Category: News

The Weinstein Company sets release date for Inglorious Basterds
August 21 is the date the Quentin Tarantino-directed, Brad Pitt-starring film will hit the U.S., with Universal Pictures announcing the overseas dates at a later time. (Source: Variety)

Save the Date: David Fincher at the Lincoln Center
If you’re lucky enough to live in New York City and aren’t doing anything on January 4, you might want to head over to the Lincoln Center where the Walter Reade Theater is hosting a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which will be followed by a live conversation between director David Fincher and the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Check out the details here; tickets are $25 to the general public at the door.

I’m not sure how we missed this one, but there it is for all your freeze frame-y pleasure. Since I’m only a lukewarm Dragonball fan, I’m okay with them tweaking the backstory a little bit, although I do wonder why Bulma is packing heat.

Justin Chatwin (Goku), Emmy Rossum (Bulma) and Chow Yun Fat (Roshi) are the good guy stars of Dragonball: Evolution, with James Marsters filling out the bad guy role of Piccolo. It’s first release date will be in Japan on March 12, 2009 while it will then go into wider release to the U.S. and several other countries on April 8.

The beginning to this write-up on Eragon kinda says everything you’d need to know about Entertainment Weekly‘s list of 25 movies that actors probably did only for the paychecks:

Maybe [Jeremy] Irons (right) is a closet nerd with a thing for fire-breathing flops. After all, he also starred in 2000’s Dungeons & Dragons. But what’s [John] Malkovich’s excuse?

What, indeed. All I remember is salivating over them and Gabriel Byrne in Man in the Iron Mask. Now that’s how one is supposed to musketeer.

This story [of Defiance] needed to be told.

Those of us who make films are forever searching for heroes. More often than not they’re imaginary. Luke Skywalker battles the Galactic Empire; Frodo Baggins duels with the Dark Lord. We have Spider-Man, Batman and Iron Man, but few ordinary men. Because the closer one looks at real-life heroes, the less they conform to the simple verities Hollywood finds easiest to peddle.
—Director Edward Zwick, on why he made “yet another 1940s Holocaust-survivor movie”

[Also, the fact that the NY Times was able to get Zwick to tell his story himself is a reason why I still have respect for print journalism, and I probably always will.]

It’s very tiny, and it’s in Japanese, but the first trailer for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is available on the official website. Or, you can just watch the Trailer Addict version below.

The Legend of Chun-Li stars Kristin Kreuk (best known as Lana Lang, from “Smallville”) as the blue-eyed Chinese martial artist, with Michael Clark “I’m forever a villain” Duncan as Balrog (Vega, in the U.S. versions of the game), Neal McDonough (last seen on TV in “Desperate Housewives” and “Tin Man”) as M. Bison and American Pie‘s Chris Klein as Nash (aka Charlie).

It doesn’t look too horrible, but am I the only one getting shades of “Denise Richards is a nuclear physicist” from seeing Kreuk play a martial artist? I’m also getting shades of 2005’s Elektra, and we all know how well that did.

The Legend of Chun Li is set to be released in the U.S. on February 27, 2009.

Is it just me, or have we been bombarded by too many “awesome memoirs revealed to be fakes” stories lately?

The latest to come out of New York City revolves around the story behind Angel at the Fence, which was supposed to be the true story of how Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor met his wife while a teenager at Buchenwald because she smuggled him apples from the outside. They separated, and then years later, they reunited at Coney Island on a blind date. Rosenblat’s story was trumpted all over the place, and he even went on The Oprah Winfrey Show twice to talk about his romance, which Ms. Winfrey called “the greatest love story ever told in the 22 year history of the Oprah show!”

Except, according to the New York Times and recent research by Holocaust scholars, the most heartwarming detail about their “true story” is fake:

[Rosenblat’s agent Andrea Hurst said] “It is with heavy heart that I share what I learned today from my client, Herman Rosenblat, about his book, Angel at the Fence. Herman revealed to me that part of his memoir was not true. He’d invented the crux of this amazing love story—about the girl at the fence who threw him an apple—which drew my attention when I read it in a major magazine [Guideposts] two years ago.”

Of course, this means the book deal is off, but the more unbelievable part is that the deal for the movie (to be called Flower of the Fence) is still on, and set to begin production in March 2009 (according to the Times UK):

The film’s producer plans to go ahead. Harris Salomon, of Atlantic Overseas Pictures, said he had always planned a “loose and fictionalised adaptation.”

Also back in the Variety article, an unnamed Atlantic rep said that “Mr. Rosenblat had ‘agreed to donate all monies from the film to Holocaust survivor charities as a condition to moving forward.'”

Listen, I hope you can understand why Gordon said earlier this year that this kind of thing is not cool. Let the New Republic explain it a bit further:

Deborah Lipstadt, who wrote the 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, is troubled by the possibility that Herman’s love story is fabricated, because she believes it could be co-opted by the Holocaust denial movement. “If you make up things about parts, you cast doubts on everything else,” Lipstadt told me. “When you think of the survivors who meticulously tell their story and are so desperate for people to believe, then if they’re making stories up about this, how do you know if Anne Frank is true? How do you know Elie Wiesel is true?”

I hope that Salomon or someone at Atlantic Overseas will be able to ignore their wounded pride enough to cancel this movie project as well.

Citing “budgetary considerations and other logistics,” Variety reported last week that Disney will not be co-financing The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (aka the third installment of the Chronicles of Narnia franchise) with Walden Media, throwing the future of the entire series into doubt.

The second film didn’t exactly light up the box office this summer the way the first one did, with Prince Caspian pulling only $419 million worldwide, compared to the $745 million that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe pulled in 2005, despite a respectable 66% rating on the Tomatometer.

Scheduled to start production in early 2009 to be directed by Michael Apted (The World is Not Enough), now no one’s sure if they’ll be able to raise part of the proposed $100 million to $150 millon they projected for Dawn Treader. It also doesn’t help Walden’s big summer film—City of Ember—only grossed $13 million worldwide with a production budget of $55 million.

I personally think it’d be a shame if they were to discontinue making these movies, but then again, I am a huge nut for the Narnia-verse, Christian overtones and all.

It is with much sadness that I relate that today Eartha Kitt, the singer of the best version of “Santa, Baby,” a former Catwoman, and the voice of Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove died today from colon cancer.

Kitt gained fame for her “sex-kitten” persona, her lusty, earthy purr, and her dancing abilities. It is precisely these qualities that landed her a role on TV as the second Catwoman (after Julie Newmar) in the 1960s “Batman” series as well as the first woman Eddie Murphy’s character seduces on-screen in Boomerang. However, she also had a lot fame as a recording artist and Broadway performer, having been nominated for a Tony in her role in “The Wild Party” in 2000.

I will miss Kitt’s voice a lot, and raise a toast to her on this Christmas Day.

Whether you believe in him or not, Santa Claus dropped a major piece of coal in every comic book cinephile’s stocking this year.

For it was on Christmas Eve that Variety reported that a Los Angeles federal judge declared that due to the tangling copyright issues, 20th Century Fox has a legal right to distribute Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie.

Judge Gary Allen Feess is now comics geek-public enemy number one for making this surprise announcement in advance of the original January 20 trial date and the March 2009 release date which Warner Bros. has refused to take off the books. Now that release date is in more critical danger if Fox refuses to back down and wants to take over on distribution without having fronted all the production costs, for free.

Feess said that he’d give a more detailed ruling later, and I’ll be on pins and needles till then.

Based on the fact that SAG national director Doug Allen has called off the January 2 strike authorization vote as well as my reading of Variety deputy editor and TV reporter Cynthia Littleton’s highly critical analysis of the mistakes Allen and president Alan Rosenberg have made during the negotiations, I think I’m ready to call these negotiations over for this term.

The accompanying report by Dave McNary added that instead of the vote, Rosenberg and Allen have called for an emergency meeting of the national board on January 12 and 13, with McNary adding some speculative commentary:

[The] timing of the Monday night announcement was telling. It came a few hours after Allen and Rosenberg met with leaders of the Unite for Strength faction, a group of Hollywood moderates who gained five board seats in the fall after campaigning on a platform that asserted that Rosenberg and his allies had bungled the contract negotiations strategy.

This action lead Littleton to opine:

[The] national board meeting may result in a vote to replace some or all members of SAG’s contract negotiating committee. There’s growing speculation that Allen’s fate in the guild’s top paid position may also be on the line.

All I can say is, it’s about time! I’ve generally agreed all along with Wil Wheaton’s observation that this has been mismanaged from the start, and it’s about time some more shaking up of the entrenched board and president took place.

I can’t wait to see the outcome of the meeting.

In a move that will undoubtedly garner loads of criticism from his die-hard fans (if such a thing exists), Hollywood Reporter states that the next movie about Jack Ryan, the CIA history analyst who eventually works his way up the ladder into being the President of the United States (um, oops, spoilers for Debt of Honor and Executive Decision), will not be based on any of creator Tom Clancy’s previous works and will instead be an original origin story drafted by screenwriter Hossein Amini.

Amini has some solid credits, having garnered an Oscar nomination for his 1997 screenplay adaptation of the Henry James novel The Wings of the Dove (which starred Helena Bonham Carter and Linus Roache), so it’s not like he doesn’t know how to be respectful of source material. He’s also had some recent successful screenplay sales with Shanghai (now in post-production, and starring John Cusack and Chow Yun Fat) and the in-production Hugh Jackman vehicle called Drive (no pun intended, really).

With a screenwriter in place, it’s now up to producers Mace Neufeld and Lorenzo Di Bonaventura to find a director after first choice Sam “I’ve been chained to Spider-Man” Raimi’s schedule became too busy to work around and to find a new, hot, young star to be the new Jack Ryan.

As one who devoured the novels after watching the first Jack Ryan film The Hunt for Red October, the trick to casting this part is to find someone who could embody everything that people love about the character. Jack Ryan is honest to a fault, believes the best of everyone until they fuck him over and then he is willing to annihilate them, and he thinks so far outside the box that he’s actually located on Alpha Centauri.

You also have to cast someone who’s believable as being someone who will eventually graduate college with a degree in economics and get a CPA license, become a lieutenant in the Marine Corps (medically discharged due to injuries sustained in a chopper crash during exercises), make $6 million on the stockmarket as a broker, get a doctorate in history, and teach history at Anapolis.

In other words, of all the actors out there today between the ages of 18 and 25, which of them could play a believable Mary Sue?

The most aggressive [guest on Shootout] probably was Shirley MacLaine, who took one look at our set and decreed, “You guys have no idea how to light senior women.” She stared at her hosts and added, “Or senior men.”
—Peter Bart, on his TV gig moving to another network and time

The reason I think I enjoy this article from Katey Rich over at Cinema Blend.com is because of her very last choice for the best movies you’ll ever experience during Christmas as an adult, and it’s Billy Wilder’s The Apartment:

The Apartment is all about extramarital affairs, drinking problems, suicide and unbearable urban loneliness, but it’s also one of Billy Wilder’s funniest, and best, movies. It’s Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine before they become “old coot” icons, Fred MacMurray at his most corporate evil, and great one-liners and running gags… comedy-wise, that is.

In other words, it’s a Christmas movie for those of us who enjoy a bit of cynicism with their heart-warming stories, and that’s perfectly okay with me.

Hollywood Reporter and several news outlets overseas have published the news that director Robert Mulligan died at his home in Connecticut on Friday from heart disease.

Mulligan started out as a TV director, but moved over to film with great ease. After two Rock Hudson movies and some other films, Mulligan hit the big time with his direction of To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he received his only Oscar nomination.

In fact, a lot can be said for the fact that during the course of his career, Mulligan directed five Oscar nominated performances (Gregory Peck and Mary Badham in Mockingbird, Natalie Wood for Love with the Proper Stranger, Ruth Gordon in Inside Daisy Clover (which also starred Wood), and Ellen Burtsyn in Same Time, Next Year). His last film was 1991’s The Man in the Moon, a coming of age story that helped launch Reese Witherspoon’s career.

The fact that Mulligan was able to work with such dramatic material with ease and a sense of heart is something that’s missing from a lot of today’s directors, I think, who are more concerned with either making bank, blowing things up, or making statements.

I wish more directors worked the way Mulligan did.

Reversing a trend that started this year in May, once again the idea of Frank Miller directing a feature film-version of the Buck Rogers comics and/or TV series has raised its ugly head.

All of this speculation comes courtesy of Hollywood Reporter, who really should know better than to print something like this:

Odd Lot, the shingle run by Gigi Pritzker and Deborah Del Prete, is in negotiations to option the rights to “Rogers” from Nu Image/Millennium, which obtained those rights this year from the Dille Trust [emphasis mine].

When you work in the kind of industry I do during the day, you tend to know that just because someone’s “in negotiations” or has “accepted an offer” doesn’t mean that a contract is going to be signed. I mean, for crying out loud… the AMPTP and SAG were “in negotiations” right around the same time as the last furor over Buck Rogers started and now the actors are duking it out over whether or not they should go on strike!

The rest of the article contains a bit of an idea about what a Miller-esque Buck Rogers would feel like:

[Miller] has only begun to sketch ideas, it’s expected to be a darker take, with many of Miller’s signature visual elements and themes, such as corruption and redemption.

Of course, comics artist-turned-indie director Matt Haley couldn’t resist creating a promotional poster for such a movie as well, based on an idea by Thomas Gerhardt:

With that kind of tagline, aren’t you sold?