News for
Spartan (2004)

photos

board

trailer

details

2 articles from 2008

1 May 2008 1:00 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

Like so many ambitious writers, David Mamet has many faces. There's the street-smart thriller craftsman behind Homicide, Heist, and Spartan. The sly, stagey twist-meister behind House Of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and Glengarry Glen Ross. The sentimental softie of Things Change and State And Main. (There's also the work-for-hire hack that signed onto the screenplay for Hannibal, and the clumsy, self-satisfied provocateur who wrote Oleanna, but the less said about them, the better.) But no previous project has so thoroughly fused his filmmaking facets as Redbelt, a superior, sophisticated, and unusually gentle character study where the point isn't the twists, so much as watching how one man's belief system holds up through them. Further cementing his well-earned reputation for sensitivity and depth, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things, Children Of Men) stars as a small-time jujitsu instructor with an unyielding sense of honor that comes into play when jittery...

Tasha Robinson

1 May 2008 9:30 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

By R. Emmet Sweeney

Mixed martial arts (Mma) have come a bloody long way since John McCain legendarily dubbed the sport "human cockfighting" in 1996. Its flagship organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (Ufc), aired eight of the top 15 pay-per-view programs in 2007 (boxing had four), while two smaller outfits (Strikeforce and EliteXC) have recently inked deals to air events on NBC and CBS. With major media outlets slowly offering more coverage and the sport's popularity continuing to crest, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got its opportunistic hands on those tantalizing cauliflower ears... right?

Uncharacteristic of the movie business, producers are showing restraint in capitalizing on the fad, perhaps still haunted by McCain's "cock" slam. David Mamet encountered fierce resistance to his new Mma influenced film, "Redbelt," as he tells Sam Alipour of Espn.com: "Everybody in Hollywood passed on it. One of the things I talked about (in

2 articles from 2008