Pages tagged “matt damon”

When we learned Josh Brolin would be playing George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's new film W., we were inspired to cast actors to portray some other American presidents. The rest, as they say, is history.

Steven Soderbergh has been hard at work on a bold, daring biopic that dares to go where other directors fear to tread. No, we're not talking about his movie Che, because plenty of other people have and likely will create films centered on Mr. Guevara. Soderbergh's truly revolutionary biopic is on Liberace.

Accepting her award for outstanding original music and lyrics at the 2008 Creative Emmy Awards, Sarah Silverman gushed onstage, "Oh my gosh...this makes a year of [catcall voice] 'I'm fucking Matt Damon too!' totally worth it. Matt Damon, I'm going to be honest, had very little to do with this being popular. And the person for who this video was made, Jimmy Kimmel, who broke my heart, oops... who... will always have a place in my heart."

Matt Damon has signed on to star alongside Morgan Freeman in Clint Eastwood’s upcoming film The Human Factor, Variety reports.

Given all the lousy movie-to-video game adaptations out there, it's always refreshing when an adaptation looks like its developer actually cares about a project. So when Sierra showed off The Bourne Conspiracy, and it looked like the game actually caught the spirit of the film franchise, it left only one question looming: where is Jason Bourne?

According to developer High Moon, Matt Damon turned down the role while still in negotiations to lend his voice and likeness to the game. Damon told the The Boston Globe, "I lobbied hard [with the video producers] to not make a first-person shooter game but to make it more like Myst, which was a great interesting puzzle you tried to solve - you know, to play with his amnesia or his memory. They weren't interested. They made the video anyway, without my likeness." Which would make sense if the game were an adaptation of Memento or Eternal Sunshine, but problems about violence in a Bourne game?

His involvement, implied in the quote, also doesn't seem entirely accurate. MTV's Multiplayer blog asked High Moon about this, which said that the journalist reporting the article guessed about the brackets and that Damon never actually spoke to them. To work around the issue, High Moon says, "We got the sense that his interest in games overall was marginal, and we decided to move away from celebrity involvement and take our Bourne into an original direction."

No Damon, then, and the rest of the Globe article makes it pretty clear that he'll be staying out of violent games. The situation seems to point out a strange double standard that sometimes exists between various mediums. In films, Damon has played a trained killer, a mob hitman and a sociopathic murderer. In games, he curiously seems to want to wander through a foggy meadow.

Related links:
Review: The Bourne Ultimatum
News: Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are Bourne Again
IMDb: Matt Damon

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Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi
Cinematographer: Oliver Wood
Starring: Matt Damon, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Albert Finney
Studio/Running Time: Universal Pictures, 111 min.

"There’s a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets, he stays a stranger
With every move he makes another chance he takes
Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow."
-Johnny Rivers “Secret Agent Man”

Matt Damon returns as the recovering amnesiac and ex-CIA agent Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum, the third film based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling series on the spy who won’t die - much to the disappointment of U.S. Intelligence.

Although he comes across as an average Joe (albeit a Joe who can easily disable and disarm half a dozen of the agency’s best), Bourne’s ability to out-think, out-maneuver, and just plain out-smart the security of several countries is what makes this series so popular. He is the bizarro James Bond, in that where Bond’s style demands attention, Bourne's actively avoids it. And where Bond would easily risk his life for his country, Bourne merely wants the nation to leave him be.

In sporadic flashbacks we see Bourne’s conversion and learn the role his original commander (Albert Finney) had in his transformation. Joan Allen and Julia Stiles both return as two of the few agents who don’t want Bourne dead, unlike David Straithairn’s character, who runs an operation intent on protecting those at the top from secrets Bourne unknowingly holds. Meanwhile, Damon stays authentic to character, struggling to find his true self while defending his life at the same time. As spy flicks go, The Bourne Ultimatum is the perfect “chaser” to this successful series.