part about its stars, I was way off. According to its new trailer, the film is actually about a reporter (Hartnett), who is sure that a homeless man he has met (Samuel L. Jackson) is an old boxing legend. What even the trailer doesn't make clear, though, is that the man is not the famous person Hartnett's character thinks he is (but the man does have an interesting voice, thanks to Jackson). So what is up with the kid on the poster? Well, the official plot synopsis does mention the reporter has to reevaluate his relationship with his family, so I guess it represents that (the kid is Dakota Goya, who plays Hartnett's character's son). It is interesting that he appears so prominently on the poster, considering he's barely in the trailer. I've never been much for boxing movies (no, not even Raging Bull), so I'm not that interested in Resurrecting the Champ, even though I want to like another movie by Rod Lurie, because he did such a great job with The Contender. This poster doesn't do anything to change my mind, either, with its Hartnett-as-Peppermint Patty photo and its blazing, cloudy with a chance of Armageddon background. Sorry, Yari, try again.

Click on the poster for a larger size image. Check out the trailer after the jump.

As movies continue to get more and more violent -- and as filmmakers keep defending the violence -- it makes sense that one of the most controversially violent films would get a remake. Yes, Sam Peckinpah's disturbing classic Straw Dogs is being redone, and this time it will of course take place in America. The original, for those who haven't seen it, took place in the English countryside, where a couple played by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George are terrorized by locals. Screen Gems is still in the process of acquiring the rights to the film, but they already have a screenwriter (Reed Steiner) and a director (Rod Lurie). The project definitely appears to be more on track than the proposed remake of Peckinpah's Wild Bunch we heard about awhile back.

Considering Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is pretty sick even by today's standards, Steiner and Lurie will have to up the violence to possibly NC-17 levels. Personally, I can hardly stand the graphic nature of the raping and murdering that occurs in the 35-year-old original, so I don't know what more I could take in a redo. Fortunately the new version won't be made by someone like Eli Roth. I have hopes that Lurie, who made The Contender, one of my favorite films of 2000, will be concentrating on the themes of violence more than the actual depiction of violence, since the director tends to work with more political material. Certainly the more interesting aspect -- and one of the more controversial aspects -- of Straw Dogs is the how Hoffman and George react to the violence committed against them as well as by them.

Josh Hartnett and Samuel L. Jackson have signed on to star in Resurrecting the Champ, a drama that sounds like it could be pretty great, if the writer/director has the balls to make it dark enough. According to Variety, the movie will focus on a young reporter (that's Josh) who comes across a homeless man (Sam) and, instead of leaving him alone, decides that he's a famous former boxing champion. It turns out, however, that the reporter is a moron, and the guy is no more a boxing champ than you or I. So, do you see where I'm going with the whole dark thing? If the movie is less about Hartnett's naiveté and more about manipulation by Jackson's character, it could have a refreshingly nasty edge that would set it apart from most of the (non-horror) stuff in theaters these days. While I remain hopeful, the fact that the reporter and the fake boxer "[develop] a close relationship" suggest that nothing very sinister is going on in the screenplay. Dammit.

The film will be directed by Rod Lurie who also did a rewrite on the script. Production is expected to begin this summer.