The Year That Was: 2014 in Film

Check out ALL of the PDC end of year lists!

Review: Ava DuVernay's 'Selma'

Starring David Oyelowo

Review: Rob Marshall's 'Into The Woods'

Starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Anna Kendrick

Tim Burton's 'Big Eyes'

Starring Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams

Showing posts with label miles davis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label miles davis. Show all posts

Monday, July 7, 2014

Jazzy First Look at Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in 'Miles Ahead'




Crowd-sourced movies are a dime a dozen nowadays, and a glance at the pitches made by many of the filmmakers is that their film is a personal passion project. They all say it in different ways, but when Don Cheadle says it we know it to be true. For years (at least since '08) he's been developing a film on jazz icon Miles Davis, and with only three days left for the Indiegogo campaign to hit its $325K goal, Cheadle is pulling out all of the stops to drum up some more coin.

The first image from Miles Ahead features Cheadle as the flashy jazz superstar, and boy is it a striking shot. He even got the jheri curl exactly right. But it's appropriate for a film that promises to be anything but your typical biopic. Instead it centers on Davis as he and a Rolling Stone journalist plan a heist to steal back some recordings meant to reignite his career. Ewan McGregor and Keith Stanfield co-star, and Cheadle tells EW this project is purely his own and totally without studio input...

Cheadle: "This is an independently produced film. There is no studio element. We’re still in the process locking down all the financing so it was a component of funds needed to cover a gap , including my own personal money I’ve put into the movie and a consortium of others. It’s to cover what it takes to put together a period movie, that has to have different looks and ways you’re trying to authenticate the time period you’re dealing with. And the music rights—all of that stuff costs money. But it also felt like a good way to open him up back to the public and try to raise that awareness and use the social mediums to make this a social event. To make it social, like the music Miles talked about. It just made sense on multiple levels to do it this way."

So if you can, pitch a few coins Cheadle's way so Miles Ahead can begin production later this summer.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Antoine Fuqua to direct Don Cheadle's Miles Davis biopic


In the works for years, and often presumed to be either dead or dying, it looks as if Don Cheadle's long awaited Miles Davis biopic is actually going to happen. The last we'd heard about it, Cheadle was trying to put together an overall budget for the film, but there has been a significant step made that should speed the process along, as Antoine Fuqua(Training Day) appears to have landed the director's job.

This is a slight deviation from what had been originally planned, as Cheadle had hoped to direct the film himself. Done with the approval of the Davis estate heirs,  Erin Davis and Vince Wilburn Jr., it was them who revealed the news of Fuqua's hiring. Based on a script by Steven Baigelman, the story won't be a "cradle to the grave" biopic, and is said to be more of gangster flick than anything else. Intriguing, definitely, especially with Herbie Hancock on board to provide the film's score. Hancock, a world renowned musician in his own right, was a part of Davis' Second Great Quintet.

This would presumably move Cheadle's film well ahead of George Tillman Jr.'s biopic on the jazz legend, which we learned about last fall. As good as this news is in that it means the project should be moving forward, Fuqua isn't really a director worth getting excited over. Plus, he's got a really bad track record of late when it comes to getting his films off the ground. We'll see what happens. For now there's reason to be cautiously optimistic. [WSJ]