'Red Lights' Trailer Explores More Paranormal Activity

We saw Matt Damon play a real psychic in Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, now we see the opposite side of the spectrum with Red Lights.  Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy star as a psychologist and her assistant who study the paranormal, specifically investigating individuals with genuine psychic abilities as opposed to those who are frauds.  When Robert De Niro comes into a play as world renowed psychic, Murphy's character, despite the pleas from his boss not to, plans to uncover the truth about this man.

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"A World Away From Everything You Know"... A New Trailer for 'Retreat'

On Friday, GTBP newcomer Jeremy Wynia discussed an upcoming thriller starring Cillian Murphy, the lovely Thandie Newton, and Jamie Bell called Retreat, and I gotta say I'm wicked impressed with the film's first trailer.  In this intense looking story, Newton and Murphy (pictured below) play a troubled young couple, Kate and Martin who are visiting an island retreat to escape from the rat race of everyday life, far removed from the drama of the outside world.  A mysterious and badly injured man (Bell) is washed up on shore and convinces the couple that a killer airborne virus is wreaking havoc in Europe and no one is safe. 

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Jamie Bell Shows Off His Dark Side In 'Retreat'

Anyone who does any reading on storytelling is going to see a variation on the phrase “There are no more original stories to tell,” over and over again, especially the more you narrow the story down to its core.  It’s not the story, but the way the story is told that has to be original nowadays.

Retreat very loosely follows the ‘new guy in town’ model (when boiled down), and there is no shortage of tales on this subject to say the least.  This particular tale is going to rely on the strength and vision of first-time writer/director Carl Tibbetts, and the casting that has been shuffled around and ultimately put together to include Cillian Murphy, Thandie Newton, and Jamie Bell.

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Cillian Murphy The Latest To Join Niccol's 'I.m'mortal'

I don't know why Cillian Murphy's not a bigger deal. He's memorable in everything and he usually bring something to a role that you don't expect. And even though he's been in some big films, he's not on a first-name basis with audiences.

Does he not want a franchise of his own or is it just the breaks? He'll get another attempt - again in a supporting role - to break through with mainstream audiences, according to Heat Vision. Murphy is in talks to join Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake in Andrew Niccol's I'm.mortal. Niccol definitely knows his sci-fi, and there's likely no more bankable young star at the moment than Seyfried, who has turned a few movies with very low expectations into surprising hits. Timberlake has not found the key to the box office, but he's generally pretty good. So there's a lot of upside to this project, if you ask me.

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Movie Review - 'Inception'

Inception Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Marion Cotillard Directed by Christopher Nolan Rated PG-13

There is almost always something new to dissect and digest in each scene of Christopher Nolan's Inception, a film made with so much bravura that it's hard to dismiss any part of it. A near-perfect heist movie, a near-perfect sci-fi movie, and a near perfect film noir, it is the work of an absolute clinician in total control. The only drawback is that watching Inception means consciously watching Christopher Nolan work, and he may have been such a perfectionist that he drains out of this a little of the joy of watching the movies. Anne Thompson, the great film journalist at IndieWire, compared Nolan's latest to Stanley Kubrick, and that's partially true. The tone of the film, the high-wire act the filmmaker walks knowing that there's nearly as much risk of failure as chance for staggering success, is reminiscent of Kubrick. And, in fact, Inception has some of the fingerprints of Kubrick's The Killing on its most basic structure. However, a comparison of what Nolan is attempting to do to anyone, even a great filmmaker like Kubrick, isn't fair to what is one of the most technically accomplished films you'll ever see. Original storytelling, original stuntwork, and original visual effects add up to a disorienting experience, and yet, Nolan takes great pains in making the plot, its characters, and its unique world make perfect sense throughout, although it still requires a massive amount of explanation, so complex is Nolan's story. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) wants nothing more than to get home to his children. He's half a world away, constantly working, waiting for the day when he can finally return. He's offered one last job by a powerful client named Saito (Ken Watanabe). Cobb is a thief of sorts. He breaks into people's minds and steals their deepest secrets. Cobb and his associates insinuate themselves into a subject's dream and, extracting pivotal pieces of information through what is self-evidently referred to as Deception. The dream state is chemically induced, and is shared by a team, just as there would be necessary workers during a bank heist: Someone to plan it, someone to be a decoy, someone to crack the vault, and someone to drive the car. The dreams themselves seem longer than they are. For every five minutes Dom is under, an hour of dream time elapses. Supposing the dream went one level deeper - a dream within a dream - those five minutes would buy Dom about 12 hours. That's a long time, which serves an extractor very well, because the world of the dream is completely constructed by an architect. In other words, all the world's a stage.

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