john malkovich Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If a movie is really only as good as its villain, the summer of 1993 proved it with the double-whammy of In the Line of Fire and The Fugitive in July. Everyone else had Jurassic Park fever, but I was swept up by these two excellent, evenly-matched bouts. The latter, The Fugitive, reveled in some gray areas; Tommy Lee Jones's character wasn't all bad, but in In the Line of Fire, John Malkovich was pure bad. (They were both nominated for Oscars, and Jones won.) Malkovich plays Mitch Leary, a former military man who feels the need to assassinate the current U.S. president (Jim Curley -- who looks a bit like John McCain). Clint Eastwood plays aging Secret Service Agent Frank Horrigan, who blames himself for allowing JFK to be shot, and is determined not to let it happen again. Mitch knows all about Frank's history and leaves him clues, taunting him and even talking to him on the phone. Frank, of course, is no slouch and can taunt back, causing Mitch to tip his hand, revealing just a hint of the years and years of anguished buildup that brought him to such a fate.

Note for note, the film itself is little more than a superbly made thriller -- directed by Wolfgang Petersen -- but its relationship between pursuer and quarry is something truly great and altogether rare in films. My definition of a truly great villain is one that can sit down for a cup of coffee with the hero. (It's like that old Warner Bros. cartoon in which the coyote and the sheepdog go to work together and punch the time clock before they get down to business.) Technically opposites, these two actually live in similar worlds and acknowledge each other as co-workers and colleagues. It's a very effective way of measuring the hero's humanity and making him far more interesting. Most movies settle for sneering, cackling villains who are nothing more than pure, distant evil. But the greatest enemies are kept close, closer even than friends.

Check out the clip after the jump: first we get Mitch demonstrating his evil, and then a full-blown phone confrontation with Frank.

"At the end of the ice age, a machine came. It came from outside. It came from space. It came with one purpose -- to change man into mutants..."

Those are very much the first lines of Mutant Chronicles, and it's a fair indication as to just how seriously our filmmakers are going to take their silly story. "Have faith" is a recurring mantra (hell, it's even the tagline), but speaking as someone who could get behind the genre-blending likes of Doomsday and Outlander, it's keeping the faith that the ambition of Chronicles may defeat its limited budget that proves a struggle mightier than that which our heroes face.

Warner Bros' Jonah Hex gained some really interesting casting today (yes, realThe Hollywood Reporter casting, no April Fool's stuff). According to , Will Arnett and Michael Shannon are joining the cast, which already includes Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, and Megan Fox.

Arnett will be playing a Union soldier named Lieutenant Grass who enlists Hex to kill Turnbull, Malkovich's Confederate voodoo practitioner. Per an old casting notice, Grass is a man who's blindsided by the dirty fighting style of his enemies, a man more interested in new styles of warfare than really understanding his enemy. The role isn't meant to be funny, so Arnett will be toning down his style. Even when he's funny, he's got a bit of the creep about him (no offense, Mr. Arnett) which seems perfect for Jonah Hex, where everyone is a little ... off.

Shannon, fresh off his Oscar nomination, will be playing Doc Cross Williams, the bizarre ringleader of a brutal gladiator / circus event. Williams' is one of Hex's recurring nemesis in the series, whose finest achievement is making Wild Bill Hickok into a zombie. THR says he's likely to appear in sequels which is the first time anyone's mentioned a Jonah Hex franchise. While we're still a long ways away from being able to say "Hell yeah, bring it on", it's little touches like Wild Bill Hickok zombies that makes Jonah Hex such an enticing project.

Megan Fox knows how to please her fans -- and it isn't by trying out for edgy indie fare, romantic comedies, or soul searching dramas. It's by sticking to the "boy movies" based on comic books or transforming cars.

So it should come as no surprise that Fox has signed for not one, but two comic book properties. The first is Fox Atomic's long-rumored Fathom, which casts Fox in the lead role of Aspen Matthews. The film doesn't have a director yet, though it once attracted James Cameron. Jordan Mechner (creator of the video game Prince of Persia) is writing the script. To Fox's credit, she's been a fan of the comic since its start in 1998, and is helping to develop and shape the big screen adaptation. Will her ex-fiancee Brian Austin Green stay on as producer, as listed in The Hollywood Reporter?

Fox is also set to join Josh Brolin and John Malkovich in Warner Bros' Jonah Hex -- which brings a really promising project down a notch or two in my eyes. (Hey, she's perfect for Fathom. But I would have preferred Hex steer cleer of such pandering.) Fox will play Leila, a gun-wielding beauty and love interest for Jonah. I don't believe she ever appeared in the original series, though Hex's mythology is so uneven that she very well might be a current character. (There was a female supermodel who claimed to be Jonah Hex, maybe she's inspired by that.)

But hey -- THR reveals that Malkovich's Turnbull will be a voodoo practioner who is trying to raise an undead army of Confederate soldiers. So not even the gratutious inclusion of Fox and her smoking guns can really dim my enthusiasm. Who knows? She might even end up cool as well as hot.

Wanna convince Josh Brolin to be in your movie? Just let him cast it himself and he'll be putty in your hands!

You might remember that Brolin was having a hard time deciding whether he wanted to do Jonah Hex back in November. He was; he wasn't; he wasn't sure; he couldn't decide. Brolin said: "It's so ridiculous. But once I started putting people in my mind and saying what if I put Malkovich in this role then what does this movie become?" It might have been musing back then, but three months later, it's a reality!

Variety reports that John Malkovich will play Turnbull in the film, a rich plantation man mourning the loss of his son Jeb by Union soldiers in a whole complicated ordeal. Naturally, he blames Hex, Jeb's best friend, and enemies are made. Oh lord, bring on the tongue in cheek wonder! It sounds like Brolin is getting just what he wanted -- a fun movie with some acting chops.

Brolin tempted me towards this project, but with Malkovich has definitely been piqued. I just keep imagining Dr. William Block and Osbourne Cox locked in a room together. Add Danny Trejo as El Papagayo and I think I'd die in delight. How about you?

I'm a big enough person to say when I'm wrong, and sometimes, I'm also a big enough person to say 'I told you so'. The new R-rated trailer for Simon Hunter's Mutant Chronicles up at IGN, and while it was nice to get a glimpse of carnage from the sci-fi actioner; I have to be honest with you; it still isn't that much better than the last trailer we got our hands on.

Mutant Chronicles is set in the year 2707, when natural resources are at an all time low, and humanity has gone 'steampunk'. When mutant creatures descend, Thomas Jane (as the leader of a Marine Platoon) becomes the last line of defence before we all pack it in and abandon the earth. Throw in some quality CGI, and a cast that includes Ron Perlman, Devon Aoki, and John Malkovich as a bad guy, and you should have had something, right?

Chronicles has earned a paltry 20% approval rating over at Rotten Tomatoes, but I guess it's the optimist in me that wants to believe the rating is the result of only a few people having seen it. Then again, even those who have weren't too thrilled with it either. Chronicles will have a limited theatrical release on April 24th, and then the film will head straight to the Sci-Fi Channel for a March premier.

So, have we all been just a little too hard on Mutant Chronicles? Are we all expecting too much? Or is there a very good reason why this film has made such a bad first impression. Take a gander at the trailer and sound off below...

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for The Great Buck Howard, which premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, and is gearing up to hit theaters on March 20th. Starring John Malkovich, Colin Hanks, Tom Hanks and Emily Blunt, The Great Buck Howard tells of a has-been magician (Malkovich) who stages an unlikely comeback thanks to his new assistant (Colin Hanks). Last year at Sundance, Scott Weinberg called Buck Howard a "smoothly, strongly appealing comedy" that's also a "a feel-good movie that doesn't make you feel stupid for feeling good." Check out the full size poster by clicking on the image below.

(Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" begins its platform release this weekend, so we're offering a reprint of our Cannes review from last May.)

By Kim Voynar

Clint Eastwood's Changeling (which may or may not be now known as The Exchange), is a riveting drama about a missing boy and the undying constancy of a mother's love. Angelina Jolie excels in a powerful performance as Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son, Walter, disappeared in 1928. Five months later, police returned to her a boy they said was Walter; Christine alleged that the boy was not her son.

At the time, the Los Angeles police department was under considerable pressure due to the efforts of a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), to expose corruption within the police force. Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), who heads up the investigation, doesn't particularly care whether the boy is or isn't Walter Collins; he has a publicity campaign to manage that's all about making himself look good, so he tries to convince Christine to accept the found boy as her son. When she fights back by going to the press, Jones has her committed to the psycho ward.

As we've started to get our fair share of trailers for the coming prestige projects -- Frost/Nixon, The Soloist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno -- I was curious as to why we'd yet to get one for Clint Eastwood's period drama, Changeling, if it were set to open by the end of next month. Particularly after Kim's Cannes review, I wanted to get a proper glimpse beyond a brief clip...

Perhaps hearing my prayers or just tiring of my complaints, Yahoo! Movies saw fit to post the trailer (watch it after the jump as well), in which a young mother (Angelina Jolie) in 1928 Los Angeles finds herself standing up against a corrupt police department when her missing son is returned, or rather replaced by a different child altogether.

Even if the same piece of score hadn't been used in both of their trailers, I'd still have felt a need to draw a correlation between this and last October's missing-kids-and-corrupt-cops powerhouse, Gone Baby Gone (of course, it doesn't hurt that Amy Ryan shows up in both of them). From Eastwood's end comes a particular tinge of Mystic River, and so far as I'm concerned, all of those signs point to something substantial waiting for us when Changeling opens in limited release on October 31.