Gerard Butler, star of RockNRolla and Law Abiding Citizen is in discussions to star in Slide, a movie based on Little League baseball with the idea it will be reworked into a film about soccer.  Doesn’t this sound on the surface like Kicking & Screaming, the Will Ferrell vehicle from a few years back?  It does when you hear that Butler would be a coach (ala Ferrell) with a questionable past and is a, as 24Frames tells it:

character comedy that centers on a troubled father trying to make up for lost time by coaching his son’s team — but who finds himself in hot water after some of the local mothers take a little too much of a shine to him (and he to them).

Now, I never saw Ferrell’s comedy, but this sounds awfully familiar.  Whereas the original concept would have been akin to Bad News Bears.

Soccer films don’t have a great box office rep, but one would think if done well, there is always hope, as soccer is the biggest youth sport in America, by far (if I recall).  Butler on the other hand, really hasn’t shown he can be a box office force, though many of his films have at least seen respectable results (often in part due to the co-star).  If Butler were to rock the Lion-O mane like in the header picture, it might be more interesting.

Gabrielle Muccino, the Will Smith-led Pursuit of Happyness director, is interested in helming.  This would lead one to believe perhaps it wouldn’t be such a funny film.

Not sure what to make of all this, it is still in the development stages with nothing locked down, so if it happens, I’ll let you know and we can evaluate it further.

The man with many defenders (see his latest casting announcement), Gerard Butler, has lined up another project for himself, written by one Bill Shakespeare, titled Coriolanus.

The film marks the directorial debut of Ralph Fiennes, who will play the lead character, Roman leader Gaius Marius Coriolanus. Butler will star opposite him as Tullus Aufidius, commander of the Volscian army. The cast also currently includes William Hurt, Eddie Marsan, Jessica Chastain and Vanessa’s Red grave. The script was written by John Logan (Gladiator), which “The Hollywood Reporter” describes as “a contemporary version of Shakespeare’s Rome-set political and family drama.”

At the risk of being deemed an uncultured swine, I must state that I hate Shakespeare. I can’t get through it. I can’t comprehend it. Some people love and admire the style, but I subscribe to the immortal words of Jay-Z: “If you can’t understand him, it don’t mean that he’s nice/It just means you don’t understand all the bullsh*t that he writes.” The one time I’d ever been resigned to using Cliffs Notes was for Shakespeare (the other times I was forced to read him, I just didn’t care). Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet used Shakespearean language, but I admired it mainly because of its visual style. Sadly, for me, I’d need at least somewhat modern English to get behind this. I don’t know exactly if that’s what “a contemporary version” entails. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on Shakespeare pro or con. I’m willing to listen.

Gerard Butler is just one of those guys right now.  It seems that Hollywood is giving him every possible opportunity it can to make him into a star.  While he ate up roles in movies like Guy Ritchie’s underrated RockNRolla and the just released revenge-thriller Law Abiding Citizen, he also made headlines for doing The Ugly Truth with Katherine Heigl and perhaps doing the nasty with Jennifer Aniston.  His movies haven’t really been hits though (see Gamer) since the effects-laden extravaganza 300, for which Butler has apparently been given too much credit for it’s success.  Nevertheless, Gerard continues to have films in the pipeline, the latest seems to be a project called Slide.  He describes it to Film School Rejects:

“There’s a few different projects that we’ve been working on, but there’s one in particular – it’s a movie called Slide about a former baseball player who goes back to try and patch things up with his child and estranged wife and ends up coaching the kid’s baseball team,” Butler said. “He becomes the subject of fascination and longer by every bored house wife in the town. And it’s him trying to survive that while trying to patch things up with his kid. I think we’re going to have Gabriele Muccino direct the movie. Hopefully. We’re in talks with him, and he’s very much up for directing it so we’ll what happens there.”

This sounds like an intriguing enough project.  It seems to have hints of TV’s “Eastbound & Down”.  Muccino has been hit/miss so far at the box office with Seven Pounds flopping but The Pursuit of Happyness hitting a home run.  Both of those films starred the biggest box office star on the planet in Will Smith. While I like Butler, he’s no Smith, so the success of Slide, if it happens, is far from a given.  This news drops on the eve of the World Series (who you with, Phils or Yanks?), so the timing is at least apropos.  What are your thoughts on Butler and Slide?  Hit us one time.  BAM!!

Director F. Gary Gray, with all of his mustered machismo brutality and combustible set pieces, is back and he has the judicial system in his sights with Law Abiding Citizen. Swooping flyover shots of the William Penn bronze statue sitting atop Philadelphia’s City Hall are filmed with a seemingly discerning eye while judges and prosecutors alike are depicted as flamboyantly assertive and dishonest.

This is an oppressive film, with its industrial color palette, clanging shackles and flood of legal terminology. If you could smell a film, Law Abiding Citizen would smell like a musty wrought-iron fence. But wait until the slimy politicians and self-preserving district attorneys start roaming the halls of steel-caged thugs who aren’t any more animalistic and unlawful than the prosecutors who put them there. As they speak, you can even see their corruptness and indecency through the cold, wintry air – that is until they receive a new inmate, Clyde Shelton.

Clyde (Gerard Butler) is a father and a husband who is the victim of a random break-in, which brings about the death of his wife and daughter at the hands of two brutes. The prosecutor in this case, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), in an effort to guarantee a conviction, makes a deal with one of the two murderers who is now a cooperating witness and will testify in court against the other. So we have two murderers – one gets the death penalty, one gets off in three years.

The police escort Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) to a squad car, just a minor step in Clyde's grand scheme.

Outside the courthouse, in front of a sea of photographers, Nick shakes the witness’ hand in the view of a sheepish and bewildered Clyde, who has just witnessed the injustice of the legal system first-hand. The fact that Nick was unwilling to go to court and get a conviction for both men because of insubstantial evidence, despite it being the absolute truth, makes it all the more difficult for Clyde to swallow. Fast-forwarding ten years, the film quickly becomes an amoral revenge-kick before switching gears completely (to its credit) into a somewhat rational undressing of the American judicial system through the mind games of the now imprisoned, yet still mystifyingly dangerous, Clyde Shelton. “I’ll bring the whole system down on your head”, he says to the wide-eyed and frustrated Nick, “it’s gonna be biblical.”

The fundamental problem with “Citizen” is that it’s a film that wants to toe the morality line and do it under the guise of a slick package, but it simply doesn’t have what it takes under the hood. Our two protagonists are given bland, lifeless dialogue to just throw back-and-forth while the filmmaking is far too routine to overcome the lack of viable substance and certainty. Compounding matters are the surprisingly flat and underwhelming performances of not only the supporting cast but also the two main stars.

Cell phones are actually really dangerous in this movie. They can be used to make deals with criminals and apparently be rigged to...you know.

Gerard Butler (300, The Ugly Truth) is just plainly miscast here as an unbelievable portrait of a grieving father/husband-turned-vigilante. He’s too rough and prickly with his lisp and toned-physique – the fact that I never bought him as this “wounded soul” could not be compensated for by button-down shirts and raincoats, much to the filmmakers’ surprise. Jamie Foxx, on the other hand, looks like he needed a warm cup of coffee to the face. Supporting players and familiar faces like Colm Meaney and Bruce McGill are almost too ideal for their roles while female counterparts like Leslie Bibb (Iron Man) as an understudy lawyer to the district attorney and Viola Davis (Doubt) as the no-nonsense Mayor are hopelessly derivative.

I do appreciate what the film is trying to do here, but it’s often too non-committal, meandering and preposterous. When Clyde’s secret, or rather how he does what he does, is revealed, it’s both a letdown and a shot to the film’s already crumbling credibility. When it’s over, we get the feeling that Clyde’s goal could have been obtained through simpler means and spared us the lecture.

One of the most popular styles of film has been, and will always be, the revenge movie. When these films are done right, they can elicit an emotional response from the audience that few films can match. There have been countless movies made on the subject to date.  The most widely acknowledged film in the revenge sub genre of action films would have to be the 1974 film, Death Wish. The film starred movie tough guy Charles Bronson (not to confused with the Charles Bronson of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film) as a man who seeks revenge for the murder of his wife and assault of his young daughter.

From the looks of these released stills, you could deduce two things...

In the past couple years there have been many revenge movies released such as Tarantino’s Kill Bill, The Brave One starring Jodie Foster, and Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon (this film was based on the follow up novel to “Death Wish”).  The revenge movie however has become a cliché, so when I heard about director F. Gary Gray’s new film Law Abiding Citizen, I was less than enthused about the film. That was my reaction prior to seeing the film’s trailer, now I am eagerly awaiting Citizen’s release.

Law Abiding Citizen tells the story of Clyde Shelton, played by Gerard Butler (300) whose wife and daughter are killed by two men after their home was broken into. After the men are captured, one is put on death row while the other makes a deal with the District attorney’s office, to avoid the charges. Shelton can’t fathom that the men responsible are getting off so easy, and seeks revenge not only on his family’s killers, but also on the entire justice system that let this occur. Clyde is captured soon, but the DA who got the killers off, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx, Ray), comes to realize that prison isn’t going to stop Shelton from getting his revenge on those responsible. Nick is the only one who can stop Clyde before he kills again.

The film is directed by F. Gary Gray, who hasn’t directed since 2005’s Be Cool, but he looks to be coming back in fine form with Citizen. The cast for this one includes Butler and Foxx as I already mentioned, but the supporting players include Regina Hall (Scary Movie), Colm Meaney (Intermission), Leslie Bibb (Iron Man) and Michael Gambon (the Harry Potter films).

1: Gerard Butler is hardly in the film. 2: A lot of action takes place off screen. Hopefully neither is the case.

Law looks to be a very tense action thriller that will please fans of smart action films. The cast is great and the twist for the film, I can tell will be a doozy. In the film’s trailer it’s revealed that Butler’s character is not the ordinary man he appears to be, but a Jason Bourne type government agent. This plot point alone, as well as the thought of one man righting the wrongs of our legal system is all I need to know. I’m in. I can only hope I’m not disappointed with the execution, as everything else looks to be on the right track.

Law Abiding Citizen opens October 16th

In the last few years, the popularity of online gaming has soared to new heights. Games like “World of Warcraft” and “The Sims” have begun taking up many Americans free time. In these games, you are transported to another world, where you are in control of a character of your creation and with that control you can act out all of your wishes with the push of a button.

This concept is taken to the next level in the new film Gamer, directed by the same team behind the Crank series, which starred Jason Statham, Neveldine and Taylor. The film is set in a future where online gaming has reached a record amount of players, as well as unparalleled realism. What can be more realistic than controlling actual people?  You see, in the world of Gamer the public has become enamored with a new game called “Slayers,” the creation of genius designer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), in which death row inmates are controlled by players at home and pitted against one another in a massive fight to the death – for the entire world to see. The prisoners that are placed in the game are promised that if they can survive thirty sessions they will be given a full pardon and then, released.

"Do you know how hard it is to concentrate on the road with you yelling in my face?"

No single inmate has ever reached the lofty goal of surviving thirty missions but, “Slayers” biggest star Kable, is the closest with 27. Kable (Gerard Butler), is described as the perfect soldier and if he can survive the next few missions, while under the control of 17 year old Simon, he can get his freedom back and rejoin his wife. Kable’s wife Angie (Amber Valletta), is also going through her own mind control nightmare. After losing custody of their daughter (however, we are never told why this has occurred), she finds herself working as an “actor” in Castles’ first hit game, “Society.” Society is a Sims-like game, where the players are controlling real life humans. And the human controlling her is a particularly perverted guy, who has her wearing and doing, increasingly degrading things.

Add to all this a group called the “Humanz,” a rag tag group of rebels led by Brother (Ludacris) who are fighting to bring down Castle’s whole mind control empire, and you have a film that includes many elements we’ve seen used more effectively, in much better films. With the film being made by the duo behind the Crank films, we know we are in for a wild ride, but Gamer, for all its action, blood, and nudity, is clearly lacking what the Crank series offered in spades, a sense of fun. The lead performance by Butler is rather one note, he scowls and kills, but we never find out much more than that. Gerard Butler does his best with what he has to work with, and in the end he comes out with the film’s most solid performance.

Don't worry Kable - a geeky, unarmed kid has your back.

The same cannot be said about Michael C. Hall as Ken Castle, the film’s villain. He plays Castle as a semi-redneck who becomes an instant billionaire after creating these new forms of entertainment. With his southern accent and over the top acting, I couldn’t believe for a second that he ever created such a complex piece of entertainment. Hillbillies in most cases are not technological geniuses.

The supporting cast is made up of Kyra Sedgewick (TV’s “The Closer”), playing an investigative journalist trying to get the story behind what makes Castle tick. Also in the film is Alison Lohman (Drag Me to Hell), as a member of the “Humanz,” and it seems her role is to merely provide the audience with what is happening with the plot, so we don’t have to even think about what’s happening on screen. “Look, boobs and explosions!” is all we need to think about, I guess.

The film is shot with hand-held cameras (same as the Crank films), and in Gamer, the same “million cuts per second” are used as well. This film being of the action variety offers plenty of said action, as long as you don’t get sick from staring at the screen, trying to decipher who is blowing up whom.  The action actually takes a backseat to the story in the second half, but the characters are painted so thinly that I lost any real interest in who wins or loses by then anyway. We all have seen this type of movie enough times to know how it all will end.  Directors Neveldine and Taylor haven’t showed us anything we haven’t seen before here, but if you are seeing Gamer I’m sure you are well aware of the type of film you are getting yourself into anyway. As I said in our preview of the film, the production values and star power of Gerard Butler are the only reasons this film made it to theaters. Otherwise, Gamer would be sitting on the direct-to-DVD shelf. In other words, I found Gamer to be, well…played out.

Written by “The Film Nest” writer, Rob R. (Raging Rob in the Comments section).

Late summer is usually a dumping ground for the movies deemed unworthy to stand next to the bigger blockbusters. Movies like Gamer are released at the end of summer by the studios to try and squeeze a few more dollars out of rabid summer movie fans. Gamer is the latest film in the vein of The Running Man, The Condemned and Death Race. All of these films revolve around wrongly imprisoned men, fighting for their lives in a game show watched by millions. Gamer looks to follow this basic plot pretty well.

Gamer, which has went through several title revisions (first “Game” then “Citizen Game”), is set in a futuristic world where mind control is now possible. Mind control apparently lends itself very well to gaming because the online game, “Slayers” is a phenomenon, (think “American Idol” with guns). “Slayers” is the creation of  genius Ken Castle, (the great Michael C. Hall – TV’s “Dexter”) in which death row inmates are controlled by at-home players in a fight to the death, against others from around the world. If any of the death row inmates can achieve 30 wins they are given their freedom. Gerard Butler (300) stars as Kable, the games most popular warrior who also holds the most victories in “Slayers” history (27). Butler’s character is being controlled by Simon, a gamer who has become a star in his own right because of his ability to win. Kable has been kidnapped and taken from his wife and daughter. Against his will, he is forced to fight in the deadly game in hopes of one day winning his freedom, and in the process bringing an end to Castle’s twisted blood sport.

Cool guys don't look at explosions.

Gamer is written and directed by the team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the same guys behind both Crank films. As the box office performance of their last film, Crank 2: High Voltage was very poor, I don’t think we will be seeing any further Crank movies, unless they are of the direct to video variety.  Gamer has a cast that includes: Alison Lohman (Drag Me To Hell), Kyra Sedgwick (TV’s “The Closer”), John Leguizamo (Ice Age:Dawn of the Dinosaurs), and rapper turned actor Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges (aka “Mr. Phat Rabbit” – do your homework!).

While Gamer boasts a unique mix of actors, I’m not sure that the film will find  financial or critical success. The directing team of Neveldine/Taylor really need this film to do well, as I fear if it doesn’t succeed their chances of getting in the director’s chair behind bigger projects may soon disappear. As for action fans, I’m sure this will have just what they want to see in their summer movies. The film’s trailer features dozens of explosions and firefights which are sure to please fans of this genre. The trailer also features the Marilyn Manson cover of “Sweet Dreams” and I’m sure that the rest of the soundtrack is filled with many similar rock tracks to accompany the destruction on screen.

"THIS...IS...SPARTA!!" Oops, wrong movie.

For me, this looks very “been there, seen that.” Hopefully, there is a little more under the surface to save this from the rehashed plot and straight-to-video vibe Gamer is giving me.

You can play Gamer on theater screens starting September 4^th.

This is weird, there is an augmented reality poster for Gerard Butler’s upcoming film Gamer, brought to us by Lionsgate.  (We will be bringing you our preview for the film in the coming weeks).  This is unlike the Motion Poster for the film which we gave you a while back.  I have never seen anything like this.  You can see the video below which gives a demonstration of the process (make sure you have the sound on to get an idea of what it does), but you can also experience it for yourself by clicking here at IGN.  You’ll want to read all the way to the bottom for instructions on how to do it.  I have never seen technology like this used in this fashion, and while many will comment on what a gimmick it appears to be, it is undoubtedly very interesting 3-D technology.  For those that try it, please share your experiences with us in the comments section.  I am curious to know what you think.  Enjoy!

The Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx led Law Abiding Citizen from director F.Gary Gray (Friday) is rounding into form for it’s 2010 release.  I am kind of feeling the plot from the film’s IMDB page:

An everyday guy decides to take justice into his own hands after a plea bargain sets his family’s killers free. His target: The district attorney who orchestrated the deal.

It almost sounds like it has elements of one of the 10 Movies “The ‘Hood” Loves The Most, New Jack City, in it or at least aspects of HBO’s “The Wire” mixed in.  Gray released the following statement via twitter keeping us abreast of his progress:

Hey Tweeps! I’ve been really busy editing “Law Abiding Citizen”. Hitting deadlines, cutting music, sound FX etc.

This has kind of been an under the radar film, but with a cast that includes two big names as well as screenplay credits from David Ayer (Training Day) and Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), this one should have a considerably raised profile by the time it is drops next year on March 26th, coincidentally the month where Butler had so much success in 300 a few years back.  FYI, I’ve included two posters below, not sure which is current at this point.

Just doing our part to push things along and keep you informed with the latest.  Of course, for all you tweet heads, you can now follow us on twitter (just click on the sidebar to join or follow the link above) to stay informed with us in new ways as well.