'The Road' 2nd Trailer

The Road comes out November 25th. I cannot wait for Oscar season to truly begin!

Happy Birthday Viggo Mortensen

Of course Viggo Mortensen (51 today) is best known for playing Aragon in the LOTR films, but my favorites are his roles in David Cronenberg films, both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.  He finally earned an Oscar nomination for Eastern Promises, where he plays a Russian Mobster in London.  He did a lot of preparation for the role, going to Moscow to talk to underworld figures there, and learn about the significance of the prison tattoos they wear.

Mortensen became acutely aware of the effect his tattoos had while on location, noting he "had scared the shit unwittingly" out of some Russian immigrants in London restaurants. "I had to remove the visible ones when I went out anywhere, they really did scare some people."

 Eastern Promises is probably my favorite, and no it's not just the nude fight scene.  "I am just a driver," Viggo's character says.  "I go left, I go right, I go straight ahead."  Viggo just so nailed this Russian mobster in all his scariness and complexity.  Here's a little taste in the Youtube clip below.  If you've never seen Eastern Promises, you have to go rent it as it's some of his best work ever.  Viggo's latest film, The Road, has been pushed to a Thanksgiving release date.

The Road (Trailer 2009)

Finally!! Esquire has called this the "most important film of the year". There is some controversy about this trailer from the Weinsteins as the book by Cormac McCarthy never specifies what apocalyptic event happens.

The film tells the story of a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit McPhee.) traveling through a desperate, post-apocalyptic world. The flap jacket on the book describes the setting as “burned America.”The film co-stars Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, and Guy Pearce.

Hurray! A sequel to Eastern Promises is in the works

This is awesome news. MTV interviewed David Cronenberg, the director of Eastern Promises, and he says he's working on putting together a sequel to Eastern Promises, for which Viggo Mortensen earned an Oscar nomination playing Russian gangster Nikolai.

The big twist at the end of 2007’s “Eastern Promises”—that Viggo Mortensen’s character, a Russian gangster named Nikolai, is really working for a British intelligence service—raised as many questions as it answered.

Cronenberg has never had any interest in revisiting his work -- and little of it ever has the loose ends that Eastern Promises did. "It's the first time I've ever been in a situation where I actually want to do a sequel to something. I've never had the desire to do that before. But in this case, I thought we had unfinished business with those characters. I didn't feel that we had finished with Nikolai and we had done a lot of research that was more than we could stuff into that one movie."

I hope Naomi Watts is back, too, but whatever the script is, I'm sure it will be great. You certainly left that movie wanting to know even more about Viggo's character and what made him the man he was. Viggo's Russian prison style tattoos were a long lasting type, and scared Russian immigrants who saw him with them off set!

Happy Birthday Viggo!

Today is Viggo Mortensen's 50th birthday. I didn't see him in Appaloosa, and now we'll have to wait for The Road.

When it comes to the 2008 Oscars, this could be the end of “The Road.” The Viggo Mortensen-starring dark thriller, which earlier this week had been pushed from November to December, now looks likely to open in 2009. A new release date has not been set, but the movie, a Dimension title from The Weinstein Company, probably will bow in either February or March.

The Weinstein Company declined to comment on any postponement. But director John Hillcoat’s film about a man (Mortensen) and his son wandering a post-apocalyptic U.S. is not expected to be ready in time for a 2008 release, and those involved with the film have decided that it will benefit from more post-production time and a less crowded release calendar.

Nuts.

Here's a blast from the past pic of Viggo from 1980. He used to just be a pretty face!

and here he is in Eastern Promises. Like a fine wine, he has aged pretty damn well.

Appaloosa Trailer

Viggo Mortensen & Ed Harris in the same Western! Coolio! Plus Jeremy Irons for good measure.

Viggo Mortenson's Good

I had not heard about this movie before. ‘Good’ stars Viggo Mortenson in a dramatic story about a professor that’s conflicted over the rise of the Nazi party’s power and with their ulterior motives. Looks like Oscar bait, and Viggo already has The Road coming out this fall. No release date, but this looks very intriguing.

First Look at The Road with Viggo Mortensen

The New York Times has a first look at the filming of Cormac McCarthy's The Road which is due out this November:

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Road,” takes place in a world that, because of some unexplained catastrophe, has just about ended. The sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams, Mr. McCarthy writes, “ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

“The Road” began filming in late February, mostly in and around Pittsburgh, with a later stop in New Orleans and a postproduction visit planned to Mount St. Helens. The producers chose Pennsylvania, one of them, Nick Wechsler, explained, because it’s one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story’s main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.