BLOGS
April 2008 Archives
Disney loves remaking its features, especially those starring people who have gone on to bigger and better things like Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster. We've seen La Lohan redos of the aptly titled triumvirate of Freaky Friday, Fully Loaded and The Parent Trap. They've done live action versions of 101 Dalmatians with Glenn Close complicit in Cruella De Vil's plot to boil puppies the way she did Michael Douglas' rabbit. (How else was she going to get their fur off?) Robin Williams bounced around with Flubber and The Shaggy Dog starred Santa Clause cash cow Tim Allen. Since they're so used to going back to the well, I've got a few predictions for what films Disney will do next:
Old Yeller 2008: Old Yeller is now made of CGI and has facial and body expressions generated by Daniel Day-Lewis with sensors all over his body. Day-Lewis will spend 3 months in a cage at the ASPCA to get the feel for what being a dog is like, and will demand a doghouse and a fire hydrant instead of a trailer on the set. Since it's 2008 and kids today are wussies, Old Yeller doesn't wind up on the business end of a gun. Instead, he saves his young boy hero from a well. The makers of Lassie settle out of court.
Darby O'Gill And the Vertically Challenged People: Sean Connery will come out of retirement to remake the movie he wishes he could forget he made, Darby O'Gill and the Little People. Connery's role in the original is now played by Ewan McGregor, so Connery will be digitally shrunk to play one of the vertically challenged folks. This musical reunites McGregor with Nicole Kidman, his costar in Moulin Rouge. Songs by Randy Newman and Sinead O'Connor.
Rap of the South: They'll never drag Song of the South out of the Disney vault, but that doesn't mean they can't do a politically correct version of it to capitalize on the current rap craze. The first R-rated movie under the Walt Disney Pictures banner stars Southern rap stars Andre 3000, Master P, and Li'l John in the tale of a wise old storyteller (Samuel L. Jackson) who teaches the young men in his charge how to be better fathers and sons through the magic of rap. Pixar will do the computer animations and "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" will be remixed by Kanye West.
I can't wait.
Fanboys rejoice! Sir Ian McKellan (that's Magneto to you) is reprising his role as Gandalf in Guillermo Del Toro's Hobbit Part One and Hobbit Part Deux. Reuters quotes McKellan as saying " I spoke to Guillermo in the very room that Peter Jackson offered me the part and he confirmed that I would be reprising the role. Obviously, it's not a part that you turn down, I loved playing Gandalf." If memory serves me correctly, McKellan's Gandalf, Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins and Andy Serkis' CGI Gollum characters are the only ones that overlap with the Lord of the Rings. This means those of you waiting for that super hot liquor-filled love scene between Samwise and Frodo will have to instead scour the Internet for that fanboy fiction that turns Mount Doom into Brokeback Mountain. Those Hobbits, they know how to par-tay!
Hopefully, del Toro will do a better job than Rankin and Bass with the material. Their animated Hobbit, which far too many of my schoolmates watched in lieu of reading the assigned book, isn't exactly terrible. It's what you'd expect from the guys who gave us a Baby New Year whose big ears rival Will Smith's and Barack Obama's. But if del Toro is so dedicated that he's moving to New Zealand for four years to work on the films with producer Peter Jackson, one can hope that level of dedication equals quality filmmaking. We'll know in 2010 when the first film comes out.
Speaking of which, why are there two movies in the first place? The Hobbit isn't that big a book, and its story doesn't seem equipped to be spread over two films. Is this greed on the part of the filmmakers? Perhaps New Line can do a cross-pollination of Warner Bros. franchises, and reveal in the two part film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that Gandalf and Dumbledore knew each other in the Biblical sense. I'm being facetious and silly, but I really do mean the next line you're about to read. If they don't include Leonard Nimoy's horrific "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" on the Hobbit soundtrack, I ain't going to see it.
I believe that everything in life has a pattern to it, which would explain why every time Mariah Carey shows up in a movie or TV show, her character has a stripper name. A stripper name is a name that either sounds like a double entendre, is alliterative, or is a regular named spelled in some garish fashion. Most of Carey's roles cover one or both scenarios. In Glitter, she was Billie Frank, which sounds like an adult film star (admittedly a male one, but whatever). On Ally McBeal, she was Candy Cushnip. The film WiseGirls casts her as Raychel, adding the "y" to Rachel as a subtle way of asking "Y is she in this movie?" After changing up for the sequel to State Property, playing the descriptively named Professionally Dressed Woman, Carey is right back to her old tricks. In her latest film, Tennessee, she plays Krystal. I bet the actors' accents make her name sound like Cristal.
What's old is new again; especially in Hollywood. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 1975 Disney supernatural kid flick Escape to Witch Mountain is going to be re-re-imagined (it was previously re-imagined as a made-for-TV movie in 1995) as the adventure Race to Witch Mountain.
It seems I'm fast becoming the Movies Without Pity guy who picks on Tom Cruise. If he'd stay out of the news for five seconds, it would lessen my temptation. By itself, the 25th anniversary of Risky Business is a tame news story. Couple it with Cruise's return to The Oprah Winfrey Show, however, and you've changed the dynamics. Everyone will recall Cruise's last appearance on Oprah, where he went cuckoo for Katie Puffs and turned Oprah's couch into a trampoline. Miss Sofia is hoping you'll remember too; the ads for her two part series on Cruise play like mini-Hitchcock trailers. "Will he go bonkers again?" they imply. The ads have Oprah asking Cruise questions about his behavior, both on her show and on the Today show, and each time they cut to Cruise looking like he's itching to go bouncing across the room like the early versions of Daffy Duck:
Being the current lust object of decrepitly old directors like Woody Allen and Brian DePalma isn't enough for Scarlett Johansson. America's fakest femme fatale (see Match Point and The Black Dahlia if you think I am in jest) has now decided she wants to sing. Perhaps this decade's Diane Keaton took a cue from Woody's Everyone Says I Love You, a musical he cast with actors so tone deaf the THX speakers shut down in protest. Whatever the excuse, the star of the Woodman's upcoming Vicky Cristina Barcelona has become the latest actor to try burning up the Billboard charts. I bet William Shatner is laughing on the set of Boston Legal right now.
Amy Winehouse may have said "no, no, no" to rehab (until recently, anyway), but she's saying "yes, yes, yes" to a song for the next James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. The Guardian is reporting that Winehouse is "working on the theme song" with Mark Ronson, who also produced her Back to Black album.
Variety reports that Mel Gibson is set to star in Edge of Darkness, a feature film adaptation of a 1985 BBC miniseries. Also noted is that this will be Gibson's first starring role since 2002's Signs and We Were Soldiers. Perhaps Gibson's been too busy writing and directing his own films, or taking long drives to give much thought to headlining a film until now.
The fossil record is littered with examples of what a long, slow process evolution usually is: Around forty million years ago, wolf-sized whales were scampering around Pakistan on their furry little legs. For the reptilian Sleestaks from Land of the Lost, however, it took just over thirty years to evolve from guys in truly horrible rubber suits to...guys in slightly less horrible rubber suits.
Vulture asks, "Where Are the Roles for Superwomen?" and I'd be lying if I didn't say I've been wondering the same thing.
Remember the Wonder Woman movie that was being written by Joss Whedon? I'm sure you at least remember when it fell apart. If you're curious what happened to that movie after Whedon's departure, it is still on. The script as it's currently being worked will be an "origin story," written by two men. Which is a change for the worse. I know Whedon is a man, but if a man has to write Wonder Woman, it would be better -- at least as far as feminism and girl power are concerned -- if it were helmed by the guy who created Buffy rather than Brent Strickland and Matthew Jennison, neither of whom have written a screenplay before. But I'll try to withhold judgment.
Most Tolkien fans breathed a sigh of relief last week when it was announced that Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro would direct The Hobbit. There were notable exceptions, but it was mostly a fanboy's or fangirl's dream come true.
Disney good girl hyphenate Miley Cyrus has kept bloggers busy lately, first with her racy (although, let's be honest: typically teenage) MySpace photos, then pictures of her baring her midriff while snuggling up to a boy (also a pretty typical teenage move).
But she finally figures she should issue an apology to fans (a rare move from an entertainer) after appearing "topless" in Vanity Fair, in photographs by Annie Leibovitz. Miley said: "I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed."
Longtime Hollywood outsiders Joel and Ethan Coen are becoming as mainstream as Michael Bay these days. (I kid, of course, in comparing the intelligent, quirky writer-director team to the director-producer of Bad Boys, Armageddon, and Transformers.)
But they are gaining popularity outside of their loyal cult following. In February, they won three Oscars (and gave the most subdued speeches in awards show history); and it was announced today that they'll open the Venice Film Festival with Burn After Reading, starring some relatively unknown actors: you know, actors like George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, and Brad Pitt -- all of the actors who non-mainstream filmmakers are working with these days.
It looks like most of the country trusted Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's comedy skills, and gave the terrible trailer for Baby Mama a pass, as the film raked in $18.3 million on 2,543 screens to open at No. 1 at the weekend box office. Not too far behind was Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, which took in $14.6 million on 2,510 screens.
It's a big win for Tina Fey, who proved she not only can create, write, produce, and star in the funniest comedy on TV, but that she can also open a movie at the box office -- even despite lackluster reviews. Turns out it paid to be a chick flick this weekend, as two-thirds of the moviegoers who turned out to watch Fey hire childish surrogate Poehler were women, while two-thirds of those paying to see Harold and Kumar take another trip were men.
The Festival de Cannes announced most of its 2008 lineup this week. In a Moviefile entry last week, I mentioned that Hollywood expected to have a meager showing in the competitive portion of the Festival. One article said that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York might be the only entry, unless Steven Soderbergh could complete his mondo four-hour Che Guevara biopic under the wire. Soderbergh appears to have accomplished this feat, as Che is listed in the Festival's recently released press kit.
For most of us, tax season is like a nightmare we finally woke up from and don't have to worry about for another eleven months. For Wesley Snipes, however, the nightmare is just beginning: The actor has now been handed a three-year prison sentence for tax evasion. Prosecutors argued for the harshest possible punishment under the law as a way to set an "example." What, because high profile tax crime cases are really making people think twice about not paying up? If that were the case, Snipes would have remembered Willie Nelson losing his property and his profits for a while in the 1990s and not gotten himself into this mess in the first place. Nelson himself would have remembered what happened to the infamous Al Capone and cut a check for Uncle Sam long before his troubles ever started.
In what has already been a bad week for the automotive stars of the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, it has just gotten a little bit worse. According to CNN, an experienced stuntman was seriously injured in a car crash while filming an action sequence in the same area of northern Italy where earlier this week a driver for Aston Martin lost control and dunked his auto into Garda Lake while en route to the 007 set. This time at least, mention of what happened to the driver came in the first sentence of the article. Sadly, he seems to be in much worse shape than the uninjured driver of the Aston Martin.
Get ready to get off your ass and march down to the video store again (at least those of you with Blu-ray players (to which I whine: lucky!)). Cnet blog Crave has reported that Netflix will begin charging a premium on accounts that rent Blu-ray movies. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reportedly said on a conference call that "consumers are used to paying more for high-definition." Hastings clearly hasn't met my boyfriend, who took a fine-toothed comb to the cable bill when they added a couple of HD channels to the line-up, muttering "So help me, we'd better not be paying for these..."
Dark Horizons is reporting that Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee will once again helm a movie portraying a gay main character, with the fairly awesome headline "Ang Lee Gay Again With Woodstock." The flick, fully titled Taking Woodstock and adapted from a 2007 Elliot Tiber book, tells the story of an in-the-closet artist who is head of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town. The town holds a yearly permit to hold summer music concerts, which he grants to the then-low key Woodstock festival to hold on his farmer neighbor's lawn. In addition to the Chamber job, the closeted main character also helps his Old World Jewish parents run their resort motel in the Catskill Mountains. (And yes, I'm actively refraining from making the requisite Dirty Dancing joke that immediately springs to mind due to my deep and abiding (and yes, adolescent) love for that movie.)
Hollywood is looking in unusual places again for movie ideas, and this time they've infiltrated the Billboard chart from 1973. The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Producer Warren Zide has just picked up the film rights to the classic Jim Croce song "Bad Bad Leroy Brown." The film will be based on the title character, who in the song is a badass from the south side of Chicago who takes a liking to a married woman only to get beat up by her jealous husband. Though it's doubtful that the film's entire plot will revolve around that one snippet of story, Zide is hoping to turn it into an action-comedy franchise.
As I've been watching a lot of Animal Precinct lately, it surprised me less than it may surprise some that Rocky, the grizzly bear who most recently wrestled with Will Ferrell in February's Semi-Pro attacked and killed its trainer earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reports. The trainer was employed at Predator's In Action, which specializes in training wild animals for work in movies and television--the company has supplied animals to Gladiator and The Last Samurai among other films--and up until the incident had boasted a perfect safety record.
You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge a kid by his Pappy either. I just read in the Hollywood Reporter that Tom Cruise's son has a small role in Will Smith's upcoming movie, which wasn't odd until I read that Cruise's son was playing a younger version of the Fresh Prince. My mind immediately flashed to two images:
1. Will Smith's son Jaden, who was very good alongside his Pops in The Pursuit of Happyness, asking Jada Pinkett "why couldn't I play Dad? Is he mad I upstaged him in that last movie?"
2. Robert Downey Jr., armed with a big vat of makeup and a cigarette, telling Cruise's son the finer points of blackface makeup. "You gotta make sure you're the same color as Will, so we're going to mix Browns number 5, 42 and 9."
E! Online reports that 2009's Golden Globe Awards ceremony has been pushed up to January 11th, making it the earliest show in the history of the Globes. I don't know about you, but I miss the days when the Golden Globes were a glorious joke that didn't take itself seriously. I'm nostalgic for the days where bribery, a well cooked pot of spaghetti or whom you were screwing got you a Globe. It gave the proceedings a corrupt, New Jersey-style politics air (and I can say that, being a Joisey Boy). Nowadays, the Hollywood Foreign Press wants us to take it seriously, so much so that rather than just releasing a press statement last year during the strike, it went through with that Nancy O'Dell and Billy Bush nightmare show. A scroll of the winners names' across a black screen while nails on a chalkboard noises played in the background would have been more watchable.
You'd think Ishtar would have convinced celebrities that giving their movies odd names usually guarantees a flop. If the audience isn't sure how to pronounce the movie's title, they're going to opt for something easier to say. Ken Russell once came up with a provocative ad campaign for his dismal mess, Whore, wherein the poster said "if you can't say it, just see it." Perhaps United Artists can use the same tactic when (or should I say if) Tom Cruise's Valkyrie finally opens. What 12-year old boy (and believe me, Hollywood markets everything to 12 year old boys) can pronounce it, let alone knows what a Valkyrie is? Hell, Microsoft Word, which I believe is 12 years old now, doesn't even know. It keeps flagging that word as a typo.
The Tribeca Film Festival in New York City opens tonight, bringing with it a more streamlined approach than usual. Variety says there are 25% less movies and a more centralized means of getting to them, addressing prior complaints from former attendees like me. The festival, co-created by Bobby DeNiro to stimulate downtown Manhattan activity after September 11th, is in its seventh year and has the usual mix of the obscure and the mainstream. While the Tribeca Fest doesn't have the Upper West Side snootiness of the New York Film Festival, the French snobbishness of Cannes nor the ghost of Harvey Weinstein a la Sundance, it does have Travis Bickle shooting you at close range if you act up at a screening. So be on your best behavior if you go.
David O. Russell is still directing movies, which proves that if you can make movies that are as terrible as they are incomprehensible, pseudo-independent studios like Fox Seachlight will give you money to make more. Russell is also still alienating his actors on set. First, it was George Clooney on Three Kings, then Lily Tomlin on I Heart (Mike) Huckabees. Now, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Russell has incurred the wrath of Sonny Corleone on the set of his latest, Nailed. I wouldn't drive through any toll booths or require in-home nursing if I were you, Mr. Russell.
No, that headline is not the plot of his next movie. It's what Hollywood studios have in store for those who illegally copy and sell movies: They've recruited fighting film legend Jackie Chan for a billboard in Beijing's Silk Market, taking an antipiracy message directly to where much of the movie copying industry takes place. According to Variety, Chan's billboard message is a simple one: "Protect the movies, say NO to piracy."
Set to begin filming this month is Amelia, a biopic about aviation heroine and larger-than-life historical figure of some controversy, Amelia Earhart. Cast as the titular character is Hilary Swank, who continues her streak of playing tough girls (and boys) who defy convention before meeting an untimely end. Physically speaking, Swank looks like a good choice to play the "tomboy" aviatrix, although there's no word yet on how close filmmakers will be sticking to historical details. Earhart, suffering from repeated bouts of severe sinusitis (which has to suck for a pilot), sometimes had a drainage tube coming out of her face to let out the accumulated mucus. As I mentioned earlier this month, one way for actors to get respect is to get ugly, but copious oozing might be pushing the gritty boundaries of reality just a tad. Not that Swank is hurting for respect after winning two Oscars. Although maybe it wouldn't hurt to build up the stores a bit, in case there's another The Reaping in her future.
Happy Earth Day! Today's the one day out of the year when everyone makes that extra special effort to throw their plastic water bottles into the recycling bin instead of the regular trash. Or to at least not throw them into a duck pond along with a cache of used hypodermic needles and dirty diapers. For its part, Disney is launching Disneynature, a new production house which will "[focus] on producing documentaries about the environment." Mickey and all the other cute little critters Disney's built its empire on would be proud. You know, if they were real. To show you just how conservation-minded they are, the folks at Disney had originally planned to call it Disney Nature, but decided that extra bit of space between the two words would have added up to a lot of extra news print over the coming years. Jean-Francois Camilleri, head of the new unit, is even permitting employees to refer to him in memos as J-Franc to save on ink. Well, not really, but I'm putting it out into the universe just the same. You never know what will stick.
The world is buzzing today with news and gossip about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The big news, of course, is the LA Times story that maintains that George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford won't be paid until the studio brings in $400 million in revenue. That's a large haul, even for Indy. And it's a shocker in Hollywood, where actors, directors and writers usually get paid a high set rate first, and talk about residuals later. It's a risk on the parts of the big three, but they clearly believe in this movie, and were willing to bank (pun intended) on it making a haul big enough to cover the $400 million and still pay them loads of money. Or maybe they're doing it for the love? Naaah...
Sometimes, life imitates art instead of the other way around.
Someone drove James Bond's Aston Martin into Lake Garda in Italy on Sunday, and all media outlets have been talking about is the car. I had to read all the way to the end of the fourth paragraph of this news item, for instance, before I saw, "...but the driver was able to swim ashore." Thank goodness, right? I mean, sure he destroyed a $250,000 car, at least he's okay.
Most media outlets have been saying he's a stunt man, so maybe that's why no one wonders if he's okay: They assume a stunt guy knows how to get out of a car in a lake. But of course.
Judd Apatow and friends (and the studio promotional vehicle) tried as hard as they could, but they couldn't hold back the martial arts tandem of Jackie Chan and Jet Li (who could, really?) as The Forbidden Kingdom fought its way to the top of the weekend box office, taking in $20.9 million on 3,200 screens, compared to $17.3 million on 2,800 screens for Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That's about $6,500 a screen for Jet Li and Jackie Chan; but the $6,200 take per screen for Jason Segel and Kristen Bell is nothing to sneeze at, either.
In under a week, the Cannes Film Festival will announce its 2008 line-up. Stalled by an impending writers strike, American filmmakers last year were too worried about what this would mean for the future to come up with much in the way of "avant-garde" movies in time for Cannes. Where last year saw several promising entries, including No Country For Old Men, this year it seems as though only Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is headed for the competitive category, reports guardian.co.uk. According to the report, big-budget films like the new Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda are slated for "glitzy" showings, but will naturally not be vying for the chance to accidentally poke themselves on the prestigious (if spiky) Palme d'Or.
If you've been online for more than two days in your entire life, you've probably come across (or been part of) chat room discussions that go a little something like this:
Studlychip1982: I didn't really like the movie. Too long and drawn out.
moviesRluv: yeah well what do u no? the movie rocked and u sux!!!
A few posts later, there's an out-of-nowhere comparison to Nazis and/or reference to gun control, general expressions of paranoia, lashing out at uninvolved parties, and suddenly you've got a name-calling internet shouting party that has little to do with the starting discussion. Uwe Boll seems to have taken this phenomenon to heart: When his own movies are criticized, he unleashes a tirade against other directors. Does he address the comments about his movies? Not really. Does he shrug off criticism as one of the slings and arrows a professional endures? Does he quietly go about his work and improve his craft? No, and no. When internet movie fans start up a petition to put an end to Boll's movie career, he points out how much Michael Bay sucks.