The holidays are behind us, 2015 is a memory, and a brand new year lies ahead — and for a lot of us, that means drawing up a list of resolutions that we all know we’ll probably end up breaking before St. Patrick’s Day. In the spirit of the New Year, we’ve decided to round up a list of movies that correspond with some of the most popular resolutions. Whether you’re trying to quit smoking, change your diet, or get your finances in order — of even if you feel like your life is in pretty good shape as it is — here’s a cinematic smorgasbord to help you ring in 2016. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, it’s Total Recall!
For most of us, unwittingly gulping down a roofie is the biggest danger we face when accepting drinks from a stranger in a strange place. But for recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), his decision to fall off the wagon in The Shining means striking up a deadly bargain with the malevolent spirits that really run the spooky old hotel he’s been tasked with looking after over a bitter Colorado winter. Next thing you know, ol’ Jack’s chasing after Shelley Duvall with an axe and wandering through the world’s freakiest topiary — food for thought the next time you think about ordering that extra drink. And as for The Shining? It is, as Emma Dibdin wrote for Digital Spy, “One of the most viscerally disturbing films ever made.”
A blistering non-fiction takedown of empty calories and corporate agriculture might not be the first place most people would look when hunting for books to adapt for the big screen, but Richard Linklater isn’t like most directors. Sadly, many critics felt Linklater’s ensemble-driven take on Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation failed to turn the book’s passionate argument against mass-produced meals into a compelling movie — although for an equal number of scribes, the powerful performances delivered by the impressive cast (which included Bruce Willis, Luis Guzman, and Patricia Arquette) made up for any narrative gaps. “For slicing through the euphemisms and getting to the heart of the matter,” argued Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Fast Food Nation is the most important American film of the year.”
Rodney Dangerfield’s schlubby humor and salt-of-the-earth persona made him the perfect fit for Back to School, starring the respect-deficient comedian as a self-made millionaire who, needing a distraction from his latest philandering trophy wife, decides to head back to college as a way of bettering himself while reconnecting with his uptight son (Keith Gordon). While it presents roughly the same cartoonishly unrealistic picture of campus life as any other 1980s college comedy, School has a sweet core lacking from most of the decade’s T&A-fueled romps, and it benefits greatly from charismatic performances by Dangerfield and a young Robert Downey, Jr. “It’s a good character for Dangerfield,” nodded the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr, “one that veers him away from the ‘I don’t get no respect’ pathos that comes too easily to him, and enough attention is paid to the minimal plot to integrate Dangerfield’s classically constructed one-liners.”
No matter how many degrees you have, moving up the corporate ladder often comes down to who you know. Even then, as naive college grad Brantley Foster (Michael J. Fox) discovers early in The Secret of My Success, your family connections might not be good for much more than a gig in the mailroom — unless you opt for the non-traditional approach and invent a new employee who rocks the boardroom in spite of the fact that he doesn’t technically exist. A major box-office hit in 1987, Success received lukewarm praise from critics, although its frantic screwball pace and slapstick comedy took full advantage of Fox’s comedic gifts, and its corporate setting helped make it what James Sanford of the Kalamazoo Gazette referred to as a “Quintessential 1980s comedy.”
Atkins, Paleo, South Beach… there’s a diet for every week of the year, but for sheer effectiveness, none of them can hope to match the pound-shedding power of a gypsy curse. At least, that’s what we learn in Thinner, director Tom Holland’s rather misguided adaptation of the gripping Stephen King story about a slovenly lawyer (Robert John Burke) who picks the wrong old lady to run over and ends up losing weight at an alarming rate. While none of the story’s essential themes translated particularly well to the screen, Thinner still managed to raise a few critics’ neck hairs, including Clint Morris of Moviehole, who decreed it “Stephen King’s freakiest film in eons.”
“But wait,” you might be saying. “What does Season of the Witch have to do with getting out of debt?” And while it’s true that in narrative terms, this 2011 fantasy action-adventure about a Crusader traveling to a remote monastery with a woman accused of witchcraft might not offer much in the way of lessons about managing one’s money, behind the scenes, it was all about getting back into the financial black. At least it was for star Nicolas Cage, who signed on for the project after learning he’d incurred a crushing $13 million tax liability with the IRS. Roundly panned by critics far and wide, Witch is just one of many debt-motivated movies Cage has starred in over the last few years — not that his motivations mattered to writers like ReelViews’ James Berardinelli, who opined, “Cage is effective as a falling down drunk in Las Vegas or a treasure hunter navigating goofy road trips but not as a disillusioned champion of the Church going one-on-one with a demon. Steven Seagal would have been more believable.”
With the possible exception of Lewis Black on a good night, it’s hard to like anybody when they’re angry. Bruce Banner, however, takes this maxim to ridiculous green extremes — and while neither of his solo big-screen outings have come close to maximizing the potential of his counterpart on the printed page, Banner’s rampaging alter ego came tantalizingly close to cinematic glory in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton as the hunted scientist who morphs into an indestructible beast whenever he gets a little too ticked off. Packed with action and ripe with subtext, the 2008 Hulk tried to split the difference between portraying a man desperately trying to manage his anger and allowing audiences the simple joy of watching him give in to it all and break stuff. It doesn’t always work, but for David Cornelius of eFilmCritic.com, it all added up to “One of the great monster movies, exciting and scary and sad all at once.”
This classic 1947 noir isn’t really about quitting smoking — in fact, ex-P.I. Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has a cigarette in hand just about every time he’s on the screen — but it makes puffing tobacco look like such a stone cold cool habit that a viewer can pretty much inhale the vice’s visceral pleasures just by watching Out of the Past. In fact, no less an authority than Roger Ebert deemed it one of the all-time greatest smoking movies; as he put it, “There is a lot of smoking in all noirs, even the modern ones, because it goes with the territory. Good health, for noir characters, starts with not getting killed. But few movies use smoking as well as this one; in their scenes together, it would be fair to say that Mitchum and [Kirk] Douglas smoke at each other, in a sublimated form of fencing.”
It’s hard to imagine any studio other than Pixar having success with a family film this idiosyncratic — a movie about a lonely trash-compacting robot with a mostly dialogue-free first act doesn’t exactly scream “summer blockbuster” — but audiences trusted the Pixar brand enough to show up in droves for WALL-E, and they were rewarded with not only one of the best-reviewed animated releases of 2008, but what was, in the words of the Boston Globe’s Jay Carr, “the best American film of the year to date.” The movie’s eco-friendly storyline came with a surprising bit of controversy, drawing fire from conservative pundits who were annoyed with what they interpreted as a left-wing, anti-business message, but its 96 percent Tomatometer and massive $534 million gross drowned out the chatter. As with just about everything Pixar has done, it works whether you’re looking to be edified or simply entertained; as the New York Times’ A.O. Scott noted, “it is, undoubtedly, an earnest (though far from simplistic) ecological parable, but it is also a disarmingly sweet and simple love story, Chaplinesque in its emotional purity.”
Nothing’s more important than family, but sometimes it’s hard for us to see that until it’s almost too late. For example, take Max Dugan (Jason Robards), whose decades of estrangement with his daughter (Marsha Mason) come to a sudden end when he shows up on her doorstep to right old wrongs and start a relationship with his grandson (Matthew Broderick) — and share the bitter news of his impending death. Boasting a screenplay by Neil Simon and typically light-fingered direction from Herbert Ross, Max Dugan Returns entranced critics like Janet Maslin, who wrote for the New York Times, “There are certainly some questionable ingredients to the story, but you’re not likely to notice them while the film is under way. You’re likely to be laughing.”
Vacations are always fun in theory, but it’s very rare that every member of the family is equally on board with whatever the person planning the trip has in store — especially if said planner is an arrogant-yet-well-meaning dunderhead like Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), who miscalculates basically every possible preparation for the family trip to Wally World in National Lampoon’s Vacation. From getting saddled with a lemon of a car to refusing to ask for directions, Clark makes plenty of mistakes — and when he isn’t messing things up on his own, he’s beset with annoying family members (like Randy Quaid’s legendary Cousin Eddie) who do it for him. The final act descends into lunacy, but underneath it all is a frantic desperation for an unattainable ideal that lies at the dark, splintered heart of any vacation gone wrong. “The Griswolds,” decreed Fred Topel for Crave, “are a national treasure.”
Lawrence Bourne III (Tom Hanks) doesn’t exactly start donating his time for the most altruistic reasons — he’s trying to dodge a gambling debt by fleeing the country — but once he ends up on a plane full of Peace Corps volunteers bound for Thailand, he’s in for the experience of his life, in terms of manual labor as well as the many misadventures he gets into alongside fellow volunteer Tom Tuttle (John Candy). And while Volunteers may not have drummed up the sort of box office totals the studio was hoping for from reunited Splash vets Candy and Hanks, it tickled Walter Goodman of the New York Times, who wrote, “Take a healthy helping of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a dollop of The Bridge on the River Kwai, a dash of any Tarzan movie, a soupcon of Casablanca, a whiff of The Wizard of Oz and a stunt or two from a favorite Saturday serial, stir frenetically, and if you’re lucky enough to have snappy dialogue by Ken Levine and David Isaacs, you may end up with as funny a movie as Volunteers.”
This week at the movies, we’ve got courageous Crusaders (Season of the Witch, starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) and a country comeback (Country Strong, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw ). What do the critics have to say?
Say what you will about Nicolas Cage, but give the man credit: at a time when too many movie stars studiously protect their images, he’s unafraid to look ridiculous. Sometimes, his devil-may-care attitude pays off (see Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), and sometimes, well, we get stuff like Season of the Witch, a Medieval action flick that critics say is too dull to qualify as so-bad-it’s-good kitsch. Cage and Ron Perlman star as former Crusaders who are tasked with protecting and transporting a woman accused of being witch to a remote monastery; on their arduous journey, they must contend with wolves, zombies, and the black plague. The pundits say Season of the Witch is bottom-of-the barrel fantasy fare, with cheesy dialogue, so-so special effects, and a general air of silliness. (Check out Cage’s Five Favorite Films, as well as this week’s Total Recall, in which we count down Perlman’s best-reviewed movies.)
A lot of country songs are great not for their originality, but because they’re infused with passion and craftsmanship. The same holds true for plenty of movies, but unfortunately for Country Strong, it can’t transcend its clichés, devolving into a showbiz melodrama despite good performances and heart-on-its-sleeve sincerity. Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Kelly Canter, a country superstar fresh from rehab; still shaky, she embarks on a tour, with hot young singer Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund), overseen by her manager/ex-husband James (Tim McGraw). Can our heroine overcome romantic entanglements and the bottle to reclaim her place atop the charts? The pundits say the leads give it their all, and the music is toe-tapping, but Country Strong is undone by meandering pacing and a slavish adherence to soapy formula.
Also opening this week in limited release:
Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, a documentary about the life and times of the overlooked 1960s folk singer, is at 100 percent.
The Time That Remains, a generation-spanning dramedy about a Palestinian family, is at 77 percent.
If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle, Romanian drama about a young man about to be released from prison, is at 57 percent.
When Nicolas Cage goes up against the forces of the supernatural in Season of the Witch this weekend, he’ll have another awesome wig and his very best intense/befuddled stare in his arsenal. But to really improve his odds of victory, he’ll need something more — like the imposing menace of Ron Perlman, occasional Hellboy and character actor supreme. Whether he’s appeared au naturel or under makeup, worked live action or voiced animated characters, Perlman’s distinctive talent has been entertaining audiences for 30 years, and he’s assembled an eclectic filmography along the way. It’s about time Ron Perlman received the Total Recall treatment, wouldn’t you say?
Witty equal-opportunity political humor has become something of a lost art on the big screen over the last decade or so, but things weren’t always this way. For proof, simply look to 1995’s The Last Supper, an ensemble indie comedy about a group of young liberals (including Cameron Diaz, Ron Eldard, and Annabeth Gish) who begin poisoning conservative dinner guests as part of a misguided campaign to save the world. While the murder victims aren’t terribly sympathetic, their murderers aren’t especially likable either — so by the time they cross paths with a Limbaugh-esque conservative pundit (played by Perlman), loyalties to either ideological extreme have been tested. “In today’s divisive political climate, where compromise is a dirty word,” observed Leslie Rigoulot of Film Scouts, “The Last Supper raises not only timely questions but moral dilemmas as well.”
Perlman and his Last Winter director, Larry Fessenden, re-teamed for this 2008 black comedy — only this time, they were both on the same side of the camera. Helmed by Glenn McQuaid (who also worked behind the scenes on The Last Winter), I Sell the Dead recounts the story of a pair of Irish grave robbers (played by Fessenden and Dominic Monaghan), as told to a jailhouse priest (Perlman). A bizarre mashup of 19th-century period thriller and zombie/alien comic gore,Dead had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run, playing on only two screens, but even some of the critics who couldn’t recommend it found the film impossible to dislike — such as Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, who mused, “If it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.”
A sort of cross between An Inconvenient Truth and The Thing, this wintry thriller found writer/director Larry Fessenden returning to the themes of isolation he explored in Wendigo, while adding an ecologically conscious twist: at a remote ANWR drilling base, a team of workers (led by Perlman) starts dying off, casualties of “sour gas” released as a side effect of global warming — or are they under attack from vengeful spirits of the Earth? Though it screened in extremely limited release, The Last Winter received more than a few positive reviews from critics, including Aaron Hillis of Premiere Magazine, who called it “A richly drawn, ambitious character piece both socially relevant and genuinely suspenseful” before concluding, “This is filmmaking both gorgeous and deeply unsettling.”
No stranger to prosthetics, Perlman went back under the makeup — and reunited with his Cronos and Blade II director, Guillermo del Toro — for 2004’s Hellboy, an adaptation of the popular Dark Horse Comics title. Grossing under $60 million in the U.S., it was something of a disappointment at the box office, but Perlman and Del Toro were a natural fit for the franchise, as Hellboy‘s steadily growing cult audience would come to realize — and as appreciative critics were quick to recognize, including Rob Gonsalves of eFilmCritic, who noted, “Perlman, at age 53, strides in like a hungry young actor itching to prove something, only with 22 years of experience lending him charisma and confidence.”
Perlman’s work with Guillermo del Toro has placed him within some pretty remarkable cinematic worlds, but his sojourn into Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s City of Lost Children might be the most visually striking of them all: a dense, whirring dystopia where an evil scientist (Daniel Emilfork) steals the dreams of kidnapped children. Their only hope is One (Perlman), a circus strongman whose younger brother is among the lost — and for whom he’ll set out on an arduous journey to rescue. Rife with sights that will haunt the viewer long after the credits roll, City won praise from critics like Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle, who recommended it as “a dark phantasmagoria so visually amazing and provocative — yet dense and confusing — that viewers may need to see it more than once to take it all in.”
A goofy Steve Zahn comedy with a minuscule budget and a box office tally that wasn’t much bigger, Happy, Texas gave Perlman the opportunity to steal scenes in another supporting role: Marshal Nalhober, a straight-shooting cop in hot pursuit of three escaped prisoners (Zahn, Jeremy Northam, and M.C. Gainey) posing as the organizers of a local beauty pageant. Eminently quotable and buoyed by a smart, rootsy soundtrack, Happy provoked appreciative guffaws from critics like Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, who called it “a hoot, a hilarious comedy that’s smart and caring, yet sexy and ingenious enough that it just might stir up some of that elusive Full Monty-style box-office appeal.”
A latex-covered Perlman got his big break in this award-winning adaptation of the 1911 novel, about a Neanderthal war for fire — and the dangerous quest undertaken by a small band of tribesmen who are forced to find another source after their clan’s fire is stolen by a rival tribe. An hour and 40 minutes of grunted dialogue and dirty caveman sex obviously isn’t what most filmgoers have in mind when they head out for a night at the cineplex, but Quest for Fire managed to perform relatively well at the box office, and became something of an early ’80s cult favorite — as well as a hit with critics like Janet Maslin of the New York Times, who said it was “more than just a hugely enterprising science lesson, although it certainly is that. It’s also a touching, funny and suspenseful drama about prehumans.”
Four years after the first Hellboy, Perlman teamed up again with Guillermo del Toro for another round of supernatural fun — and while the original Hellboy earned mostly positive reviews, the sequel was an even bigger critical winner. A gleeful blend of popcorn thrills and uniquely del Toro visual splendor, Hellboy II: The Golden Army reunited the original cast for an epic battle between the forces of good and an irate elven king (Luke Goss) who wants to reignite the long-dormant war between elves and humans. While it was overshadowed at the box office by The Dark Knight and Iron Man, it still earned over $160 million — and earned the admiration of critics like Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who called it “the biggest, richest, most imaginative superhero movie of the summer.”
Perlman started his continuing association with Guillermo del Toro in this 1993 horror movie, about the gruesome series of events that unfolds after an old man (Federico Luppi) discovers an ancient scarab that injects him with a mysterious substance — one which restores his youthful vitality, but leaves him with a thirst for blood. Perlman stars in a supporting role as the ironically named Angel de la Guardia, a hoodlum sent on a quest by his elderly uncle, who craves the scarab’s restorative powers; the path of violence he carves in pursuit of his goal sets in motion some of Cronos‘ most memorably horrific sequences. It barely registered a blip on the U.S. box office, but Cronos was an instant hit with critics; as an appreciative Ken Hanke wrote for the Asheville Mountain Xpress, it is “one of the most intelligent — and strangely moving — horror films ever made.”
We always see a little bit of an outcry when animated efforts make the cut in Total Recall — and there’s even more consternation when a ‘toon tops the list. But for a guy like Ron Perlman, who’s spent so much of his career under heavy makeup, it makes a certain kind of sense that Disney’s Tangled would be a top-rated effort; while it’s true that he could only use his voice to bring the malicious twin Stabbington Brothers to life in this film, those constraints really weren’t so very different from some of his previous live-action roles — or, for that matter, Perlman’s long list of voice credits. In the end, it’s hard to argue with Tangled‘s overwhelmingly positive reviews, summed up concisely by Tom Long of the Detroit News, who wrote, “Tangled is the best animated film from Disney in the past 15 years.”
Finally, here’s Perlman (in character) pitching DirecTV:
Nicolas Cage may have the most unclassifiable body of work of any actor in movies today. He began his career with teen roles in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Valley Girl and uncle Francis Coppola’s Rumble Fish, went off the wall for Raising Arizona, Wild At Heart and Vampire’s Kiss, won a Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas and then somehow became a big-budget action star in films like The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off. The odd trajectory defines the actor to this day, but behind all of Cage’s (seemingly puzzling) film choices there’s been one constant: his fierce dedication to each and every role, whether he’s crafting performances for Spike Jonze, Ridley Scott and Werner Herzog or headlining Disney tent-poles and comic-book capers. This week, Cage nurtures his fantasy fetish as a 14th-century knight in Dominic Sena’s supernatural actioner Season of the Witch, while he continues filming on the Ghost Rider sequel with Crank directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine.
We got the chance to speak with Cage recently, where we asked him to name his all-time five favorite films. “It’s a shame because there are so many more,” he says, considering his choices, “but if I had to go with the five, I’d pick the ones that changed my life.”
Read on for his thoughts on Season of the Witch, the Ghost Rider sequel, and why, he says, he’s going through his horror movie period.
The first two, I’m gonna go with Elia Kazan, ’cause they’re really the reason why I became an actor in movies. East of Eden, with James Dean, and A Streetcar Named Desire, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The performance by James Dean — the scene specifically where he tries to give his father, played by Raymond Massey, the money from selling the beans on his birthday, and he’s rejected — it broke my heart; it was not like anything I’d experienced before, in terms of art, and I’d seen a lot of movies at that point. I was 15, and I’d seen Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Welles’ Citizen Kane — great films, but when I saw Dean in that, it really put the hook in me because I felt like him and I knew then the power of film acting, and I knew then what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do to try to move people with motion pictures. So that’s why I have to put that on the list.
Yes, I admired Marlon Brando and I know that he influenced James Dean and he really kind of changed the world of film acting with his naturalistic style, but it was because of Vivien Leigh’s performance as Blanche DuBois that I would put that as one of my favorite movies; because of her dialog, the Tennessee Williams dialog, the music, Kazan’s direction, and Vivien Leigh’s delivery of lines like — I’m paraphrasing — but when she says, “the human heart, how can that be straight?”, you know. It was such a powerfully vulnerable, tragic performance that I have to put that on the top five, because that movie held that performance.
96% Tomatometer)
Then I’m gonna go into Kubrick. 2001, because it is so enigmatic, it is so poetic, and it remains a mystery to me, even today where I can view it annually, three times a year, and still find something new in it. I’m still mystified by it. It achieved this status of being eternal in a way that didn’t rely heavily on performance; it was the special effects, the music. The fact that it was a success, that it was a commercial success, and it challenged every critic — many critics didn’t get it — so it was really ahead of its time. Nothing’s been ever quite like it again.
91% Tomatometer)
Because of Malcolm McDowell I’m gonna go into A Clockwork Orange, because that was the other great teenage performance, along with James Dean in East of Eden. Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of the subject of violence and the mystery of nature and to go against out natures and what is or isn’t necessary, and what is the true evil, and all of these questions that came out of the absurdist and evocative film that is Clockwork Orange, again, is everlasting. And also his lighting: even today when you look at some of the stills from the movie, when they’re in the Milk Bar, it looks like virtual reality and I don’t know how he did it — he was really a master of light.
Finally I’m gonna say The Wizard of Oz, because that movie, again, is not like any other film — it’s a completely original experience and it has stood up against the test of time. Children are still enchanted by it, adults are still enchanted by it, and nobody has ever been able to capture that feeling since; and it’s a musical. Plus, that first introduction to color film, that doorway sequence and going in to Munchkin land — it’s just mind-blowingly beautiful. And her performance, her voice, Judy Garland — you know, they don’t make ’em like that anymore. So, I would say those would be the top five.
Next, Nicolas Cage on his supernatural phase, the absurdity of The Wicker Man, and returning to Ghost Rider.
RT: Did you enjoy making Season of the Witch?
Oh yeah, this was a real adventure for me. I’d wanted to play a knight for quite some time because it was a childhood fantasy of mine, and here I was finally getting to do that — and dealing with supernatural forces that are becoming increasingly interesting to me, because I want to celebrate the movies of people like Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. I’m really trying to build a body of work that does that now. I don’t want to do one kind of film only; I am eclectic and that’s how I stay interested. So right now I’m in that phase, of movies that go into horror and mystery and the unknown.
Christopher Lee’s in the film — did you two talk about The Wicker Man and what it was like remaking his film?
Yeah, we did talk about that. First of all, I’m a huge fan of the original movie and his performance in it is outstanding, and I had to share that with him. We talked a little bit about the remake and he wanted to know what happened and I just said well, look, the movie was true to Neil LaBute’s kind of intentionally absurdist black comedy view of relationships between men and women — and we went for it. Let me put it to you this way: you don’t get dressed up in a bear suit and do those kinds of things to women and not know it’s ridiculous [laughs]. The problem is people didn’t know that we knew that it was what it was; hopefully now they will. I mean, I don’t know how they couldn’t know that, but that’s okay.
The film’s sort of become a cult item over time as people realize how absurd it is.
[laughs] I think so too and I think some things take time to mature, and with hindsight become a lot more understood.
You’re working with Dominic Sena again on Season; had you been looking to do something together after Gone in 60 Seconds?
Well I really enjoyed working with Dominic on that movie. He makes you feel comfortable and you feel relaxed and that you can be creative. In this case he really had a chance to show his visual style. Gone in 60 Seconds was much more of a straight-up urban action film whereas Season of the Witch goes into far more imaginative places and more expressionistic places and Dom’s really great at that in terms of lighting and landscape. I’m glad he had a chance to do that because I don’t know how many people are aware of his ability in that department, but it’s pretty immense.
The year ahead is looking typically busy for you. Have you wrapped the Ghost Rider sequel?
Not yet. I’m about a third of the way through. It’s going very well.
How different is it from the original?
It’s very different. I’m a fan of the first one but that one was more of a fairy tale where as this one is a completely different kind of animal, and that’s what the directors wanted. But I have to say that I’ve never worked with anybody quite like Neveldine and Taylor before. It’s a brand new experience. Mark Neveldine is doing things with the camera that are just mind-blowing. He’s a combination stuntman/camera operator/director and I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s on rollerblades hanging off the bike, hanging from wires that are 300 feet up in the air, I mean he’s getting these shots and virtually risking his life. There’s nobody else that really does any of that. And Brian Taylor is just so knowledgeable about filmmaking: in the same sentence you can talk about Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and then go into Ishirô Honda’s War of the Gargantuas — he just knows movies. And he’s totally been encouraging about me playing the Ghost Rider as well as John Blaze and this has opened up all sorts of new doors. It was because of him and his passion that we were able to go into areas that I think will really mess with people’s minds; some really abstract, kind of wild supernatural stuff that’s a lot of fun.
Season of the Witch is in theaters this week.
