REEL WEEK: Cops, Crazies, and a Coming Trip to Burtonland
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Entertainment Editor
Huntington, WV (HNN) – As the new movie about a biological nightmare makes its way onto multiplex screens across America, HNN readers should recall an interview with 24-year-old White Sulphur Springs native, Jeremy Ambler. The young WV man has assembled an impressive list of “extra” roles in major motion pictures and now has qualified for Screen Actors Guild eligibility.
You’ll get a sneak peek at him in “The Crazies,” which is set in an Iowa town plagued by insanity, death and zombies when a toxin enters the water supply. Ambler plays an army soldier wearing a gas mask. His character escorts main cast members (such as Timothy Olyphant, Joe Anderson ) to a helicopter in an intense quarantine scene.
A re-make of a George Romero 1973 film, “Crazies” was shot in Atlanta.
(For the full Ambler interview, click: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/local/100119-rutherford-jeremyambler.html )
Opening alongside “The Crazies,” Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan play longtime NYPD partners searching for a mint condition baseball card (a stolen one), but both good guys have agendas. Willis sees nabbing the memorabilia obsessed gangster as a quick way to pay for his daughter’s wedding; Morgan’s preoccupied with his wife’s alleged infidelity. Can they keep their badges on the prize?
ALICE IN BURTON LAND
March blows in with Tim Burton’s imaginative and maybe a little off-the-wall edgy adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland 3D.” Of course, this is Disney, so it won’t be too dark or non-happy ending. Still, the now 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the land of the Mad Hatter where she finds her destiny --- end the reign of the Red Queen. Some buzz suggests that this “feel” of the adventure fits the same motif and mood of Lewis Carroll’s novels. Burton (“Beetlejuice,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Edward Scissorhands”, “Sweeney Todd”) has a rep for shifting the formerly mundane into an exotic, sometimes freakish spin so expectations soar (or plummet considering Alice falls into a rabbit hole) as the director of two Batman entries (“Batman” 1989; “Batman Returns” 1992) remolds a beloved fairy tale.
Opening against “Alice,” will be Richard Gere’s latest cop odyssey, “Brooklyn’s Finest, which teams him with Ethan (“Training Day”) Hawke, Don (“Reign Over Me,” “ Hotel Rwanda,” “Crash”) Cheadle and Wesley Snipes. There’s even a gorgeous Shannon Kane to provide eye candy in between on duty cop stuff. Ms. Kane has worked behind the scenes , like, key assistant production accountant) on “Along Came Polly” and “Rainmaker,” but she’s anything but dowdy as you’ll note in the trailer.
SPRING INTERNATIONAL
Finally, March 5-6-7 will be the dates for the Spring International Film Festival sponsored by the Marshall Artists Series. It’s at the Keith Albee so here’s a three day weekend in which the grand movie palace unreels celluloid again.