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

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.

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)

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

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 

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.