Skip to Content

WoW Insider is getting ready for BlizzCon!

don delillo Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Josh Hartnett Targets the 'End Zone'

Filed under: Comedy », Sports », Casting », Newsstand »

You just saw him running from vampires in the cold, dark Alaska of 30 Days of Night. Now get ready to see Josh Hartnett evading more human adversaries on a hot, Texan football field in End Zone. According to Variety, the actor has been cast as the lead in an adaptation of the farcical Don DeLillo novel, which will be directed by George Ratliff (Joshua). The movie, scripted by Ratliff and his Joshua writing partner David Gilbert, will see Hartnett as a college football running back who is ruining his chances for stardom by thinking too much about another kind of end zone, that related to nuclear war. Also cast are Kat Dennings (Big Momma's House 2), who plays the love interest, and Joshua star Sam Rockwell, who plays the school's publicist. Another significant role, not yet filled, is a professor of international terrorism and mass destruction who sees Hartnett's character as a perfect soldier.

I can't really picture Josh Hartnett as a perfect soldier, let alone a football player. But I guess I never could have imagined him as a cop or a pilot or any other responsible position had I not seen it realized on screen. Mostly my image of him is focused on three relatively slacker roles: Trip Fontaine in The Virgin Suicides; the sex-crazed abstainer of 40 Days and 40 Nights and the "wrong man" protagonist of Lucky Number Slevin. Now that I think of it, though, I could see him as one of the pot-head jocks in Dazed and Confused, and since DeLillo's novel was released in 1972, it places Hartnett's End Zone character in almost the same environment. Of course, I don't recall Randall "Pink" Floyd ever contemplating nuclear war.

New On DVD - Bloodrayne, Cheaper By The Dozen 2, Transamerica

Filed under: New Releases », DVD Reviews », New on DVD », Home Entertainment », Columns »



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.
 
 
.