desperate housewives Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I ended my subscription to Tiger Beat years ago, I haven't seen John Tucker Must Die and I don't watch Desperate Housewives, so every time I see the name Jesse Metcalfe, I can't place him. First, I confuse him with Jesse Bradford, another young actor. Then, I imagine he looks like a young, male version of Roseanne's Laurie Metcalf (they're not even related, as you can guess by the name spelling). But apparently the guy is quite a heartthrob -- not a teen heartthrob, though, as he's about to turn 29. That should certainly help the appeal of Insanitarium, which he's just been cast in, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The rest of the fairly obscure cast includes Peter Stormare (Fargo), Kiele Sanchez (that attempted new cast-member of Lost from last season), Kevin Sussman (Ugly Betty's "Walter") and Olivia Munn (co-host of G4's Attack of the Show).

The indie horror thriller has been written by Jeff Buhler (the upcoming Midnight Meat Train adaptation), who will also make his directorial debut. The plot involves a mental hospital (aka, umm, insanitarium) where a crazy doctor (Stormare, possibly channeling his character from Minority Report) experiments with his patients, giving them a drug that turns them into flesh-eating psychopaths. Metcalfe plays a guy who fakes crazy in order to join his sister (Sanchez) in the hospital, and save her. That leaves Sussman and Munn, both of whom hopefully get to eat a lot of flesh. The movie is being produced by Mason Novick (film fest sensation Juno), J.C. Spink (The Butterfly Effect), his partner, Chris Bender (Red Eye) and Andrew Golov and Larry Shapiro, who also produced an upcoming movie titled Zombie Strippers.

It was pretty much inevitable that, like Eva Longoria, Teri Hatcher would eventually start getting movie gigs from producers who, after watching Desperate Housewives and seeing her face constantly in the tabloids, forget that she still isn't a very good actress. According to The Hollywood Reporter, her first post-Housewives gig will be a supporting role in Resurrecting the Champ, a semi-sports flick we told you about a few months ago.

The movie stars Samuel L. Jackson as a homeless man who reporter Josh Hartnett decides is actually a former boxing champion. In fact, though, he's no such thing, which at one time made the story sound awesome and unpleasant. Now, though, more details about the screenplay have emerged and, while Jackson's character still isn't the guy Hartnett thought he was, it turns out that he was a pro boxer back in the day. So the edge is now totally gone -- boo to that. Hatcher will play "the head of a TV channel who teaches Hartnett the ropes of being a reporter-turned-celebrity" (apparently he turns into a big star as a result of tracking down Jackson's character); the movie heads into production this summer.

• Bloodrayne - Teutonic terror Uwe Boll directs movies no more than gravity directs objects to Earth. His grasp of pithy things like story and character development is nearly non-existent, and his penchant for adapting video games has earned him a reputation as a sort of idiot savant (only without the savant part), kind of like if the kid on the porch in Deliverance only knew how to play the riff that Vanilla Ice nicked from Queen's "Under Pressure". His latest, a shameless Blade ripoff about a half-human, half-vampire avenger (Kristianna Loken), is miscast, barely written and staged with the skill of a spastic with cataracts. Currently residing on the IMDB's Bottom 100 (at #34), it and Boll's rotting body of work have elevated the oeuvre of Ed Wood, whose non-charting Plan 9 From Outer Space was once considered the worst film ever made, to common hack status. At least the inclusion of the free PC version of the Bloodrayne 2 video game will help soothe buyer remorse.
 

• Doogal - A saccharine, cheap-looking CGI import from Britain about a lazy, cowardly, sugar-addicted pooch (with a mullet cut) who must find a way to save the world from an icy death is not the follow-up to Hoodwinked that Disney escapees Bob and Harvey Weinstein hoped for...or we asked for. At least they've got the swell Over The Hedge in theaters this week. Formerly titled The Magic Roundabout and re-dubbed (Doogal, that is. Not Over The Hedge.)

• Duma - With most arthouse films rated "R", it is always a pleasure when one comes along that culture mavens can take their kids to, and The Black Stallion director Carroll Ballard's latest nature trek -- a visually lovely adventure -- certainly does fit that bill. It is about a 12-year-old South African boy (Alexander Michaletos) who must return his pet cheetah to the wild, encountering and overcoming a number of obstacles along the way, the biggest one being our initial reluctance to accept its premise.
 

According to Variety, Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria is set to take her first starring film role in Touchstone's romantic comedy, Deep in the Heart of Texas. [My head is so full of Tony Parker/San Antonio Spurs jokes right now that I can hardly type. Give me a second.] In the film, Longoria will play "a spoiled Beverly Hills diva who becomes a fish out of water when she is relocated to San Antonio to run the new Latin division of her ad agency." Hmm. Eva Longoria as a spoiled diva? Why, that just might work!

The film was just recently pitched to Touchstone, so it'll be awhile before it gets anywhere near production; the Desperate Housewives break in the summer of 2007 is likely the earliest it could shoot. The script is currently being written by pitchers Pamela Buchignani and Lynnette Ramirez.

Since Jennifer Lopez (or JLo) is on her way out, it only makes sense for her to attach herself to someone who's on their way in. According to Sky News, the actress turned singer turned actress turned what the hell is she now has penned a comedy and is doing what she can to attract the Desperate Housewife, Eva Longoria, to star opposite her. Now, you're probably wondering what in the world Jennifer Lopez would write a script about, right? Okay, so maybe you just want to know whether either one will be naked. Sorry, I don't have the information you requested. Please try again later.

But I can tell you that the two will play sisters who, after some sort of massive fight, decide to use the press to get revenge on one another. Hmm, JLo writes a story about how the press can ruin someone's career? Something tells me she's dying to take away at least one good thing from those awful Bennifer days. And here I thought it would be an addiction to alcohol. Oh well. Assuming everything falls into place, the untitled comedy will start shooting in September.

[via Moviehole]

The first time I saw Felicity Huffman wasn't on Sports Night. It was on a short-lived (but fun) CBS show called Raven, about a martial arts expert (Jeffrey Meek) looking for his son in Hawaii with the help of Lee Majors. She was in one of the best episodes, playing a deadly assassin. I don't know, I've always thought she was cute, even back then, in the early 90s.

She tells The Boston Globe that she was told several times in her career, "you're just not pretty enough." But she was happy that they told her that, because they always told her that her looks weren't good enough, but never said that her talent wasn't good enough. And now, with an acclaimed-movie (Transamerica), a hit TV show (Desperate Housewives) and lots of awards and nominations, she's getting the last laugh.