I know I’m a little late to the Cleopatra party, but when you have a day job like mine, things fall by the wayside.
The news to date about Steven Soderbergh’s newest brainstorm, Cleo, is that he is in the planning stages of doing a movie musical about the life of ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra that will be shot in 3D. Initial reports on this popped up on places like Variety back in October with its star confirmed as Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The newest news is that Ray Winstone (whom I adored in Beowulf and am eager to finally see him in Scum) is joining the cast as Julius Caesar, and a finer choice has never been made. But the thing that I’m interested in the most is this musical scoring by Guided by Voices.
MTV.com‘s Josh Horowitz got Soderbergh to talk about the disbanded group and how he thought of them:
Soderbergh said he’d been thinking about using frontman Robert Pollard’s music for his long-gestating musical, when a conversation with former GBV member James Greer led to Greer writing the script in just six weeks. “He went away for like six weeks and wrote this great script! It’s like an Elvis musical in a way. It’s not serious. I mean it’s historically pretty accurate but its sort of like Viva Las Vegas meets Tommy.”
Considering that Winstone was in The Who’s Quadrophenia—which is perhaps the best rock musicals around—I was hoping that the musical could have a little bit of that sort of gravitas. And then I went vid-hunting on YouTube:
Er. Yes.
Well, since they’re constantly reinventing themselves, maybe GBV will have something different for the musical?
DJ Tulleken says:
You enjoyed him in Beowulf? Seriously? Ebert thought Zemeckis was going for satire, and I can see why he would think that of a film where the protagonist inexplicably shouts his own name numerous times and does a Simpsons Movie/Austin Powers-style nude fight scene, but I’m pretty sure the intention was more towards impact than humour.
Sorry, Beowulf has been percolating into a pet peeve for a while 🙂
Still, I don’t really see him as Caesar either. Ray Winstone really does best when he can capitalise on his cockney ‘ard man / salt o’ the earth act, a la Sexy Beast or There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble.
Scum is pretty brutal…that film and Nil By Mouth are probably why I find Winstone slightly scary to this day, but both films are also required watching.
Catherine Zeta-Jones sounds like a good casting choice though, although I can’t say I’m currently blown away by the whole concept.
Gordon McAlpin says:
Man, I hated Beowulf.
DJ Tulleken, if you like Winstone, check out The Proposition. FANTASTIC movie, terrific (supporting) role for Winstone.