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The plays of William Shakespeare can be a little tricky to translate onscreen, and can seem a little too challenging for the average moviegoer. Revered actor Ralph Fiennes may have found a way past that in his directorial debut of Coriolanus.
Based on the life of the famed Roman leader, the movie follows Gaius Marcius Coriolanus (played by Fiennes) as he's banished from Rome, the city he once fought to protect, and strikes an accord with his enemy (Gerard Butler) to bring about the end of Rome.
watch the fantastic trailer >> Posted 08.11.11 by Ryan -
An early promotional trailer has appeared for actress Rachel Weisz's next vehicle The Whistleblower. A politically-charged action movie based on the true-life experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and outed the U.N. for covering up a sex scandal.
Directed by filmmaker Larysa Kondracki, Weisz is joined by Monica Bellucci, Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, David Hewlett and Liam Cunningham.
Red band warning! The trailer contains some language. You can view it here.
Posted 06.01.10 by reelz -
Roland Emmerich is not going to destroy the world … this time. No alien invasion, no ice, no cataclysms at all. No, for his next project the director of Independence Day and 2012 is going to get Shakespearean. The movie, titled Anonymous, aims to dramatize the theory that Shakespeare didn't really write all those classic plays. They were instead, in this version of history, written by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
Shooting is set to begin in March, and he already has, as he puts it, "a true English cast" on board, with Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, David Thewlis as the queen's secretary of state (and master of intrigue) William Cecil, and Rhys Ifans as the Earl Of Oxford.
And the plot, as in many a good Elizabethan drama, is all about the plotting. Emmerich sums up some of the twists and turns in an interview with Empire:
It's a mix of a lot of things: it's an historical thriller because it's about who will succeed Queen Elizabeth and the struggle of the people who want to have a hand in it. It's the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen. Through that story we tell how the plays written by the Earl of Oxford ended up labelled 'William Shakespeare.
Don't worry, though. After he finishes this project, Emmerich is scheduled to return to his roots with an epic sci-fi flick about the collapse of galactic civilization. And he is planning to shoot that movie, Foundation, in motion-capture 3-D, giving him plenty of scope for his old world-destroying tricks.
Posted 02.25.10 by reelz -
It's the 12th century all over again as armor-clad knights ride into battle in the English countryside. Or so it appears from some new photos of the filming of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood in the Daily Mail.
The movie, originally titled Nottingham, has been undergoing extensive script revisions, and has had another significant cast change. Vanessa Redgrave, who had been slated to play Eleanor of Aquitaine, bowed out due to the tragic death of her daughter Natasha Richardson in March.
She has been replaced by Eileen Atkins, who told the Mail that she's had some adjusting to do because of dramatic changes in her lines, and difficulties overcoming a serious bird phobia. This is a bit of a problem because her role requires her to hold, and perhaps feed dead mice to, a large owl.
As for Russell Crowe, who stars as Robin Hood, a producer says:
He doesn't have the old Robin Hood tights. He's got armour. He's very medieval. He looks, if anything, more like he did in Gladiator than anything we're used to seeing with Robin Hood.
Not too surprising a choice given how successful Scott and Crowe were collaborating on that historical epic. And of course they wouldn't want this reinterpretation to be in any way confused with Mel Brooks' satirical take on the genre, Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Posted 05.24.09 by reelz -
At the news of Natasha Richardson's tragic death, tributes poured in from Hollywood and Broadway. Judi Dench described the Tony Award winner as "a really great actress" who had "an incredibly luminous quality, that you seldom see, and a great sense of humor."
Richardson appeared in more than 20 films, but is best known for The Parent Trap, Maid in Manhattan, and Nell, in which she starred alongside her husband Liam Neeson. She first appeared on film at the age of four as a bridesmaid in The Charge of the Light Brigade, which starred her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and was directed by her father, Tony Richardson. In this clip, the actress talks about the joys of working with her mother on 2007's Evening.
Posted 03.19.09 by reelz