Screenhead

January Jones will be starting with Nicolas Cage in the thriller The Hungry Rabbit Jumps. Jones is known for her on AMC’s Mad Men.

Rabbit is schedule to start shooting around the beginning of December.

The film follows a man (Cage) who, after a crime is perpetrated on his wife, gets more than he bargained for when he enlists a vigilante group to help him settle the score. Jones will play the wife.

Reportedly, Jones’ role is very meaty and active.   

Roger Donaldson is attached to direct from Robert Tanen’s script.

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In anticipation of this week’s horrific release of Saw VI, Screenhead wanted to give you one last spook before you hit theaters this Friday with a very special Halloween Exclusive Sneak-Peek of Lionsgate’s upcoming thriller, Season of the Witchwhich moments just premiered on IGN!  The sneak-peek is short — but you’ll get creeped-out.

Starring Nicholas Cage, Season of the Witch comes to theaters March 19, 2010! 

Here is the low down of the movie, which looks pretty creepy: 

In the supernatural thriller Season of the Witch, Nicolas Cage stars as a 14th century Crusader who returns with his comrade (Ron Perlman) to a homeland devastated by the Black Plague. A beleaguered church, deeming sorcery the culprit of the plague, commands the two knights to transport an accused witch (Claire Foy) to a remote abbey, where monks will perform a ritual in hopes of ending the epidemic disease.

A priest (Stephen Campbell Moore), a grieving knight (Ulrich Thomsen), an nomadic swindler (Stephen Graham) and a headstrong youth who can only dream of becoming a knight (Robert Sheehan) join a mission troubled by mythically hostile wilderness and fierce contention over the fate of the girl. 

When the embattled party arrives at the abbey, a horrific discovery jeopardizes the knight’s pledge to ensure the girl fair treatment, and matches them against an mysteriously powerful and destructive force.

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So I announce my Barney and Friends winners, which is all light and fluffy, and then BANG! BANG!  Two new posters for Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendez  arrive at my door step.  Cage and Mendes look so serious. Being a bad cop is no fun.  Yet, I hear that Cage is hilarious in the movie as well. Of course, there’s violence, guns, sex and drugs. Something Barney would never approach with the kiddies.

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Nicolas Cage cut himself loose from The Green Hornet. 

Last July before Comic-con 2009 we mentioned Cage was to play the villain in Columbia’s action movie, being directed by Michel Gondry.  THR reports the actor and the studio never came to terms on a deal.

The report makes sense because Cage is set to star in two movies back to back: The Hungry Rabbit Jumps and Drive Angry.  I couldn’t fathom how he was going to fit the Hornet in the production schedule.

Principal photograph of the Hornetbegan last week with Seth Rogen, Cameron Diaz and Jay Chou on the set in Los Angeles.

(Source)

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It’s too early to tell yet if Nicolas Cage will star in The Green Hornet, but Columbia Pictures is negotiating with Nicolas Cage to play the gangster villain.  Cage can do this part.  I’ve always seen him as a villain since his Oscar winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas.  Plus, some of you may know that we will see Cage’s wicked streak in The Bad Lieutenant, which finished shooting and is now in post-production.

Not only is Cage negotiating with the studio but Cameron Diaz is also negotiating to play a reporter and love interest in the Michel Gondry-directed movie that stars Seth Rogen as the masked crime fighter.  I am still not comfortable with Rogen, but that could change as I see more of the movie.

Speaking of seeing more of the movie, production is at full throttle with a fall start date, even though the studio still needs to replace Stephen Chow, Green Hornet’s sidekick Kato.

(Source)

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Nicolas Cage is at his best bad playing a drug addict and takes sexual favors for bribes.  Werner Herzog created a monster of a movie that makes me cringe, knowing that cops can get this bad.

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Sultry Italian actress Monica Bellucci has joined the cast of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Productions.

The film tells the story of a sorcerer who recruits and trains a young protégé to help him fight the forces of darkness in Manhattan.

Bellucci is set to play a sorceress and long-lost love of Nicolas Cage’s character. Other cast members include Jay Baruchel, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer and Toby Kebbell.

Shooting is currently underway in New York City. Jon Turteltaub is directing.

Popularity: unranked [?]

What is it with Nic Cage and precognition?

Seriously, the last movie I caught him in was that movie Next, where he could predict the future up to a couple minutes in advance, now he’s got the capacity to predict farther out.  More on that in a minute, I just wanted to get that point in there that Nic Cage and suspense movies about precognition seem to go together like beans and rice, or failing that, chocolate and peanut butter.

Anyway, this time Nic’s back in the precog department with Knowing, only this time, he’s got a roadmap of the future written by a clearly insane ten year old girl.  At least I think she’s ten—it’s not like I got a copy of her birth certificate.  Said road map is put into a time capsule as part of a school building’s grand opening and sunk into the ground for the next fifty years.  Fifty years later, Nic’s kid gets a hold of the road map, which is basically just a series of numbers.  How handy that Nic’s playing an astrophysics professor at MIT!

When Nic finally puts his huge analytical MIT brain to work, he discovers that the series of numbers on the page essentially tell the future, in unsettling detail.  As he works to uncover the secrets behind the numbers, he’ll learn a whole lot of OTHER unsettling details until the final unsettling ending.  This ending, sadly, I absolutely cannot tell you about because it will be a MONSTER spoiler.

Basically, the first two hours or so of Knowing are a series of really, really awesome moments, one right after the next, and you’ll spend a good chunk of the movie with your jaw dropped.  Let me put it this way—there’s this one truly spectacular scene with an airliner that just GOT me.  I was downright amazed—the last time I’d seen anything this eye-popping with an airplane was one of the last scenes in Pulse.

Even the plot holes are so cool that you’ll slide right over them—for instance, watch for Nic’s cell phone to spend a lot of time unable to get a signal, until his son calls him from a landline phone, and then suddenly, not a pop or a hiss.  I didn’t even catch that one until about five minutes AFTER the movie ended.  It was just that cool.

However, the ending, which contains massive twists, isn’t exactly the greatest thing since sliced bread.  While I understand, from a narrative perspective, that they really didn’t have a fat lot of choice BUT to do what they did, it still left a whole lot of unanswered questions that didn’t sit well with me.  And it was sad to have to go out on that note—for crying out loud, this was an AWESOME movie.  For the first two hours my mind was BLOWN.  But then, they hit the ending, and suddenly it all just falls apart by a sequence that seems almost tacked on.

In the immortal words of Mr. Horse, no sir, I didn’t like it.

But still, considering the sheer ratio of good to suck in this movie, and further considering that the suck was of the most minor sort to begin with, it’s still hard to do anything but recommend this movie.  You really ought to get a thrill out of Knowing, especially if you’re a science wonk.

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With so many great movies to watch today, it is hard to determine which film will be dominant and worthy. But if numbers are to be the base “Knowing”, starring Nicolas Cage, has been doing well and has racked in an estimated $24.8 million in 3,332 theaters–the widest release of the new movies as well as having the largest per-theater average of the Top 10.

This is quite eye-popping considering not many people gave this film a chance to make great strides. But then again we have seen other surprises from movies that suddenly crash into the limelight. Besides, Nicolas Cage is a great actor that will always have a following and most of his films have done fairly well in the movie industry.

Plot:

A single father and chairman of his town’s historical society is summoned when a time capsule buried behind an elementary school in 1958 is prematurely unearthed because of a water-main break. The man, whose son attends the school, sifts through the contents and finds drawings of what 1958 tykes predicted the modern world would be like. It’s all flying cars and fantasy stuff, with the exception of one chilling entry. One child predicted some of the most horrible events in recent history, and there’s one that hasn’t yet occurred, which the man attempts to prevent.

(Source) Comingsoon.net

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Teresa Palmer will take on the lead in Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which also stars Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel. Palmer is playing Baruchel’s love interest.

According to Hollywood Reporter the story is similar to the classic Goethe and Paul Duka story which inspired the Mickey Mouse portion of Fantasia.

The new version will be a live-action feature centering on an apprentice (Baruchel) as he is left to tend to a magic workshop when his sorcerer master (Cage) leaves it in his hands. The apprentice gets a broomstick to do his chores for him, but things get out of control when the broom develops a mind of its own.

Jon Turteltaub is directing while Jerry Bruckheimer is producing.

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