Posts Tagged ‘Elizabeth Banks’
She’s the versatile actress you’ve seen in movies such as “W” and “Our Idiot Brother.” Elizabeth Banks is back with her latest project, “Man on a Ledge,” the action thriller in which she plays a police negotiator.
We sat down with her this week to talk about her latest role and her memories of living in San Francisco.
Elizabeth Banks is firing all cylinders right now, and you likely won’t find a more versatile actress on the IMDB. The vivacious blonde actress can ostensibly do it all; from comedy (“Zack and Miri Make a Porno”, “The 40 Year-Old Virgin”), drama (“W”, “Seabiscuit”), thriller (“The Hunger Games”, “The Uninvited”), horror (“Slither”) to adventure (The “Spider-Man” trilogy), she’s got the genres cornered and perfected. At the junket for her new film “Man on a Ledge”, I asked Banks about her aspiration to produce her own films. She spoke a little about “Tink”, announced a little while ago, in which she’ll play Peter Pan’s fairy-dust spreading buddy.
The movie, says Banks, is a little like Will Ferrell’s “Elf”.
It’s a live action Tinkerbell movie sort of in the vein of Elf in which I would play Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell gets thrown out of Never Never Land, and it’s about where she goes and who she meets and the adventures she has….Tinkerbell is one of the greatest characters because she’s mischievous and snarky and fun and sexy and jealous and vengeful
Banks says don’t get too excited just yet….
We’re in script stage and everybody is really excited and blah, blah, doesn’t mean anything. You might as well not even write it down because who knows, it might not even happen.
“Fright Night” scribe Marti Noxon is on scripting duties, with Banks, Adam Shankman (“Hairspray”) and McG (“Charlie’s Angels”) among the film’s producers.
Meanwhile, Banks has another film she’s listed as a producer on, “Pitch Perfect”.
It is a comedy set in the world of competitive cappella singing. It stars a bevy of hilarious, young talent – Rebel Wilson, Adam DeVine, Anna Kendrik, Anna Camp, Britney Snow. It’s really funny.
Actress Elizabeth Banks gained big-screen recognition for her roles in “Sea-Biscuit” and “Spiderman.”
On T.V. she’s been a regular on comedies including “Scrubs” and “30 Rock.”
106.7 FM ‘The Fan’ movie reviewer Kevin McCarthy learned that even when she’s playing a serious role, as she does in the new movie “Man on a Ledge,” she likes to sneak in a little humor when she can.
New York City. Mid-day. A man steps outside the window on the edge of the Roosevelt Hotel. Is he jumping? That’s the question that street level onlookers and moviegoers want answered from Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks, Jamie Bell and Ed Harris in “Man on a Ledge”
This trifle of an action film does have some mojo going for it. It’s played a bit tongue-in-cheek, with the wry Banks filling the role as the hard-drinking New York Police suicide negotiator. The tension in this film is wholly exaggerated, to a point where it teeters on the brink of parody. All the ensemble cast has their game faces on, however, as the somewhat overly complex plot unravels.
Sam Worthington is Nick Cassidy, introduced as a cop-turned-thief doing hard time at Sing-Sing. His brother Joey (Jamie Bell) is embarrassed that Nick has sullied the family name, but does manage to get Nick a temporary furlong from the joint to attend his father’s funeral. Also attending are is the convict’s old police partner Mike Ackerman (Anthony Mackie) and Joey’s girlfriend, Angie (Génesis Rodríguez). Nick is able to distract his handlers enough to make a spectacular escape from the graveyard. The manhunt to retrieve him is on, led by his ex-partner.
The next time Nick makes an appearance is on the ledge of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The chaos surrounding the event is almost instantaneous, as onlookers encourage Nick to jump, even as he insists he will talk only to police suicide negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks). The show on the ledge is a deception, however. Nick is out to clear his name and get revenge on David Englander (Ed Harris), the rich dude who sent him up the river. While Nick distracts the New York City police department, the brother/girlfriend combination of Joey and Angie are breaking into Englander’s supposedly impenetrable safe deep in the building next door.
Besides being the most elaborate scheme ever to clear a name – why doesn’t Nick just hire a good lawyer – the “Man on the Ledge” goes to great lengths to keep up the suspense on both the ledge and the break-in. Nick’s desire to have Bank’s character as his talking partner becomes all part of what is going on in the building next door, within the plan’s utter complexity. And it’s a good thing that girlfriend Angie obviously works out, because otherwise she’d never get into the skintight cat suit that allows her to crawl through duct work.
That’s what happening in this film, two simultaneous stories, each feeding less and less off each other. Worthington is game for this type of role, he does a decent job of trying to hold it all together, it just is so absurd once it’s figured out, that if I were part of the planning committee, I would have just paid off some dirty cops to burn some records. Elizabeth Banks is her usual I’m-in-on-the-joke self, showing off the “million dollar a picture” smile and slightly winking to the camera as the suicide negotiator.
There is an element of the 99 versus the one percent as represented by the rich man played by Ed Harris, but again he’s so mean and spiteful there is not one person in the or outside the film that wants him to succeed (maybe his administrative staff). He would have been better off not harassing Nick and writing off whatever he supposedly stole as part of some off-shore money laundering. This is a set-up that truly could have spared the time, effort and emergency vehicles involved just with a little outside-the-box tax and legal maneuverings.
In as much, though, as the audacious plan seemed unnecessary, it did provide an exaggeration that at times was entertaining. At least it had the cat-suited Angie slinking around, because pink underwear is best when breaking and entering. That spanking of convention, as well as Bank’s presence and the oiliness of Ed Harris, was enough of a diversion to keep the story rolling along. It’s funny that in cinematic fiction the good guy is the one that generally wins, while the opposite is true in real life, at least when money is involved.
“Man on the Ledge” is what movies are for, a 102 minute diversion rooting for a guy who was wrongly accused, who still had the wherewithal to get the right plan together at the right time, all while entertaining New York City and the audience in the dark on a 14-inch stage.
Whether you’re into television junkie or a film nerd, you probably know Elizabeth Banks. In television the actress has had memorable turns on “30 Rock” and “Scrubs,” while her film credits include a mixture of comedic and serious efforts like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “The Next Three Days.”
This week, in the thriller “Man on a Ledge,” Banks plays a police negotiator named Lydia Mercer. When a disgraced ex-cop Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) climbs up on a New York hotel threatening to jump, Mercer is tasked with talking him down. What she doesn’t know is that the stunt is merely a smokescreen to hide his true plan. Certain shady characters discover his motives, so they set attempt to stop Nick, causing chaos to ensue.
Recently I had the chance to sit down for a roundtable interview with Banks about the movie. Below are some highlights of the conversation.
Q: One of the cool things about your character in this movie is that she’s a “police officer” and not a “police woman.” There’s not anything mentioned about her being a woman in the movie. Was that important to you to just play a character where it didn’t matter?
Elizabeth Banks: I really, I was very drawn, (pauses) thank you for noticing, I was drawn to the fact that she was nobody’s wife or girlfriend. I also felt the same way. I felt that gender really didn’t matter. It definitely goosed it a little that she’s a woman, but it could have easily been a man. It felt to me like a younger John McClane. That definitely drew me to it.
And the other thing is that I met with some actual NYPD negotiators and I asked specifically to meet a woman. And I said, ‘They have women right?’ And they were like ‘Oh yeah we’ve got a few.’ I met this great lady from Staten Island via Ireland, so as you can imagine her accent was incredible. She was very girly and she was like 42, a mom, wore a cute Banana Republic suit, and carried a cute purse that had her piece in it.
Elizabeth Banks, who stars in this weekend’s Man on a Ledge with Sam Worthington, has joined the star-studded cast of Frank or Francis, Charlie Kaufman’s musical satire about Hollywood.
Banks joins a roll call that includes Jack Black, Nicolas Cage, Steve Carell, Catherine Keener and Kevin Kline in a story that follows a battle of wills between Frank, an intellectual film director (Carell) and Francis, an online blogger (Black) who still lives with his parents and who delights in attacking the other man’s films.
Cage plays an actor who is famous for his high-concept films, while Kline will play the director of the world’s top-grossing movie as well as that character’s brother, who turns into an animatronic head. (Yes, it’s a Charlie Kaufman film.)
Banks will play a highly-regarded actress making formulaic comedy bombs who is having an affair with Carell’s Frank.
Anthony Bregman of A Likely Story is producing.
Banks, repped by UTA, Untitled Entertainment and Ziffren Brittenham, will also appear in Lionsgate’s Hunger Games, which opens March 23.
Elizabeth Banks had a motto on the set of Man on a Ledge, and it was: “Thank God for Ed Burns.”
“I adore him,” she told The Hollywood Reporter of her co-star, whose film opens nationwide on Friday, Jan. 27.
The duo play a pair of NYPD officers who are forced to work together to talk Sam Worthington’s character down from the ledge. The film is directed by Asger Leth and required Banks to film many of her scenes from the top of a high rise in New York City.
“I’m not afraid of heights, I’m afraid of human error,” she told THR. “I’m afraid of like, did they actually put the harness on right and is my coat gonna get stuck in a window… is my boot gonna fall off. Anything can happen, and those are the things that scare me. Not the actual height.”
While Burns had his preparation in the bag with a family full of NYPD officers, Banks took the opportunity to meet with a female negotiator from Staten Island who taught her that, “the women on the force are constantly proving themselves over and over.”
“When they hear I’m playing a cop, of course they’re gonna break my balls about it,” Burns said of his father and three cousins who currently serve on the force. “But at the same time everybody gets a thrill out of seeing a family member in a big movie, that’s always pretty great. And then when I’m playing a cop, I’m sure they’ll see things that I didn’t do to the letter, let’s say, and I’ll hear about that.”
Speaking to his scenes with Banks, Burns added: “She and I hit it off immediately.”
