G.I. Joe Cast Preview
Our friends over at IGN have created a little clip introducing us to the cast of upcoming action flick G.I. Joe. I have never before in my life seen a G.I. Joe TV show episode, read one of the comics, or played with the dolls action figures, so I really couldn’t tell you if these casts are accurate or not. Though, I’m slightly excited about Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has been making a name for himself since he was 13 and had his first starring role in Angels in the Outfield.
Any G.I. Joe fans out there? What do you think of the cast?
Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna Movie Trailer
Spike Lee’s big screen adaptation of James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna chronicles the story of four black American soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division who get trapped in a small Tuscan village on the Gothic Line during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The film deals with the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre, but is structured with a Titanic/Saving Private Ryan flashback plot device involving a priceless Italian artifact, which is discovered in a murderer’s closet. The sculpted head from Ponte Santa Trinita, valued at $5 million, is a clue to a mystery that began 39 years earlier, when the soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines and separated from their unit after one of them risks his life to save an Italian boy.
Miracle at St. Anna stars Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi, John Leguizamo, and Joseph Gordon Levitt. Judging from the trailer, Spike Lee might be heading for an Oscar nomination with this one. Tell me what you think in the comments below.
You can watch the trailer in High Definition on Yahoo. Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna will hit theaters on September 26th 2008.
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon Levitt in Talks to Star in Rom-Com 500 Days of Summer
The last recent rom-com I watched (re: politely forced) was Music and Lyrics, which was so amazingly terrible it even made the domineering rental-picker blush. One of the problems nowadays with this genre is an utter void of chemistry between the leads in favor of “mall hot” eugenics. Feh to that! Without even knowing the plot or director, the words “Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, epicly in love” is not really deserving of an eye-roll. Let them and their tears and their city-chic pets make out in the rain, sounds totally opposite-of-mall-hot to me.
EW’s Hollywood Insider reports that the two young and talented actors are in talks to star in the “anti-romantic comedy” 500 Days of Summer, with Deschanel in chats to play a girl who doesn’t believe in love, while Gordon-Levitt would play the guy who does, indeed, believe and must show her. Ooh la la. Cue Elvin Bishop’s drunktastic “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” from Boogie Nights on your WinAmp. Director Marc Webb, making a crossover from MTV music videos for Good Charlotte (blech), Ashley Simpson (blech) and Weezer (hi high school) to features, will helm the pic for Slashfilm fave Fox Searchlight. The script is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber who, uhhh, wrote The Pink Panther 2.
Deschanel is climbing the Tinseltown ranks in major upcoming flicks like M. Night’s The Happening and Jim Carrey’s Yes Man, and just released a cutesy folk album with M. Ward called She & Him. She was also eye-lash-battingly great on the third season of Weeds. Gordon-Levitt is currently cashing in on Stephen Sommers’s G.I. Joe in the role of Cobra Commander and can next been seen, next week in fact, in the dismally reviewed Iraq War fable Stop-Loss.
SXSW Movie Review: Stop-Loss
Directed and co-written by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, The Last Good Breath), Stop Loss dramatizes the U.S. military’s “stop-loss” policy that allows the military to postpone the honorable discharge of U.S. soldiers and send them back to Iraq and Afghanistan for another tour of duty (usually a year to eighteen months). Alas, Stop Loss proves the adage that “good politics don’t make good art.” Stop Loss suffers from a serious case of implausibility and contrivance that fatally undermines whatever insight Peirce hopes to shed on the stop-loss policy and its unfairness toward the soldiers who serve in the U.S. military in foreign countries.
Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), leads his men, including his best friend, Sergeant Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Isaac ‘Eyeball’ Butler (Rob Brown), Al ‘Preacher’ Colson (Terry Quay), and Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk), down an alley to hunt down suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq. Pinned down in an ambush, King loses several men, but saves Shriver and Rodriguez from almost certain death. With his tour of duty almost done, King returns to his small hometown in Texas. There, he receives the Bronze Star for his bravery in saving his men and a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in combat. After celebrating with Shriver, Burgess, Shriver’s fiancé, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), his parents, Ida (Linda Emond) and Roy (Ciarán Hinds), King returns to the army base for debriefing.
At the army base, King learns he’s been “stop-lossed” by the military under orders from the executive branch. He has only a few days before he has to return to Iraq for another tour of duty. King refuses, forcing his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Boot Miller (Timothy Olyphant), to send him to the stockade. King manages to escape and convinces Shriver to stall while he drives to Washington, D.C., to see Orton Worrell (Josef Sommer), a senator who, days earlier, offered to help King with any problems he might encounter stateside as thanks for his heroism in Iraq. A fugitive from the law, King accepts help from an unlikely source, Michelle, who offers to drive him to Washington, D.C.
As drama, Stop Loss has more than its share of problems, beginning the moment King refuses to return to Iraq, disobeying his commanding officer, and becoming a fugitive. His decision to refuse the stop-loss order comes quickly, with insufficient provocation or motivation. King’s decision to seek help from Senator Worrell reeks of desperation and naïveté. It becomes a quixotic journey to nowhere, with stops along the way for King to get into a violent confrontation with several thugs, a visit with the family of one of the men who served under him in Iraq but didn’t return, and potential intimacy with Michelle. King also conveniently runs into another soldier who decided to flee with his family rather than get stop-lossed back to Iraq and frequent bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which hits the returning soldiers to varying degrees and at various times (all of them inconvenient for them, but convenient for the plot).
Thematically, Stop Loss is muddled and, at times, incoherent. While Peirce deserves credit for tackling a potentially divisive subject, she does herself or the subject any favors by turning her characters into mouthpieces for her opinions about the Iraq War and the continuing occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military. Certainly, she wants to personalize and humanize the stop-loss issue for American audiences, but unfortunately, the characters veer too much into caricature to convince anyone on the right side of the political divide that they’re wrong. Of course, risks are always involved when filmmakers feel compelled to tackle current events. Too often, characters become secondary to themes or messages. Here, the message seems to be more a plea for compassion for soldiers in the military and an end to the stop-loss policy that puts men and women in danger well after their tours should have ended.
Ultimately, Peirce tries to have it both ways: she wants to criticize the stop-loss policy as fundamentally unfair to the men and the women who serve in our military and their families due to the increased mental, emotional, and physical costs incurred by an additional tour of duty, but also wants to reaffirm the ideals of duty, honor, and loyalty as worth having and defending, regardless of the circumstances and the politics. It’s a noble sentiment, but one that has little connection to the real world and the current administration’s military policy, specifically the still-ongoing “surge” that added 30,000 troops to ground forces in Iraq (some of whom were stop-lossed into remaining in or returning to Iraq).