Two leading ladies, two very different films. One puts Angelina Jolie through an identity crisis in Salt‘s neo-cold war atmosphere, the other stars Julia Roberts in a big-budget adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love. Jolie and Roberts are two of the highest-earning, name-brand A-listers in the business. See the trailers below for these summer movies. Eat Pray Love could prove welcome summer programming for adults, especially women, while Jolie could inject an element of the unexpected in Salt, which was originally set to star Tom Cruise.
Roberts plays a woman who, unhappy with her marriage and cookie-cutter existence, leaves socioeconomic security behind on a journey of spiritual and gastronomical self-discovery in Italy, India and Bali. Javier Bardem and James Franco co-star as her love interests.
Both films star skinny women traveling under emotional duress. But Salt looks like a formula studio action thriller. Director Phil Noyce was pleased enough that Russian agents have infiltrated college communities and suburban book clubs in Cambridge, MA that he emailed the NYT story to press as evidence that the Cold War hasn’t ended.
Real world developments and a strong showing by Salt at the box office could also spur on that long-awaited big-screen adaptation, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
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