Indie Thriller GRAND PIANO Lands Elijah Wood

• Tweet
• Pin It

Frodo Baggins takes a flying leap into high-concept hell.

You have to hand it to Elijah Wood.  Of all the people who have made that ever-dicey transition from child star into viable adult lead actor, Wood seems to have traversed the chasm with the greatest of ease.

At the age of thirty-one, Wood has a staggering seventy-five acting credits on his IMDb resume.  That’s some rapsheet, especially for a guy who still looks like he’s thirteen years old.  To my largely untrained eye, he seems to have achieved this by remaining in front of the camera at an almost constant rate, while at the same time mastering the careful dance between off-the-path indie flicks and orbit-shaking blockbusters.

The latest entry will be the indie thriller Grand Piano, brought to you by the sickies who brought you the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Buried (a film which, in regards to Reynolds, would’ve worked much better as a documentary). It is the story of a vanished piano virtuoso who returns to the stage after a five-year layoff.  When he is about to start playing, he finds a menacing note written on his sheet music, and it will be up to him to play his ass off to save his own life as well as his wife’s.  The Hollywood Reporter is doing its best to help producers Adrian Guerra and Rodrigo Cortes position Grand Piano as “Speed at a piano,” which, for anybody who isn’t a blathering studio twit, is a little like saying “Snakes On A Plane at a chess club.”

So, is this a misstep for Frodo?  Sheer odds will tell you that almost any step that any given actor takes in the course of a career is likely to be a step in the wrong direction.  The nice thing about an indie flick is that, even if Grand Piano does shit the bed, Wood can get the sheets and blankets into the slop sink before anybody really takes notice.

But a warning to Wood:  No soiled sheet escapes the watchful eyes at the Complex.  In a year, when Grand Piano tumbles out of the Redbox, you can bet we’ll have copious notes on the finished product.  Provided, of course, we don’t forget all about it in the meantime.

3 Comments

1. 

   Owen

   May 3, 2012 at 7:47 am

   I think this film will be fantastic and not like Speed at all. Taken from a current Entertainment Weekly interview:

   “Wood chuckled when he heard that description of the project… “We always need some kind of tagline for a point of reference, don’t we?… “It’s extremely Hitchcockian. It’s essentially a heist over the course of a classical piano performance in a concert hall. The pianist that I play is essentially being held hostage and being told to play and not to miss a note, or he’ll be shot or his wife will be shot. The script is exhilarating. I really never read anything quite like it. It’s incredibly suspenseful in a really classical way.”

   I’d take a Hitchcock-like film over Speed any day.

   Reply
2. 

   Jimmy Callaway

   May 3, 2012 at 5:27 pm

   Clearly, none of us are blathering studio twits. I daresay if you detect any real animosity towards this flick, it’s likely due to awful taglines for a point of reference. Kudos to Wood for eschewing that sorta thing, but then again, he’s giving interviews to Entertainment Weekly. I call a stalemate.

   Reply
3. 

   Josh Converse

   May 3, 2012 at 5:48 pm

   Wood’s rearticulation of the plot synopsis isn’t blowing my skirt up any. I’m also not finding anything on the writer/director team’s scary resume that leads me to believe they are capable of anything “Hitchcockian,” fun as it is to say. So when I say this movie is likely to blow big chunks of chewed tuna casserole all over the booth, I’m just playing the odds based on the braintrust at work.

   Reply