Seymour Cassel Tagged Articles at Cinematical

One man to not truly break through the 1980s stigma and revamp his career is Eric Stoltz. James Spader did a heck of a job with it, now being smarmy fun on Boston Legal, as did the likes of Jon Cryer, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and more. But then again, even Stoltz's '80s classics, Mask and Some Kind of Wonderful, were drowned by the likes of Molly Ringwald and her swarm of teen romances, so it's not like he ever had a bit spotlight.

Stoltz remains a bit on the outside, but still working as hard as ever. He's got a bit of a role in Milk, and now Variety reports that he's joining a wartime indie drama called Fort McCoy. Along with the likes of Brendan Fehr, Camryn Manheim, Lyndsy Fonseca, Seymour Cassel, and Kate Connor, Stoltz is nestled in Wisconsin shooting the true story, based on a script from Connor.

McCoy centers on "a barber who moves with his family during WWII to a POW camp in Wisconsin, where the children are the sole youngsters on the base -- save for a German teenager who forges an alliance that crosses language barriers with the barber's little girl." I imagine we can see how this plays out sometime during next year's festival season, with hopefully a release after that.

Frank (Shane Andrews) is coming back to L.A. after some time away. He looks into a job, where the supervisor Larry (Seymour Cassel) says he can have the position " ... on account of you came all this way and you ain't drunk." Frank goes to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Rita, but she isn't there. He leaves her a note every time he steps out, but she doesn't seem to be getting them. And as Frank gets from point a to point b riding the busses and walking the sunburnt streets of Los Angeles, we have to wonder where he's going and where he's coming from. ...

Written and directed by Ben Rodkin, Big Heart City consciously evokes the 'beautiful loser' cinema of the 1970s, from the unrepentantly conflicted nature of Frank's character down to the presence of longtime John Cassavetes collaborator Cassel. Shot on 16 millimeter film -- a rarity in the digital video age -- Big Heart City not only has the grit and grain of old-school technology but the grit and grain of old-school storytelling. Frank goes to work; he goes to the track; he rehearses the stories he tells Larry, although we can't be sure if he's trying extra hard to convince Larry or convince himself. And the longer Frank waits for Rita, the more we see him bend and break under the strain of cruel hope.

A quirky, character-driven throwback to all those lovable, yet meandering '70s flicks, The Wendell Baker Story arrives at a time when people are itching for a large, big-budgeted special effects spectacular. This film is not that. However, it does reunite brothers Luke and Owen Wilson for the first time since they shared the same big screen in Wes Anderson's 2001 pic The Royal Tenenbaums. To make it even more of a family affair, the eldest Wilson brother Andrew helps the younger Luke direct, while the result ends up falling somewhere between Bottle Rocket and Rancho Deluxe; a neatly-wrapped Texas meal that comes with enough mouth-watering sides to keep your belly full as your mind begins to wonder.

Wendell Baker (Luke Wilson) is a low-maintenance conman whose friendly, good-natured optimism hinders more than it helps him; so much so that all he ends up doing is conning himself. Knee-deep in his latest scam (which involves driving to the border to sell fake Texas drivers licenses to illegal immigrants), Wendell figures he has it all worked out. Not to mention there's a little lady (Eva Mendes) waiting for him back at home, if he remembers to pick her up from work on time. He's such a free-spirited, "everything will turn out just fine" moron that even when the feds bust him, he shakes off a lengthily prison sentence as if he accidentally forgot to pick up a bottle of water on the way to the gym. But that's Wendell. The way he sees it, life is too short to feel pain. But when his sweet-as-pie girlfriend Doreen decides to ditch Wendell because he's too busy mending rifts between the blacks and the skinheads while in prison, the old "you don't know what you got until it's gone" theme hits him harder than a bull at a rodeo.