Trailer, Poster for John Cusack's 'Shanghai'

For no particular reason, I was wondering the other day whatever happened to Shanghai, a period piece reuniting John Cusack with his 1408 director Mikael Håfström that features a good international cast and cost way too much ($50 million) to just disappear. Now it's back on the radar, with a new poster and trailer.

Click to see the full poster If the project is new to you, it went into production two years ago. At the time, the Weinstein Company didn't really have a release date planned. Then it looked like the end of 2009 sometime, but that never materialized, either. Some of that, I'm sure, had to do with the studio not really having the money to release a bunch of movie around the awards season. And so it waited. Now, however, it looks like Shanghai might actually hit the US later this year, as soon as September, with other international releases planned before that. What follows is the international trailer, and I'm sure a US version will be coming our way soon, particularly if that release date gets cemented. Looks like a handsome production, if nothing else.

Click to read more ...

New Photos and Release Date For John Cusack's 'Shanghai'

According to the Weinstein Company website, the studio has moved Shanghai into the 2008 awards race and will release the film on Christmas. It was less than a month ago when I was looking over the Weinstein's fall preview and saw no mention of the film at all. But something has apparently changed in Bob and Harvey's world, which could mean the studio feels confident that the film can compete with some more heavily-armed competition. Taking place in the years before World War II, Shanghai stars John Cusack as an American traveling to Shanghai after the death of his friend. There's some romance, some mystery, and some intrigue. I can't get it out of my mind that the summaries I've read for this movie are very similar to the setup of The Third Man, which is one of the greatest films ever made. Maybe there's more to the plot, but it sounds like they've just replaced Vienna with Shanghai. The film stars Chow-Yun Fat, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Ken Watanabe, Rinko Kikuchi, and Gong Li, and there are some new publicity photos that are just radiant. Here's hoping the colors and costumes can come to life throughout the film like they do here. And, I guess officially now, Shanghai will be released on December 25th.

John Cusack Talks Up His New Period Piece 'Shanghai'

John Cusack has been frank about his movie choices in the past. As recently as last year, he said he felt he's only done ten good movies in the past 25 years. Ten out of about fifty? "Well, there aren't 40 that are great, put it that way," he said.One of the good ones, in his opinion, was 1408, the Stephen King adaptation that was almost a one-man show for Cusack. I happen to agree that it was a pretty effective genre picture. Now Cusack has re-teamed with the director of 1408, Mikael Håfström, for the period piece Shanghai, and the actor says he jumped at the film for a few reasons. "To do something that has a big budget, a great scope, with a great director and great actors that has the quality and level of writing and the level of production design ... is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," says the normally reserved Cuse. "Any actor in his right mind would want to do this film -- would die to do it." So what's so special about Shanghai? He's right about the cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, and Ken Watanabe co-star, and the film kind of has an inverse Third Man storyline: Cusack works in American intelligence just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he travels to Japanese-occupied Shanghai to investigate the death of a friend. Cusack mentioned the film's budget, which hovers around the $10 million mark. That's a pittance in the U.S., but in the Asian film world, it's a healthy chunk of change. Still, with Cusack's up-and-down career at the box office, maybe finding good roles in good films is a better formula than playing for the payday in a romantic comedy so he can do the movies he really wants to do. It doesn't matter how many people saw Must Love Dogs; none of them checked out his labor of love, War, Inc. But it sounds like he's genuinely excited about Shanghai, so we'll take his word for it for the time being. Let's hope if it's as good as he says that The Weinstein Company doesn't make the film jump through a ton of hoops when it's scheduled for release next year. After all, the company more or less buried Cusack's Sundance hit, Grace is Gone. That is, unless you can find another word for a movie that made $50,000 in theaters.