In Contention

Tag: Paul Greengrass

  • FRIDAY FORECAST: Lean ‘Zone’

    Matt Damon in Green Zone*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass return to the screen this week with their third collaboration and first outside of the Jason Bourne series. That particular franchise has done wonders for the careers of both men, particularly Greengrass, who won an Oscar nomination for “United 93,” but didn’t exactly see the film break the bank. Damon too, was just recognized by the Academy but had one of his leanest box office years on record with the stuttering “The Informant!” and “Invictus.”

    So here they stand with “Green Zone,” a stylistic twin to their bread and butter series. Universal is doing everything they possibly can to pretend this is just another Bourne film and has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. “The Bourne Supremacy” debuted with $64.4 million en route to a $216.0 million finish. “The Bourne Ultimatum” did even better with a $76.6 million start and $251.6 million total. Compare that to the $14.7 million of “The Hurt Locker.” The best the Iraq War has ever done at the box office is the $52.6 million of “The Kingdom.” The only thing more poisonous at the box office than Iraq is Eddie Murphy. Hey-Oh! I think we’re looking at a subdued $18 million debut here.

    “She’s Out of My League” takes the subtext of every Judd Apatow produced comedy and makes it the whole plot. Ugly funny dude lands a boring hot chick and hopefully we all get a couple chuckles out of it. This is obviously trying to be for Jay Baruchel what “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was for Jason Segal but I’m afraid that film’s $18.8 million debut will be out its league. Double digits will be a good result at this point so I’m saying $10 million.
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  • THE LONG SHOT: Critical condition

    Gabourey Sidibe in PreciousAhead of its U.S. release this week, there is a wave of mild surprise in the blogosphere over the fact that “Precious,” the film deemed by some (yours truly included) to be the present Best Picture frontrunner, is currently sitting on a lowly Metacritic score of 57. Fitting neatly with the largely media-fabricated talk of a backlash against the film, some commenters are citing this rather arbitrary number as a debit against the film’s chances.

    As much as I’d personally like that to believe that — and as relieved as I am to see that I’m not the only person who didn’t respond to the film – such talk will doubtless be short-lived, given the paucity of reviews making up the current score and the likelihood of raves to come. If anything, public support is more crucial than critical consensus to this film’s campaign – if audiences don’t turn up to see this grim, minority-oriented indie, many Academy members won’t feel compelled to either.

    That said, it looks increasingly possible that “Precious” (I refuse to use that lumpy subtitle all season, by the way) could turn out to be a more critically divisive item than might have been expected following an ecstatically received festival run.

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  • Nolan out for third Batman? Who could step in?

    Christopher NolanBill Ramey over at Batman on Film has posted a rather disconcerting report this morning regarding the status of Christopher Nolan’s involvement with a third film in the lucrative Batman franchise.  The info, which is hardly concrete, comes from one of the numerous Bat-related sources Ramey has acquired over 12 years of focusing his site on the development of these films.

    Ramey hedges his bets and writes what we all know, that “it is far from a given” that Nolan will return for another go.  But he offers a few bullet-pointed reasons from his source that certainly make a lot of sense.  Among them, says Ramey’s guy, “the death of Heath Ledger rocked Mr. Nolan hard,” and the project is back to square one with a virtually non-existent story due to the initial planned inclusion of the Joker in the third film.

    It has been reported that Warner Bros. has a shortlist of preferred directors to step in should Nolan decide to walk away from the director’s chair.  The studio is going forward on this whether he is or not, we can all be sure of that.  “Watchmen” director Zack Snyder was one of those names, but Snyder’s people told Ramey he has no interest in tackling the project (thank God).  But if not Nolan, then who?

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  • Oscar watch 2009: Paul Greengrass talks ‘Green Zone’

    Matt Damon in Green ZoneIt’s no secret that Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” is one of my most anticipated films of 2009.  Part of a slew of Universal product that could find itself in the running for Oscar this time next year, the film is a loose adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s best-selling “Imperial Life in the Emarald City” and hopes to break the recent streak of popularly challenged dramas reflecting the conflict in Iraq.

    L.A. Times journo John Horn has filed a brief but interesting back-and-forth with Greengrass about the production, which has been in the editing lab for nearly a year because of the amount of footage the director has shot on location around the globe.  Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear and Amy Ryan, “Green Zone” might just be the film to bring audiences into the cinematic Iraq War discussion — or maybe it won’t.

    I’m also looking forward to Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” this year, which grabbed major raves in Toronto last September.  Here’s a bit from Horn’s piece:

    “It is not a movie about Iraq,” Greengrass said on the London set of his film last spring. “The hope is to make a strong, contemporary thriller that is set in Iraq. Thrillers thrive on extremity, and there is no more extreme environment than immediate post-invasion Baghdad,” he said. (Indeed, the cinematographer’s slate used during production titled the film not “Green Zone” but “Green Zone Thriller.”)

    The film follows Roy Miller (Damon), a warrant officer leading a team of 18 Army soldiers searching for weapons of mass destruction in late 2003, just after the American-led invasion.

    Instead of a cache of deadly chemicals, though, Miller’s team finds disorganization and ineptitude, and Miller soon grows desperate.

    “It’s a race against time to find those weapons,” the 53-year-old British filmmaker says. “It’s a race against time to catch Saddam Hussein. It’s a race against time to establish essential services. And it’s a race against time to win the confidence of the Iraqi people.”

    Check out the rest here.

  • Greengrass isn’t up for ‘Chicago 7’ after all

    Well that’s a bummer. It turns out the “timing didn’t work out” for director Paul Greengrass on the DreamWorks film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” The director has confirmed as much with CHUD’s Devin Faraci.

    We can dream, I suppose…

  • Is Paul Greengrass taking up the reins of ‘Chicago 7?’

    Paul GreengrassFilmmaker Paul Greengrass has been drawn to the sphere of politics since day one in his career as a filmmaker. He launched into the fray with 2002’s blisteringly realistic “Bloddy Sunday” (an account of the Derry massacre of 1972) and followed it up with a “Bourne” installment, putting his unique knowledge of covert military operations to use.

    2005’s “United 93” was a tightrope walk that managed to land him a Best Director nomination, while 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum” was easily one of the best films of last year. He has been a director on an upward curve, settling quite comfortably in his role as an artist to watch, if not the artist to watch.

    One of my most anticipated productions of 2009 is Greengrass’s “Green Zone,” an adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” that could be a hell of a windfall for the Iraq stalemate when it finds its way to screen. Matt Damon will star and Greengrass will have yet another stage for his brand of cinema.

    Finally, though I’m excited for the visual splendor and dedication to source material of Zack Snyder’s upcoming “Watchmen,” I think we all would have been interested in Greengrass’s spin on the material had it come to fruition when the project was at Paramount Pictures a few years ago. The “‘Citizen Kane’ of comic books” certainly knows from the beast of politics.

    Now word is circulating that the director may be attached to direct DreamWorks SKG’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” a film originally stuck in Steven Spielberg’s ever-rotating wheel house of ideas. If it’s true, count this viewer excited.

    Here’s what Neil Miller of Film School Rejects has uncovered:

    Then this evening, out of almost pure chance, I was skimming through the pages of Production Weekly, checkout which productions are currently in active development when I ran across an updated listing the The Trial of the Chicago 7. After cross checking some other participants, including writer Aaron Sorkin and Producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, I deduced that this was the same production. The only odd part was that instead of listing Steven Spielberg or no director at all, the production listed a different director: Paul Greengrass.

    Well…that’s a development, to say the least.

    Greengrass has shown in all the aforementioned films an adeptness to the even keel when dealing in hot button issues of war and policy. He spends a considerable amount of time focusing on character rather than the situation.

    I remember interviewing Kevin Macdonald in early 2006 about his then upcoming “The Last King of Scotland,” and he made it a point of mentioning that he was more interested in the way politics affects the individual, rather than the statement of the politics themselves. I think that characteristic is applicable to Greengrass’s work ethic as well.

    So count me in on this one.  I’ve never seen Brett Morgan’s “Chicago 10” documentary, but I’ve always thought this story could be a hell of a showcase in narrative form on screen.  Greengrass would be a great fit.

  • SHORT TAKE: “United 93” (***)

    Universal Pictures\' United 93I finally got around to seeing the first 9/11 theatrical release earlier this week, Universal’s “United 93,” and the feelings it digs up, the questions it actually asks without hitting us over the head, and the overall commitment to ultra-reality that director Paul Greengrass is proving himself to be the master of, will all make it a unique entry in the coming wave of films rooted in that horrific day.

    The film’s best moments reside in the mass confusion of Cleveland, Boston, and New York air traffic control centers, making it clear that orders and procedures failed miserably in the wake of an event that had not occured in 20 years – the hijacking of a domestic flight. It actually makes the blood boil to watch the clock tick as people second and third guess. In fact, one of the things “United 93” does so well is expand the timeline of all four crashes in our minds. To most, 9/11 was a quick moment. We discovered a plane had hit one of the towers – 15 minutes later, another plane, and within the next hour, we learned of the next two planes. It was all fleeting. But a lot was going on in that space of 60 minutes, and some of it can be downright infuriating – and it all makes those extra seven minutes he spent looking around a classroom like a lost kid seem all the more painstaking.

    I love that Greengrass fills his frame largely with the actual individuals in these scenes, rather than casting them with known or even unknown actors. The effect is kind of staggering, and when you get right down to it, the best possible decision. The decision to choose his moments on the actual flight 93 wisely, keeping most of the action in the control rooms, was also wise, steering clear of presuming too much about events we’ll never fully know.

    I don’t want to get into a full review here, and I want to see the film again before really forming an opinion. The sense I take from “United 93,” however, is less about the film’s subject matter than it is about the director’s talents. If Michael Mann is a director that glamorizes ultra-reality, Greengrass is a director who utilizes it like a tool in his arsenal. It’s a commanding sort of helming that seems to almost recall the notion of autuerism.