Susan Sarandon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you love ceramic elephants and famous people, and you'd like to help fight Africa's AIDS epidemic, then get out your checkbook. A number of high-profile celebrities, including George Clooney, Glenn Close, Hugh Jackman and Denzel Washington, have agreed to scribble their names on ceramic elephants to raise funds for Project Zambi, a charity dedicated to raising awareness and funding programs that care for African children orphaned by AIDS.

The organization was started by Hasbro employees, who were inspired by the Chikumbuso Women and Orphans Project in Zambia. They created "Zambi the Elephant," sending a textile artist to Zambia to teach art workshops and get input from the children there on the design of the Zambi stuffed toy, which wiggles its ears, raises its trunk and makes happy sounds when you tickle its chest. The toy retails for $49.99 and Hasbro has committed 50 percent of the toy's net profits, with a minimum of $500,000, to Project Zambi.

Oliver Stone's sequel to his classic '80s tale of slick, money-hungry stockbrokers, Wall Street, is racking up quite the cast. Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps already has Shia LaBeouf, Susan Sarandon, Frank Langella, Michael Douglas, and arthouse It Girl Carey Mulligan (An Education) signed up for a 21st century take on greed on whether or not it's good (answer: probs not). But the big rumor all summer has been that Josh Brolin will take over the role of the villain after Javier Bardem turned down the role.

Well, as our buddies over at the esteemed website The Playlist point out, in this weekend's New York Times Oliver Stone casually confirms the rumors that Josh Brolin will indeed be playing the villain, and Charlie Sheen will be popping up in a cameo as his character from the original, Bud Fox.

Now that the real Wall Street and its counterparts around the world have felt the collective shudder of the past year's financial implosion, Stone is hoping to show some hope for redemption for Gekko.

"In his first run at Wall Street, Mr. Stone produced characters and a portrayal that lived longer than he ever expected and with unintended consequences. But he never would have made a second version if it didn't appear that the system, and high finance, had finally been brought to its knees.

'We wouldn't have done this movie in 2006,' he said. "'Things were too loose. I didn't want to glorify pigs.'"

Money never sleeps and Shia LaBeouf gets such great cinematic parents. Variety reports that Susan Sarandon is in negotiations to join Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. And with that, we've got yet another reason to wonder if #2 will boast one of the best casts of 2010.

Should she sign on the dotted line, Sarandon will play Shia LaBeouf's mom. As we've already learned, he's playing a new Wall Street trader who "falls under the seductive influence of Gordon Gekko." Frankly, I'd much rather Susan fall for Gordon's seductive charms, but that would be an entirely different movie.

As it stands, Ms. Sarandon only gets to play mom again -- hopefully with some dramatic flair and not just motherly concern. But as all of these great names sign on, are any of you worrying about the project more? I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but LaBeouf has inspired a solid stream of skepticism once he hit it big, and now he's going to star in a highly anticipated film surrounded by a lot of beloved, uber-talented names. There will be no action to fill in the blanks, no explosions (one would assume) to distract us from any unevenness. Can he really hold his own against Sarandon, Michael Douglas, Frank Langella, and the rest?

Okay, so I might've just knocked Sandra Bullock for going after the Oscar gold, but here's The Lovely Bones, with a story I can get behind (Alice Sebold's best-selling tale of a young girl murdered and the aftermath she observes from the afterlife), a filmmaker I can get behind (Peter Jackson, scaling things back post-Lord of the Rings), an ensemble* I can get behind (Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, and the critically-cast Saoirse Ronan), and now a trailer I can get behind.

Reading the novel earlier this year, I was struck by the simplest moments that captures almost too precisely how grief can change loved ones most unexpectedly, and while it seems that Jackson has certainly created a visually luscious realm for Ronan's character to inhabit and has retained the thrust of a somewhat supernatural murder mystery, part of what won me over was how Sebold's mystery took years to unfold, as the whole family comes to terms with the closure (or lack thereof) in their own personal ways.

If Jackson and company can balance the sprawling drama with the inherent whodunit (whydunit?) come December 11th, then The Lovely Bones could be lingering above all of the other contenders this coming awards season.

*I must confess a certain gratitude that Wahlberg replaced Ryan Gosling here. It's enough of an age difference to matter, let alone general temperament.

I really don't know who thought You Don't Know Jack would be a great title for an HBO biopic about Jack Kevorkian, the doc who spent eight years in jail for his role in assisting the terminally ill to commit suicide, but whoever you are, I applaud you. It adds a smidge of levity (and inappropriate humor, my favorite kind!) to what is sure to be a rather dark feature, indeed.

Al Pacino has taken on the role of Kevorkian, a friendly enough looking older fellow whose name has become synonymous with assisted suicide. (Now is not the time for jokes about his roles in Righteous Kill or 88 Minutes and what effects either might have had on movie-goers.) Kevorkian's interest in dying patients, his creation of a device to assist the terminally ill in their own suicides, and his own work helping 130 people with terminal diseases end their own lives earned him the nickname Dr. Death, about eight years in jail, and a Time magazine cover.

Tony Montana will be joined by Susan Sarandon and John Goodman in You Don't Know Jack, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The pic is a "loose" adaptation of the book Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian's Life and the Battle to Legalize Euthanasia by Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie. I haven't read the book, but it seems like a somewhat empathetic look at this controversial man. Noted political activist Sarandon has been cast as Janet Good, an advocate of the right-to-die movement who took her own life because of pancreatic cancer.

With never-ending zeal, Hollywood looks back to the good ol' days with remakes and re-imaginings. But it's always the plots; always the stories. What about the actors? If there was any way that looking to the past would be beneficial, it would be grabbing those actors of today and getting them to dip back into the roles of yesterday -- the gigs that made us love them, but were so soon forgotten or cast aside.

Between casting ruts and earnest attempts to foster specific career paths, actors all too often leave their well-loved roots in the past, becoming an entirely different sort of performer. Very rarely do we get glimpses of those early years, and as nice as it is to see glimpses of former glory in a skit that pops up on SNL or Funny or Die, it's not the same as a feature-length, starring gig.

What follows are seven actors and actresses who are ripe for a return to the past. Naturally, this is only the start of a very long list, so be sure to add your picks in the comments.

How do you imagine heaven? Peter Jackson's vision of the place may not be the same, based on an advance look published by Empire Magazine, and that's probably a good thing. The director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy has revealed a glimpse of his concept of the heavenly realm, from his upcoming movie The Lovely Bones, and it looks a lot like ... the Empire Magazine logo (if you click through to their site and enlarge the image; see part of it above). Yup, the Brit zine promises many more pictures in their upcoming issue, but for now all we have is one shot that makes heaven look like a studio with some clouds in the background.

If you haven't read the book, it's an absolutely devastating read, written by Alice Sebold from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl. Susie Salmon (played in the movie by Saoirse Ronan) narrates the tale from her own personal heaven: she was brutally raped and murdered by a neighbor / serial killer and has to come to terms with her own death while watching her family and friends deal with extreme emotional trauma. Susie's heaven is not like Warren Beatty and Buck Henry's Heaven Can Wait or, really, like most other heavens depicted in film, so this initial image is promising.

It's also in line with what Jackson told USA Today: "It is quite like the world of dream, using the magic of metaphor to convey Susie's psychological and emotional life." USA Today also has a different, exclusive image (see above), which shows a shadowy Stanley Tucci as the neighboring serial killer. Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, and Michael Imperioli also star. The Lovely Bones is due in theaters on December 11.

We're getting more Beverly Hills Ninja. It might be September, but it feels like it's Christmas! Variety reports that the film will be the first mainstream Hollywood flick to shoot in South Korea, but it's still keeping to its roots with the simple name -- Beverly Hills Ninja 2. Written by Mitch Klebanoff (co-producer and writer of the original), who will also direct, the terrible idea will focus on "an orphaned boy who wants to be a ninja but becomes involved in a crime in Hollywood while looking for his real parents." One would think Kevin Farley might be the guy heading this sucker, but no it's DAVID HASSELHOFF. Oh yes, try to resist the Hoff going ninja.

Farley, instead, gets a little something different. What do you do after you run with the cliche of "unattractive" girls who can miraculously become hot with the help of a shunned Playboy bunny? Divorced dudes. Variety reports the director of House Bunny, Fred Wolf, is directing a new flick called Divorced Guys. The comedy, which follows a group of divorced guys who go on a road trip to figure out how their marriages failed, was written by Wolf, Farley, and David Spade, who will also star.

Meanwhile, it looks like Michael Douglas is gearing up for another wacky role that could be worth the time. Variety reports that he's going to "play a car magnate with a runaway libido" in a new film called Solitary Man. More specifically, he's a guy who used to be the owner of a chain of car dealerships until "business and romantic indiscretions" mucked things up. Making the whole thing more intriguing -- Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, and Jenna Fischer are in talks to co-star. It's not quite as cool as him playing Liberace, but it'll do.

First things first: "From Page to Screen" is a new column I'm trying here at Cinematical. Each week I'll discuss in detail a book that serves as the source material for either an upcoming or a past film adaptation. In the case of forthcoming films, I'll talk about the prospects for the adaptation: the challenges of bringing the particular book to the screen, the casting, the plot, the literary intangibles that so often wind up missing from the resulting movies. In the case of past films, I'll discuss the adaptation's approach to its source: what changed, what stayed the same, what worked and what didn't. Oh, and I'll actually have read the books.

I never tire of repeating my simple philosophy when it comes to adaptations: books are not movies. What works on the page won't always work on the screen. To demand total faithfulness to the book is folly, and will usually lead to a crappy movie. (This is also the case, by the way, for "true stories" and biopics -- people's lives, no matter how interesting, don't always, or even often, make for good films.) But that, I think, makes my task here more interesting rather than less. What does it take for an adaptation to work -- as a film in its own right, or as a translation of the source material?

The idea for this came from a number of discussions I've had here on the site. People are passionate about the books they love, and protective of them. The adaptation process is fun to talk about -- and even more fun when you've read the book and can have an informed conversation. I hope you'll join me, and I plan to be active in the comment threads.