logan lerman Tagged Articles at Cinematical

There's no reason to beat around the bush, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief only exists because Harry Potter is popular. That's not a slight on the literary series, as I've never read any of Rick Riordan's young-adult novels and we're here to talk about the movie, anyway. Regardless of the film's origins, it's clear from what ended up on screen that this came into being because movie theaters are a marketplace and, after the tepid reaction to Eragon, Twentieth Century Fox had no competing product to lure in the coveted Hogwarts demographic. So they scoured the bookshelves of their local Barnes & Noble and picked up the first popular, but more importantly, un-optioned fantasy series they could find.

It must be frustrating to work under those circumstances, to have to produce a product in the shadow of the colossus that is Potter. I imagine that Fox selected Christopher Columbus, who directed the first two Potter films, and essentially told him to do it again. And there's nothing inherently criminal about that. It's silly to dislike a movie just because you know its dreams were born in accounting and not creativity; and it's even sillier to spurn movie Y solely because movie X did it better. It is reasonable, though, to dislike a movie because it's just not good.

Percy Jackson starts off okay. We're introduced to the title teen right before he learns he's the son of Poseidon and that he has two weeks to return a lightning bolt he didn't actually steal, lest Zeus start a Godly war (somehow without using the most powerful weapon in the world that was just stolen from him). But this promising riff on what a hidden world with orphaned Demigods might be like soon devolves into a by-the-numbers fantasy 'adventure' that literally has to follow a map to its inevitable and obvious conclusion.

Speculation has been rife about the planned "reboot" (yeah, I hate that word too) of the Spider-Man movie franchise, now that Sam Raimi and Toby Maguire have departed that particular Marvel universe. Adding fuel to the fire, Logan Lerman tells Access Hollywood that he's been talking with Sony about playing Peter Parker.

Lerman, 18 years of age, stars in fantasy flick Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which is due out next week. Previously he's had roles in the 3:10 to Yuma remake and Gamer. (I first saw him in the TV show Jack & Bobby; he was the younger brother and quite good.) Lerman says of Spider-Man: "There has been a few discussions, it's definitely something I'm looking into." He claims to be a huge fan of the character and the series. He acknowledges that talks are in the early stages, but says: "I'd love to focus on the human element a bit more."

Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios have said the next film in the series will focus "on a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises," though it's not clear if the new, high school Peter Parker will take cues from the original Spider-Man universe or perhaps display influences from Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate version of the comic. Somehow, I don't think Logan Lerman will be the last we hear of possible Peter Parkers in the coming weeks, and possibly months, as the picture gets ready for its 2012 release.

Update: The Hollywood Reporter adds that both the studio and Lerman's reps have denied there's anything to this story, adding there are currently no ongoing discussions with Lerman for the role and that no offers have been made.

A colleague of mine once observed that the very manner by which Chev Chelios had to keep himself alive in the Crank films respectively represented the approach that writing/directing team Neveldine/Taylor took for each of them, which is to say that Crank 1 was all about keeping our hearts racing and Crank 2 was all about shocking us as an audience. It's a simple, literal assessment that nonetheless cleared up why yours truly was a fan of the first and yet let down by the second -- I'd rather be excited than appalled any day.

And at the intersection of 'thrill' and 'shock' is precisely where N/T's latest, Gamer, falls, and it succeeds considerably more when it's shooting for the former than when it's reveling in the latter.

Percy Jackson: The Lightening Thief is the first in a series of young adult novels by Rick Riordan about a kid with dyslexia and ADHD who's also the kid of, you know, the son of Poseidon. As with most of us, he learns all about himself at summer camp -- except instead of mosquito bites and panty raids, Percy finds his camp is full of the sons and daughters of demigods. Since being optioned by Fox 2000 in 2004, it's acquired quite a roster of theatrical demigods to the cast, and its latest additions are pretty swell.

Rosario Dawson (who was the only part of Seven Pounds that didn't make me want to throw a shoe at the screen) is playing a sexy Persephone who gets a little friendly with Percy's BFF Grover, who, as it turns out, is a satyr. Awkward!

I don't know if Chris Columbus' Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief will be the next Harry Potter, but it certainly has a cast that can rival the one living at Hogwarts. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the latest to sign on is the always lovely Catherine Keener, who will be playing Sally Jackson, mother to Logan Lerman's Percy.
Of course, Sally isn't just any ordinary single mother, she's one beloved by at least one Greek god. A forbidden love affair with Poseidon produced Percy, who just might be the boy to fulfill a prophecy. Sally tries to conceal Percy's identity from the gods and from himself, but of course that never works.

The Olympians cast so far include Uma Thurman as Medusa (I know, right?), Pierce Brosnan as Chiron, Melina Kanakeredes as Athena, Kevin McKidd as Poseidon, and Sean Bean as Zeus. They're still looking for a Hades and probably annoyed Clash of the Titans nabbed Ralph Fiennes as theirs.

I share Peter Martin's doubts that this will be the next Potter (I think that's a one time thing), and I'm so-so on the story because it flouts mythological convention and gives the man-disdaining Athena a daughter. But I am a sucker for a lot of the cast members (especially McKidd and Bean), and the idea of McKidd and Keener being so overcome with passion that they flouted the decrees of the gods? That is the stuff Greek myths are made of, so who knows? It might be pretty fun.

Where, o where, will the next Harry Potter come from? Could it be from New York, via Texas? Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman, and Sean Bean have signed up for Percy Jackson, according to The Hollywood Reporter, an adaptation of The Lightning Thief, the first book in a series by former Texas schoolteacher Richard Riordan. After the failure of various projects to become "the next Harry Potter," the news prompted Entertainment Weekly to wonder, "Could this finally be the next big family fantasy franchise?"

Based on the premise, Percy Jackson stands a good chance of appealing to a wide market, but much will depend on the script, since Chris Columbus is still on board to direct. As Christopher Campbell wrote two years ago, Columbus "may have been the least inspired director involved with the Harry Potter franchise," so big questions remain. Can he deliver a good-enough movie that won't disappoint fans of the books and whip up enthusiasm among non-readers for seeing a series of movies in the same vein?

The 12-year-old titular hero, to be played by Logan Lerman, appears to be "just another New York kid diagnosed with ADHD, who has good intentions, a nasty stepfather, and a long line of schools that have rejected him" before he discovers that his father is Poseidon (the Greek god, not the doomed ocean liner). He sets off on a cross-country journey to retrieve Zeus' lightning bolt, "the original weapon of mass destruction," which his father has been accused of stealing. Kevin McKidd will play Poseidon, which is inspired casting. Fox is aiming for release in February 2010.

Will you mark your calendars? Will Percy Jackson do better by avoiding comparisons with Harry Potter?

As the season marches on, 'for your consideration' ads litter the trades and various awards analysis websites. However, there aren't nearly enough campaigns for the year's worst performances.

You have your obnoxious kids (Jaden Smith in The Day The Earth Stood Still, Logan Lerman in Meet Bill). You have your touched individuals who straddle the line between functional and, ahem, 'full retard' (Sophie Okonedo in The Secret Life of Bees, Omar Benson Miller in Miracle at St. Anna, David Morse in Hounddog). You've got your guys that give 'insane' a bad name (Jason Butler Harner in Changeling, Donny Osmond in College Road Trip), and you've got your girls that give English a bad name (Ahney Her in Gran Torino, Natalya Rudakova in Transporter 3).

Oh, and then there's just about the entire cast of The Happening. (If I had to pick just one person, though, I'd go with the gardener who babbles on about hot dogs. The man's priceless.)

So, unless we're about to let Witless Protection sweep the Razzies, what were some of your least favorite performances of the year?

After skating the edges of the Western genre for years, with his 'urban Western' Cop Land and his country western-flavored music biopic Walk the Line, James Mangold has finally taken the plunge and made a full-on Western with 3:10 to Yuma, and the result is a success. While very faithful to the 1957 original -- some scenes are actually recreated word for word -- this film is also Mangold's own, stirring up the same ideas he's always shown interest in. If you're a Mangold fan, you know there are shadings of the classic High Noon situation in all of his films, with the good but under-pressure man standing by his principles as he's deserted by everyone around him, and 3:10 is no exception. This time, the good man is a poor, hobbled rancher named Evans, played by a typically dour Christian Bale. Evans is so broke he's about to go under when an opportunity presents itself -- he can make a fistful of cash if he's brave enough (or stupid enough) to walk a notorious and recently captured gangster named Ben Wade to the train station that will take him to prison.

Stepping into the shoes of Ben Wade is Russell Crowe, who plays the part as though he's certain that he's the film's good guy. When the film first catches up with Wade, he's sullen and bored with the criminal life, and prefers to sit up on a ridge and draw pictures of wild life, while leaving the scheming to his frustrated goons. Not that he's a pacifist -- Wade is a man capable of quick, brutal violence (even with a fork), although not prone to hatred or stupidity or any of the other dull characteristics we'd tend to associate with a man who robs and kills for a living. In fact, Crowe's (and Mangold's) decision to give Wade an abundance of good qualities to cancel out the bad ones may be a bit too much at times -- after all, we don't really want to root for this guy, do we? It's always something of a cheat when a movie tells us that the bad guy has taken many lives in the past, but doesn't really show us that side of him during the film.