Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, double dose of screen captures! Plus HQ Stills for Knight & Day.
Category: Movie News
Brad Bird, who has two Oscars for his Pixar films, is on a mission to make his first live-action blockbuster but, on a recent morning, as he regaled some journalists with behind-the-scenes tales of Hollywood, there was really only one word to describe his raconteur style: animated.
Waving his arms, hunching over and making high-decibel sound effects, the writer-director was a one-man cartoon as he unspooled a story about working on the “Ratatouille†recording sessions with Peter O’Toole. It was a good story but one suspects Bird will walk away from his new project, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,†with far more exotic memories.
The fourth film in the “Mission†franchise, with Tom Cruise back as super-spy Ethan Hunt, opens everywhere on Dec. 21 and, five days before that, it will get a special early run at IMAX and select prestige theaters. It was Bird who pushed hard for that early giant-screen plan — he is, quite literally, thinking big for this key career moment. But don’t think for a minute that he’s sour on his cartoon past.
“I’m not like some animation directors and like, ‘Thank God I’m out of animation and sitting at the adult’s table, I’m tired of sitting at the kid’s table,’†Bird said with a mock, raspy anger. “I have other ideas I’d love to do in animation. My ideal career from here would be to jump back and forth and let the project dictate what medium I work in. To me it’s all storytelling.â€The story this time starts in Russia where the Kremlin is bombed and the blame is put on Hunt and his three IMF teammates (portrayed by Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton), who must embark on a perilous globetrotting mission to get to the true villains. Shooting a Paramount Pictures tentpole in Dubai; Prague, Czech Republic; Moscow; Mumbai, India; and Vancouver, Canada, shows how much ground Bird has covered since his drawing-table days. The 54-year-old Montana native started his career as an animator with early credits like “Animalympics†in 1980 (produced, by the way, by “Tron†writer-director Steven Lisberger) and Disney’s “The Fox and the Hound†a year later.
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Tom Cruise risked life and limb filming action sequences at the top of the world’s tallest building for “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” but he said that wasn’t any scarier than the singing required for his first musical, the just-wrapped “Rock of Ages.”
“They all have their risks,” Cruise said with a laugh of playing rocker Stacee Jaxx in Adam Shankman’s adaptation of the Tony-winning 2006 musical, which featured songs by jukebox heroes such as Bon Jovi, Styx, Journey and Pat Benatar. Among the tunes Cruise belts out in the film: “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
Shankman is coming off the foot-tapping success of “Hairspray,” while Cruise, inspired by his dance-loving wife, Katie Holmes, is taking a true genre gamble even as he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his first screen appearances (“Endless Love” and “Taps” both came out in 1981). The action star said Holmes’ influence is also why he added some memorable dance-floor moves to his Hollywood agent performance in “Tropic Thunder.”
“I had started dancing because I was inspired by my wife. She kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do a musical sometime,’ ” Cruise said. “Kate’s a dancer, so she would say, ‘Let’s go to dance class,’ and she would take us and that’s how I kind of came up with the idea of Les Grossman doing hip-hop. And then to take it to this level with this? It was really fun.”Shankman has said Cruise is a natural and has music in his genes thanks to an opera singer in his family tree. The filmmaker has shown a flair for the unexpected: Shankman pulled a signature performance from John Travolta in his gender-flipped role in “Hairspray.” So perhaps “Rock of Ages” will be one of Cruise’s acclaimed “experiment” roles, such as in “Magnolia,” “Collateral” or the aforementioned “Tropic Thunder” — even if the sight of the bare-chested, long-maned Cruise as Jaxx has already been jeered across the Internet.
The actor said he’s just pumped to be working with Shankman.
“He’s on fire,” Cruise said. “What he accomplished with ‘Hairspray’ was amazing. My daughter has seen it 15 times and our whole family has watched it over and over and it’s just enormously entertaining. To be able to hold that tone throughout is really something.”
The cast of “Rock of Ages” also includes Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and much of the heavy lifting for the shoot was done in South Florida. Cruise said his singing and dancing work there was a different challenge than his “Mission: Impossible” job swinging out windows atop the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, but in some ways more stressful.
“I was working on it when I was finishing ‘Mission’ and I was singing five hours a day and I was dancing five hours a day,” Cruise said. “Adam said, ‘Look, we’re going to have a lot of fun,’ and we really did…. I did six months preparing for the movie, and all my stunt training and all of those years doing that, it helped me with the choreography.”
“Rock of Ages” hits theaters in June.
Source: LA Times
Hey guys, I’ve uploaded some Lions for Lambs imagery: HQ Stills, Caps, Set pictures and Posters. Enjoy!
Hey guys! The full trailer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is out. Screen captures on the gallery
The magazine will be available this thursday, if anyone can scan it, I’d be forever grateful! I don’t get the magazine here
Empireonline.com Exclusive: ‘I’m very sensitive to it.’
There are casting calls so controversial that they look likely to reduce the internet to a smoking wasteland of charred avatars and ashen memes. Michael Keaton as Batman, Daniel Craig as Bond, The Last Airbender… that kind of thing. It’s fair to say that the choice of Tom Cruise to play Lee Child’s towering do-gooder Jack Reacher in One Shot has smoke pouring out of the web again.
With the movie currently filming in Pittsburgh, Empire tracked the man down to ask about the farrago. “Firstly, I’m very sensitive to it,” Cruise explained, revealing that Child came to watch his readings. “This is Lee’s book and Lee’s character. Him giving me his blessing is what made me do it. If he hadn’t then I wouldn’t have done it.”
And what of the discrepancy in height – Cruise giving away more than a few inches to the clock-brained legend? “Lee told me that the reason he wrote him that size (6′ 5″) is because that was just one element to his character, and that opened the door to me playing him.”
As Cruise himself is quick to point out, he’s no stranger to controversial casting. His pick to play Lestat in Neil Jordan’s Interview With The Vampire may have been pre-trolling, but it still caused a stink with fans of Anne Rice’s novel – and, briefly, with the writer herself.
No-one should doubt the actor’s commitment to the role, though. “Reacher is such a great character,” he enthused. “He doesn’t have a cell phone, he doesn’t have email. He’s off the grid. He pays for things in cash. People look at things through the prism of the colours of their life, but Jack Reacher does things the way we want to sometimes. In that sense he’s sort of a Dirty Harry, a James Bond, a Josey Wales.”
Source: Empireonline.com
Hey everyone! Here are some more screen captures, this time, my all-time favorite: Jerry Maguire. Again, I sorta of overdone with captures for this movie too. Can’t help it 😀
And a new rumour/possible movie for Tom “We Are Mortals”, based on a futuristic war manga, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka called “All We Need Is Kill“, which is for sale on Amazon. Huffington Post reports:
Is Tom Cruise mortal?
It’s a legitimate question, given his wrinkle-free face and action star moves as he reaches 50 years of age. He’s featuring this winter in “Mission: Impossible 4,” will star in the violence-galore upcoming Jack Reacher adaptation “One Shot,” and will play a futuristic soldier repairman in “Cloud Atlas.”
The question of Cruise’s mortality will be addressed in a new, manga-inspired way, if all things go as planned, in yet another gun-toting badass role in “We Are Mortals.” Of course, that’s what we heard about Brad Pitt, too.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cruise is in talks to join the Doug Liman-directed “We Are Mortals,” an adaptation of the futuristic Japanese war manga, “All You Need Is Kill.” Cruise would play a soldier who dies in the first day of combat in an intergalactic war, but is brought back to life each day to fight and die once again (and Bill Murray thought he had it bad).
Previously, Vulture had reported that Pitt was in talks for the role, which made sense since Liman directed his 2005 film, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” which not only made a lot of money at the box office, but ended up making a lot of money for tabloids, too.
