jeremy renner Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Now that Iron Man 2 is in the finish stages, and Thor will kick off filming in January, the casting rumor mill must now find some new grist in The Avengers. (Not Captain America, oddly enough. We'll just skip right over that one!) Empire sat down with Jeremy Renner, who revealed that he'd been in talks with Marvel Studios and Avengers' writer Zak Penn about tackling the part of a superhero.

While he's reportedly been linked with Captain America on some dim corners of the Internet, Renner is thinking he might like to play another Avenger : Clint Barton, better known as Hawkeye. "I don't know if I'd be right for Captain America. I met with the Marvel guys, actually, but we didn't talk about Captain America. But one of the writers, Zak Penn, we've become friends over time and he was thinking maybe Hawkeye could be interesting. He sounds like an interesting character."

Renner stressed "no offer has been made ... I think there's a little ways from that" but he also speculated that Hawkeye might cameo in Thor or in First Avenger: Captain America. But Thor has an awfully big cast at this point, so tossing in an Avenger cameo seems a bit dubious, though there's always room in a post-credit sequence. Iron Man 2 would have been the ideal place (Mr. Clint Barton and the Black Widow go way back) but the ship would appear to have sailed on that one.

It's a quiet day (so far) on the Interwebs, which has led to everyone noticing and buzzing about a great little rumor that Ain't It Cool News discovered thanks to The Modesto Bee. The Bee caught up with up and comer Jeremy Renner (currently turning heads in the much buzzed about The Hurt Locker), and he revealed that he was trying to get behind the wheel of a famous black Interceptor. "I'm also fighting to do the new Mad Max film with George Miller. That might be next summer. I'm screen-testing and meeting George Miller."

A screen test is a long way from a casting announcement (just think about who all screen tested for The Green Lantern), but it's the first news to come out of the long delayed Max Max reboot / remake project in some time. Obviously, Renner is being vague enough that he might not even be referring to trying out for the part of Mr. Rockatansky, but come on. If you name drop Mad Max, you're trying out for Max, which suggests this will be a straight up remake.

Read the rest at SciFi Squad

Bomb squad. War zone. Malfunctioning robot. In the opening sequence of The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow expertly sets a tone of anxious, sweat-soaked drama. The film has been playing in New York and Los Angeles, expands to selected cities this Friday, and then goes wide on July 24. You can watch the first eight minutes online at Hulu (or after the jump).

And if that doesn't grab you, I don't know what will. I saw The Hurt Locker at SXSW, and that opening sequence pinned me to my seat. Guy Pearce leads a bomb squad that includes Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. They're already suited up in protective gear as the scene begins, wisecracking and otherwise demonstrating an easy camaraderie. A small wheeled robot has a minor mechanical malfunction, requiring Pearce to walk into harm's way to fix it. The team's wary conversational bravado continues, even as they shift into high alert on the mostly empty street. Civilian bystanders could be friendly -- or they could be waiting to trigger the bomb.

Jeremy Renner, who turns up a little later in the picture, stars as a new member of the squad. He's a confident expert, but his reckless methods cause the others to question whether his devil-may-care attitude is needlesssly endangering their own lives. Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly also appear in small roles. I fully agree with James Rocchi, who wrote in his review: "You'll want to see it at a theater near you, in fact, on the largest possible screen with the best possible sound." Don't miss it.

Based on journalist Mark Boal's real experiences following bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker isn't just a welcome return to big-screen action from director Kathryn Bigelow (who has wrung both fame and infamy from her art with Near Dark, Strange Days and Point Break). It's an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it's an 'apolitical' film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war. Even so, plunging us into the thick of things alongside the highly-trained men (and they're all men here) who defuse bombs for the Army, Bigelow and Boal avoid the speeches and postures and long, contemplative talks of home front films like Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah by staying in Iraq, and they shun the loopy, loony formal experiments of Brian De Palma's Redacted. Boal and Bigelow stay laser-focused on one group of men with a singular mission, and make us live in the constant possibility of death. Viewed from half a world away, a bomb is a political concern; viewed from less than a foot away, a bomb's just a high-stakes exercise in problem-solving, where making a mistake means a final, terminal education in the physics of expanding gases.

The Hurt Locker follows three soldiers -- bomb tech James (Jeremy Renner) and his subordinates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) into the jaws of death; it's all last names in The Hurt Locker, as seen on patches and heard in urgent radio dispatches. Early on, Bigleow establishes that people will be killed in this film -- with a bravura sequence that depicts a bomb's detonation on the macro and micro level, billowing bursts of smoke and pressure and flame intercut with gravel and dust leaping choreographed in lockstep by the pressure wave, as if God had slammed his fist on reality hard to make a point -- and while Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are fine actors, they're also unknown enough to subconsciously let us know that they aren't safe from what may happen.

The Hurt Locker sees director Kathryn Bigelow craft a big, booming tale of tension based on journalist Mark Boal's experiences and interviews with bomb disposal experts in the streets of Iraq. Toronto didn't just see The Hurt Locker earn raves from many critics; it also saw the film get picked up by Summit Entertainment for distribution. Cinematical spoke with Bigelow and Boal in Toronto about breaking the audience's unconscious link between an actor's salary and a character's destiny, whether or not their film is really apolitical, the fun and excitement of blowing things up on-set, how making the movie yourself is the best way to be sure you make the movie you want to and much more.Cinematical's podcast content is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

Kathryn Bigelow should really make more movies. She's directed some terrific action flicks (Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days), but she seems to disappear from filmmaking for long periods of time -- her last movie was 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker. Bigelow's upcoming project is a drama about the Iraq war called The Hurt Locker, and it was announced today that the film will star Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie . "Who, who, and who?" you might be asking yourself. Renner recently starred in the pretty sweet 28 Weeks Later. Geraghty has done the war movie thing before, he played Fergus in the underrated Jarhead. And Mackie starred in Half Nelson and what I consider Spike Lee's only bad movie -- She Hate Me. "He Who Must Not Be Named" Ralph Fiennes and "He Who Can't Remember His Name" Guy Pearce will have cameos in the film.

The script was written by Mark Boal, a former Playboy journalist -- see! there's good articles in there! -- and was inspired "by true events and recently declassified information." The film will follow "an elite Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal team in present-day Baghdad that fights an onslaught of bombs and snipers." Renner will play the team leader. Mackie, Geraghty, and Pearce will play team members, although if Pearce just has a cameo I'd imagine he doesn't last long. Fiennes will play a mercenary. Says Boal: "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite." He adds, "It's really exciting for me, coming out of the world of journalism, to have a movie come out about a conflict while the conflict is still going on." Hell, at the rate things are going, they could delay the release of Hurt Locker ten years and it'd still be going on.

Odds and ends from Thursday:

• Whether you want it or not, they're making a sequel to the fairly engaging Danny Boyle flick, 28 Days Later. Only 28 Weeks Later (Yes, that's the name of the sequel for those of you who have been living in a hole for the past year) will have a new director (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo), a new writer (Rowan Joffe) and, now, a new star. Jeremy Renner (Lords of Dogtown) has signed on to play Sgt. Doyle, one of the sequel's brand new heroes. Pic, which finds Boyle and 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland wearing producer hats, picks up six months after the original. While Special Forces come in to try and neutralize the area, the zombie virus once again rears its ugly head and, well, sh*t goes down ... as usual.
• Looks like Brendan Fraser now has a co-star for his new flick, Inkheart, as Paul Bettany has come onboard to play a fire-eating performer in this adaptation of the popular children's book (which is part of a trilogy written by German author Cornelia Funk). Story revolves around a father who has the ability to "bring characters from books alive by reading them aloud." Yikes, here's hoping he stays away from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• In an attempt to cash in on the demand for movie downloading, AOL has struck a deal with 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. to begin offering selected titles from each studio online for downloading. Ranging from $9.99 to $19.99, folks will be able to own their film, as well as play it on a "limited number of Windows-based personal computers or portable devices that support Microsoft Corp's Windows Media Player technology." Yeah, put that in your Mac ad Justin Long!