Category: News

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

From the way the Variety article is written, it sounds like Harrison Ford is totally in the bag for doing another Indiana Jones movie.

However, if you look at the actual Moviefone interview with Harrison Ford (warning: pop-up), that’s not actually what he says.

Compare the texts with me:

Variety’s headline (complete with mismatched capitalization): Paging Dr. Jones; Ford Wants to play Indy and Jack Ryan Again

Ford’s actual quotes from the Moviefone interview:

Moviefone: Would you be up for another go-around as Indy?

Ford: Again, it would have to do with the quality of the script that I read, if and when we decide to go forward.

This has been your reading comprehension lesson for today.

Within the last 48 hours I have seen American presidents depicted in two movies, “W” and “Frost/Nixon.” And now I’m sitting with my absentee ballot (I’ll be traveling on election day) and I’m paralyzed. After seeing these two films, anyone in their right mind would conclude that this country is not very good at choosing presidents.
—Variety EIC Peter Bart, on why he’s not voting (maybe) in the upcoming U.S. election

Although the story came out yesterday in Variety and other places, according to the New York Times, the idea of filming a sequel to the 1987 Oliver Stone hit Wall Street has been in place since May 2007.

The old details are that the sequel will retain its producer Edward R. Pressman, and Variety says Fox really wants Michael Douglas to come back and play a post-prison Gordon Gekko. I have to admit that while I’m not crying into my martini over the loss of the good-guy Bud Fox character or even Oliver Stone (because Steven Soderbergh seems to be picking up his mantle very nicely), if they replace Michael Douglas with anyone else as Gordon Gekko, I will start throwing Bloomberg machines out of windows.

The new details are that Allan Loeb (21) will be its writer, probably based on the fact that he used to be a stockbroker in Chicago. I cry shenanigans on that, and think that former trader-turned-poker blogger Paul McGuire would be better suited to write it because he’s got a sharper edge to him. Don’t believe me? Just read this bit, written towards the end of the World Series of Poker this year:

When the online qualifiers won their seats they thought they won a ticket to the big dance. What they really won was a one way trip to nothingness.

After the third day you get numb to the smell of donkey blood and you ignore the bottoms of your jeans stained with oodles and oodles of spilled blood so much so that a steady stream bisects the Amazon into two parts. The French media have been calling it “Une riviere remplie du sang des anes.” That loosely translated into Donkey Blood River.

You can try to repress those horrific memories of the anguish in the killing fields and stash them next to your suicidal thoughts, but they always bubble up to the surface and ambush you when you least expect it. I have a few flashbacks everyday. I can’t escape the faces of the ones we left behind. Like the young kid from that small farming town in Kansas. He barely shaved. Had a girl back home. They were fixin’ to get married. He texted her every break until… it was his time to go. He exploded into a thousand little pieces. Never saw it coming. Sucked out on the river. One moment he was smiling and excited to be at the same table as Jesus. The next moment, he was a statistic. Seat open, table 23.

Fucking brilliant.

I do not envy the work that Variety online editor Anne Thompson and her researchers did on this story about the complicated split-up of Dreamworks SKG and Paramount’s production slate.

I am, however, going to be a dick and cherry pick the pertinent details out of it out for you:

Tintin: This is the one whose future is the most uncertain. After Universal backed out of a financing deal, Paramount offered to fully finance it, but without Spielberg’s usually large back end deals. Dreamworks started shopping it around, they lost a lead actor, and now no one knows where it’s going to go.

Here’s a hint from me: You just signed with Reliance for around $1.2 billion. Surely another $100 million isn’t going to break their coffers?

Up in the Air: The Jason Reitman directed comedy about a career transitions consultant (think the two consultant schmucks from Office Space) whose only two goals in life are to accumulate 1 million frequent flyer miles and get hired by an inscrutable company called MythTech will be released as a Paramount film. IMDB has George Clooney attached, but no mention as to what his role.

The Lovely Bones: Surprisingly, after spending $65 million to acquire it, Dreamworks doesn’t want to release this Peter Jackson-directed film after all, and this one will go to Paramount, too. It’s based on a best-selling, Oprah Winfrey-approved novel about a girl who was raped and murdered and sees how it’s affected her family from the beyond—like the TV series “Dead Like Me,” but less funny?

Cowboys and Aliens: This is one of the 17 that Steven Spielberg is taking with him and Paramount has an option to co-finance. It’s based on a graphic novel from Platinum Studios which is about an alien spaceship that crash-lands in the 1800s and the cowboys and Native Americans who have to fight it off.

The Rivals: This one is in Paramount’s hands, with an option for Spielberg to co-finance. Nicole Kidman (as classic actress Sarah Bernhardt!) and Marion Cotillard have been attached, or so Variety says.

UPDATE: (10/15 12:08 AM) According to her Anne-ness below in the comments, “The Lovely Bones was always going to be distributed by Paramount; when DreamWorks went to Par, the studio distributed their movies…now Universal will do the honors. Eleven DreamWorks movies in various stages of post-production will be distributed by Paramount, and there will be more co-financed movies released by the studio going forward, not to mention ones that were developed and left behind by DreamWorks that Paramount could decide to make.”

Check out the rest of the Dreamworks/Universal details here.

My first reaction to reading the Variety story of how comedian Steve Carrell signed a three-year first-look deal with Warner Bros. which includes housing his very own production studio Carousel Productions on their lot is optimism, tempered with a cautious skepticism.

Most of the skepticism comes from remembering this story, published back in 2002, which talks about a two-year first look deal that Warner Bros. struck with public radio show This American Life. According to Wikipedia, the one film that eventually did get released within the terms of the deal that was based on a TAL story was Unaccompanied Minors, which has a 27% fresh rating on the Tomatometer. Other projects that have been rumored to be picked up but haven’t gone anywhere include a story about a woman who trained herself into becoming a superhero and one about inmates at a maximum security prison who put on a production of Hamlet as part of a rehabilitation program.

Still, TAL is not Steve Carrell, who is more Hollywood-savvy and seems to have a head for choosing projects that run the gamut from pure comedy to thoughtful comedy. That’s not a bad trait to have when you set up a shingle to produce other people’s projects, as Carousel will be doing for the next three years.

Here’s hoping!

Due to its popularity slipping in the polls, Variety reports that the Conservative Party of Canada (colloquially known as the Tories, and yes, this is based on their roots as former British loyalists during its colonial days in the 1800s) dropped a bill from its platform that would have allowed it to pull tax credits from films and TV shows it felt were “not in the public interest” in anticipation of next week’s election.

In other words, in response to public opinion and with the support of actors like comedian Mark McKinney (yes, the one from Kids in the Hall), a conservative government is reversing its stance on a bill that would have effectively let the government deem what movies could be made and what movies are too pornographic or violent to make.

Let me repeat that one more time: Canadian conservatives who are noticing that the people of Canada don’t like them very much are changing their political stances in order to get elected.

If only the U.S. political parties worked like that, eh?

As reported in the Toronto Star, McKinney said that as good as the news is, it’s not enough: “[It’s] fantastic news, but I don’t think it’s anything we should be grateful for at all. This is like a man who steals your wallet and then kicks you in the face and then says, `Sorry about kicking you in the face.”

One of the reasons why this is such good news is that for almost a year, Prime Minister Steven Harper and other Tories cut $45 million CDN from federally funded arts programs, stating that such things didn’t matter to “ordinary Canadians.” The fact that people in the arts have made this one of the key platform issues in the election and it got the party to back down is freaking amazing.

This post has been brought to you by my own election fatigue and the wish that in the U.S. we could regularly overthrow the government just like the Canadians can.