the hunting party Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Here in the dawn of the New Year, I'm still nursing my holiday hangover, so I'm going to finish up with my three-part Overlooked and Underrated series of columns, starting with Julian Jarrold's Becoming Jane, a fictitious biographical romance about Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway). It garnered unfavorable comparisons to Shakespeare in Love (1998), a film as dreadfully over-hyped as its cousin was under-hyped. (The hype meter must be perfectly balanced now.) James McAvoy -- currently receiving showers of awards attention for his involvement in Atonement (306 screens) -- plays the smoldering lover who titillates the educated and prickly Miss Austen. Unlike most brain-dead comedies in which the lovers are supposed to "fix" each other's shortcomings, these lovers are perfectly matched. Not to mention that Maggie Smith gives another one of her deliriously snooty performances.

I can't figure out why Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party failed, when it was just as energetic and funny as The Matador -- unless critics bristled at the film's political pokings. In this one, Richard Gere, Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg make a wonderful team as three journalists (ranging from rookie to washed-up) who journey through Bosnia to find an infamous war criminal. Shepard's movie is constantly unexpected and alive, with three-dimensional characters you won't soon forget. Stick around for the whimsical closing credits, which explain the parts of the film that were "real."

For one thing, Goya's Ghosts is messy and uneven. Then there's the fact that most of Carrière's films never find United States distribution. On top of that, the vast majority of his work is adaptations of novels. Finally, I think it's safe to say that his reputation rests on the fact that he generally works with acclaimed directors. To go one more, it's probably fair to say that the majority of his entire reputation rests on the six films he wrote with Luis Buñuel from 1967 to 1977. This is not to say that Carrière is a bad writer: on the contrary. Some of his films since Buñuel have been very good, notably Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Jonathan Glazer's misunderstood Birth (2004). I'm using this case to point out the trickiness of ranking and cataloging screenwriters and their films. Certainly they deserve much more credit and respect than they get. But where do we start?

Since World War II spawned its share of war-themed movies, both direct and indirect, it's only natural that our era does the same, especially given that the Iraq War has gone on for several years now. A lot of movies over the past four or five years have dealt with the attacks in New York, soldiers in war, prisoners of war, and endless variations on these and other themes. Even the recent Western 3:10 to Yuma, hidden underneath its character-driven gun slinging, has a little something to say about the occupation. Most movies tackle their subject head-on, such as the numerous documentaries of the past few years and films like United 93 and World Trade Center as well as war films about other eras like Letters from Iwo Jima and Days of Glory. How refreshing, then, to see a movie like Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party, which has on its mind the topic of war criminals still at large. It wants to know why the U.S. has been unable to find certain outlaws, when just about any civilian with a passport, the price of a drink and a line of B.S. can do it. But instead of grousing or hand wringing, it becomes a spry, surprising and intelligent comedy.

The movie is told through the point of view of a TV news cameraman nicknamed Duck (Terrence Howard), who once worked together with reporter Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) in any Third World war zone worth covering. Their lives together were dangerous and exciting. They dodged explosions, drank in dive bars and romanced local girls. But when the tragedy got to be too much for Simon, he melted down on the air, effectively ending the relationship. Duck has since been promoted to a highly paid New York studio job, while Simon works for increasingly desperate TV stations so far off the radar that he eventually disappears. For the five-year anniversary of the end of the war in Bosnia, Duck, a polished TV anchorman (a perfectly cast James Brolin) and a network executive's son, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg), arrive to cover a routine press conference. Simon is also there, and he convinces Duck to help him cover the story of the decade: finding an infamous war criminal known as The Fox (Ljubomir Kerekes) with a $5 million bounty on his head.

The Weinstein Co. just sent Cinematical the first poster for the upcoming comedic thriller The Hunting Party, starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, and opening in limited release on September 7th, and then wide on the 21st. Based on an Esquire magazine article about three journalists who made an attempt to capture a Bosnian war criminal on their own, the film was originally titled Spring Break in Bosnia. The trio, which includes Gere, Howard and Jesse Eisenberg, begin a search for the elusive criminal but eventually get mistaken for a CIA hit squad and find themselves being hunted by the person they thought they were hunting. Diane Kruger, the face that launched a thousand ships in Troy, has the female lead in this one, and the film was written and directed by Richard Shepard, who wrote and directed the Pierce Brosnan crime comedy The Matador. Click on the image above to get the full-sized poster.