RodLurie Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Some more cast members have been revealed for Rod Lurie's "re-imagining" of Sam Peckinpah's controversial '70s thriller Straw Dogs, which is good because it just started filming in Shreveport, LA. Like, yesterday. James Woods (one of my favorite creeps) has joined the cast, as have Willa Holland and Dominic Purcell; however, there's no real info on who they will be playing, as the three leads have already been cast.

Kate Bosworth is taking on the complicated character of Amy Sumner, who was played by Susan George in the original; James Marsden is her husband, David, originally played by Dustin Hoffman, and Alexander Skarsgård is her ex-boyfriend Charlie, Susan's ex and the ringleader of the escalating violence against the couple.

In Lurie's version, the Sumners relocate to Amy's hometown in Mississippi instead of Cornwall, and David is a screenwriter from Los Angeles rather than a milquetoast mathematician. I'm very curious to see how Lurie plans to handle the ambiguities of the original, especially the rape scene that had many critics leveling charges of misogyny against Peckinpah.

Did this movie really need a "re-imagining?" Can we please think of a new term of directors and writers who take pre-existing characters and put them in almost the same circumstances but in different locations? How will the cast hold up to the original? And let's not forget the iconic poster from the original -- that will be hard to top.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which is due to hit theaters on September 11. Perry definitely has an army of supporters in his target audience -- African-American, female, and religious -- and I Can Do Bad All by Myself sounds like more of the same. Three delinquent children loot the home of the lovable-but-firm Madea (Perry), and she takes matters into her own hands. She delivers them into the care of their only relative, the hard-drinking, nightclub-singing April, played by Academy Award-nominated Taraji P. Henson. Aunt April sponges off her married boyfriend and wants nothing to do with the kids, but things start to change when a good-looking Mexican immigrant (Adam Rodriguez) moves into her basement.

In a funny marketing twist for folks outside Perry's usual target audience, the poster references a vastly different movie: Sam Peckinpah's controversial, violent home invasion thriller Straw Dogs, starring Dustin Hoffman. It may be a little obscure for mainstream audiences, but I think it's pretty clever when you consider it in light of the Rod Lurie remake that is due out next year, which will be set in the deep South -- Perry country! Check out the above poster and the original Straw Dogs poster side-by-side, as well as the full version of the new Tyler Perry movie poster, in the gallery below.

Meanwhile, Tyler Perry fans can check out the trailer for I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which just debuted at Fandango.

If there's one remake that's solidly irking the masses, it would be Rod Lurie's plan to re-do Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Remaking a big studio film is one thing -- remaking a controversial and violent Peckinpah film is something else entirely. In March and August of 2007, Cinematical readers weighed in with their distaste, and now a few years later, this sucker is finally getting cast ... with Cyclops.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that James Marsden will be taking over Dustin Hoffman's shoes to play David Sumner. This time around, the man will be an LA screenwriter who moves to his wife's deep-South hometown before the marriage troubles begin and locals get violent.

I have to admit it; I'm kind of intrigued. It's not that I want a remake (I almost never do), but I really want to see what Lurie is doing with this. He's already expressed his distaste in the rape controversy, and swears it will be much different in his film, and he's moved the whole project over to an entirely different social landscape. Why? And then picking Marsden? I can't decide if this is a move of genius, and something that could set the actor on more of a Hoffman path than a rom-com and annoying eye-zapper path, or if this is just another reason to ignore this remake.

So far, it's like a garish accident, you're compelled to look even if you don't really want to... But what do you think? Does Marsden make you want to pick up the pitchforks and revolt, townie-style?

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.

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?