TheGoodHeart Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Indie Roundup is your guide to what's new and cool in the indie film world.

On-Demand / Online Viewing. Love him or find him irritating, he's practically a category unto himself now. Joe Swanberg continues to explore the endlessly fascinating topic of twenty-something romantic relationships in Young American Bodies, a web series now on IFC.com. Season 4 debuted on Monday at IFC.com, and future episodes of the five-part series will premiere on a weekly basis. If you're a Swanberg fan, you'll want to check it out: it expands on his vision of sex and everything that leads up to it and follows afterward: elusive, kinda real, kinda fake, pretty messy.

In honor of Veterans Day, SnagFilms presents a selection of films appropriate for the occasion, covering a national shrine in Arlington: Field of Honor, dangerous missions in Baghdad Bound: Devil Dog Diaries, remembering the Battle for Midway, and so one. Truly, there's something for everyone to discover among the documentaries showcases. Similarly, Hulu has two films of interest: Jerabek, the tragic story of U.S. Marine Ryan Jerabek, and When I Came Home, which covers the troubling issue of homelessness among veterans.

Also newly available online: the enchanting "banjo player goes to Africa" doc Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart (on iTunes) and a close-up (sorry) view of artist Chuck Close (also on iTunes).

Deals. As always, our friends at indieWIRE has been tracking recent acquisitions. The latest: romance My Year Without Sex (Strand Releasing, due spring 2010); drama The Good Heart, with Brian Cox and Paul Dano, directed by the very talented Dagur Kari (Magnolia Pictures, due next year); and social satire The Joneses, with David Duchovny and Demi Moore (Roadside Attractions, due spring 2010).

After the jump: more than Precious at the box office.

Key Screenings. And away we go! The Toronto International Film Festival got underway on Thursday, as official opener Creation landed with a painful thud. Reaction was more positive for Lars von Trier's Antichrist (except for the guy who vomited on fellow attendees during the screening) and Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces, according to Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE, who also noted that Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Willem Dafoe, and Penelope Cruz (plus the lovely Amanda Seyfried, above) appeared in support of their wide-ranging films, not to mention scantily-clad men and women at different functions.

The first full day of screenings found Anne Thompson gushing over the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man ("Utterly assured, personal, serious, sad and very funny"). George Clooney (staring, above) and Jeff Bridges received ovations for The Men Who Stare at Goats, tweeted a Twitter user; however, Karina Longworth recoiled: "Its vacuity actually seems offensive" compared to Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death, dealing with the tragedy in Nanking, China in 1937.

Our Coverage. As our writers on the ground scramble to hit all the choicest press and public screenings, and somehow find time to write in between dashing from one theater to the next, reviews have begun to filter in. Written by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox, Jennifer's Body "substitutes hipster credibility for emotional currency," says Todd Gilchrist. Directed by Jason Reitman and starring George Clooney, Up in the Air is "brisk, funny, and not enslaved to genre conventions," declares Eugene Novikov. And Erik Davis presented a TIFF Exclusive: the poster for indie flick Kirot, with Olga Kurylenko as a gun-toting mother / assassin.

News about a deal and more highlights from the Information Superhighway -- after the jump!

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.

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.