Variety is reporting that Director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, United 93) has pegged Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear to join Matt Damon in an Iraq war thriller (currently titled “Imperial Life in the Emerald City“) that begins shooting today in Spain for Universal Pictures.
The film is based on the nonfiction book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran which Greengrass and Brian Helgeland turned into the premise for this fictional thriller set in the “Green Zone,” a walled and fortified area where U.S. troops stay during the Iraqi occupation. It is, supposedly, behind this wall that out of touch leaders make flawed decisions that do no accurately reflect the realities of life in war-torn Iraq. (Hmmm…. wonder where this is going…)
Damon will be playing an officer who teams up with a senior CIA officer to search for those ever elusive weapons of mass destruction while Ryan plays a New York Times (of course) foreign correspondent sent to Iraq to “investigate” the U.S. government’s WMD claims. Kinnear will be playing a CIA officer. Antoni Corone has also been cast as a colonel.
Ryan is a hot commodity at the moment, coming off Ben Affleck’s critically acclaimed “Gone Baby Gone” for which she is receiving numerous award nominations. She is also set to appear in Clint Eastwood’s next film, “The Changeling.”
Kinnear, of course, is a Hollywood staple whose next film is the Marc Abraham directed “Flash of Genius” for followed by the comedy, “Baby Mama” and the just wrapped “Ghost Town.”
Sounds pretty good, like the director and Damon being in it, plus Ryan was pretty great in Gone Baby Gone.
Mike Olbinski’s last blog post..A Mike Life hits 2000 comments and 4000 spamments
Amy Ryan is actually a pretty big star on Broadway, which I didn’t really know until recently. Looks like they want her to be a star in Hollywood too.
Oh yeah, that’s just what we need. Another Hollywood foray into a subject they don’t know anything about, chock full of stereotypes for your viewing pleasure…
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But Robert…if they stop making those kinds of movies there won’t be anything left for them to make…
I suppose. I guess everyone who knows anything about something can be revolted at Hollywood’s aborted attempts to use them for entertainment, be they doctors, lawyers, cops, soldiers, spies, or computer programmers. It’s easy to miss when you don’t know the subject matter. Given those trends though…I wonder if they ever get ANYTHING right.
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Somehow I doubt it. Hollywood has a long and storied history of changing things to reflect their world views and opinions. Some of the details might be right but the ideas behind them are always going to be biased when they come from a certain segment of the population.