Diane Lane Says New Superman Will Once Again Cover Origin

Though Zack Snyder is too busy hiding out and waiting for people to forget Sucker Punch exists to reveal any new details about his upcoming Superman reboot, it seems Diane Lane has given us our first real insight into the plot. And it seems the film will be a give us yet another retelling of Superman's origin story.

Lane told E Online:

"I read the script under lock and key. I was locked in a room with the script and was only allowed three hours with it. I nailed it into my memory. I'm really excited. I'm really not allowed to talk much about it, I think, but it does cover the entire range of years, from infancy on."

Click to read more ...

Smooth Move, Warner Brothers: Studio Picks Lane to Play Superman's Mum

So no, she’s not playing Lara-El, tragically blown-up alien mother to the Man of Steel.  No, of course the news today is that Diane Lane, frequent portrayer of sexy older women, will instead be playing Martha Kent, loving, adoptive (and possibly sexy) mom to recently-cast Brit Henry Cavill’s Superman.

I'll go out on a limb and say this won't be her wardrobe for this one.

Click to read more ...

Movie Review - 'Secretariat'

Secretariat Starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich Directed by Randall Wallace Rated PG

The challenge in making a movie like Secretariat stems from the fact that pretty much everybody already knows the story. In case you're one of the few who don't, I won't ruin the nearly 40-year-old spoiler for you here, but suffice it to say that the where of this movie isn't a surprise, it's the how that most are coming to see.

What screenwriter Mike Rich has done is focus on the journey of how Secretariat gained his place in history. He does so in the typical, PG-rated, overly-dramatized Disney fashion, but this is a pretty acceptable way to make up for the foregone conclusion nature of the film. What gets annoying is how he relies too much on dialogue to fast-forward through the exposition of his story; it feels a bit forced when characters tell each other things they already know just for our benefit. The movie is made almost as a throwback sort of period piece of the late-60s/early-70s: everybody speaks in grandiose metaphors, and they have a knack for saying just the right thing to each other to elicit a long, drawn-out, satisfied smile.

The story is told mainly through the eyes of Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), who in 1969 inherits control of a Virginia horse farm. She hires a trainer named Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich) to teach her newly-acquired young colt to race. Laurin, an eccentric French-Canadian—as one character puts it, he "dresses like Superfly"—is made into a stereotype of a character here: he uses some unconventional means to push the horse to achieve its goals, but his methods are sometimes so crazy they just might work. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Click to read more ...

Diane Lane and John Malkovich in 'Secretariat' Trailer

There haven't been too many Triple Crown winners in horse racing. Only 11 horses have ever pulled it off, the last three in a five-year span in the 1970s. Secretariat covers the unlikely story of the 1973 winner, the first Triple Crown recipient in 25 years.

The angle, of course, can't be the horse, really. So Secretariat is about the people who turned him into not just a champion, but the horse that put an exclamation point by winning the final race in the trifecta in record time...and by 31 lengths. Those people are the horse's owner (Diane Lane) and his enigmatic trainer (John Malkovich). So here's the trailer, and it looks by-the-numbers. That's OK. You'd kind of expect it to be, especially for a feel-good movie. But I've got a hunch we'll like Malkovich in this.

Click to read more ...

Diane Lane to Star in Secretariat Movie

I guess all you can hope for is that you're not outshined by the horse: Diane Lane will star in one of those Based on Real Events movies when writer-director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers, the Braveheart screenplay) brings the story of Secretariat to theaters.

Secretariat won the Triple Crown of horse racing in 1973, and Lane will play his owner, Penny Chenery. No word yet on whether Hilary Swank will star as the Secretariat. The standard for this kind of movie is Gary Ross' pristine Seabiscuit, but this one has a slightly different perspective.

Click to read more ...