rodrigo garcia Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In his decade in the storytelling business, Rodrigo García has made a name for himself not only as a notable television director (Carnivale, Six Feet Under, and In Treatment), but also as a filmmaker intensely interested in the lives of women and the intricacies of smaller, often interconnected story lines. It started with Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her and Ten Tiny Love Stories, but García really made his mark with 2005's Nine Lives. When he followed it up with the television movie Fathers and Sons, it was inevitable that he would one day take that same theme and apply it to the female characterizations he loves so much. It wouldn't be in the form of Mothers & Daughters, as Carl Bessai* brought that very film to TIFF in 2008. But with a slightly different title, Mother and Child, García jumps leaps and bounds beyond Bessai's take and has created a well-crafted web of female characters and universally engaging storytelling.

*Who, by the way, has his own Fathers & Sons on the way.

For quite some time, the supernatural thriller Passengers -- starring Anne Hathaway as a grief counselor working with survivors of a plane crash (among them, Patrick Wilson) who begin to vanish -- had been quietly set on opening this Friday, September 5th.

However, as the date neared without any sign of a poster, a trailer, anything, I began rooting around the IMDb message boards and was about to post a Spanish-language trailer, complete with accompanying amateur translation, when along came a legit trailer (by way of Reelz Channel), a real poster (courtesy of IMP Awards), and a new date of October... well, just October for now.

Given his knack for ensemble dramas such as Nine Lives and Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, director Rodrigo Garcia seems to be a curious pick for the material, as the focus is less on what's happened to the group as a whole and more on Hathaway and Wilson investigating one another. Otherwise, the vibe I'm getting here is the one I had from 2004's The Forgotten: it has just enough of a hook to get me to watch it, but I doubt that the pay-off will live up to it.

What do you guys think? Will September's Lakeview Terrace and October's Rachel Getting Married satisfy your Wilson and Hathaway jones, respectively? And facing this Halloween's mainstream horror fare, is Sony, under the Tri-Star banner, about to dump this in a limited amount of theaters as they had with, say, Wind Chill, which just happened to star Prada pal Emily Blunt?

I think I'm pretty much the only one who wasn't crazy about Little Children, save for a second half that featured an outstanding performance from Jackie Earle Haley (someone give this guy a best supporting something -- please, I beg you). Maybe I caught it at the wrong time (trust me, 10am isn't the best time to catch a flick in the theater, especially when you were up partying the night before), but the thing just moved too slowly ... and another dull performance from Patrick Wilson didn't help. Ever notice how the one thing every Patrick Wilson flick has in common (aside from the fact that Wilson appears in a role) is that whoever co-stars outshines him in almost every conceivable way?

With that said, Wilson has signed on to star opposite Anne Hathaway in Passengers -- remember that supernatural thriller flick we told you about last month? Hathaway herself isn't the most exciting actress, but she's cute, bubbly and you can't help but kind of like her. With Rodrigo García helming, pic revolves around a grief counselor who helps assist the survivors of a plane crash, but becomes wrapped up in a whole mess of thrills and chills when each survivor begins to disappear one by one. Oh, and amidst all this, she finds the time to fall in love with Wilson's character who -- you guessed it -- is one of the survivors. Ronnie Christensen (who makes his feature debut here, having penned a few TV projects like the instant classic Chameleon 3: Dark Angel) wrote the script, and production will begin shortly with Mandate Pictures producing and Columbia Pictures distributing domestically.