Untitled Moon Project

"Jake Gyllenhaal will team with helmer Doug Liman for DreamWorks' "Untitled Moon Project."

Actioner revolves around a private expedition to the moon and the race for lunar colonization.

Screenplay was originally penned by Liman and John Hamburg. Author-screenwriter Mark Bowden ("Black Hawk Down") did a complete reconception of the story and will pen the screenplay.

The project marks the return of Alli Shearmur, former Paramount co-president of production, who ankled the studio earlier this year. She will produce alongside Simon Kinberg and Liman.

Liman and one-time Universal exec Shearmur developed a strong relationship back when Liman directed "The Bourne Identity" for the studio. Shearmur also worked with Gyllenhaal when she oversaw production on "Zodiac."

DreamWorks has targeted the project for the fast track.

Gyllenhaal will next shoot the Jim Sheridan-helmed "Brothers" opposite Tobey Maguire.

Liman, whose helming credits include "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and "Swingers," directed the upcoming futuristic "Jumper," which 20th Century Fox will release early next year".
Source: Variety.com

Movie Review: "Disturbia"

"D.J. Caruso, the director of Disturbia and previously of The Salton Sea (2002), proves to us the importance of developing characters to make the viewers feel the discomfort of the world the characters have made for themselves. The story's screenplay is penned by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth, screenwriter of Red Eye (2005). Ellsworth also wrote the remarkable "Halloween" episode of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The casting is solid as a rock, featuring Matt Craven, who plays Kale's father Daniel Bretch in a brief but warming initial scene, with echoes of a Spielberg-type father-son dyanamic. The sensitive protagonist Kale Bretch (Shia LaBeouf) is confined to move in a limited 100-foot circle around his home wearing an electronic monitoring device attached to his ankle after having an altercation with his Spanish teacher, whom Kale punched in the face.

"He's like a modem. He gets a constant signal from Mr. Bracelet that he sends through your phone line to the monitoring station downtown. So they know where you are, where you've been and what you're thinkin' 25/7," Detective Parker (Viola Davis) tells us.

Kale is deprived of his Internet connection and is frequently told off by his strict mom Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss), so the boy finds a new hobby, spying on the people around him by using huge binoculars and high-tech wireless equipment that includes a camcorder he's checking constantly behind his mother's back. When Kale spies a newcomer to the neighbourhood he thinks it's the ideal option to relieve the stress of his boredom.

This newcomer, Ashley Carlson (Sarah Roemer) is a gorgeous, blonde, long-legged girl who also has a controlling dysfunctional family, Kale soon notices, including a mother whose irritating tone is even worse than that of his own mother. Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) is the zany bro in this triangle of detached youngsters enslaved by their cell phones, portable monitors, tripods, walkie talkies, iPods, and the loud pop soundtracks beloved by the Generation Y.
Kale and Ashley share a notable lack of parental bonding which creates a point of immediate intimacy between them, since Kale discovers she needs her own bracelet, too: "The bright green bracelet is from The Place. The red one is from The Komodo Club, and yellow is from Razors." Shia LaBeouf and Sarah Roemer complement each other in these post-modern Hitchcockian dynamics, with LaBeouf assuming the role of the man obsessing over a statuesque and unpredictable woman.

Kale's hyperactive imagination as a result of being under arrest leads him to focus excessively on the lives of his closest neighbours, very particularly on the mysterious and apparently laid back Mr. Robert Turner (David Morse), watching his garage doors, and his black Mustang convertible. Every time Mr. Turner's garage opens up Kale's heart accelerates, as if he received negative energy from Turner shattering the peaceful scenario of suburbia.

Kale begins to spy on Ashley in a voyeuristic way that could annoy some female viewers, because by doing this, he is turning Ashley from a fleshed-out woman into a shallow sexual object who becomes more and more idealized in his view. The hormones raging in Kale makes this behavior somehow tolerable whenever Ashley appears, especially when she is dressed provocatively in a bikini.
But Ashley isn't going to conform to the role of the airhead hottie and instead she assumes control over their relationship, subtly and progressively, undermining Kale's self-confidence, despite her inability to differentiate if the neighbour who broke into her car was doing it in a "nice" way or if the apologies from Kale are "either the creepiest... or the sweetest thing" she's ever heard. Most of time she's a passive eyewitness to Kale's increasing anguish.

Hence, Disturbia isn't only a tale of the latent phsychopathia who lies beyond the white fences and green lawns, but also of the spectator who willingly participates in this process, confusing normalcy with deviancy, a perpetual vigilance that will ultimately carry us away from the safety we thought we had, trapped in our cozy environments.
The camera could stand in for our collective libidinous conscience in an era when virtual games are quickly gaining new players. No wonder Kale and Ashley base their relationship in playing each other, often hiding their insecurities. Comparing Disturbia to Hitchcock's Rear Window, we only see the voyeurism factor and the suspenseful floating atmosphere in common, but DJ Caruso avoids making a carbon copy of a typical Hitchcock battle between the sexes, as Kale and Ashley's characters are far from those of the victimized male protagonist and the gelid high society queen played by James Stewart and Grace Kelly.

The film builds to a thrilling conclusion after a long, suspenseful journey, one of the film's messages being that there's no reason to shrug carelessly and look the other way.

"Also, you look out the window all the time, like I do, only you're looking at the world, you know. Trying to figure it out. Trying to understand the world. Trying to figure out why it's not in order, like your books. I'm only looking at you". -Kate to Ashley. Published on 6th October in Blogcritics.org

Michelle Trachtenberg Video

Wyzard, the host of www.aroseasred.com liked my video montage of Michelle Trachtenberg and linked to it in his fansite of Michelle. Check it out!

Reese in "S.F.W."

"(The release of S.F.W. was postponed until 1995, some say because of thematic similarities to "Natural Born Killers". Whatever the real reason, the delay didn't help at the box office. The film grossed less than $100,000.)
[...] Ironically, the very same quality which made Spab a total loser in society makes him a hero in a hostage crisis. Just as he defied his teachers, parents, and employers and made himself a nobody without a future, he now defies the abductors, and makes himself a hero! Mimicking his nihilism becomes trendy. His catch-phrase of "So Fuckin' What?" is on everyone's lips as well as their t-shirts.

Imagine his surprise and confusion when the hostage crisis ends and he finds out that the people who used to ridicule him now hold him up as an icon because they admire the very same attitude they used to despise. Seeing this hypocrisy makes him have even less respect for people than he used to, but that in turn makes the people he despises love him even more! Attitude, man! He wants to escape from the people who want to apotheosize him, but he also needs to ward off the vultures and profiteers who want to help him cash in on his fifteen minutes of apotheosis". Source: www.scoopy.com

"I really think that Reese Witherspoon was great in the small bits we got to see her in, and it is too bad they did not focus more on that character". Source: www1.epinions.com

Let's watch a younger Reese Witherspoon in this failed but "bizarro" film "S.F.W." ("So Fucking What" - 1994) directed by Jefery Levery in a video montage I've made with scenes of the film: (and don't miss Tobey Maguire playing a slacker teenager).

Official Rendition Movie Video Clip

New affiliate: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

It's an honour for me to be an affiliate with the official fansite of Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Joseph Gordon-Levitt.org.
Some screencaps that I've taken from the deleted scenes of the "Brick" DVD extra-disc have been added to the "Brick" gallery, courtesy of Lee.

A test for Reese

"Witherspoon plays the wife of an American-Egyptian chemical engineer who disappears after boarding a flight from Cape Town. She gradually learns that her husband is suspected of being a terrorist, and has been “rendered” by the CIA to a North African country, evidently Morocco. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the CIA analyst charged with overseeing her husband’s interrogation, who becomes troubled by the morality of what he and the US government are doing.
[...] According to the most recent survey by the film-trade paper The Hollywood Reporter, Witherspoon, who is 31, is now America’s highest-paid actress, outstripping Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie. She has been able to command a salary of $15m a movie for the past four years, since the twin successes of the first Legally Blonde film and the romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama. Her status was cemented when she won a best-actress Oscar in March2006 for her spirited performance as June Carter Cash, singer and long-suffering wife of the country legend Johnny, in Walk the Line.

Today, on the stage, she seems distant and distracted. Of course, everyone in the room knows there have been tabloid rumours, in the past few weeks, that Witherspoon and Gyllenhaal, who have been discreetly placed some distance apart on the stage, have been seeing each other.Everyone also knows that she filed for divorce from her actor husband, Ryan Phillippe, at the end of last year.

Whatever I may be reading into her demeanour, Witherspoon certainly gives off almost nothing of the super-perky, relentlessly optimistic effervescence that she has imprinted on the public mind through her spot-on performances as the upwardly mobile Southern debutante Elle Woods in the Legally Blonde movies. That Southern-belle pedigree is no Hollywood fabrication: Witherspoon comes from a wealthy Tennessee family (her father is a surgeon) that is descended from one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence.
[...]One of the things I’m keen to explore with her is the fact that she has built her astonishingly successful career mainly by playing women, such as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, who seem to have an absolute sense of their own destiny, a dead-on certainty about who they are and who they want to be. That seems to be very much who Witherspoon is herself, incredibly focused and goal-orientated, with a very Southern, and conservative, sense of the life she has always wanted – a life she quickly made for herself after she arrived in Hollywood, becoming wealthy beyond anyone’s dreams, married to a Hollywood dreamboat, with whom she has two adorable children.

In Rendition, on the other hand, she plays a woman who is having to deal with events that are out of her control. However determined she may be, there’s nothing she can do to persuade the US government, which won’t even acknowledge that it has kidnapped her husband, to let him go. I ask Witherspoon how she found it to play a character swimming helplessly in a world she couldn’t control. “It was difficult,” she admits. “It was really challenging playing that bewilderment and confusion and isolation. She doesn’t know what she is dealing with. She is so disorientated, and she also has the burden of being pregnant, which is limiting in itself, and the inherent vulnerability in that. It was hard, sad, alienating and isolating.”

Witherspoon acknowledges that she has always been incredibly driven, and has felt a deep need to prove herself to other people. Even now, after rising to the top of the pay charts, with an Oscar under her belt, she says she feels that she is “underestimated”. “I honestly don’t know where that comes from. As a child, I made great grades in school and had some friends – not a lot of friends, but a significant number – and, I don’t know, I’ve always felt this need to accomplish and push myself further. And I don’t feel like people really have any idea what I am capable of.” It’s a sad answer, but it makes me realise how hard it must have been for her, especially as a woman in Hollywood, to achieve what she has. She agrees. “I don’t ever rest on anyone’s ideas of what they’re going to do for me – I never have,” she says. “My mother impressed that on me at a very early age. If you want something done, do it yourself. I have operated under that sensibility for a very long time.” Of course, it wouldn’t be surprising if Witherspoon were depressed, as most people are when coping with divorce. I thought she had been brave to acknowledge, in a recent interview in an American magazine, that about a month after her marriage ended, she found herself sitting in her car in a car park, unable to get out. And, as I say goodbye, I can’t help looking back at a young woman who does seem trapped, like a beautiful, sad princess, in the tower of a magnificent dream castle she has built for herself. But perhaps I just caught her on a bad day". Source: Entertainment.timesonline.co.uk