brad anderson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If anyone needs a second chance alongside the Bar None sock puppet dog, it's Hayden Christensen. Maybe he's a good actor, maybe he's middling, maybe he's bad (I forgot to see Jumper, and Virgin Territory still hovers in the middle of my Netflix queue), but he deserves a shot to prove himself one way or another. A good horror movie is as good a shot as any. According to The Hollywood Reporter, that's just what he's got, and will be starring in Brad Anderson's Vanishing on Seventh Street. Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo are in negotiations to join in the spookiness.

Penned by Anderson and Anthony Jaswinsky, Seventh Street takes place in the ghostly shell of a once-thriving city. Living residents inexplicably vanish once they come in contact with its new shadowy residents. Five individuals fight to stay alive, dodge these eerie threats, and grapple with the meaning of existence. Christensen will play a reporter, Newton a desperate nurse, and Leguizamo a subway operator; the other two characters have yet to be cast or named. Filming will kick off mid-October in Detroit. (Cue the stories of socio-economic parellels.)

I haven't gotten to see much of Anderson's work (I'm anxiously waiting for Scott Weinberg to assign The Horror Virgin a viewing of Session 9), but he certainly can deliver the moody, shivery atmosphere. There's a dash of A Long Day's Journey Into Night in the the Seventh Street story description, and I'm fascinated with anything that might dabble into ideas of Purgatory. Blood, guts, and slashers are certainly scary, but staring into the abyss of life, death, and existence? That's the stuff of true horror.

It's understandable if you don't get a shiver down your spine when you hear the name Danvers unless you're a fan of abandoned insane asylums, horror movies, or H.P. Lovecraft. But if you've caught the criminally underseen Session 9, which was written and directed by Brad Anderson, you'll know an apartment at the newly renovated Avalon Advantage in Danvers is not the hottest property investment on the market.

Session 9 is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, and it boasts a fine performance from David Caruso as well, with nary a pair of sunglasses in sight. And, most pantswettingly, it was actually filmed on location in the Danvers State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Danvers, MA. (Anderson also wrote and directed the equally excellent and underseen Transsiberian.)

As per the wonderful website Atlas Obscura, "While it was built with a surprisingly caring and modern attitude toward the mentally ill, by the 1930's the site was crowded, falling into disrepair, and was using shock therapies and lobotomies on a regular basis. The addition of criminals, alcoholics, and the mentally retarded to the overcrowded hospital made it very difficult for the hospital to help cure any of its mental patients. The hospital was shut down in 1992."

Read more at Horror Squad

This list is harder to put together than it may seem, since one first needs to settle on a definition of "overlooked" and "indie." Nonetheless, I've endeavored to compile a set of seven small films, each of which had some manner of U.S. theatrical distribution, and each of which got less attention than it deserved -- or so I thought. None of these movies figures in the year's Oscar race, but they should be remembered for your DVD collection.

1. Boy A (John Crowley) - This is the movie Harvey Weinstein supposedly championed, though I suspect he only did it so that after it flopped he could point to it as an example of no one caring about whether his movies are any good. Whatever. Boy A is very, very close to being a great film, kept from the mantle by one too-on-the-nose plot thread that rears its head in the late going. Other than that it's a quiet, profound rumination on punishment, forgiveness, and our insistence on letting juvenile convictions haunt people for the rest of their lives. In a better world, Andrew Garfield would get an Oscar nomination for his heartbreaking performance. And the ending is a knock-out.

2. Transsiberian (Brad Anderson) - I don't think I saw a more effectively atmospheric movie this year -- no, not even Let the Right One In. The story is what it is (it's not too impressive), but the snowbound setting -- and the movie along with it -- constantly straddles the line between beauty and menace in a way that's truly gripping. I left the theater in a sad, unsettled funk, even though I get the sense that Anderson was going for breathless suspense. It's pitched as a thriller, and Anderson is a God among horror buffs after Session 9 (which I still haven't seen; it's creeping up my Netflix queue), but Transsiberian is beautiful and hypnotic above all else.

Clockwise from top left: Get Smart, Transsiberian, Kung Fu Panda, Budd Boetticher Box Set, Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary Collection.

Welcome to this week's edition of Spin-ematical, chock full of alternatives to election coverage!

Kung Fu Panda
Though some of the celebrity voices were useless, Jack Black is great, and the film itself is pleasant, good-natured, and respectful of Asian culture. Available in at least seven editions, including widescreen, full-screen, Spanish, a Christmas gift set, with and without Secrets of the Furious Five (a 20-minute short), and on Blu-ray; oddly, this doesn't release until Sunday. Buy it.

Transsiberian
Traveling by train in the dead of winter from Beijing to Moscow should be much more restful than what happens to Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer in this adventure / suspense / thriller; Ben Kingsley plays a menacing Russian detective. I'm recommending this one sight unseen because Brad Anderson (Session 9, The Machinist) directed. Includes a 34-minute "making of"; also available on Blu-ray. Replays are inevitable. Buy it.

Get Smart
The bumbling Maxwell Smart as a generic action hero? (*sigh*) Steve Carell makes the character his own by repeating the old catchphrases without enthusiasm and proving to be far too adept for his own -- or the movie's -- good. Anne Hathaway is a very sexy spy, but Dwayne Johnson is miscast and even Alan Arkin struggles. The TV series never took itself too seriously; if only the movie had done the same. Available in widescreen and full-screen editions, as well as a two-disk version and on Blu-ray; a plethora of bonus scenes are included, notably a 5-minute "vomit reel." Ugh. Skip it.

After the jump ... Indies on DVD, more Blu-ray debuts, and Collector's Corner.

With the much buzzed-about Transsiberian expanding to Los Angeles this Friday, August 8th, Cinematical has been given an exclusive clip from the film for you to check out. Above, watch as Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer and a four-eyed Woody Harrelson discuss the advantages and disadvantages to living in the old U.S.S.R. while on a Trans-Siberian train ride from China to Moscow. Eventually, our young American couple (as played by Mortimer and Harrelson) will meet another couple and find themselves entangled in a web of drugs and murder. Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson says Transsiberian "is more like a classic thriller in the Hitchcock vein, even taking place on a train as many of Hitch's films did." And speaking of Jeff, he's been all over this one -- check out his review over here, as well as interviews with both director Brad Anderson and star Emily Mortimer. Word of mouth is very good for this one (85% on Rotten Tomatoes), so definitely check it out when the film arrives in your neck of the woods.

Here's the current release schedule:

Aug. 8
Los Angeles (see theater list below)

Aug. 15
Chicago
Washington DC
San Francisco

Aug. 22
San Diego
Atlanta
Denver
Houston
Dallas
Seattle

Aug. 27
Minneapolis

As always, we seek to highlight indie films with this weekly post, so let's pause a moment and celebrate the success of a good, old-fashioned railroad movie. Brad Anderson's Transsiberian opened on two screens and earned a very tidy $17,600 at each, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. That has to be considered a triumph in the face of "The Bat Effect." Perhaps Transsiberian will get to a few more cities before its eventual landing on DVD shelves.

In a very welcome upturn of events, French thriller Tell No One expanded from 19 to 55 screens in its third week of release and averaged $9,725 per screen. More people will have a chance to catch this word-of-mouth success when it expands again this coming Friday.

Also in its third week out, The Wackness expanded by three theaters and kept a decent $4,441 per-screen average. It finally opened where I live and, while I loved Olivia Thirlby more than I should and was convinced that Jonathan Levine has good instincts as a filmmaker, I'm amazed it's done as well as it has, considering how drab so much of it feels. But that's just my minority opinion. I would still encourage you -- especially you 90s kids -- to consider checking it out when it expands wider this Friday.

Finally, Lou Reed's Berlin earned a per-screen average of $3,825 at the two theaters where it opened. Must be more Lou Reed fans out there than I thought.

The first Brad Anderson film I saw was Session 9. (I also spent $27 on the out-of-print DVD, which I've watched at least three times in the last year. It's a great movie.) And then I saw his dark and twisted love letter to Alfred Hitchcock: The Machinist. Wow. Aside from Christian Bale's staggering performance, it's just a rock-solid, old-fashioned mind-bender of a noir thriller. Good stuff. Most recently I saw the director's train-bound and icy chiller Transsiberian at Sundance, which (shocking!) I also enjoyed quite a bit.

Which leads us to a logical question. What can Brad Anderson fans expect next? According to Bloody-Disgusting, the writer / director is not straying far from the genre fare any time soon. First on the filmmaker's plate looks to be All Lost Souls, which is a "serial killer movie," and then perhaps Vanishing, which Anderson describes as "a smart post-apocalyptic horror film." Sounds good so far.

But even further down the road, Anderson could be looking at a remake of the 1943 occult flick The Seventh Victim -- and a Cronenbergian thriller called Concrete Island, which just might reunite the director with two of his Machinist collaborators: screenwriter Scott Kosar and low-key superstar Christian Bale. And to all those projects, I say this: Cool. Get to work, Brad!

[ Thanks to Bloody-Dee for the cool info. ]

This never occurred to me before, but "train" movies are a really interesting sub-genre. You could program an entire two-week film festival of train movies, from comedies (The "Three Stooges" shorts, The General, The Darjeeling Limited) to suspense movies (James Bond, Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Runaway Train) and tons of others. It's the perfect setting for a movie: it's a limited space, but long -- for chases -- and it moves through the frame as opposed to sitting still like a hospital room or a warehouse. Plus, unlike an airplane, there are plenty of beautiful views going by outside. And so, if the train movie is a genre, it follows that it needs a solid genre director to add another potential classic to the list.

Brad Anderson (no relation to me, by the way) is such a director. Like Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder, he has been able to effortlessly leap between dark, genre films (Session 9, The Machinist) and romances (Next Stop Wonderland), and even weird combinations of the two (Happy Accidents). His films may not reach the pinnacles of great art, but each and every one of them represents a good, sturdy, entertaining example of sheer, joyful craftsmanship. Anderson's fifth feature (not counting his early, hard-to-find The Darien Gap) is Transsiberian, a film that I would be proud to add to the list of recommended train movies. The title train runs from Beijing to Moscow and crosses through some pretty remote, snowy terrain; it's a great place for something devious and sinister to happen. (The 1973 Peter Cushing / Christopher Lee film Horror Express took place on the same train!)

His namesakes Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson made immediate genius debut splashes on the movie scene, but Brad Anderson, 43, has taken a slower, more indirect route, one more like the long, steady careers of John Ford and Howard Hawks. (By the way, none of these Andersons are related, and I am not related to any of them.) Brad Anderson has turned into a solid, dependable genre director, highly skilled and capable of making any kind of movie. Unlike most filmmakers today, his films are based on ideas, stories and characters rather than marketing concepts, and so they tend to hold up well past their sell-by date. So far they include the romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland (1998), the sci-fi romance Happy Accidents (2000), one of the decade's best horror films, Session 9 (2001) and the haunting The Machinist (2004).

Opening July 18, Anderson's new film Transsiberian is more like a classic thriller in the Hitchcock vein, even taking place on a train as many of Hitch's films did. Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer star as American couple Roy and Jessie, on their way back from China and taking the famous train. Ben Kingsley also stars as a Russian narcotics detective. Roy and Jessie meet a younger, traveling couple, Abby (Kate Mara) and Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), and find themselves entangled in a web of drugs and murder. Normally, the man is the hero in this type of story, but this time it's Jessie, a reformed "bad girl" making a go of it in her marriage with the simple, happy Roy (a train nut). Cinematical recently enjoyed a brief phone conversation with Mr. Anderson, and that's where we began:

In an interesting casting turn, the passenger manifest for the Trans-Siberian will get a little less Morton and a little more Mortimer. Transsiberian, which was set to star Oscar-nominated actress Samantha Morton, has been recast due to Morton's injuries from a collapsed ceiling. Her replacement is Emily Mortimer, who you probably remember for her role in Lovely & Amazing, or more recently as the mis-treated wife in Match Point. The change should definitely bring a different feel to the film, but it might go unnoticed due to the strange pairings within the piece.

Mortimer, best-known to mainstream audiences as the struggling actress from Scream 3, will be the love interest of Woody Harrelson. And you thought Jack Black and Kate Winslet were an odd match! The two will play an American couple traveling on the Trans-Siberian train from China to Moscow. While on the train, they meet a younger couple, Abby and Carlos, who are played by Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega. In a Christie-like twist, the couples' travels turn from an easy and relaxing trip into a deceptive and murderous chase. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ben Kingsley tops off the cast as a Russian police officer who is "hot on the trail of the couples." I'm not sure how the pairs come together, commit crimes, and become wanted.

The film was written, and will be directed by Brad Anderson -- the man who directed Christian Bale's haunting role in The Machinist. Considering the strange feel of that film, this could be the man to pull off the story and interesting casting. Or, at the very least, it could be an amusing diversion.