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[The part where the bombs are on the ferries] speaks to the innate goodness of human behavior. And let’s remember that Oscar ballots are due next January 12, just a week before Barack Obama is inaugurated. It’s safe to say most Hollywood types will also see that event as an example of innate human goodness. All of this only helps The Dark Knight‘s chances [at winning the Best Picture award], don’t you think?

—Entertainment Weekly’s Oscar pundit Dave Karger, on how the elections will affect the Oscars

Marvel Comics has taken another step towards getting Captain America, one of their first characters, a shot at big screen stardom with the announcement that Joe Johnston will be the film’s director, says Hollywood Reporter.

Producer Kevin Feige waxed enthusiastic about the choice, saying, “This is a guy who designed the vehicles for Star Wars, who storyboarded the convoy action sequence for Raiders of the Lost Ark…” Johnston’s other credits include Jumanji, Hidalgo, and the upcoming The Wolfman.

The studio is currently hearing pitches for the First Avenger: Captain America storyline, but I have to say honestly… how complicated does this story have to be? Hell, I could bang out a pitch right now:

Rebecca Barnes, a journalist for The Stars and Stripes is starting an assignment about an embedded Army platoon when they come under fire, and under overwhelming odds. She notices one soldier in particular do things that seem inhumanly possible, a soldier she didn’t see before when she met the platoon, and who seems to disappear right after the firefight. Becky reports back to her superior officers about this amazing man, wanting to switch her focus to doing the story on him. But her superior officers dismiss her, telling her that she’s not cleared to know or write anything about it, and tell her to write about puppies and kittens instead, like a good woman.

Becky’s a true-blue muckraker at heart, though, and starts doing some digging, uncovering some nasty secrets about the U.S. army getting involved in human scientific experimentation… and the world’s best soldier at the same time. Now the race is on, for Becky’s superior officers are trying to squelch the story, and the enemy is trying to get at Becky for what she knows…

See? Box office gold, I tell ya.

The more I read about the original story of Gulliver’s Travels — I have yet to read the original; bad former English major! — the more I realize that even with Jack Black at the helm as Gulliver, 20th Century Fox will probably ignore the more interesting of the tales to focus on just the giants and tiny people instead.

Variety reports that the entire project has been kept under wraps for a while because that’s just what Hollywood does when it’s trying to adapt a work that’s in the public domain. Fear of someone else jumping the gun and taking away their thunder, I assume. Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) has been signed to the project as its director for a while, but once they got Black, they’ve moved into high gear to get the production started in March 2009.

Most people already know that part of Gulliver’s Travels involves a big man traveling among tiny people and then his later adventure as a tiny man among giants. What rarely been seen on the big or small screens before is an adventure he has on a flying island called Laputa (calling all Miyazaki fans!) whose devotion to the pursuit of science is marred by the fact that they have no idea what to do with their inventions. The grade school student in me is instantly reminded of Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, and thanks to how people used his invention destructively, also gave his name to the Nobel Peace Prize, among others.

The last of Gulliver’s travels is even more depressing, where when he is caught between a race of intelligent horses and somewhat less intelligent humans (who turn out to be not so dumb) he becomes so disillusioned by his encounters that he spends the rest of his life shunning humanity as a whole and speaking to his horses.

On second thought, the idea of Jack Black having an absurdist conversation with a horse doesn’t sound too terrible to me…

This may probably only be interesting to some of you, so I’m going to make it brief. Thanks to the power of teeny-boppers, Zac Efron’s smile, and High School Musical 3‘s box office take ($158 million in both domestic and foreign gross as of last night) Paramount Pictures is fast-tracking their Footloose movie-musical, which will not be based on the 1998 Broadway show, but will be more strongly tied to the original 1984 Kevin Bacon movie says Variety and Cinematical.

Efron is in talks to star, and they’ve already got Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist director Peter Sollett to take another pass at a script. But I’m not entirely convinced that this would be a good vehicle for Efron because ever since Leonardo DiCaprio said at a Body of Lies movie premiere that he was happy not being a heart-throb anymore and Efron could take that crown from him, those teenyboppers would want to see their hero do more than just dance and romance girls stuck in Midwestern towns, right?

On second thought, never mind…

[Just in case you needed a break from the election news. -TL]

More details of Terrence Howard’s dismissal from Iron Man 2
Some say it was Howard’s behavior; others say that it was his initial salary… Read up on all the dirt. (Source: EW)

Charlize Theron joins Cruise in The Tourist
Or so they say because the words “in negotiation” are being used. The role is for an Interpol agent who uses a hapless American tourist to flush out a criminal with whom she had an affair. I hope you can hear my eyes rolling from where you are. (Source: Variety)

George Clooney isn’t The Lone Ranger, at least not yet (and other Bruckheimer news)
In a nutshell, Clooney’s dubious, Depp will be Tonto, the Pirates writers are doing the script, and Sorcerer’s Apprentice will be shot in New York. (Source: Coming Soon.net)

From book to movie: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
When he wasn’t busy wearing white suits and protesting over-development in Manhattan, Tom Wolfe found the time to sign a deal with Fox Searchlight to make a movie of his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is about a weird cross-country trip that Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and friends took in a Day-Glo bus while on acid. Acid Test will be directed by Gus Van Sant and scripted by Dustin Lance Black, last having worked together on Milk. (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

J. Michael Straczynski lands on Forbidden Planet
Best known to his “Babylon 5” and comics fans as JMS, the screenwriter for the Clint Eastwood-directed Changeling recently landed another deal to pen a remake of Forbidden Planet, that 50s movie that many people only know about because of Robbie the Robot. And then, only barely. (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

Pulitzer-winning playwright joins Spider-Man 4 writing committee
Best known amongst theater geeks for having won the 2007 prize for his Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire’s work may become known to a wider audience as he was recently named as having joined the Spider-Man 4 writing committee. Insiders say that Lindsay-Abaire’s addition to the team means the movie will have more of a focus on characterization, and to that I say “Hallelujah.” (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

Samuel L. Jackson joins The Last Dragon remake
Just in case you aren’t up on your blaxploitation remake news, the word is that Jackson will be playing a character known as “The Shogun of Harlem” whose flunkies always affirmed his egotistical assertions about himself by saying, “Sho’nuff!” The best part is the son of original director Berry Gordy is on the production team. (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

Normally, I wouldn’t be posting an article about a non-theatrical release, but this one based on a story from Variety deserves a look, and it’s not just because of the director’s last name.

Director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club, Maid in Manhattan) has a film called The Princess of Nebraska which made its limited U.S. debut this past weekend, but it didn’t make a single dime in a movie theater. Instead, Magnolia Pictures released the entire film onto YouTube (content locked to non-U.S. users) in return for a share of the ad revenue. According to the article, by Monday morning, it had 160,000 views, and as of right now, 191,000 people have seen the movie. This marks the first time a major film has been premiered on the Internet without the accompaniment of DVD sales.

Nebraska is the tale of a Chinese exchange student (played by Ling Li) who gets pregnant during her stay in the U.S. and her quest to seek an abortion in San Francisco. The narrative is interspersed with mini-films made by Li’s character on her cell phone, probably a first for film as well (smallest moving image camera to record scenes for a major motion picture release).

My esteemed colleague has made points for both sides of the theatrical release versus home video release argument before, but I’m going to go beyond him and say that with more and more people eschewing those “traditional” forms of movie enjoyment for the Internet and all its pirated and/or free high quality content, we could have the start of a theatrical film revolution as well as a legitimate reason to feel empathic towards the SAG and AFTRA actors who are hoping to get a larger slice of the “new media” pie.

Earlier this week, Variety and Fangoria posted updated cast lists for Relativity Media and Atlas Entertainment’s Season of the Witch (directed by Dominic Sena), and upon hearing this news, I had to think very hard about what I like and don’t like about this.

What I do like is the plot, which features 14th century knights escorting a girl who is suspected of being a witch who brought the Black Plague upon all of Europe. It’s definitely different from what’s out there right now, and (so far) it’s not a stupid kind of different. I also like that Ron Perlman has been signed to star opposite Nicolas Cage and to that I say “Yippee!” Though I think I was too young to really get on the Vincent bandwagon, I have always thought that Perlman was one of my favorite character actors. I mean, I love him so much that I even think fondly of Alien: Resurrection just because he’s in it.

I’m intrigued by some of the other new cast members, British actor Stephen Campbell Moore (The Bank Job), Irish actor Robbie Sheehan, and British actress Claire Foy (playing the witch), mostly because IMDB says that Sheenan was in a TV series called “Young Blades” which was about Alexander Dumas’ musketeers during their academy days—which means that if he’s playing one of the knights, he already knows his way around a sword.

What I don’t like is Nicolas Cage.

For some reason, I just don’t get him as an actor. He does sensitive and/or troubled man well (Moonstruck, Leaving Las Vegas), he does befuddled action hero well (The Rock), he does surreal comedy well (Raising Arizona). Yet, if you asked me if there was a recent Nicolas Cage movie that I had wanted to see, the answer would be “Um…. no?”

So I think that what I’d like to see next out of Witch would be more details about who’s playing what role, and what I’m hoping for is that Cage plays the secondary character and Perlman gets to be the lead.

After a summer of near-non-activity and lots of posturing, the Screen Actors Guild took a page out of the Federal Reserve’s playbook and called for a “bailout” of their negotiations—or to be completely accurate, they requested that the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service contact the AMPTP on their behalf to ask them to return to negotiations.

This all went down during the Hollywood Membership meeting on Sunday, which according to the A.L. Miller at the SAG Watchdog site was held at the Grand Ballroom of a Marriott in downtown Los Angeles. A crowd of nearly 800 members were present, most of them eager to send off a strike authorization vote to the entire guild when unofficially polled by vice president Anne-Marie Johnson.

However, they also agreed that before they did that, they should contact and request federal mediation, and if their negotiating committee determines from that action that they won’t be able to get a new contract, then they’ll send off the vote.

The AMPTP had this to say, in the form of a letter sent to SAG’s leadership:

In light of the unprecedented economic difficulties facing our industry and the nation, the Companies continue to hope that the Guild’s leadership will recognize the five major labor agreements that have already been concluded this year and will accept our Final Offer while it remains on the table.

What wasn’t in the letter was the unofficial position taken by the AMPTP that neither calling for a strike or getting the feds to step in would make the studios budge, as noted in the first paragraph of the “Breaking News” item from October 19.

However, Miller’s choosing to see this and a Variety article written about these recent events (which Miller was gracious enough to reproduce) as a weakening of their resolve.

First, Miller pulled out a single quote from the very long article:

One source close to the studios said he’s expecting the congloms will agree to participate in the mediation process in hopes that a deal can be hammered out.

From this single line of text and the AMPTP’s statement, Miller concludes:

[Let’s] analyze this carefully written statement a little closer. First off, like I said, it isn’t really a response at all but a bit of rambling rhetoric, or what is know in the trade as vamping.

It starts with a little self-serving bragging, and ends with a dash of wishful thinking. And then avoids a direct YES or NO, and, instead, argues that there is no justification for SAG to expect a deal exceeding past negotiated deals in, ah, ah, better times. No, no NO nowhere in that sentence.

You know me, I’m all for critical analysis in reading press releases. But I think that this time, especially considering how many times the AMPTP has thrown around the “in this economy” remark, the Watchdog and the SAG are the ones whose asses will have a bite taken out of them.

Not content with flooding the fandom with its Star Trek coverage this week, EW reported yesterday on an item that only alluded to in their print magazine: What’s J.J. Abrams’ problem with William Shatner making an appearance in the new movie?

It all started when back on September 8, AMCtv.com was interviewing Abrams about his new TV series “Fringe” and a Star Trek question came up:

We tried desperately to put [Shatner] in the movie, but he was making it very clear that he wanted the movie to focus on him significantly, which, frankly, he deserves. The truth is, the story that we were telling required a certain adherence to the Trek canon and consistency of storytelling. It’s funny — a lot of the people who were proclaiming that he must be in this movie were the same people saying it must adhere to canon. Well, his character died on screen. Maybe a smarter group of filmmakers could have figured out how to resolve that.

Ten days later, Shatner responded to Abrams’ remarks… on YouTube:

So what does Abrams have to say for himself now? Well, he’s sticking to his guns:

I don’t know how my life has become a thing where William Shatner talks to me through YouTube. I was such a huge fan of his, but we wrote a scene for him in the movie and it didn’t feel right. And he said to us—he said publicly—that doing a cameo didn’t interest him. Which I totally appreciate. But we did try.

Abrams clarified things more for MTV on Tuesday:

I didn’t [personally] write anything [for Shatner]. Alex [Kurtzman] and Bob [Orci], who wrote a spectacular script for us, we all wanted to make it work.… The scene they wrote, which was good, it honestly felt like “contrivance to insert William Shatner into our movie.” It just felt very much like what it was.

Shatner’s YouTube stream had no comment, however, through a spokesperson, he said, “I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to be involved in the Star Trek universe at this point.”

[A +1 to whomever gets the reference in the headline to this post. – TL]

As if forming his own production company, starring in a hit comedy TV series that didn’t suck the life out of its British predecessor, and filming a movie with fellow “it” NBC star Tina Fey as well as the sequel to Get Smart during the hiatus wasn’t enough for his career, Variety reported that Steve Carell will be the lead in a historical comedy called The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

From the same minds that brought us Blades of Glory, Gerard will be the story of a brave and Forrest Gump-like officer in Napoleon’s army—yes, that Napoleon—who will get into all sorts of scrapes as he follows the French emperor all over the Continent and straight into his exile by the British on St. Helena. John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky’s script in turn is based on stories from the fertile pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which The Guardian thinks is the reason why this movie is even being made—to cash in on the hype surrounding the two Sherlock Holmes movies already in production. Still, it’s not a half-bad idea to look backwards through literary history for comedic fodder, and of course the first book that came to my mind was Flashman: A Novel by George McDonald Fraser.

Anyone else have any funny books written before the 1900s they think would make great movies that haven’t already been done before?

Dear Brad Pitt,

I think you’re totally dreamy and I loved it when you got all hot and nearly nude and brooding to play Achilles in Troy. Your petulance when that stupid Agamemnon tried to take the captive that was rightfully yours was totally in keeping with what really happened in the epic poem and I trembled at the thought of your manly loins chafing in your leather as you fought your emo demons to get her back.

You’re also doing some pretty crazy-cool things right now, such as starring in David Fincher’s follow-up to Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; finishing up work on The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (totally standing in line for this next year); and you just started work on Quentin Tarantino’s curiously spelled WW2-flick Inglourious Basterds, which is aiming for a June 2009 release.

However, you had to fuck it all up and do some crazy-ass shit to get Variety to start teasing that you, George Miller (Happy Feet, the upcoming Justice League), and Warner Bros. want to get the band together with your production studio Plan B to adapt Homer’s other poem, The Odyssey. And the detail that sticks out with me the most is this line:

Their intention is to transfer the tale to a futuristic setting in outer space.

Listen, I am all for weird-ass adaptations of stories. But just not this one. It’s nearly perfect as it is. It celebrates humility, piety, wit, and wisdom through severe adversity. It gives us the most beautiful example of feminine fidelity in Penelope’s steadfast refusal to marry again, even though everyone around her is telling her that her husband is probably dead and shouldn’t she move on already?

For some reason, I just can’t wrap my brain around the idea of taking this perfect, classic story and sticking it into outer space.

So please, don’t make it so I have to?

Sincerely,
Trisha Lynn