The Black Label Media feature project is a true account of a U.S. cavalry charge that took place in Afghanistan against the Taliban being produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

Trevante Rhodes has found his first role since breaking out with his starring turn in indie sensation Moonlight.

The actor is in negotiations to join Chris Hemsworth, Michael Pena and Michael Shannon in Horse Soldiers, Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Black Label Media’s true account of a U.S. cavalry charge that took place in Afghanistan against the Taliban.

Based on the book by Doug Stanton, the events took place weeks after 9/11, when a team of United States Special Forces went to Afghanistan and were to take over the city of Mazar E Sharif. But their modern equipment proved to be worthless in the rugged, harsh Afghan terrain, so with local help, the soldiers retrained to fight using only horses and their personal gear and weapons.

Peter Craig and Ted Tally wrote the script and Nicolai Fuglsig is directing.

Jerry Bruckheimer and his Jerry Bruckheimer Films banner will produce along with Black Label Media’s Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill and Thad Luckinbill. Bruckheimer’s Chad Oman will executive produce. Black Label Media, the company behind the much-buzzed about Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone musical La La Land, will also finance.

In A24’s Moonlight, Rhodes plays a young gay man who is coming of age in drug-addled Miami. The actor, who plays the oldest version of the main character, received critical acclaim for his work in the Barry Jenkins-helmed movie, which is doing strong business at the box office.

He also stars in the Tyler Perry show If Loving You Is Wrong, which plays on OWN. Rhodes, who appeared in HBO’s Westworld and will be seen Terrence Malick’s upcoming film Weightless, is repped by CAA, GSA Entertainment and Jackoway Tyerman.

Source: HOLLYWOODREPORTER

12:35PM PDT 11/01/16 by Diana Lodderhose

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Pena has joined Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon in the cast of Nicolai Fuglsig’s Horse Soldiers, the tense true story of a U.S. Special Forces team and their untested captain sent to a rugged region of Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11. Lionsgate is expected to be launching the title to buyers at the American Film Market this week.

Pena will play Diller, a member of Mitch’s (Hemsworth) team that was assigned to join forces with a Northern Alliance warlord to fight against overwhelming odds to drive out the Taliban.

Diller is described as a West Virginia hick who would have been a history teacher if his temper didn’t get the best of him. His character shows great bravery when he volunteers to lead a group around the mountains into life-threatening terrain to attempt to cut of the Taliban’s supply line.

Horse Soldiers is being co-financed by Black Label Media, whose Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill and Thad Luckinbill are producing with Jerry Bruckheimer and his Jerry Bruckheimer Films banner. Chad Oman will exec produce. The film was adapted from Doug Stanton’s book by Peter Craig and Ted Tally.

Pena can be seen in the upcoming Warner Bros title Collateral Beauty and John Michael McDonough’s film War in Everyone. He’s also starring as Ponch in Dax Shepard’s CHiPs.

He is repped by CAA, Management 360 and attorney Rick Geno.

Source: DEADLINE

8:30AM PDT 10/27/16 by Mike Fleming Jr.

DEADLINE EXCLUSIVE: Catherine Keener has joined the cast of Soldado, the Lionsgate- and Black Label Media-financed second installment of the drug war thriller that began with 2015’s Sicario. Gomorra helmer Stefano Sollima is directing the film, which was scripted by Sicario scribe Taylor Sheridan.

The sequel focuses on Alejandro Gillick, the shadowy, Man on Fire-like protagonist played by Benicio Del Toro, and Josh Brolin’s CIA agent Matt Graver, who in the first film established themselves as hellbent on hunting down cartel kingpins, no matter what. Keener will play Brolin’s boss, trying to navigate the gray area that Gillick and Graver live in as the tale turns to what else is being smuggled across the border between Mexico and the U.S. in the tunnels used to move drugs and illegal immigrants. Those tunnels also can be used to bring terrorists into the U.S.

The sequel is being produced by Thunder Road’s Basil Iwanyk, Black Label’s Molly Smith and Thad and Trent Luckinbill, and Edward McDonnell.

Keener, who recently starred in the HBO mini Show Me a Hero, next stars with Chloe Grace Moretz and Ansel Elgort in the Sacha Gervasi-directed November Criminals from Sony Pictures and the Jordan Peele-directed Blumhouse/Universal pic Get Out, coming February 24. She’s repped by Gersh.

Source: DEADLINE

11:39AM PDT 9/30/16 by Diana Lodderhose and Mike Fleming Jr.

DEADLINE EXCLUSIVE: Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon are set to star in the Nicolai Fuglsig-directed Horse Soldiers, the tense true story of a U.S. Special Forces team and their untested captain sent to a rugged, mountainous region of Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11. They were assigned to join forces with a Northern Alliance warlord to fight against overwhelming odds to drive out the Taliban. The film is being co-financed by Black Label Media, whose Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill and Thad Luckinbill are producing with Jerry Bruckheimer and his Jerry Bruckheimer Films banner, where Chad Oman will be executive producer. The project is an adaptation of Doug Stanton’s book, which Peter Craig and Ted Tally adapted.

This becomes another step up for Black Label, which came out of Toronto with tremendous buzz for the Damien Chazelle-directed La La Land with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.

“I am so happy that we’re finally getting this great project off the ground with wonderful leading actors, Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon,” said Bruckheimer, who developed the drama for the last seven years. “It’s also great to be partnered with Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill and Thad Luckinbill of Black Label Media, which is such a dynamic and exciting production company.”

BLM’s Trent Luckinbill called Horse Soldiers “exactly the kind of compelling dramatic story that Black Label is committed to telling – an incredible account of real life bravery and heroism in the face of insurmountable odds. We couldn’t be more proud to partner with Jerry Bruckheimer in bringing this incredible story to life.”

Beyond La La Land, which Lionsgate releases December, Black Label recently wrapped writer/director Danny Strong’s Rebel In The Rye, which stars Nicholas Hoult and Kevin Spacey. Among the projects they are percolating are the Sicario sequel Soldado, with Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro, the Joseph Kosinski-directed Granite Mountain with Jennifer Connelly, Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Taylor Kitsch, James Badge Dale and Jeff Bridges, and the Ian Samuels-directed Sierra Burgess Is A Loser. They also signed a first look, two-year deal with ABC Signature and ABC Studios. Next up for Bruckheimer is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which will be released May 26, 2017.

Hemsworth, currently in production on Thor: Ragnarok and then Avengers: Infinity, is repped by CAA, ROAR and Gang Tyre; Shannon, who’ll be squarely in the Oscar mix in the Best Supporting Actor category for his performance in the Tom Ford-directed Nocturnal Animals, is currently shooting The Shape Of Water and just signed on to The Current War. He’s repped by CAA, Wetzel Entertainment and attorney David Krintzman.

DEADLINE

1:45 AM PDT 8/31/2016 by Todd McCarthy

Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to ‘Whiplash’ is an L.A.-set musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a couple of Hollywood strivers who fall in love.

If you’re going to fall hard for Damien Chazelle’s daring and beautiful La La Land, it will probably be at first sight. There’s never been anything quite like the opening sequence: Traffic is at a standstill on the high, curving ramp that connects the 105 freeway to the 110 leading to downtown Los Angeles. Most of the cars are occupied only by single drivers, who are all listening to different music. But after a moment, instead of just sitting there simmering, somebody gets out and starts singing and dancing. Soon someone else does the same. Then another, and yet another, until a bad mood has been replaced by a joyous one as the road becomes the scene for a giant musical production number set to an exuberant big-band beat.

Aside from wondering how the filmmakers managed the logistics of pulling off such an audacious location shoot, lovers of classic musicals will be swept away by this utterly unexpected and original third feature from Damien Chazelle (opening this year’s Venice Film Festival). From a commercial point of view, the looming question for this Summit/Lionsgate release, set for December openings, is whether younger audiences will buy into the traditional conceits that Chazelle has revitalized, as well as into the jazz and lyrical song-and-dance numbers that fill the soundtrack.

Only foreign-film connoisseurs of a certain age will realize that the writer-director’s true inspiration here stems not as much from vintage Hollywood musicals (although allusions to them abound) as from the late French director Jacques Demy’s two landmark 1960s musicals with Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort — especially the latter, which was far more dance- and jazz-oriented. Although serious romantic longing and love’s poignant transience underpin the narratives for both Demy and Chazelle, both films share a breezy lightness of tone that keeps their narratives skipping along.

And while Chazelle’s breakthrough success two years ago with Whiplash also possessed a central, if eccentric, musical component, La La Land bears a much closer kinship with his mini-budgeted 2010 Harvard undergraduate feature Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench, which was a sung-and-danced-through musical.
As did so many American musicals made before the mid-1960s, this one pivots on a simple boy-meets-girl/they fall in love/complications ensue scenario. For this to work at all, you need to have attractive and sympathetic leading actors, and once you see Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone go into their moves here, it’s as pleasurable to accept them in such roles as it once might have been to embrace, say, Gene Kelly and Shirley MacLaine.

Their “meet cute” takes place on the freeway. Actress Mia (Stone) works in a cute cafe on the Warner Bros. lot (they should open it for real) and has been on a grinding run of fruitless auditions; she’s “someone just waiting to be found,” as she puts it in a plaintive song. A skilled pianist, Sebastian (Gosling) is fed up with providing tinkling background music at bars and restaurants (J.K. Simmons fires him from one gig); he’s a jazz freak, loves Miles Davis and swing bands, hangs at The Lighthouse down at the beach and is convinced that he’s “a phoenix rising from he ashes.” In other words, these two are like thousands of others in Hollywood, treading water but hoping to make it in spite of the odds.

Played out across the four seasons (albeit in different years), their romance begins bumpily. Seb, as he comes to be called, is downright rude to Mia at a springtime pool party, even though she could not look more splendid, quite like a brilliant sunflower, in a perfect yellow dress. Later, when he can no longer kid himself about his feelings for her, an enchanting musical sequence has them strolling and singing in the Hollywood Hills from one streetlamp to another backdropped by a glorious vista.

In just one of countless aesthetic decisions that have gone into making the film the sophisticated confection that it is, many of the musical numbers have been shot at magic hour, which both softens and intensifies the colors, as well as the beauty and romanticism of the mostly real-world Los Angeles settings. The city has rarely looked this gorgeous in films, a credit to the director’s romantic imagination as well as to the technical expertise of Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle), who has superbly composed the movie’s constant movement in the ultra-widescreen 2.52 x 1 aspect ratio.

Once they are a couple, things become, in a word, complicated. Realizing the long odds against Mia’s breaking through as an actress, Seb urges her to write something of her own to perform, which she buckles down to do. Paradoxically, he goes commercial, joining a successful band fronted by Keith (John Legend) that is constantly on tour, dictating long separations. A lengthy postscript, set five years later, features a fantasy dance sequence (a frequent motif of old musicals). But while aiming for poignance, the film loses some of its edge in this final stretch and arguably overstays its welcome by perhaps 10 minutes; bringing the pic in at under two hours would have been advisable.

All the same, for Chazelle to be able to pull this off the way he has is something close to remarkable. The director’s feel for a classic but, for all intents and purposes, discarded genre format is instinctive and intense; he really knows how to stage and frame dance and lyrical movement, to transition smoothly from conventional to musical scenes, to turn naturalistic settings into alluring fantasy backdrops for set pieces and to breathe new life into what many would consider cobwebbed cliches.

The helmer shares his leading man’s preference for bygone styles, and it remains to be seen whether or not the charm and persuasiveness of the film’s look and performances are enough to disarm skeptical young audiences who have rarely, if ever, been exposed to the conventions Chazelle employs so enthusiastically and skillfully.

Happily, the two leads are completely in sync with his objectives. Sebastian has a certain gruff impatience and short temper born of creative frustration, but the concern and love he feels for Mia doesn’t take long to well up. Gosling may not be a trained dancer or musician, but his moves are appealingly his own and months of piano practice have given him convincing style on the keyboards.

Stone is simply a joy as the eternally aspiring actress it’s hard to believe is being passed over. Emotionally alive and able to shift gears on a dime, Stone is all the more convincing in this context as she has the kind of looks that would have been appealing in any era, particularly the 1930s and 1950s.

Many of the old Hollywood neighborhoods and establishments so selectively used here are meant to summon up meaningful movie memories: a date to see a revival screening of Rebel Without a Cause at the (defunct) Rialto Theater in Pasadena immediately segues into a visit to the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory, and one extended sequence makes the Warner Bros. backlot look busier than it probably ever has been since the 1930s.

All of Chazelle’s key collaborators were clearly in total sync with the project’s aims. Composer Justin Hurwitz, who worked on both the director’s previous films, has delivered an LP’s worth of buoyant, charming tunes, mostly in a jazzy vein, with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul supplying the lyrics. Production designer David Wasco and costume designer Mary Zophres adroitly supplied touches of the old and new in an elegant way, while choreographer Mandy Moore similarly danced a stylistic tightrope that greatly helped Chazelle achieve his aim of delivering a welcome gift of vintage goods in a dazzling new package.

Source: HOLLYWOODREPORTER

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are falling in crazy, stupid love all over again in the first trailer for “La La Land.”

In the film, from director Damien Chazelle, Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress who serves coffee while she waits for her big break. Gosling is a jazz musician who scrapes by playing in dark and dingy bars. They try to make their relationship work while facing the pressures of making it big in Hollywood.

Gosling whistles, then sings in the film’s first trailer:

“City of stars, are you shining just for me? City of stars, there’s so much I can’t see,” he sings. “Is this the start of something wonderful, or one more dream that I cannot make true?”

The trailer does not contain any dialogue, but shows snapshots of Stone and Gosling dancing, walking, taking auditions and looking longingly into each other’s eyes. The montage ends, as any good one does, with a kiss.

In addition to its co-stars, the film’s cast also includes J. K. Simmons, Finn Wittrock, Callie Hernandez, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Meagen Fay.

The original song that Gosling performs in the trailer, “City of Stars,” is available on iTunes.

“La La Land” is set to open the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 31, and hit theaters Dec. 2.

Source: VARIETY