russell crowe Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Perception is everything, and I don't mean to get all metaphysical on you, but sometimes it's how the world sees us that can define who we are -- but what if the world thinks you're a psycho? In an interview with American Psycho director Mary Harron, she was reminiscing about the black comedy, and as it turns out, her star Christian Bale based his vision of the murdering yuppie on -- wait for it -- Tom Cruise. According to Harron, she and Bale had been collaborating on the character when "...he [Bale] called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy."

Actors take inspiration from all kinds of places, but you can't help but wonder if Bale saw something that we would all be made painfully aware of: the 'crazy' side of Cruise. And it was that same energy that worked so well in P.T. Anderson's Magnolia when Cruise played motivational speaker Frank T.J. Mackey. But for me, what made this story truly funny, is that who could have predicted that soon enough Bale would be dealing with his own troubled image in Hollywood as a rage-aholic and something of a bully? On the upside, though, maybe Bale's on-set rant will one day inspire another young actor (ahh, the circle of life).

These guys aren't the only ones to battle troubled reputations (whether or not they're deserved), and after the jump: a few more stars who have run their reputations into the ditch...

I'm beginning to think that Liam Neeson owns Hermione Granger's Time Turner, or that he has a lifelong supply of Red Bull because he's signed on for another role -- and this one would appear to be filming simultaneously with The A-Team. According to The Hollywood Reporter reports that Neeson has just joined Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks in Paul Haggis' The Next Three Days.

Days is a remake of the 2008 French thriller Pour Elle, and accuses an ordinary woman (Banks) of a gruesome crime she insists she didn't commit. She's sent to prison and becomes suicidal, and her desperate husband (Crowe) plots to break her out. (Ah, love!) But she'll have a little help from Neeson, who plays an ex-con who has broken out of prison multiple times, wrote a how-to guide about it, and offers his assistance to Crowe. The role is being described as "cameo in nature" which suggests Neeson might be narrating his own Dummy's Guide to Escaping From Prison, or is at least available to Crowe by cell phone to work out the tougher bits.

Filming just started on Days in Pittsburgh last Friday, and wraps on December 12. The A-Team just started filming too, so I'm honestly surprised that their schedules can coincide so neatly. Maybe Neeson is ducking down to Pittsburgh and filming this one on the weekends. I think they're missing a prime opportunity here to tie The Next Three Days into The A-Team universe. If there's one thing Hannibal Smith knows anything about, it's being accused of crimes you didn't commit, and evading the law until you're free of them.

There's a long-running joke in Hollywood that one of the easiest ways to earn an Oscar is to either 'Ugly it up" or contract a disease. But, in recent years, one of the newer trends that can lead an actor to the podium is for them to take on a role where they play a person of same-sex orientation (a fact that has already become the stuff of satire). Over the past 10 years, plenty of actors have earned Oscars for playing gay roles, and the latest actor to join the club could be Matt Damon, who has signed to play Liberace's lover in Steven Soderbergh's biopic of the flamboyant musician.

So what's the big deal? Don't actors pretend to be different people all the time ... isn't that their job? Well, yes, but it's a little more complicated than that. Gay and lesbian political advocates have long lamented the sad state of affairs where straight actors are getting gay roles, instead of giving 'out' actors their chance to shine. So, while I question the idea that only gay actors could play a gay character, just as only straight actors can play straight characters, the sad fact is that Hollywood is still relatively puritanical when it comes to allowing their actors and actresses to be out and proud -- and that needs to change. But, that doesn't mean I think an actor (gay or straight) shouldn't play role any role they want ... just as long as they're good at it.

So on that note, I decided to give a little credit to five performances by straight actors in gay roles that transcended orientation and, ultimately, are just damn fine performances.

After the jump: my picks for the best of straight actors going gay for pay...

I know from comments on past posts that I'm not the only moviegoer desperate for more of Captain Jack Aubrey. I'll go on record and say that as much as I enjoyed Captain Jack Sparrow, I'd much sooner take another journey with Aubrey and Stephen Maturin over a fourth Pirates.

There's a glimmer of hope now, as Russell Crowe talked to USA Today and said that very early talks were underway for a new Master and Commander installment. A script based on Patrick O'Brian's The Reverse of the Medal has been written, and like Far Side of the World, it's a combination of several different stories. Negotiations are currently underway to obtain the rights, but USA Today doesn't specify if they've lapsed, or if Fox lacks the neccessary books of the 20 volume series.

Crowe said that "there's still a long way to go," and that it's one of several projects he's considering, so we can't hold our breath. Medal would be quite the follow-up, since it would be an older Aubrey than we met before, and one who is embroiled in fraud charges and dealing with illegitimate offspring. It would also introduce that other side of Maturin, one that's distinctly different from his naturalist ways. I hope it happens, though. It would be a good time on land and sea for all!

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

State of Play (240 screens) continues playing this week, and despite its lukewarm performance and reviews, something about it makes me happy. In mid-2003, I got myself into hot water with a Russell Crowe fan club. I reviewed a very minor film called The Hard Word, starring Guy Pearce, who of course had been Crowe's co-star in L.A. Confidential (1997). I took the opportunity to compare the two actors, praising Pearce for his work in interesting films like Ravenous and Memento, and questioning the much more fashionable Crowe. I did this mainly because I was irritated at the enduring popularity of two terrible films, the sludgy, brooding mess Gladiator (2000) and the manipulative Oscar bait A Beautiful Mind (2001).

I felt that Crowe went through the former film with one single expression, a glower, and through the latter with an unchanging collection of tics and actor's tricks; neither one was a particularly interesting or deep performance. Both performances received Oscar nominations, and Crowe won for Gladiator. I was also irritated that the immeasurably superior Memento, and Pearce, didn't get the same attention. In any case the Crowe fan club grabbed my review, posted it on one of their forums and went to town. I started getting all kinds of angry, nasty e-mails. The fact that I presented one, small opinion contrary to their perfect, orderly world absolutely infuriated them.

It's a strange coincidence, but just the other day I was having a conversation with a friend and we turned to each other and said: "Hey, whatever happened to Madeleine Stowe?" Well, she hasn't been making many appearances on the big screen lately, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy. Variety has announced that Stowe will be make her directorial debut for Hyde Park Entertainment with the period drama, Unbound Captives. The film stars Rachel Weisz, Hugh Jackman, and Robert Pattinson and centers on a woman, "whose husband is killed and her two children kidnapped by a Comanche war party in 1859."

Stowe wrote the script herself back in 1993 as a starring vehicle, but at the time no one was jumping at the chance to finance the film of an actress and first time screenwriter. But that doesn't mean that the studios didn't like what they saw, because according to Variety, "Fox offered Stowe $3 million, and later $5 million, for her script, with Ridley Scott poised to direct and Russell Crowe to star. She turned down what was among the highest sums offered a first-time scribe because there was no promise she would be anything more than screenwriter." Stowe was convinced that it was better to let the project die on the vine rather than have somebody else mess with her script -- and I have to hand it to her, I doubt I would have been as principled.

I have the deep suspicion that despite being picked up round the Internet, this Nick Cave "synopsis" will end up being some kind of hoax. If it does, the story someone has concocted for Gladiator 2 is so brilliantly crazy that it's worth reading.

Gone Elsewhere has the rundown for you. This script meets up with Maximus seconds after he comes to in the afterlife. Our deceased gladiator isn't met by his family, but by a mysterious figure named Moredecai. He introduces him to the Roman pantheon who mock him, and offer a deal to kill their brother Hephaestos. If he can, they'll reunite him with his wife and son. Once out of immortal earshot, Moredecai tells Maximus these are lies and that his wife, Maria, sacrified her place in Elyisium to allow their son, Marius, to cheat death. He's now back in Rome living a mortal life. Disbelieving this, our undead hero marches to find Hephaestos who is trying to usher in an age of a "one, true God" and sends him hurtling back to mortal Rome. There Maximus encounters the adult Lucius who is pretty busy slaughtering Christians for the Emperor, a situation that Maximus finds himself embroiled in ... and not surprisingly, one that reunites him with his adult son. There's the cue to unleash hell.

Needless to say, it's a unique read. Cave really took the "What we do in life, echoes in eternity" tagline literally. (You'll know what I mean when you get to the end.) It's so easy to let your mind get carried away imagining scenes like Lucius passing a bust of Maximus and realizing he just saw him in a mob that I'd like to see this filmed, albeit not as a Gladiator sequel, but as pure Roman fantasy. Read it, and see if you agree.

[via IMDB]

Newspapermen occupy that movie middle ground between detectives and action heroes. They dig up clues, but the clues are hard-won, based on experience and the building up of contacts and sources. The clues are rarely left at the scene of the crime. Newspapermen rarely get into danger, but when they do it's not something they're really prepared or trained for. Coming face-to-face with a deadly killer, Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) can barely make eye contact. Cal doesn't fight or outwit the bad guy; he just runs and hides. It's not important that he try to be a hero. It's more important that he survive to write the story.

Of course, real reporters don't get to solve murders and uncover international corporate conspiracies every day, and that's where Hollywood comes in. The new film State of Play is based on a six-hour BBC mini-series from 2003. I haven't seen the original, but I'd bet that it's much distilled and sped up, and no one is going to argue that the new film is any kind of improvement. But taken on its own, it's probably the best newspaper/journalism movie in years -- perhaps since Shattered Glass (2003) -- even if it falls far short of the purity of All the President's Men (1976). It's also the first movie of its kind to address the inherent feud between sturdy, superior, old-fashioned print reporting, and reckless, inexperienced, sloppy blogging. (Guess which side the movie is on?)

Thirty years ago, a political crisis and two movie stars inspired thousands of young people to pursue a career in journalism. Now that the profession may be dying, is it foolish to hope that an economic crisis and three movie stars could revive interest?

Opening tomorrow, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play stars Russell Crowe as a world-weary reporter investigating a murder in which his old friend, politician Ben Affleck, may have been involved. Rachel McAdams also stars as an up-and-coming blogger. Obviously, that's a very different kind of movie than Alan Pakula's All the President's Men, which starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who helped uncover the full extent of the Watergate conspiracy in the 1970s. In the wake of that movie, The Atlantic commented: "Today's generation of young Americans is flocking to journalism schools in unprecedented numbers ... the extraordinary popularity of 'communications' has been attributed to 'the Woodstein Phenomenon,' the effect of the Woodward and Bernstein feat of exposing and unseating the Nixon gang in the White House."

Ever since, there has been no shortage of qualified journalists; the problem is that jobs for journalists are drying up faster than a water hole in the Sahara. Without getting into a discussion of why the newspaper and magazine industries are dying, my questions are:

• Will anyone look beyond the murder thriller trappings of State of Play?
• Will it cause anyone to think about why good, solid investigative journalism is still so important -- in part, to hold elected officials, government workers, and corporate executives accountable for their actions?
• Will anyone be prompted to come up with viable solutions to sustain and support a valuable profession before it's gone forever?