kate mara Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Two more have been added to the ever large Iron Man 2 roster, according to The Hollywood Reporter and with production all nice, quiet and secret save for Jon Favreau's Tweets, we can speculate endlessly on what their additions might mean.

The first is a no-brainer, as Clark Gregg is returning as Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. Having hammered out the acronym, he gets to come back and try to keep Tony on the straight, narrow, and heroic. I think that's nice. You could just have any old agent, but they're keeping Gregg.

The female addition is what's really interesting. Kate Mara has joined the cast in an unspecified role. I'm going to just throw out a random guess (based largely on her looks) that she's playing Bethany Cabe. I can't believe they'd throw another love interest or action chick into the mix, but Cabe helps to defend Tony against Whiplash and Justin Hammer. She also suits up in some old Iron Man armor alongside Rhodes' War Machine to battle the giant robot Ultimo. The groundwork is there, but it's an awful lot of action and romance for one film. Perhaps Cabe will simply show up as Stark Industries' Head of Security, ready to do her part later on? Maybe she's just a love interest for Hammer? We'll know soon enough.

But wow, three redheads in one Marvel film? I thought it was Wolverine who had that particular fetish. Go Tony!

This never occurred to me before, but "train" movies are a really interesting sub-genre. You could program an entire two-week film festival of train movies, from comedies (The "Three Stooges" shorts, The General, The Darjeeling Limited) to suspense movies (James Bond, Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Runaway Train) and tons of others. It's the perfect setting for a movie: it's a limited space, but long -- for chases -- and it moves through the frame as opposed to sitting still like a hospital room or a warehouse. Plus, unlike an airplane, there are plenty of beautiful views going by outside. And so, if the train movie is a genre, it follows that it needs a solid genre director to add another potential classic to the list.

Brad Anderson (no relation to me, by the way) is such a director. Like Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder, he has been able to effortlessly leap between dark, genre films (Session 9, The Machinist) and romances (Next Stop Wonderland), and even weird combinations of the two (Happy Accidents). His films may not reach the pinnacles of great art, but each and every one of them represents a good, sturdy, entertaining example of sheer, joyful craftsmanship. Anderson's fifth feature (not counting his early, hard-to-find The Darien Gap) is Transsiberian, a film that I would be proud to add to the list of recommended train movies. The title train runs from Beijing to Moscow and crosses through some pretty remote, snowy terrain; it's a great place for something devious and sinister to happen. (The 1973 Peter Cushing / Christopher Lee film Horror Express took place on the same train!)

Part of me is really itching to see the upcoming film, Transsiberian, which I blogged about all the way back in December of 2006, while the other part of me is trying to prepare myself for disappointment. You hear about a murder mystery -- one that involves traveling couples on a train, whose trip becomes a murderous adventure with a foreign man hot on their trails -- there's one thing that should come to mind.

If it doesn't, you need to brush up on both your classic murder mystery reading and Agatha Christie* films. This project just screams Agatha Christie and Murder on the Orient Express, although I imagine that Ben Kingsley's Russian police officer won't be as quirky as Hercule Poirot.

The film has wrapped, and Variety reports that First Look Studios has picked it up, with plans to release it late this summer. (Finally!) To recap -- the movie is about an American couple played by Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson who find themselves "in a chase of deception and murder on the Siberian train journey from China to Moscow." Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega co-star as a younger couple on the train, and as I noted above, Kingsley is an officer hot on their trail. In the meantime, you can check out an early review for the film here.

*And I should make sure I'm not confusing Orient with Appointment with Death when I write that! Thanks, Saavik.

If the commercials for Zoom (directed by Peter Hewitt, who previously blessed you with Garfield, Tom and Huck, and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey) make you think that Tim Allen's latest film is a bizarre cross between last year's surprisingly good Sky High and the Spy Kids flicks, you aren't too far off the mark. In Zoom, Allen plays Jack Shepard, formerly known as Captain Zoom, leader of Team Zenith, which, 30 years ago, fought to rid the world of evil and all that superhero stuff. That is, until General Larraby (Rip Torn), the bureaucrat in charge of the Zenith Program, decided to up the young superheroes' powers by zapping them with Gamma-13 rays, which turned Concussion, Zoom's older brother, into Evil Concussion, who then took out the rest of Team Zenith before Captain Zoom took him down, sacrificing his own powers in the process. Whew. Got all that? Because that's just the back story.

Mmm ... odds and ends:

• Electric Entertainment has signed a distribution deal with MGM which, while it normally wouldn't matter to anyone at all, is worth mentioning because it means that MGM will distribute Flyboys, an oddly under-the-radar, $60 million WWI flick that stars Jean Reno and the prettiest bad actor around, James Franco. Thanks to the deal, the movie should be in theaters this fall.
• Everyone is very excited this morning about the news that David Krumholtz (aka one of the guys in Numb3rs who isn't Rob Morrow) has signed on to appear in Woody Allen's next movie. You remember that one -- it's got Michelle Williams in it, and doesn't have a name or a plot. Rest assured, however, that Krumholtz will be doing whatever it is Allen tells him to do in Paris. This much we know.
• Since they're actually building a cast for it, it's starting to look like third-time lucky for Paramount's Shooter. After it failed to get off the ground the two times they tried before (with Keanu Reeves and then Robert Redford each in line to star - I bet they were never cast in the role before or since), the studio announced it again last month, this time as a collaboration for Mark Wahlberg and Antoine Fuqua. Variety reports today that Kate Mara has joined the cast, playing the love interest of Wahlberg's pissed off ex-sniper; production is due to begin this summer.
• Tyrese Gibson just isn't getting the scripts he wants, apparently. To correct matters, he threw together a spec called To Each his Own and, what do you know, sold it to Screen Gems. Gibson will star in the film (It's about "two friends in conflict" -- could that not be the summary of say, 86% of all the movies ever made?), and also co-produce it through his HQ Pictures.