stephen rea Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Adapting real life stories for the big screen is a dangerous proposition. Play too fast and loose with the truth and you stand accused of insensitivity and arrogance; remain too slavish to the facts and you might end up with a deadly dull drama. Inspired by a hit and run automobile accident with a bizarre twist, director Stuart Gordon and screenwriter John Strysik walk this tightrope with finesse, concocting an original, deadly serious, blackly-comic thriller.

Stuck begins by following the basic outline of what happened in Fort Worth, Texas, in the fall of 2001, which I've written about before. In short: a nurse, high on drugs, smashes into a homeless man, who lodges in her car's windshield. She drives home, parks in her garage, and goes to bed, leaving the man bleeding -- and stuck. The film quickly veers away from the facts of the case, though, transforming into a deeply-felt meditation on personal accountability in an age of irresponsibility. It grows more and more outrageous, nearly fishtailing out of control, before righting itself and delivering a walloping conclusion.

Mena Suvari stars as the out of control caregiver, here renamed Brandi, and Stephen Rea is her moral counterweight as the down on his luck Tom. For her part, Brandi isn't so much immoral or amoral as she is incredibly self-centered.

The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

How many times has this happened to you? You spend the evening drinking and doing drugs, and as you precariously drive home, you hit a pedestrian, leaving him embedded in your windshield. You figure he's dead, so you leave him where he is, park the car in the garage, and hope nobody finds out.

I think we've all been there. Iconic horror filmmaker Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) made a movie based on the idea, Stuck, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and has now been acquired by Image Entertainment for U.S. release. Sister company ThinkFilm will release it theatrically next spring, and then Image will handle the DVD sales.

The film stars Mena Suvari as the driver and Stephen Rea as the victim. The story has him not quite dead after all, and understandably P.O.'ed when he realizes she's left him out in the garage, stuck to her windshield, to die. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg, who knows horror like Rosie O'Donnell knows pizza, reviewed Stuck at Toronto and said: "Backed by a pair of very fine lead performances, several colorful background players, a quick pace, and a handful of truly memorable scenes, Stuck might just be Stuart Gordon's best flick since Dagon -- or even From Beyond."

Furthermore, it's "a surprisingly smart flick that starts out slowly and gradually explodes into a darkly satisfying finale."

It's based on a true story, apparently this one, which happened in Fort Worth. But Snopes, the indispensable urban-legend-cataloging site, shows that the Fort Worth incident is by no means unique. This confirms what I've always suspected: there are a lot of really scary drivers out there.

There is some interesting international news coming from Variety. They're reporting that Cache director Michael Haneke is gearing up for his next film, having just wrapped a U.S. remake of his thriller Funny Games. The new project is interestingly called The White Tape or the Teacher's Tale. Over at Variety, it's all in quotes, so I assume it's the full title, and not two possible titles. Very little is being said about the feature -- it will be co-produced by X-Filme Creative Pool and Les Films du Losange, and will be set in a Northern German village before the first World War. That's the only official news to go on, but there are a few more bits over on the IMDb message boards. It's going to be about the rise of the Nazis, and apparently, actor couple Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe were rumored to be starring. Obviously, with Mühe's passing this week, that won't be the case.

The other news bit is of the more classic variety. Daniel Brühl, who starred in Goodbye, Lenin!, is going to head a new adaptation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis as the giant insect previously known as Gregor Samsa. While I'm not a big fan of the story, it's looking to be an intriguing new project as both the ever-creepy Stephen Rea and one of my favorite young actresses, Anna Paquin, are also starring. I presume they will play Gregor's sister and father, which leaves his mother yet to be cast. Metamorphosis will mark the directorial debut for FeardotCom producer Limor Diamant, so hopefully this will be much, much better -- not that it would be hard to improve on the Stephen Dorff flop.

Mena Suvari is Stuck in a really really really bad situation. She has cornrows, a difficult job as a nurse practitioner and has just hit Stephen Rea with her car. The first trailer for the Stuck thriller is being hosted on Bloody-Disgusting. It's definitely bloody and the cast happens to include some of my favorite actors -- have you ever seen Stephen Rea not play someone interesting? And I've appreciated Mena Suvari since her very brave performance as the dirty-mouthed yet inexperienced teenager in American Beauty.

Aside from Suvari's terrible imposition, the trailer shows Rea going from one horrible moment to the next. It seems like the kind of bad day that every person wishes they could sleep through. Suvari is a hard working, party girl -- a personality conundrum? -- who appears to want more responsibility at work but puts everything in jeopardy after striking Rea with her car. What happens next could mean death for Rea and a huge cover up for Suvari in order to keep her life running smoothly.

Stuck is written and directed by Stuart Gordon. -- the director who brought us Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, a far cry from his 'not for children fair.' Gordon is also responsible for Dagon and 1985's medical school experiment gone bad, Re-Animator. Stuck premiered last month at Cannes Film Festival -- its wide release date has yet to be determined.

The Next Karate Kid is no longer the embarrassing thing on Hilary Swank's resume. The Reaping is a movie that skates close to total incompetence, neither following its own rules, or seeming to care one way or the other. It focuses on the adventures of Katherine Winter, (Swank) who is something of a gymrat Amazing Randi, turning up at sites where local yokels think they've witnessed a miracle and spoon-feeding them some good old fashioned, God-hating science. When a Southern Caricature named Doug (David Morrissey) asks Amazing Hilary to come down to his town because, um, they're undergoing the ten biblical plagues down there, she doesn't snare him in a butterfly net but happily packs her bags. Let me stop here and mention that, having never seen or heard of actor David Morrissey before this film, I wrote in my notes: "If this guy is Southern, why the English accent?" When I got home, I looked up Morrissey's IMDB page and saw that he was, in fact, English. That's how much The Reaping cares about its details.

Once arrived in Mississippi Burningville, Swank and her overtly-religious partner, played by Idris Elba, begin to take notice of a local family that is being shunned by polite society because of a hazy perception that they are devil-worshippers, and have caused the local river to turn red. The little girl of the family, Loren (AnnaSophia Robb) is so feared by the local rubes, in fact, that at one point they are ready to set off in pickups to kill her. Swank and Co. must set about rowing through the river, colored a convincing shade of red through impressive special effects, in order to determine the scientific reason for the discoloration and calm down the God-fearing populace. At one point a few frogs also plop down from the sky into the river, but I couldn't figure out if that was supposed to count as a separate plague or the same one. And by the way, if a biblical plague is town-specific, which it apparently is, can't you just move one town over?

Stephen Rea has a never-ending resume and it seems a surplus of constantly different characters. He has two films due out this year (The Reaping and Until Death) and three more in production. It obviously shows that having a unique, offbeat look, oh ... and being extraordinarily talented in Hollywood can do wonders for your career. One of the projects that he is currently filming is Kisses.

Kisses is written and directed by Lance Daly who is also responsible for 2004's comedy The Halo Effect; which Rea also appeared in. Kisses is about two children who run away from home on Christmas; only to spend the night on the dangerous streets of inner-city Dublin. Kelly O'Neill and Shane Curry will play the runaways. This is Curry's debut film and O'Neill's second project; the two have an opportunity to learn from one of the best.

Rea and Daly have much in common, mostly that they're both from Ireland. All three of Daly's films also take place in Dublin -- 2001's Last Days in Dublin and The Halo Effect, which walked away with five nominations at IFTA. Rea is an actor that I adore who can -- and so little do -- pick only roles and scripts that please him and make him grow as an actor. IMDB quotes him as saying, "I didn't want to be seen as just a guy on a list. I'm interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along."

If you're like me and itching to see Rea before Kisses makes it to theatres -- possibly at the end of this year -- then see The Reaping, which opens on April 5.

Just over a month ago I shared with you the news that genre favorite Stuart Gordon was about to get rolling on an odd-sounding thriller called Stuck -- and I promised to bring you casting news when it became available. I really did! "Stuck begins production in New Brunswick next week. We'll let you know if any cool casting news hits the 'net." See?

Well anyway, some of the aforementioned casting news has indeed hit the 'net, and here's what we got: Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea. She'll play a young woman who smashes into a homeless man with her car, only to find him irretrievably lodged within her windshield. So she drives home with the guy "stuck" there, parks her car in the garage, and waits for the poor dude to die. Nice, eh? Gotta love good ol' Stu Gordon.

More than a dozen other actors have also been named as Stuck employees, but Rea and Suvari are easily the biggest names in the cast. Check out the rest of the actors at Bloody-Disgusting.com, which is where I originally found the information. Obviously.

Odds and ends from Wednesday:

• Okay, so you're probably pretty sick of all the mutant talk by now, what with the tremendous amount of fuss surrounding X-Men: The Last Stand. Well, snap the hell out of it because The Mutant Chronicles is gearing up for production and just added Devon Aoki to a cast that already consists of John Malkovich, Thomas Jane, Stephen Rea and Ron Perlman. Aoki, who you may remember playing the devilish Miho in Sin City, will take on a similar role as a sexy, fearless fighter who puts kicking ass before her two small children. Look for the group MAM (Moms Against Miho) to have a problem with this whole thing.
• In an effort to to tap into the insecure, sexually inexperienced male inside all of us, Dreamworks wasted no time in snatching up the spec script, She's Out of My League, from the writing-directing team of Sean Anders and John Morris. Described as The 40-Year-Old Virgin meets There's Something About Mary, story will surround some ordinary dude who is attracted to, what he believes, is the perfect woman. That is, until his friends and family grow suspicious and attempt to sabotage any chance he has with the girl.
• Director M. Night Shyamalan recently spoke with Harry over on AICN and had some pretty interesting things to say about his upcoming film, Lady in the Water. While he didn't spoil the plot or give away the twist ending (Oh, c'mon -- you know there's going to be a twist ending), he did admit to feeling as if the film had a sort of Coen Brothers feel to it, in that it's very independent. That's also one of the main reasons why Lady went through Warners instead of Disney, so that Shyamalan could be, in his words, "off the map a little bit." Hey, I dig -- so long as that map doesn't lead to the bottom of a toilet.

I don't know if it's genius or pure insanity to direct a remake for your first feature, but that's what Douglas Buck is doing. After helming a couple of shorts (one of them really long -- nearly an hour), he rolled up to Hollywood and said "Hey man, gimme some De Palma." And the decidedly un-glamorous No Remorse Pictures said "Right on, brother! We'll produce that. Let's go to Canada!" Or, you know, something like that. What it comes down to is that Buck is directing a remake of Brian De Palma's 1973 film Sisters, a psychological horror movie about twin sisters. It's not universally loved at all, but the people who like it really, really like it, and are surely contorted with rage right now if this is the first they've heard of Buck's venture.

The film stars Stephen Rea as a shrink, Chloë Sevigny as a "nosey reporter" and French actress Lou Doillon (Hey, she's Jane Birkin's kid! Thanks, IMDb.), and is currently filming in Vancouver.