At this point, it’s not even possible to come up with “joke” versions of these things – it’s like there’s no light left between “actual movie pitch” and “Robot Chicken sketch pitch” anymore. But yeah, Adam Sandler will star in a feature film version of the “Candy Land” board game.
The “interesting” thing, relatively speaking, is that Sandler pal Robert Smigel – late of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and “TV Funhouse – is coming along to do the script. He’s a real talent… but I can’t really see his general sense of humor (or Sandler’s, for that matter) matching well with what Hasbro clearly will want to be a kid-friendly franchise-starter.
Yup. Marvel has released a preview of their “Avengers” Super Bowl ad, which gives us a brief glimpse of (maybe?) bad guy flying-machines (the main one is still Loki on some kind of jet-bike, though) and The Hulk:
From Devin at BAD I learn that said BAD’s partner/overlord, Drafthouse Films, has picked up distribution rights to the SXSW-buzzed oddity “The FP;” which I’d previously heard spoken of as “the next ‘Six String Samurai.’” The basic pitch is a send-up the “such-and-such-familiar-game-BUT-AS-A-GLADATORIAL-BLOODSPORT!!!” genre and the late-80s/early-90s punk-rock-post-nuke aesthetic that often accompanied it, the comic hook being that the rival clans of The FP settle their issues in winner-take-all deathmatches of… “Dance Dance Revolution” (Here called “Beat Beat Revolution.”)
Yup. Drafthouse has announced a limited theatrical-release on March 16th of this year. This is real. Here’s a(NSFW)trailer.
You will be unsurprised to learn that the emerging “modernized fairytale” trend has inspired someone to reboot the Linda Hamilton/Ron Perleman “Beauty & The Beast” series as what sounds an awful lot like “Castle-but-with-a-sorta-wolfman”; but Moviehole’s report on the pilot script adds an “are you kidding me!?” detail: the “new” Beast is a guy who got transformed into (more or less) a half-animal version of Captain America… by 9-11.
Yeah, I know. Ten years, Bin Laden is dead, but still… yikes.
Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait has only directed a handful of films, but they’re all pretty damn great – pitch-black yet somehow not “gratuitous” stuff that cuts straight to the bone in ways few other comedies would dare. Example: “Sleeping Dogs Lie” starts out as a movie (partially) about bestiality and winds up as possibly the most honest romantic-comedy ever concieved (it’s moral: Want a healthy relationship? LIE.)
The word on his newest feature, “God Bless America,” has been that it’s dark stuff “even for Bobcat;” a bastard lovechild of “Super” and “Idiocracy” by way of “Falling Down” for the Fox News era. The premise? A suicidal everyman has an epiphany: Why kill himself when it’s everyone else – particularly reality TV stars, cell-phone addicts, religious nuts and “American Idol” – who’re the problem? What follows is either a trailer for the most incendiary movie anyone has attempted in years… or a direct-feed from the inside of MY mind at any given moment: http://www.hulu.com/embed/srVGpTVdB74W60YwSyZf6g
Yes, what is apparently just a Super Bowl commercial is considered important enough to warrant a teaser trailer. Unless, of course, they really ARE making a sequel (probably not.) I have what you’d call a “complicated” relationship with “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” On the one hand, it’s hard to ignore that it’s a movie that essentially treats a narcissistic semi-sociopath – who “get’s over” on anyone trying to keep him from doing whatever he wants even though he’s a priviliged upper-middle-class white suburban kid who could easily do all the things he’s conning his way into WITHOUT the conning part – as a kind of aspirational role-model. On the other hand… maybe it’s because I TOO was a mostly-comfortable middle-class suburban smartass when I saw it and really did identify with him. Either way, it’s still a fun movie.
Also, something just occured to me: If you took the original film and did some digital-trickery to all of Ferris’ fourth-wall-breaking moments so that it looked like he was talking into his webcam/smartphone… it would essentially play out like an ULTRA up-to-date movie about teenagers in the youtube/facebook oversharing age. That’s how cool Ferris was – he was VLOGGING HIS LIFE two whole decades before “Vlogging” was invented.
This is going up a little late, but worth a listen none the less. I sat in for John Black on The Post-Movie Podcast with Steve Head, the subject being year-end top-ten lists. This is part 1 of 2. ENJOY!
For the past two decades, Steven Spielberg has – quite openly – been structuring a lot of his directing schedule around the “one for me, one for them” model: frequently Interspeding his high-end “prestige” projects with projects more likely to be tentpole blockbusters (though it’s not always a one-to-one ration.)
The next “for them” project (next year’s Abe Lincoln biopic being the “for me”) is supposed to be “Robopocalypse” – a machine-uprising-against-humanity movie based on Daniel H. Wilson’s book – slated for the July 4th weekend of 2013. Now, Deadline reports that he may already be circling another major prestige-entry after that for Warner Bros: “Gods and Kings;”A big-budget biopic of Moses. Yes, that Moses. Basket in the reeds, Egypt, burning bush, ten plauges, “let my people go!,” parting-seas, Ten Commandments, golden calf, the whole nine yards.
The buzzword on this one is “Braveheart-like,” which means it’s aiming to be a big, straight-faced, action-oriented version of the story; though there’s no indication if it’ll be a “realistic/historical version” or feature the explicitly-supernatural driving forces as in the original scripture. Either way, I really, REALLY hope he does this…
Obviously, the most famous version of this story in movie terms in the DeMille movie from 1956. It’s fashionable to snark at this movie, and not without reason – it’s garish, overblown and corny as hell – but those are precisely the reasons why it’s one of my favorite “classic” movies: DeMille, for all his myriad issues, was the perfect guy to make what was essentially trying to be a “living” version of the way Exodus was depicted in Rennaissance religious-art. It’s the swords-n-sandals “high fantasy” (and I mean no disrespect in either direction by “fantasy”) version of The Old Testament; rippling muscles, heaving bosoms, stern declarations of honor and rage, wailing high-pitched emotional breakdowns, thundering orchestral score and God’s Wrath visualized through what were then cutting-edge FX.
DeMille’s movie – especially the showpiece FX scenes – are SO iconic it would probably be a fool’s errand for any present-day filmmaker to try and top them (I would bet on this being a mostly-historical with “subtle” mystical elements for the most part) but if anyone can pull it off it’s Spielberg. The real question is: Who plays Moses – or, rather, who wants to stand up to the innevitable comparisons to Charlton Heston giving one of the most culturally-entrenched performances of his (or anyone else’s) career?
Oh, and please allow me to weigh in on the obvious Movie Geek question: YES, I absolutely think that when they build the Ark of The Covenant it should totally end up looking just like the version from “Raiders” (bonus points for “Map Room”/”Miracle of The Ark” getting repurposed as “God’s Theme”) thus making this an Indian Jones prequel. That would be awesome.
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