Another Trailer for ATOMIC BLONDE

Last week Universal released a second trailer for the Cold Ware Berlin-set Atomic Blonde, and it's even more action-packed than the first one. Based on Antony Johnston's graphic novel The Coldest City and directed by John Wick co-helmer David Leitch, Atomic Blonde is clearly the spy movie to beat this year! Charlize Theron (Fate of the Furious) stars, alongside Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service), James McAvoy (State of Play), John Goodman (Argo), and Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy).

Two Teasers for the Trailer of Atomic Blonde

Universal has released two short, tantalizing teasers for a longer, red-band trailer set to drop tomorrow for Atomic Blonde, which I've said before will be the spy movie of the summer. Seriously, everyone is going to be talking about David (John Wick) Leitch's film version of Antony Johnston and Sam Hart's Cold War Berlin-set Oni graphic novel The Coldest City (even despite the unfortunate title change). Why? Well, take a look at these micro-teasers and see for yourself! Charlize Theron (The Fate of the Furious), Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service), James McAvoy (State of Play), John Goodman (Argo), and Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) star.

You'll be hearing a lot more about Atomic Blonde once it premieres next week at SXSW! It opens nationwide in July.

Tradecraft: BBC and AMC to Re-team on Spy Who Came in from the Cold Miniseries

We learned last summer that the next John le Carré miniseries would be a new adaptation of his seminal 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Now we know the networks that will air it. Unsurprisingly, given the tremendous success of The Night Manager on both sides of the Atlantic and its three Golden Globe wins last week, the BBC and AMC will again partner on this new Spy, Deadline reports.

As previously reported, The Ink Factory and Paramount Television put the project into development in June, with Slumdog Millionaire Oscar winner Simon Beaufoy taking on the unenviable challenge of adapting one of the greatest spy novels of all time. (Goldfinger's Paul Dehn wrote the script for the classic 1965 feature version along with the author.) "The old lion himself," as Hugh Laurie described le Carré at the Globes ceremony, provided a quote for the press release, saying about the new "limited series" (as miniseries are now known), "I’m very excited by the project, and have great confidence in the team." Cast and director have yet to be announced.

Read my book review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold here.

Tradecraft: Lietch to Direct Coldest City Solo

Variety reports that John Wick co-director David Leitch will tackle the Oni Comics adaptation The Coldest City solo after the project was originally announced last May as a joint venture between him and his Wick partner Chad Stahelski. It was recently announced that Leitch had left the Keanu Reeves sequel, and now we know why. John Wick 2 will begin shooting next month in Budapest and Berlin, and that would have conflicted with the schedule for The Coldest City, so the pair decided to divide and conquor. The Coldest City was written by Kurt Johnstad, adapted from the graphic novel by Antony Johnston (Queen & Country, Alex Rider). Charlize Theron, fresh off a riveting performance in Mad Max: Fury Road, will star in the spy story set at the close of the Cold War in late 1980s Berlin. I'll be curious to see if the Focus Features movie maintains the tone of the gritty, black and white comic, which owed more to the serpentine, double- and triple-cross-filled plots of Len Deighton and John le Carré than to the more action-packed side of the spy genre typified by Fleming and Ludlum, or if the movie will have more action, since that's exactly what Leitch proved himself to be a master of in John Wick.

Watch Sundance's Deutschland 83 Series Premiere for Free on iTunes

Did you miss the premiere of Sundance's fantastic new Cold War spy series, Deutschland 83? Well, don't worry! You can download the series premiere for free on iTunes. And I definitely recommend doing so. This German import is something special, and I'll have my full review up in the next few days. In the meantime, here's the official synopsis from Kino Lorber:

A coming-of-age drama set against the culture wars and political events of Germany in the 1980s, Deutschland 83 was filmed across several locations in Berlin including the Berlin Stasi-Museum, located on the former grounds of the headquarters of the GDR Ministry for State Security

The series follows Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) a 24-year-old East Germany native who is sent to the west as an undercover spy for the Stasi foreign service. Hiding in plain sight in the West German army, he must gather the secrets of NATO military strategy. Everything is new, nothing is quite what it seems and everyone he encounters is harboring secrets, both political and personal.

Tradecraft: James Bond Author William Boyd Creates Cold War Berlin TV Series Spy City

I don't know how I missed this until last week, when it was mentioned as an aside in a Deadline article about a new Gaumont series, Crosshair, but way back in October 2014 it was announced that William Boyd, author of the James Bond novel Solo, would create and write a Cold War espionage TV drama called Spy City! Boyd's other books include the excellent generational spy saga Restless  (which the author adapted into a miniseries with Agent Carter's Hayley Atwell) and what might be my favorite novel so far this century, Any Human Heart. (That one's not a spy novel, though it does feature some spying, and Ian Fleming as a minor character. It was also turned into a miniseries with Atwell, as well as Spooks' Matthew Macfadyan and Casino Royale's Tobias Menzies as Fleming.) Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both reported last year that Boyd would create, write, and showrun the 10-episode English language series set in early Sixties Berlin for the French studio. Germany's Odeon will co-produce, and Pascal Chaumeil (Spiral, A Long Way Down) will direct. According to Variety, Spy City "sheds light on the personal lives of spies and focuses on a group of men and women of different nationalities and backgrounds who are in the 'hornet’s nest' of divided Berlin." THR adds, "Spy City is set in the hottest period of the cold war, when Berlin was the center of the global chess game between the powers of East and West. The series is billed as an intimate look at the men and women who risked everything to become spies."

Divided Berlin is, of course, the absolute perfect setting for a cable series, and I'm really surprised it's taken someone this long to do it! HBO shot a pilot in 2012 for one called The Missionary (co-created by Malcolm Gladwell), but it didn't go to series. And it was announced last month that Epix had greenlit a spy series called Berlin Station created and written by Olen Steinhauer, but that's contemporary. Still, between the two of them, that means that two of my very favorite contemporary novelists both have upcoming 10-episode spy series set in Berlin! And I'm supremely excited for both of them.

Gaumont TV France, whose sister company Gaumont TV International is behind NBC's Hannibal and Netflix's Hemlock Grove, plans to produce one to two English-language European series a year beginning with Spy City. (And Crosshair makes the first two both espionage series!) "In the past few months, many more European-based projects have started coming our way," Gaumont CEO Christopher Riandee told Variety. "Spy City is the perfect English language project for us to produce in Europe and we are thrilled that William Boyd and Pascal Chaumeil are attached to this project,” commented Riandee.  “In addition, with Elizabeth [Dreyer, new head of international co-productions] on board we will be able to focus on additional strong international projects financed and produced out of Europe.”

In addition to being an internationally acclaimed novelist, Boyd is also a successful screenwriter. He co-wrote Richard Attenborough's Oscar-nominated biopic Chaplin (1992), adapted other people's novels into Mister Johnson (1990, starring Pierce Brosnan) and Sword of Honor (2001, starring Daniel Craig), and adapted his own novels A Good Man in Africa (1994, starring Sean Connery and Diana Rigg) and Stars and Bars (1988, not starring any James Bond, but starring Daniel Day-Lewis, which is also pretty good), among many other credits. He wrote and directed The Trench (1999), which also starred Craig. Besides Solo, his recent novels include the WWI espionage tale Waiting for Sunrise, the pharmaceutical thriller Ordinary Thunderstorms, and the short story "The Vanishing Game." The latter, Boyd's homage to John Buchan's The 39 Steps, is a great read and a great introduction to the author, as it's available for free (thanks to Land Rover) as an e-book from Amazon and as an audiobook download from Audible. It's a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it. Most of all, though, I can't wait for Spy City!

Second Trailer Drops for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.!

Warner Bros. debuted a second trialer for this summer's feature film version of the classic Sixties TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with some prints of San Andreas a few weeks ago, but it never made it online. Today they've finally made a new trailer available online. (Whether it's the same as the one that played in theaters, or a version of it, is still a bit unclear. ) Like the first one, the new one makes Guy Ritchie's film look absolutely fantastic! The bit with Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) ziplining across the Berlin Wall (in pursuit of Napoleon Solo [Henry Cavill] and his female companion [Ex Machina scene stealer Alicia Vikander], as we know from that EW story last month), just hits all of my Cold War spy fandom buttons! I love the 1960s setting, and I cannot wait to see this film! Check it out:


The Man From U.N.C.L.E. hits theaters on August 14, 2015.

Trailer: Bridge of Spies

We saw the poster yesterday; today comes our first look at Steven Spielberg's Cold War spy thriller Bridge of Spies in a fantastic trailer. Pretty much every shot is pure catnip for Sixties spy buffs. It's pretty amazing that we're getting two big spy movies set in that period this year—The Man From U.N.C.L.E. for Bondian fantasy and this for gritty, fact-based drama. I can't wait to see both movies!

Tradecraft: Charlize Theron to Star in The Coldest City, Based on Antony Johnston's Graphic Novel

Well, this is cool! Deadline reports that Focus Features has bought the North American rights to a film version of Antony Johnston's Cold War Berlin-set graphic novel The Coldest City (review here), and "has committed to a wide release." The graphic novel (and I hope the movie as well) is set in the final days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Personally, I feel like divided Berlin was just as interesting in the 1980s as the 1960s, but we get far too few period pieces taking advantage of that fascinating time, so I'm particularly looking forward to this one! Charlize Theron will star as British agent Lorainne Broughton, who's got a ticking clock to solve the murder of a fellow agent and recover some vital intelligence before the climate in Berlin thaws forever. John Wick's David Leitch and Chad Stahelski will direct, and Kurt Johnstad (300) will pen the script. That behind-the-scenes team would seem to bode a more action-oriented tale than the refreshingly cerebral story of Johnston's graphic novel (more in the Len Deighton tradition than Ian Fleming), but it's a talented group of people, so I'll give them credit for more than just what we've seen them do before. Johnstad really impressed me with Act of Valor. In that movie, he managed to assemble a serviceable spy plot out of what basically amounted to footage of Special Forces teams training, so just imagine what he'll be able to do with source material of this caliber! Johnston is a longtime spy fan whose other comic book credits in the genre also include an arc of Greg Rucka's stellar Queen & Country and adaptations of Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider graphic novels.

Entertainment Weekly Reveals Cool Man From U.N.C.L.E. Movie Details

In its summer movie preview, Entertainment Weekly has revealed some very cool details about Guy Ritchie's upcoming movie version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. We already knew that it was a period piece set in the era of the TV show (and the height of spymania), the 1960s, and we knew from the trailer that East/West checkpoints play a role. But until now I hadn't seen anything to indicate that the movie would feature one of my very favorite tropes of Cold War spy fictions both fantastical and realistic—a Berlin wall crossing! According to the magazine, "In one extended chase sequence, Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Gabby Teller (Alicia Vikander) elude Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) by zip-lining across the Berlin Wall." This, of course, happens before the American and Russian agents eventually team up, as the movie serves as an origin story for the famous partnership. I would guess the zip-lining leads into the sequence we've seen in the trailer (albeit clearly edited out of order) in which Illya pursues the pair in a nighttime car chase. EW provides some terrific concept artwork for the sequence, too (above). "What we’re trying to capture are iconic memories of the East-meets-West scenario,” Ritchie told the magazine. "Getting over the Wall is part of that world." The stunt, EW reports, was inspired by a real-life incident in 1983 in which Michael Becker and Holger Bethke fled East Berlin in the same manner. "We looked up every conceivable way of getting over the Berlin Wall," said Ritchie. "That was the most plausible." (But did he consider Jason King's method of being transported across in a shipping crate lined with luxurious cushions and stocked with champagne?) As well as the series itself, Ritchie was inspired by the Sixties Bond movies and the Harry Palmer films starring Michael Caine. Wall crossing plays a major role in the second of those movies based on Len Deighton's novels, Funeral in Berlin. And the concept of escaping an Eastern Bloc nation also recalls one of the very best episodes of the TV show, Season 1's "The Dove Affair." I would be very happy if it turns out that the movie leans heavily on that Robert Towne-penned classic! Henry Cavill News has scans of additional illustrations from the print version of Entertainment Weekly, including a cool storyboard image of the zip-lining sequence.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. opens August 14.

Tradecraft: Paul Greengrass Ponders Some Serious Tunneling

Paul Greengrass is amassing quite a stack of espionage scripts on his development pile. As previously reported, he's already hard at work on an adaptation of the non-fiction spy memoir Agent Storm, and this summer he made the surprise announcement that he was reconsidering his long-held stance on never returning to the franchise that really put him on the map and would (hopefully) re-team with Matt Damon on a new Bourne movie which he would be writing himself. Yesterday Variety reported that the Bourne Ultimatum and Green Zone director has added a Cold War Berlin story to his growing pile. According to the trade, FilmNation Entertainment has acquired the screen rights to a book proposal (that's right; it's not even a book yet, just a proposal!) by journalist Greg Mitchell called The Tunnels. Mark Gordon (The Matador, The Man Who Wouldn't Die) will produce. The Tunnels is purportedly an "untold" true story of a harrowing escape from East Berlin during the days of the Wall about a group of West Germans funded by American news networks on an expedition to get their loved ones out of the East. (The trade doesn't say so, but I'm guessing the plan involves tunnels.) I hope this one happens. Personally, I love Wall-Crossing stories, and we don't get nearly enough of them nowadays.

Look At... The Berlin Wall

Network recently relaunched their website as Networkonair, and one of the primary features of the new site is their streaming "On Demand" section. I really enjoyed the episode of Scotland Yard they posted there (now gone), but  it's another video I'm directing you to today. Anyone who reads as many books as I do about divided, Cold War-era Berlin should definitely check out the 10-minute episode of  the 1960s theatrical documentary short subject series Look At Life entitled "The Wall." It contains lots and lots of contemporary glimpses of the Berlin Wall, in color no less. It makes a great supplement to famous Berlin-set spy novels like Funeral in Berlin, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Quiller Memorandum. I don't know how long it will be available for, though; these free streaming episodes don't remain for too long on the site. This segment comes from the forthcoming Region 2 PAL DVD set Look At Life Volume 6: World Affairs, which also includes a short entitled "James Bond's Island" examining Early Sixties Jamaica. I'd sure like to see that one! As a matter of fact, I'd like to see all of these.

Tradecraft: Jesse Plemons Joins The Missionary

Deadline reports that Matt Damon lookalike Jesse Plemons (The Master) has been tapped to co-star opposite the previously announced Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) in HBO's Berlin-set Cold War spy series The Missionary. The trade blog offers up the most comprehensive description I've seen yet of the show, which comes from writer Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) and producers Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Malcolm Gladwell: "Set in Berlin in the late 1960s, The Missionary centers on Roy (Walker), a young American missionary who gets caught up in Cold War intrigue while helping a young woman escape East Berlin. Plemons ... will play Sherwood Elbridge, a young Coca-Cola executive who helps smuggle defectors out of the Eastern Bloc." Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who directed Wahlberg in Contraband (a remake of the Icelandic film Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which Kormákur produced), will helm the pilot. There's a lot of good talent involved in this series. I like both Walker and Plemons, and the behind-the-scenes involvement of Gladwell, Wahlberg and Kormákur is certainly intriguing. This is definitely a series I'm looking forward to!

Tradecraft: Benjamin Walker Cast as Lead in HBO's Cold War Spy Series

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter star Benjamin Walker has been cast as the lead in HBO's long-in-the-works Malcolm Gladwell/Charles Randolph Cold War spy drama pilot The Missionary. According to Variety, "Walker will play an American missionary who gets caught up in Cold War intrigue while helping a young woman escape East Berlin." Randolph wrote the script and exec produces along with Gladwell (who makes a point of re-reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold every five years), Stephen Levinson and Mark Wahlberg. The trade reports that "Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur is helming the pilot."

Movie Review: The Debt (2011)

Movie Review: The Debt (2011)

Note: The Debt contains twists and turns which I won’t spoil here, but might inadvertently hint at in the course of discussing the film.

John Madden’s The Debt has all sorts of classic spy elements in place, including a partial Cold War Berlin setting complete with Wall-crossing and escapes, dangerous undercover assignments, an apparently untrustworthy boss, young agents in love, gadgets, a gunfight and even a Mission: Impossible-style kidnapping plot. It’s also got a cast of excellent older actors (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds, Jesper Christensen) and very good younger ones (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas), a talented director and a screenplay pedigree including the writers of the fantastic X-Men: First Class (review here) and the hopefully fantastic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s got all the makings of a top-shelf spy movie. But, unfortunately, the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. In Madden’s hands, these elements mostly just sort of sit there on the screen. By breaking up the characters between two actors playing them at different ages, they all end up underdeveloped. And the script crumbles under its own cleverness, telegraphing its surprises with see-through gimmicks and a necessarily awkward structure. Perhaps most of all, The Debt is done in by one particularly perplexing bit of casting.

Chastain, Worthington and Csokas play a team of Mossad agents tasked, in 1966, with identifying a Nazi war criminal named Vogel (Christensen) believed to be living under an assumed name and practicing as a gynecologist in East Berlin. Mirren, Hinds and Wilkinson, respectively, play the same characters in 1997, still dealing with the repercussions of their mission three decades later. That’s kind of confusing, because Hinds looks like the spitting image of an older Csokas, and it’s easy to see Worthington growing into Wilkinson. Yet those obvious pairings are reversed. I was aware of who was supposed to be who, yet still couldn’t help fixating on the miscasting because it was so glaring. Others in the group I saw it with weren’t aware (because it’s not made very clear), and went through most of the movie assuming that Wilkinson was Worthington and vice versa. It’s an easy mistake, and seems to have tripped up other reviewers as well, including Roger Ebert. I just can’t fathom why they were cast as they were. Mirren, at least, is very obviously Chastain, because she is the only woman and none of those plot twists involve sex change operations.

In the Sixties storyline, Chastain is the rookie agent on her first mission, Worthington is the driven but untested idealist and Csokas is the cynical team leader. Christensen, who played the villainous Mr. White in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, gives a very impressive performance here as the monster hiding in plain sight. The movie’s most nail-biting scenes find Chastain submitting to his care, exposing herself (quite literally) to the enemy by sticking her feet in those stirrups so she can covertly snap his picture with a necklace camera in order to confirm that he is who she’s already pretty certain he is. These scenes are squirm-inducingly suspenseful.

The agents’ kidnapping of Vogel is very exciting, and Csokas’ plan incorporates several of Jim Phelps’ favorite ingredients for such a caper, including a drug that simulates the effects of a heart attack and a fake ambulance. (I’m certain that there was at least one episode—and probably more—of Mission: Impossible that actually featured the exact same scenario to extract someone from an Eastern Bloc city.) This leads to what should be an equally exciting attempt to whisk the captive across the Berlin Wall involving trains, cut fences and meticulous timing. Even in the individual sequences, the elements are all there, but something doesn’t quite click and they don’t generate the spine-tingling thrills I normally associate with Wall-crossings. 

The fact that the characters are spread out between two actors means that they’re not in the hands of any single performer long enough to adequately develop them. I didn’t get any sense of continuity from one age to the next, so these people really felt like totally different characters from each other. Mirren gets the most to work with in the modern setting, and therefore succeeds best at portraying character development, but none of her present-day actions satisfactorily explain Chastain’s muddled motivations for falling in love with either—let alone both—of her teammates in the Sixties.

The Debt is not a bad movie at all. It’s slick-looking and boasts moments of genuine suspense, like the aforementioned doctor’s appointments or scenes in which Christensen’s Hannibal Lecter-like Vogel taunts the agents, honing in on their individual insecurities. However it’s not an especially good movie either. While it succeeds in those moments, it fails to generate similar suspense or necessary emotions in other crucial scenes. It just kind of sits there. And when a movie with Cold War-era Wall-crossings, which are like catnip to this spy fan, just sits there, I can’t help but feel slightly disappointed. Perhaps my expectations were set too high based on the cast and writers. I’ll just have to hope that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy delivers the intelligent, adult Cold War thrills I was hoping for from The Debt.

Clips From The Debt

Clips From The Debt

Spy fans are being really spoiled this fall. There are a ton of spy movies hitting North American theaters between now and December. Off the top of my head, we've got Colombiana, The Debt, The Killer Elite, Safe, Johnny English Reborn, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. I'm sure I'm leaving a few out. Focus Features doesn't want The Debt to get lost in that shuffle, so they've released a few cool clips to remind us that this is an old-school spy movie to be excited about. If there's one thing (besides Elke Sommer) that I really love in a spy movie, it's Wall crossing. I just love scenes of agents using whatever means necessary to sneak into East Berlin or escape back into the West. And that's exacly what we get in this clip:



The Debt has a lot going for it even beyond Wall crossing. It's partially set in the Sixties (the greatest era of espionage, on film anyway), it's from the writers of X-Men: First Class (Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Peter Straughan) and it stars spy vererens Helen Mirren (RED), Jesper Christensen (Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace), Marton Csokas (The Bourne Supremacy), Ciarán Hinds (Munich, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and Tom Wilkinson (The Ghost Writer, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) – as well as Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain. And it's only a few weeks away! The Debt opens on August 31. Here's the official synopsis:

In this espionage thriller, shocking news reaches retired Mossad secret agents Rachel (Mirren) and Stefan (Wilkinson) about their former colleague David (Hinds). Back in 1966, the trio (portrayed, respectively, by Chastain, Csokas, and Worthington tracked down Nazi war criminal Vogel (Christensen) in East Berlin. At great risk, and at considerable personal cost, the team’s mission was accomplished – or was it? The suspense builds in and across two different time periods, with startling action and surprising revelations.

See a bunch more clips and a making-of featurette at the official website.