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Quick Cuts: Footloose adaptation loses yet another lead, and other stories

It looks like the Footloose movie adaptation is cursed as Chace Crawford’s reps confirmed to reporter Nicole Sterling that the “Gossip Girl” star would no longer be appearing as Ren McCormack, the rebel dancer with a heart of gold and hips of steel. Sterling’s own sources claim that the “GG” series is the culprit and not the loss of Kenny Ortega. “Dancing With the Stars” golden girl Julianne Hough is still on track to be the female lead… this week, that is. (Source: EW.com)

And speaking of Kevin Bacon, he’s joining the cast of Steve Carrell’s untitled comedy about divorce as an “alpha male” character who has an affair with his wife, Julianne Moore. The movie begins shooting later this month. (Source: The Hollywood Reporter)

Finally, as one of the “new media” bloggers but also as one who wanted (and still wants) to break into “dead-tree” journalism, I’m not sure what to think about this opinion article by Howard Kurtz which speaks briefly about the differences between an accredited movie/literary/restaurant critic and Joe/Jill Average blogger because I can’t take a side just as the writer can’t.

As a writer, I know that in order to be able to be a better one, I need to read as much as I can and I don’t necessarily have that kind of time. But someone who reads for a living and can take the time to do the research and explore all the avenues is going to be better than I am at determining whether or not something is good or great. This requires more thought. (Source: The Washington Post)

Related Posts: Director Kenny Ortega won’t be getting Footloose, Zac Efron beats feet from Footloose and into a new Life

Clive Owen and Daniel Brühl to face off, maybe, as Intruders

After Clive Owen’s appearance in Duplicity from 2009 earned only a 65% fresh rating on the Tomatometer and grossed just enough worldwide box office to recoup its $60 million budget, he appeared in a small Australian movie that same yearcalled The Boys are Back which got some good reviews.

Now, it seems as if Owen’s ready to jump back into the big Hollywood pool again, having previously booked the sequel to Inside Man with Denzel Washington and picking up a new project with director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later), according to Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog.

Titled Intruders, producers Enrique López Lavigne and Belen Atienza at Apaches Entertainment are being coy with the synopsis to the film:

[It] is known the story centers on an 11-year old girl forced to confront childhood demons. Owen will play the girl’s father.

Also joining the cast in an unnamed role will be Daniel Brühl, who was last seen as Private Zoller, the German war hero-turned movie star in Inglorious Basterds; I’m making book right now that Brühl will turn out to be the bad guy of the film.

International distribution rights have already been granted to Universal Pictures International who are also co-financing the project; the U.S. domestic rights are currently up for purchase.

Clive Owen is the kind of actor who seems to be more at home in cozy, non-Hollywood projections, and I’m gratified to see him in a production like this. And as for Fresnadillo, video game adaptation fans can relax as he’s still scheduled to be working on the Bioshock movie.

Additional casting for Intruders is currently underway and production is scheduled to begin in June in London, England and Madrid, Spain.

Taylor Kitsch hopes to not sink Universal's Battleship

My fascination with the Hasbro movies continues as Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog filed an exclusive report last week regarding the Battleship movie.

As previously noted in an update on the Stretch Armstrong movie, director Peter Berg’s Battleship will be the tale of an international armada who seeks to destroy a water-bound alien organism and/or fleet; Kit’s exclusive revealed that Canadian actor Taylor Kitsch (Gambit from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Tim Riggins from “Friday Night Lights”) will be its star playing a character IMDB claims is named Alex Hopper.

Kit notes that screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber (Whiteout) are responsible for adding the science fiction elements to the board game’s plot—and believe me when I say that I never thought that I’d ever type those three words together—which was originally based in the Cold War of the 1950s. Also of note is this:

Throughout the awards season, Jeremy Renner, riding high off of The Hurt Locker momentum, had been in the running for the role but had to decide between this movie and Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest drama, with scheduling conflicts preventing his involvement in both.

If this is true, then I believe Renner made the correct decision because the plot to Battleship now sounds like Independence Day 2: Now It’s Personal and Takes Place in the Oceans.

At least Kitsch (whom I believe has the most accidentally ironic last name for a serious actor) will also be working on a more grounded and classic sci-fi movie as he’d also booked the title role of Disney’s John Carter of Mars, which is currently filming.

Related Posts: Taylor Lautner reaches for Stretch Armstsrong, Universal and Hasbro sign a six-year pact (updated)

Trisha’s Take: Five real-life stories that would make great original movies

Inset image by gingerpig2000 @ Flickr

One of the things I’ve noticed while covering movie news for this site is that there are an awful lot of remakes and adaptations of existing movies, plays, and TV series that are being put into production, and it seems like it’s happening more and more often. In fact, it’s happening so often that I almost feel as if this kind of news deserves its own category tag.

Which is why I really appreciated this story from the Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Business blog from last week, wherein Jay A. Fernandez profiled the subject of one of screenwriter Adam Mazer’s recent true-life adaptation projects, Hal Berger.

With a working title of Snatched, Berger’s story is that he was married to a woman who was from South Africa who refused to return to the U.S. from that country with their son and after Berger got him back, she used a boyfriend and some fake passports to re-take her son from his school. And then, things got intense, as reported by the Huffington Post:

While living in South Africa for eight months to recover his son, Mr. Berger was faced with two false arrests attempts, several death threats, was ultimately imprisoned while entering the country from Namibia, and stripped of his human rights to see his child for months at a time.

While I disagree with Fernandez’s description of Berger as a “decidedly regular guy,” you have to admit that the story’s quite fascinating—which begs the question: What other real-life stories are out there that would make awesome movies?

I’m so glad you asked.

Hatshepsut
After the death of her father, favored daughter Princess Hatshepsut begins to realize that she could possibly become the sole ruler of Egypt.

My fascination for the story of the only female pharaoh of ancient Egypt (whoops, spoilers) began with my first boyfriend who painted a rather evocative image of her in both words and pencil when he was studying her for one of his art classes.

There weren’t any wars conducted during her lifetime so I don’t see this containing any Ten Commandments-style epic scenes, but I see there being lots of intrigue and clashes amongst the other political factions that wanted her nephew Tutmose III to attain a full leadership. Bonus to this would be a subplot featuring the secret romance between her and her most trusted advisor.

The Soldier Bear
After being found in the foothills of Iran, the men of the Second Polish Transport Company aren’t sure what to do with their pet brown bear cub. Luckily, Wojtek has his own idea about what he can do for his new friends.

The author of its Badass of the Week profile says, “The idea of a fucking alcoholic Nazi-fighting bear is so awesome that you’d think it was something out of a bizarre cartoon or a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie” and why not, I say? It would be like Born Free, except with less fluffy-happy-bunny time and more awesome Saving Private Ryan action, perhaps with some M.A.S.H or Catch-22-style hijinks as well.

Young Justice
When some kids reach the age of 15, they look forward to getting a permit to drive a car. All he ever wanted was a decent day’s wage—and what he did to get it would rock a nation to its very core.

The screenwriter looking to adapt this story should wait a few years as the murder of South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche (his last name means “white land” in French) by an unnamed minor is still being investigated. Hell, in the 16 hours since the time I first started drafting this article, the AP article I linked was fleshed out with much more detail.

Still, in a world where so many people are looking at the election of a black man to the highest government honor in the U.S. as a sign that racism is over, for this kind of treatment and resulting hatred and strife to still be continuing both shocks and appalls me—and makes me wonder how Kathryn Bigelow feels about making movies about post-apartheid South Africa.

Spacewomen of the Soyuz
Friends since childhood, Dorothy, Stephanie, Naoko and Tracy have endured a rigorous training regimen and numerous hardships in order to become the first all-female deep space exploration party and the commanders of the starship Soyuz. However, what awaits them in the darkest reaches will test and try their very souls.

This is probably the most far-fetched and the most deserving of the title credit “Inspired by a true story,” but when I learned that real-life astronauts Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson, Naoko Yamazaki and Tracy Caldwell Dyson have broken the record for the most number of women who are in orbit around the Earth after this past week’s shuttle launch, I couldn’t help but think that it was a cool time to be a woman of science.

I was turning 9 at the time of the Challenger disaster of January 1986 and like many kids that year, I was watching the launch live in my elementary school classroom. My teacher Ms. Clyde (later, Caitlin) had been one of the finalists for the inaugural Teacher in Space program, but Christa McAuliffe just happened to beat her out, which is why we were watching it rather intently.

I don’t know how related it is to that, but legendary comics writer Chris Claremont released a book a year later called First Flight! which revolves around a maverick female pilot/astronaut and I remember loving the book when I first read it almost 10 years after its release. (Alas, the book is no longer in print; hooray for used bookstores!)

Combine the true facts with imaginary details of these women’s lives, toss in some Alien or Moon-style corporate intrigue along with healthy bits of science, and you’ve got an awesome movie right there.

Anna Friel to frolic in Dark Fields with Bradley Cooper

According to Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter, the cast for Dark Fields is firming up with the addition of British actress Anna Friel (“Pushing Daisies”).

Friel will be playing star Bradley Cooper’s ex-wife, and judging from the logline, it’s probably Cooper’s writer’s decline that prompts their divorce. How it ties into his sudden re-emergence as a productive, successful member of society after his ingestion of an experimental drug that increases his brain power is so plain to see that it’s bordering on predictable.

However, Kit’s synopsis of the film adds an interesting little detail to the story: “[Cooper’s character] discovers that the drug has lethal and lasting side effects, including ‘trip-switching,’ a phenomenon in which time moves with a stop-motion quality.”

Filming will commence this May.

Related Posts: De Niro joining The Dark Fields,Bradley Cooper to run through Dark Fields

Trisha’s Video of the Day: When Hitchcock and Peeps meet

It’s the day after Easter, which means that it’s party-time for people who love Peeps, those sugar-coated pastel-colored marshmallow candies that are a mainstay of this season. However, one does need to be careful of what happens when Peeps go bad:

Crafted by the folks at Wooden Nickel Shorts, a little digging found this cute vlog (that’s “video blog”) entry from one of its members Dan Milano, who wrote a treatment for Ghostbusters III when he was in the third grade and managed to get Dan Aykroyd to sign it.

(My only questions are: What in the world was Aykroyd promoting? Is it just me, or did those containers look like skulls?)

MGM Studio sale teeters on edge of reality

In another one of those “It’s so wacky, it could be true!” stories that tend to crop up today, over 100 of the various lenders to MGM Studios are meeting right now to decide the fate of the financially floundering studio.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carl DiOrio filed a report yesterday, explaining exactly what’s currently at stake:

Wednesday [was] the deadline on a $200 million-plus interest payment by MGM, whose credit facility expires April 8, forcing an additional $250 million payment to lenders. To get past those two deadlines, something like a 15-day extension of the most recent debt-forbearance agreement is envisioned.

MGM and its consultant Moelis & Co. have asked for a 45-day extension, but lenders seem in no mood to comply.

“The lenders are frustrated and disappointed with the bidding process,” a lenders-side source said. “They are also frustrated by the existing restructuring proposals, which amount only to pledges to do better.”

If what DiOrio’s source says is true, I can completely understand why the lenders wouldn’t want to grant the studio any more leeway. It’s like when you ask a teenager what he or she would do to bring his/her flunking grades up and the answer is, “<shrug> I dunno.”

Surely some serious grounding and a revocation of driving and texting privileges is order.

Related Posts: Trisha’s Take: MGM bankruptcy might not be terrible idea after all, James Bond franchise future in doubt and/or in safe hands 

Video of the day: Did someone really make a black version of Star Wars?

Normally, I don’t trust any news that I read on April 1, I sure as hell am not clicking any video links, and I know that several of you are the same.

However, I had to check this out:

The posting account was created yesterday, and the link to their website Lando is the Man goes to an empty WordPress blog featuring a very nipply woman in a tank top.

Allegedly, this is the first part in the “documentary” series; if any other parts get released, I will be highly impressed.

Anna Faris drafted for Private Benjamin remake

I know it’s a phrase we often say around here, but I’ll say it yet again: remaking Private Benjamin is a bad idea.

In a Hollywood Reporter exclusive on their Risky Business blog, Borys Kit and Jay A. Fernandez reported yesterday that comic actress Anna Faris (Observe and Report, The House Bunny) was being sought after to star in New Line Cinema’s remake of Private Benjamin with Amy Talkington (The Night of the White Pants) “in discussions” to write the screenplay for proposed producer Mark Gordon (“Army Wives,” Saving Private Ryan).

The original Benjamin from 1980 earned Goldie Hawn an Academy Award nomination as Judy Benjamin, a spoiled brat who joins the Army on a lark after her rich husband dies in bed on their wedding night. The new Benjamin is still being drafted as a comedy, but a certain paragraph from the article is giving me reasons to pause:

The new take will set the story in contemporary times with modern wars as the backdrop. Insiders say the studio doesn’t want to poke fun at the men and women in the service or take political potshots, but rather focus on the empowerment elements and build on the fish-out-of-water comedy.

I honestly don’t think you can make a comedy out of what’s going on or has gone on during our modern wars because there is too much gray area between who the white knights are and who the black hats are. I think the most recent screwball military comedy I can think of is Down Periscope from 1996 and while it only gets a 13% on the Tomatometer, it is one of the few original comedies from that era I liked because it looks inwards for the conflict rather than outwards.

Producers pick up another movie with foreign funds

The Hollywood job I am most often entranced by and curious about is that of the producer. He or she is the one who gets to go up on stage and accept the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it very often doesn’t seem like he or she did any actual work on the production.

However, if there’s one thing I do know, he or she is a master at getting people to put up the money for a film to be made; if that’s the most important job, then Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes are the best producers in the world.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the producing duo, who have helped put together such productions as How to Make an American Quilt and the upcoming Dinner for Schmucks, together with Image Nation Abu Dhabi has bought an untitled screenplay, this time from writers Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow.

Here’s the wind-up, and the pitch:

The original idea sprang from research Trevorrow had done into the practice of police departments recruiting improv actors to help with low-level stings. With a Tropic Thunder feel, Trevorrow and Connolly’s storyline involves three actors who are brought in to help bust a DVD-bootlegging operation. When it turns out to be a front for much more nefarious activities, the comedy trio ends up on the run from crooks and cops alike with only their ad-lib skills as weapons.

I came to appreciate Tropic Thunder pretty late, but I have to admit that it’s one of my favorite comedies now (you gotta love a movie where the geeky guy is the voice of reason). Another movie in that vein wouldn’t be amiss, and I can definitely see why IAD would have agreed to shell out money for a project like this.

Other productions in IAD’s pocket include Peter Weir’s The Way Back, Doug Liman’s Fair Game and Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, each with an unknown release date.

Trisha’s Take: Who Do You Love review

rsz_who_do_you_love__filmposterWho Do You Love

Directed by Jerry Zaks
Starring Alessandro Nivola, Jon Abrahams, Chi McBride

Growing up in suburban southern California, I can’t say that I had the most grounded musical education. My dad loved the Beatles, but my untutored ear preferred the red greatest hits album to the blue one, and I didn’t start listening to non-top 40 stuff until it was considered cool and “edgy” to listen to Dr. Drew and the Poorman late at night on KROQ.

Much later, I was fortunate enough to meet three different guys who while romancing me, showed me that here was more to music than what gets played on the radio; now, I’m quite proud to say that I carry a pretty eclectic mix of songs on my iPod.

This is my way of saying that while I know that rock and roll was born from the blues, I don’t really know it the same way a true music aficionado does—which is why I’m glad to have seen a little part of how the rock and roll craze all started.

Who Do You Love, the story about the earliest days of seminal recording label Chess Records, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 but hasn’t been put into wider release until now. A large reason behind that could be that just months after the festival ended, Cadillac Records was put into wide release, a movie which also focuses on much of the same subject matter, but features a more mainstream cast. I’m not going to compare the two movies—although I really should—because I think that this one deserves to be judged on its own merits.

The movie begins at a Bo Diddley concert in Brooklyn in the 1950s, but the actual story begins in Chicago during the Great Depression where two Jewish brothers named Leonard and Phil Chess are captivated by a man pan-handling and playing the blues. It’s obvious that Leonard is more captivated by the music than his brother is, and it’s an obsession with the “Negro music” which leads them to sell the salvage yard they inherited from their father in order to open up a nightclub on the South Side.

Leonard (played by Alessandro Nivola) is presented as the more driven of the two, and much is made of his “ear” for talent. As such, he becomes our main character and Jon Abrahams as Phil gets to be the straight man. Rounding out the trio is Chi McBride as Willie Dixon, the brothers’ self-proclaimed tour guide into all things “Negro.”

Eventually, the brothers start their record label and the movie introduces its audience to legendary blues musician Muddy Waters (David Oyelowo) and someone the movie is calling Ivy Mills, but everyone knows is supposed to be Etta James (Megalyn Echikunwoke). It’s during the section that focuses on the Mills character where the movie turns from being a conventional musical biopic and strays into Lifetime TV movie territory by depicting an explicit romance between Mills and Leonard at the expense of his marriage to his long-suffering wife Revetta.

The most interesting thing about Who Do You Love is the movie’s portrayal of Leonard. All throughout the film, he is presented as being a smart, streetwise fellow, whose unusual negotiation tactics unfortunately do nothing to blow apart the stereotype that Jewish people are cheap and conniving. As the real Leonard Chess died from a heart attack in 1969, he’s allowed to have the flaws that seem to be missing from Phil’s character and were blown completely out of proportion in the James analogue’s or maybe even Muddy Waters’.

I can’t think of an actor I hated, not even Marika Dominczyk’s Revetta because I could empathize with her plight. She originally loved and married a man with a stable, quiet job and found herself married to one of the biggest names in the music industry. That’s enough to put strain on any marriage; add in the fact that the movie takes place during a time where women weren’t supposed to have any ambitions other than having a nice, stable home life, and there’s a recipe for disaster.

It’s been almost 12 hours since I’ve seen this movie, and yet as much as I liked it and as much as I laughed and bopped my head to the lushly-filmed musical interludes, for some reason I can’t scrape up a completely glowing recommendation. I suspect the largest reason why is because you can never really believe that the story is entirely true due to the creation of the Mills character.

If you really wanted to learn more about the blues, the birth of rock and roll, the music industry, and/or race relations during the 1950s, there are other better documentaries that you could watch. If you really wanted to see a compelling drama about the redemption of a workaholic, again, there are better movies you could watch. In other words, if you’re doing anything on April 16 when this movie goes into limited release, I don’t think you need to change your plans.

Who Do You Love is currently not rated, but if it were, it would get a soft R due to numerous uses of the word “motherfucker” and scenes of female nudity. No, the two things are not connected, you pervs.

Disney hopes lighting will strike twice with live-action adaptation for Maleficent

Dear Tim Burton,

Two years ago, Gordon wrote to you a letter where he was afraid you were going to totally fuck up a live-adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by casting a 17-year old girl in the titular role.

He eventually got over it when he saw the first trailers and understood the storyline, and a light bulb even snapped on over my head when someone revealed that the kooky character designs for the Mad Hatter weren’t just you or your art directors and/or your Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood faffing around but an updating of the animated characters’ look.

However, it’s my turn to be nervous after looking at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog and learning that Walt Disney Pictures and Alice screenwriter Linda Woolverton want to cast the same kind of adaptation magical spell onto Maleficent.

The wicked fairy godmother of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is my favorite Disney character; in fact, I adore the character so much that upon learning that someone I was meeting for a first date was in the original “Fantasmic!” cast and played the character before she turns into the dragon, it was sufficient reason to arrange for the second date.

This is where you come in, Mr. Burton. Borys Kit says that you’re not involved yet but that you were interested by the character while you were doing post-production work on Alice and that no one’s gone to your agents and said, “Let’s make a deal.” That’s fine.

The article goes on to say that a Woolverton script would feature a re-telling of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty from Maleficent’s point of view and I think I can understand what would make that kind of story compelling. I mean, after all, if Gregory Maguire was able to make a career out of the redemption of the Wicked Witch of the West, anything’s possible, right?

So, I guess this letter a tentative one of support for you becoming this movie’s eventual director, except for the part where I say that if you faff around too much with the best Disney villain who ever lived, I won’t invite you to my birthday party.

Yours,
Trisha Lynn

Quote of the day: On re-opening the balcony

When the New York Times put an interactive Netflix map online, allowing me to search by zip code and see what my neighbors were renting, the top title was Milk, followed by such as The Wrester, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt and Rachel Getting Married. Think about that. Good movies. Transformers 2 was nowhere to be seen.

—Roger Ebert, explaining his new business venture/movie review TV show

Bold Films acquires a Blank Slate

Fans of Joss Whedon’s most recently canceled series “Dollhouse,” listen up! There’s a new movie project that may interest you.

As The Hollywood Reporter noted, screenwriters Doug Cook and David Weisberg (The Rock, Double Jeopardy) sold a script to Bold Films and the plot sounds a little familiar.

Slate, described as a female-oriented take on The Bourne Identity, involves the CIA which, in order to investigate a murdered female agent, implants the agent’s memories into the damaged brain of a female convict. The agent’s lethal abilities also are implanted, and soon the convict goes rogue to discover the truth about the murder.

I remember watching the first six episodes of “Dollhouse” and I never once blinked at the idea of all the memory erasing and re-writing that they did in that show because the technology was sufficiently “shiny” enough to where I decided to believe in it. Somehow, I can’t seem to wrap my brain around the idea that this would work in a feature film featuring the CIA. Mind you, this is coming from the same person who completely bought into The Men Who Stare at Goats and Stranger Than Fiction.

I’m also looking at Bold Films’ slate and am a little confused about who they are as a production company. The first film they produced was a drama called Slingshot (2005) which starred David Arquette, Thora Birch, Balthazar Getty, and Juliana Margulies which means that from the get-go, their producers had access to a lot of the right people.

However, they also produced the third sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers which went direct-to-DVD, and managed to enlist the talents of not only the original screenwriter to write and direct this one, but they brought back Casper Van Dien to play Johnny Rico and got him Jolene Blalock (T’Pol from “Enterprise”) to be his co-star. This says to me that they’ll produce almost anything to make a buck, but at least they’ll try to make it interesting.

Most recently, they released the Paul Bettany-starring Legion in January, which has a 19% fresh rating on the Tomatometer, but made $40 million in the U.S., adequately covering its $26 million budget.

This is so confusing to me. If the producers at Bold Films have the right people in the right place, have good relationships with screenwriters, and can pick out the average money-making scripts, why is it that their movies just haven’t been that good?

Bruce Willis + Jamie Foxx = Kane & Lynch?

According to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog, screenwriter Kyle Ward was a little Twitter-happy Wednesday night, for he revealed via the micro-blogging app that Jaime Foxx was in negotiations to co-star with confirmed lead Bruce Willis (he was confirmed back in June 2008) in Ward’s live action adaptation of the videogame Kane & Lynch.

All I have to say to Misters Willis and Foxx is, “Wouldst thou willingly partake in the franchise that felled Jeff Gerstmann?”

For the non-videogame players or non-videogame industry enthusiasts out there, I’ll paraphrase this verbose and hypothetical newspost by Jerry Holkins, a.k.a Tycho from the webcomic Penny Arcade; to wit, GameSpot editor Jeff Gerstmann scored the Kane & Lynch videogame as a 6 out of a possible 10 while the online magazine was running several ads and other widgets promoting the game’s release.

And just as in the situation with the Iron Cross movie review, the magazine saw it as an embarrassment, so they fired Gerstmann’s ass. Well, not officially, but that’s how everyone interpreted it—and are still viewing it to this day.

In any case, the original videogame concerns a deathrow inmate named Kane (played by Willis) who along with a schizophrenic killer named Lynch (that would be Foxx’s role) is sprung out of prison to “retrieve” a stolen fortune, with the side effect of saving Kane’s wife and daughter. Second unit director and stunt coordinator Simon Crane is directing, and production is supposed to begin sometime this spring.