carla gugino Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Cinematical has received three exclusive teaser posters for Women In Trouble, that filthy, good-for-nothing tramp of a film from writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez (Snakes on a Plane) that's caused quite the stir online with its provocative tone and Carla Gugino awesomeness. Described as a serpentine day in the life of ten seemingly disparate women, the film dishes out one of those multi-layered storylines full of sex, intrigue and a damn whole lotta trouble. Co-starring alongside Gugino are a bevy of Hollywood's most underrated seductresses, like Marley Shelton, Adrianne Palicki, Cameron Richardson, Connie Britton and my personal favorite, Emmanuelle Chriqui. And if those names aren't enough to turn you on, then maybe the promise of assless spandex pants and this behind-the-scenes video will.

Still not convinced? Here, our own Jette Kernion said this about Women In Trouble from its SXSW premiere: "Women in Trouble is a fun addition to the current trend of revisiting and reworking exploitation-film themes in a lighthearted way." She later adds, "There's a certain pleasure in seeing a movie where the men are relegated to the Supportive Spouse and Lust Interest roles, after I've seen so many films where those are the only roles for women."

Check out all three eclectic posters in the gallery below, and be sure to keep the light on for Women In Trouble when it dips into theaters in New York and Los Angeles on November 13.

Look, I know what you're thinking. I thought the same thing when this photo arrived in my inbox. And then I looked at the "backstage" footage from Women in Trouble, which you can see for yourself after the jump, and I was even more confused. The clip begins with porn star Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino from Watchmen in a really questionable faux bondage ensemble over regular street clothes) announcing that she's here to tell you why you shouldn't see Women in Trouble. Fresh-faced prostitute Holly Rocket (Adrianne Palicki from Friday Night Lights) chimes in that she's also here to talk to you about why you should avoid the movie. It's not for people who don't like sex, "hot chicks in lingerie," "damn strong language," or, uh, spaceships, among other things. ("There is no spaceship in the movie," whispers Elektra to Holly.), Later, the two talk amongst themselves...

Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch has been like a rare jewel of girl power with its all female cast, but a little testosterone never hurt anyone, especially if belongs to Jon Hamm. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hamm has just signed on to be the sole man on set against the likes of Emily Browning, Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, and Carla Gugino.

As you know, the film centers on a young girl named Baby Doll (Browning) who is sent away to a mental health institution by her stepfather. He intends to have her lobotomized in five days time, and the horror of that sends her and her fellow inmates planning for an escape in a twisted Alice in Wonderland world of adventure and ass-kicking. THR notes that Hamm's role is being kept under tight wraps, that he's only known to be playing someone named High Roller. But given what major role has yet to be cast, I'm willing to bet he's playing the stepfather. I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hamm doing a bit of Captain Hook duty, and popping up as the antagonist of the girls' dream world as well.

Between the cast, the concept, and the girl sized t-shirt, there's not much more Snyder could add to this film to make me long for 2011 more than I already do. But something tells me he'll find room for some 300 and Watchmen cast cameos, and then the wait will really become unbearable.

The estrogen continues to descend into Zack Snyder's new feature. Now that the main cast has been set for Sucker Punch -- Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, and Abbie Cornish -- Snyder is filling in the surrounding parts, and getting a little inspiration from Watchmen. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Carla Gugino has signed up for a role in the film, which is currently heading towards an autumn shoot.

As we already know, the film focuses on a girl (Browning) who is sent to a mental institution by her evil stepfather. He is planning to have her lobotomized in five days, and she dreams of escape, which leads her to fall into an alternate reality or dream world where she escapes along with her inmate friends.

Did you like Quantum of Solace? Neither did I. Despite all the bombast and the film being billed as "The first direct James Bond sequel EVAR!" I just found myself bored throughout it, except maybe during that opening car chase. Otherwise, it was snoozeville. I lay part of that blame on the fact that we didn't get a decent Bond girl to go with it. Olga Kurylenko bored me to tears with her monotonal portrayal of a daughter seeking revenge, and I would have much rather seen more of the redhead who is all-too-briefly seen as another MI6 agent sent to guard Bond. So, with that in mind, here are seven women who I'd like to see fill the Bond cups, er... shoes.

Alright, this list is partly SXSW-influenced, and that's because of the sheer amount of hotties shown onscreen in Sebastian Gutierrez's Women In Trouble. Carla Gugino spends a good amount of time in nothing more than a bra and panty set, and you could practically see the humidity steaming off the screen because of it. Yes, she's seriously that hot, don't let her middle-aged turn in the recent Watchmen fool you. But lined up right behind her is even more hotness from the film, and you'll have to read on to see how it plays out.

Carla Gugino
I'll be honest here, and Ms. Gugino I sure hope you aren't reading this. But ... I just didn't think you had the chops. However, I loved your powerful (and all-too-brief) turn in Sin City, and enjoyed your portrayal of Vincent Chase's agent Amanda in Entourage, and now I realized that you have the curves a Bond girl needs, but you really deliver on the icy cold ball-busting looks that a Bond villain thrives on. Let's give Bond a good villainess to do battle with, and one that stands on equal footing with him in the smouldering looks department. When you appear as aging boozehound Sally Jupiter and pornstar extraordinaire Elektra Luxx a few weeks apart, it's bound to pop a few eyes out. Thanks for proving to us that you've got both the acting ability and the jigglewatts to pull this off.

I'm wary of movies that try to be instant cult/camp classics, with intentionally overdone dialogue and outrageous costumes and actors who are metaphorically winking or even non-metaphorically mugging for the camera. When the characters are in on the joke, it isn't all that funny. And when I learned that the writer-director of Women in Trouble also co-wrote Snakes on a Plane, I grew even more skeptical. But the actresses who populate Women in Trouble tend to play it straight, even when they're wearing assless spandex pants or smoking invisible cigarettes, and that's what keeps this film fun instead of tiresome.

Women in Trouble has a multi-story, anthology-like structure. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez said before the SXSW screening that he originally had one ten-page sequence that he wanted to shoot, then thought it might be easy to shoot several of them, all with different actresses, to make a good movie quickly. Apparently it wasn't all that easy, but the result is a large cast of mostly actresses playing a variety of the traditional exploitation "women in trouble." These include porn stars, tag-team hookers (one in a Catholic school uniform, natch), stewardesses (they're not flight attendants when we're poking fun at the exploitation genre), unmarried-and-pregnant women, and a very understanding masseuse.

In fulfillment of the prophecy that Disney will eventually remake every single one of its live-action movies, here is Race to Witch Mountain. It bears a passing resemblance to 1975's Escape to Witch Mountain, but it's more reminiscent of a tiresome carnival ride whose operator abandoned it and left it to run for 90 minutes. Whatever fun there is in it quickly gives way to tedium.

Appropriately, it's set in loud, gaudy Las Vegas, where Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson) works as a cab driver. In the past he has freelanced his services for one Mr. Wolf, a shady underworld figure whose goons regularly visit Jack trying to re-enlist him. Maybe I shouldn't bother mentioning that, though, because it ultimately has nothing to do with the story. For that reason, I'm also not going to mention Jack's lifelong desire to own a particular Ford Mustang, since that detail was clearly added only after someone read a screenwriting book and paused at the chapter that talked about giving your characters hopes and dreams. It's extraneous.

But back to the actual story. Jack encounters two strange preteens, a brother and sister named Seth (Alexander Ludwig) and Sara (AnnaSophia Robb). They are extraterrestrials whose spaceship crashed in the desert when they came to Earth in search of a MacGuffin, and now they must get the item and return to the ship -- which is problematic, because the U.S. government, led by heartless Henry Burke (Ciarán Hinds), has recovered the craft and hidden it away somewhere. There's also an alien assassin pursuing the kids, though that's another thing that's ultimately not particularly relevant.

Prepare to be bludgeoned. Watchmen is sledgehammer entertainment, an action epic with tremendous production values that acknowledges good and evil but is much more interested in things that go boom.

As director Zack Snyder amply demonstrated in his previous adaptations of other people's strikingly original source material (Dawn of the Dead and 300), he is more than up to the task of creating a multitude of dynamic, viscerally-exciting action sequences. As a bonus, there are small moments in Watchmen that prompt warm, unexpected laughter, skillfully-recreated scenes that inspire pure fanboy bliss, and one lengthy flashback segment that is entirely transcendent, as dazzling, thoughtful, and emotionally-stirring as anything I've seen in recent years.

And then there's the rest of the movie, which crams in a remarkably high percentage of the plot points from the original Watchmen series of comic books by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and faithfully includes tiny details, classic panels and a checklist of characters. Yet it skims over deeper reflections about masked crime fighters, superheroes, the essential nature of man, and the future of the world. It's like someone decided the alphabet was too long: most of the consonants are still there, but Watchmen is missing a couple of vowels.

The film features a bewildering assemblage of performances, with juicy turns by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley, wildly uneven, uncertain performances by Malin Akerman and Patrick Wilson, and sleepy monotone pronouncements by Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode. Some of the actors sound as though they're delivering their lines for the first time, reading off cue cards.

Any movie that begins with a dog wearing a human mask is in serious trouble. If it wants to use that kind of dream snippet as a launch pad for exploring a demented and increasingly bizarre world, if it wants to embrace a loony aesthetic and milk it for all it's worth, wonderful. Deliver a solid, jolting, dazzling, surprising thriller, and all will be forgiven.

On the other hand, if it desperately wants to be taken seriously, if it proceeds in a very measured and sober manner, if it becomes increasingly sedate as it calmly plods through tedious exposition, then you have a mess on your hands.

The Unborn looks like a ghost story, feels like a ghost story, and kinda sounds like a ghost story, but it's dead on arrival. Because writer/director David S. Goyer has been associated with a host of projects with which I have a natural affinity, I was cautiously optimistic that his fourth directorial outing (after ZigZag, Blade: Trinity, and The Invisible) might reflect more of the pulpy, noirish mood and momentum that are evident in some of the best scripts for which he's been credited in part or in whole (Dark City, Blade II, Batman Begins).

Instead, all the juice has been drained from The Unborn. Not even the sight of the lovely, lean and fit Odette Yustman, whose last name became Yowza! when the trailer and pics first hit the net, can salvage the film from mediocrity.

I don't know a guy or a girl who doesn't have a crush on Carla Gugino. Somehow the Top Whatever Sexiest of Whatever Lists have all passed her up in favor of, like, that girl from 7th Heaven, but she'll always have a spot toward the top of my sexy list. Gugino will take on the legendary (and original) Silk Spectre in Watchmen this spring, and a couple of months ago she played one of them rough-sex types in Righteous Kill -- but now ... well, now she's taking sexy one step further in the form of a porn star. Wait, strike that ... a pregnant porn star! Hot!

Variety reports that Gugino will star in Elektra Luxx, which -- get this -- is a sequel to an ensemble comedy called Women in Trouble, which never found distribution. Yeah, so why not make the sequel when the original never had a chance to fail? As previously mentioned, Gugino will play a porn star whose life gets turned upside down when she discovers a bun in the oven. Joining her in the cast are Tim Olyphant, Alicia Silverstone and Justin Kirk. Oh, but writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez isn't stopping there, and although filming on the second film is now underway, plans are already in place for a third installment tentatively called Women in Ecstasy. Unfortunately, we may never have a chance to see it ... or its previous two installments.

That brings up a good question: Has a sequel ever hit theaters before (or instead of) the original?

Update: Check out two images of Carla Gugino as Elektra Luxx after the jump.