Out Of The Furnace (2013)

The flame under The Hunger Games: Catching Fire began to sputter this weekend and the movie dropped 63%. It dropped out of first place, leaving room for Frozen, which held on stronger, to have its shot at number one.

In the film Affleck stars as Rodney Baze Jr., a young man and soldier living in Pennsylvania with his ailing father and brother, Russell (Christian Bale). Over the course of the movie we see him get sent back into the Iraq War multiple times, causing a deep change in him mentally.

Scott Cooper didn’t mess around when it came to constructing the tone of his new film Out of the Furnace. From the very first scene – which features Woody Harrelson’s character verbally and physically abusing his girlfriend at a drive-in movie – the movie envelops the audience in an incredibly dark world and doesn’t let go until you’re well on your way home from the theater. And that was exactly what the director was going for.

The holiday season is officially upon us, observed less through Christmas decorations and cold weather and more by the onslaught of Oscar fare hitting theaters this month. December is always a truly great time for both quality dramas and big bombastic comedies, and this year won’t be bucking that trend.

In a slow, post-Thanksgiving movie week with only one movie headed toward a wide release*, we only make our way out of the furnace. Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer.

Braddock now stands alongside Detroit and Gary, Indiana and any number of other Rust Belt towns as a symbol of America's lost industrial might. We've seen the pictures of rusted-out factories and crumbling towns; what Cooper wanted to bring to Braddock was a story, about what happens when the world collapses around you but also how a community moves on together

All the cards of Oscar season aren't quite laid out, as we wait just one more week for American Hustle to start screening for guilds, and probably not much longer for Martin Scorsese to finally finish Wolf of Wall Street. But a lot of the question marks have been revealed, as virtually every movie with a shot in the Oscar race-- plus some major longshots-- have been unveiled in the last few months.

Among fall movies there's the ones aiming for Oscars, the ones aiming for big audiences, and then every once in a while some that fall in the middle. We had pegged Out of the Furnace as pure prestige, coming from the writer and director of Crazy Heart and starring a laundry list of Oscar nominees and winners, from Christian Bale to Forest Whitaker

Scripted by Cooper and Brad Ingelsby, the film tells the story of Russell Baze (Bale), a blue collar worker with a rough life, spending days working at the steel mill and nights with his dying father. Things begin to look a little brighter when Russell's brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) returns home from Iraq, but soon things take a dark turn when Rodney is lured into a ruthless crime ring.

Directed by Crazy Heart's Scott Cooper and shot on location in the depressed former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Out of the Furnace aims to capture some of the blue-collar grit of the film that earned Bale his Oscar, The Fighter, but with its own rough and tumble criminal twist. In the first-look article in USA Today, which included the image of Bale you see above

Everything about this movie sounds covered in coal dust and misery, but I wonder if Cooper will be able to give it the necessary grit-- his Crazy Heart got a lot of details right about country music, but it was also a little glossier and more sentimental than you might expect

From the biggest of Hollywood blockbusters like The Hunger Games to made for TV movies like HBO Films' Game Change, Woody Harrelson manages to find himself in a bit of everything. And deservedly so since the actor almost always delivers a compelling performance. For his next role, Harrelson is in negotiations to star opposite Christian Bale and Casey Affleck as the villain in the crime drama Out of the Furnace.

Originally titled The Low Dweller and penned by insurance salesman-turned-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby, Out of the Furnace has since been polished by Cooper, who showed his capability to craft compelling characters with Crazy Heart. Here, Bale will star as Russell Baze, a tough customer who tries to forge a path for himself and his younger brother Rodney (Affleck) in the poverty-stricken Rust Belt.

Director Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace doesn't sound like the most original project we've ever heard of. The film follows an ex-con who, upon being released from prison, goes on a mission for revenge, hunting down the man that killed his younger brother. For example, the movie sounds incredibly similar to Faster, the 2010 action film starring Dwayne Johnson (which wasn't bad, but certainly not something to try and imitate less than two years later).

In August of last year speculation was running rampant about what where Oscar winner Christian Bale would go following the end of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. Reports linked him to projects like Spike Lee's Oldboy remake, Darren Aronofsky's Noah, Clint Eastwood's A Star Is Born and Michael Mann's Gold.

Though he's been playing Batman since 2005, Christian Bale has not allowed himself to be identified solely by character. Though his performances as the Dark Knight have been incredibly memorable, Bale has also put on stellar performances in movies like The Prestige, 3:10 To Yuma and The Fighter in the time since (the last in the list giving him his first Academy Award).

The tone of the script is being compared to No Country For Old Men's spare, harsh vibe, a big contrast to the music-filled, somewhat sentimental Crazy Heart. It's unclear when production might star on this, but I'm anxious to see what Cooper does next