pleasantville Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Tobey Maguire's Next Role: 'Prisoners of Trebek' or Bilbo in 'The Hobbit'?
Filed under: Comedy », Drama », Casting », RumorMonger », Games and Game Movies »
In the tradition of great movies based on real game shows (Quiz Show; Slumdog Millionaire), Tobey Maguire is said to be producing and starring in a film called Prisoners of Trebek, based on a true story about a guy who found romance while attempting to master Jeopardy. Pajiba has the exclusive scoop on the project, which was scripted by The Hoax screenwriter William Wheeler and is being likened to the work of Charlie Kaufman. Producing with Maguire's company is Mark Gordon, who worked with Wheeler on The Hoax and regularly collaborates with Roland Emmerich (2012; The Day After Tomorrow). The Kaufman connection could mean we should expect Alex Trebek to show up as himself in a surreal sort of comedy akin to Being John Malkovich. Or, Trebek could be more similar to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which also went behind the scenes of a game show in its biographical portrait of The Dating Game
Cinematical Seven: Sex Addicts on the Silver Screen
Filed under: Comedy », Documentary », Drama », Independent », Romance », NSFW », Cinematical Seven », George Clooney »

"Well, you tried it just for once, found it all right for kicks.
But now you found out that it's a habit that sticks,
and you're an orgasm addict." – The Buzzcocks
The new movie Choke, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, is about a sex addict (Sam Rockwell) who, in one element of the plot, hooks up with other sex addicts who attend the same Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings as him. Ah, the irony. The same thing happened to Sam Malone on Cheers, if I'm not mistaken, which makes the joke around 20 years old. Yet, despite that fact, sexual addiction as a term and a (non-DSM-recognized) medical problem seem fairly new to cinema.
Sure, there have been sex addicts in films for many decades, but they were more likely to be described as nymphomaniacs, lechers or typical men. Think of Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind, a number of the female characters created by Tennessee Williams and certainly the locked up nymphos in Shock Corridor. In the past few years, however, there have been a slew of actual "sexaholics," both male and female, though some aren't exactly referred to in such a manner.
Tobey Maguire Recreating Brown v. Board of Education
Filed under: Drama », Casting », Deals »
At first blush, this has all the marks of the sort of tepid, respectful, boring prestige picture that's normally a huge turn-off. Director Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) will reteam with Tobey Maguire for The Crusaders, a film about the lawyers who litigated the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka, but who keeps track?). That, of course, was when the Court unanimously held that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Maguire will play idealistic young lawyer Jack Greenberg, who teamed with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall (Terrence Howard was rumored for that role, but that seems to have gone away) to fight the segregationists. This project has been kicking around for a while, and Topher Grace was previously attached to star in what is now Maguire's role.
Ross and Maguire's Seabiscuit, which I thought was precisely the sort of unimaginative, tediously reverent historical Oscar-bait that the Academy loves but anyone with any taste can't stand, bored the pants off me. This sounds like a similar sort of project -- though on the other hand, having spent significant time venerating Brown v. Board in law school, I'm curious to see what Hollywood will do with this story. Sort of in the same way a geologist might be fascinated with The Core, y'know?









