Aaron Eckhart boards Clint Eastwood’s Captain Sully movie

Earlier this summer, Tom Hanks was found genial and competent enough to play Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in the Clint Eastwood-helmed film about the Miracle On The Hudson events. We at The A.V. Club were somewhat skeptical of Hanks’ ability to portray an ordinary man who must overcome extraordinary odds, in part because he’d once befriended a volleyball. The Hollywood Reporter has somewhat set our minds at ease with the news that Hanks will have some help in the film: Aaron Eckhart has been cast as Sully’s co-pilot and co-miracle worker.

Eckhart will play Jeff Skiles, Sully’s first officer and co-pilot who was manually flying the plane when it ran afoul of some Canadian geese. Although Skiles never received a sweet nickname from a mayor, he was instrumental in safely landing the plane in the Hudson. Eckhart’s been slumming in Gerard Butler-led action films and action-horror hybrids lately, but he could apply what he learns about performing a daring rescue in “real time” to help Hanks look good on film.

The film will be based in part on Sullenberger’s book, Highest Duty: My Search For What Really Matters, with a script from Todd Komarnicki (Perfect Stranger) for Warner Bros. The as-yet-untitled project is in pre-production and will be released some time in 2016.

source: avclub.com

Will You Be Impressed By Another Action Thriller That Plays Out “In Real Time”?

I would have thought the TV series 24 was the peak of “real time” drama and thrills. Maybe it was. And maybe the peak for the technical side of the concept was with literal real-time features Timecode and Russian Ark, films that were only made possible by digital cameras. The only sort of real-time efforts that are still of interest are those broadcast live, which are back in vogue through NBC and now Fox’s presentations of live musicals, including next year’s production of Grease.

When I saw that a new action movie with the “takes place in real time” conceit was titled Live!, I thought maybe the TV musical gimmick was carrying over to the cinema. But no, it’s just another movie that sounds like Nick of Time and 88 Minutes. Aaron Eckhart will play a “disgraced cop” who has only 80 minutes to find the police commissioner’s kidnapped daughter, and of course 80 minutes will also be around the length of the movie, too.

The difference, maybe, is that this is supposedly going to be shot in real time, too, by stunt coordinators Darrin Prescott (John Wick) and Wade Allen (The Dark Knight) making their directorial debut. If so — if they’re really aiming to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and then only roll cameras during a single 80-or-so-minute stretch — then that’s cool. But that is very unlikely. And if it wasn’t, then that sort of thing should be indeed a live event, broadcast to theaters like so many operas and concerts are these days.

As speculates /Film, the truth is probably that there will be some “invisible” edits similar to those of the recent seemingly single-shot Best Picture winner Birdman and, almost 70 years prior, Hitchcock’s Rope. It will be a step up for something like that to be made in the action genre, but just a little bit. Audiences are becoming less impressed with the idea of the long take, as technology allows for them to appear in most major tentpole action movies of late.

Perhaps this is a step towards live movies set in and broadcast in real time, though the logistics of exhibition on that would be difficult. I’d say they could do multiple shows through the opening weekend and then after that all screenings are of the best recorded version (or an edit of them), but obviously audiences would mostly only flock to those first screenings (isn’t that what Hollywood prefers we do now anyway?). It sure would make moviegoing an event again.

source: filmschoolrejects.com