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The entertainment world is still reeling from the loss of one of the true icons of modern cinema, Tony Scott, who died on Sunday after jumping off of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA. Though Scott received few accolades for the movies he directed, he consistently turned out entertaining hits and his kinetic visual style has been influencing other action movie directors since his sophomore effort, Top Gun, became an instant classic in 1986.
In addition to sending Tom "Maverick" Cruise's career into the stratosphere, Scott helped advance fledgling filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's career when he directed the Tarantino-scripted neo-noir crime-romance movie True Romance, which is arguably Scott's best work. Scott was also Denzel Washington's director-of-choice, with five collaborations between the two, starting with Crimson Tide in 1995 and ending with Scott's last movie as a director, Unstoppable, in 2010.
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Director Tony Scott's action movie Unstoppable pairs Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as two railroad employees who attempt to halt a runaway train filled with toxic cargo. Rosario Dawson co-stars as a railroad dispatcher who helps the duo.
In anticipation of the movie's November 12 release, Twentieth Century Fox has offered up three new clips of the movie to Yahoo, which show a taste of the action Scott has in store.
watch the clips >> Posted 10.27.10 by Ryan -
Director Tony Scott's latest movie, Unstoppable, could just as easily been called "Runaway Train" or even "Tony Scott Loves Movies About Trains." The Taking of Pelham 123 director's latest stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as an improbable duo tasked with stopping a train filled with toxic cargo. The movie looks like the usual Scott action-fest, with Washington in the role of the heroic martyr. Watch the first trailer below.
Posted 08.06.10 by Ryan -
Not all the action in The Taking of Pelham 123 takes place down in the subway or in the offices of the MTA. Three new clips from the movie show off some intense car chase scenes, as well as the more personal negotiations between the amateur hostage negotiator Garber (Denzel Washington) and his wife (Aunjanue Ellis) as he prepares to head into danger.
There's also a new featurette that descends back into "the darkness and the grittiness of the bowels of New York" for some commentary by director Tony Scott and the cast on the the film's other star, the subway itself.
Posted 06.01.09 by reelz -
An Esquire preview of Tony Scott's new interpretation of The Taking of Pelham 123 compares the characters in the remake to those of 1970s original and finds them refreshingly gray.
It starts out just like the reviewer expected it to: "It's fast and violent and profane. It's unmistakably modern, and, sure enough, it's loud as hell." The characters come off as mostly black and white, good or evil. Denzel Washington plays Garber, a regular out-of-shape Joe who just happens to find himself on the other end of the radio with a team of ruthless hijackers. John Travolta takes up the other end, as the ruthless hijacker Ryder, a stereotype of pure evil.
But then things got a little more complicated:
... as Garber and Ryder talk, and revelations are made, and they begin to make their confessions to each other, the lines begin to blur. Garber -- who has his own mixed emotions -- isn't all that good, and Ryder -- who believes the city has done him significant wrong -- isn't all that evil.
The director's willingness to think outside the box on good and evil extended to some of the other characters as well. Looking for real life personalities to model Travolta's accomplices on, Scott tells Esquire that he
unearthed a pair of real crazed Albanians who may or may not have spent time in prison ... and eventually they jobbed their way into parts in the actual movie ... "Now they want to be actors," Scott says with a shake of his head, perhaps wondering whether he's saved us from two monsters or created two more.
Overall, the review concludes, Scott really has managed to one-up the original, and his version of Pelham is that "rare popcorn movie in which we're never sure whose side everyone is on or where they might end up."
Posted 05.16.09 by reelz -
The New York Times goes down into the tunnels with the makers of The Taking of Pelham 123 to get some face time with the movie's 400-ton star. Subways have been a hot spot for cinematic terror lately. Witness the truly harrowing train crash sequence in Knowing. Here the train is even more critical to the action and the atmosphere.
In Tony Scott's remake of the 1974 classic hostage thriller, every effort was made to keep it real by filming as much as possible inside the actual New York City subway. "I feel that's always been my m. o. -- it's something about touching the real world," says the director. Not an easy feat in this case, considering that the train system there never sleeps, and shows little deference to star power even for the likes of John Travolta, who plays an angry, neck-tattooed hijacker, or Denzel Washington, who plays a doughy, good-guy train dispatcher. And, of course, they always had to watch out for the third rail.
One scene in Grand Central proved so difficult to film that Scott vows never to shoot at that station again. It hasn't put him off trains, though. The director says he's already begun scouting locations for one of his next projects, which is "about a runaway train hurtling toward a defenseless city with a cargo of toxic chemicals."
Posted 05.07.09 by reelz