HitFix’s Drew McWeeny and THR have two news items up about Johnny Depp casting – one a new project, another that’s been in development for awhile. Both of them would’ve sounded MUCH more intriguing back before Depp had Pirates4 and Alice In Wonderland in his recent-filmography. But, then, who knows?

First, the more interesting of the two: A biopic of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. That I want to see regardless of whom they cast.

Secondly, his long-gestating do-over of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man,” a detective franchise previously adapted into a mega-popular film series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. This is the one that has “red flag” written all over it. The basic setup is an uber-wealthy married couple, Nick and Nora Charles, who solve crimes and mysteries more-or-less for shits and giggles. The “gimmick?” They’re both functional alcoholics, doing their thing while constantly sauced – the book and films having originated in the era before over-drinking was thought of as a “problem” for the upper-class. So… yeah, you can already see what the danger is: It’d be very, VERY easy for this to turn into “Jack Sparrow but as a 40s crimesolver.”

I’m curious as to how they plan to translate ANY of it. The original films hold up remarkably well, but it’s still pretty jarring how “cute” they play Nick and Nora’s vices (seriously – go watch one of the first four or five of these, they really put it away) for modern eyes. I’m not sure that really “works” anymore. The original “Arthur” was the last real ‘eccentric rich alcoholism is adorable’ movie, and famous MAAD appeared one year later and “Arthur 2” just wasn’t as funny.

I was never a regular consumer of Steve Jobs’ or Apple’s products. I have some, but I’m a longstanding PC user and was never down with the iEverything lifestyle. Not my thing. And I was also never part of the Jobs-As-Techno-Prophet hagiography.

That being said, two things simply cannot be denied in the wake of his passing:

1. Jobs, along with the other ground-zero innovators of the home-computing movement, are responsible for creating the world we are in today. Whatever else he may have been, Steve Jobs was one of those rare individuals whose vision and drive to realize it dragged the rest of humanity’s sorry ass across the yardlines of cultural evolution. Those who read/watch my stuff know that I am unabashedly glad to live in The Age of The Nerd, where each day makes the intelligent, the creative and tech saavy more and more vital to the world as the brutish and the pre-mechanization “strong” more and more obsolete; and I know that I owe a great deal of the thanks for this Age to Jobs. His name, unquestionably, belongs next to Edison, Ford and the other Titans who built the modern world.

2. Anyone dying in their mid-50s sucks, but a great thinker and creator dying so soon is a fucking tragedy. I know that, for a lot of people, there’s something poignant or even “just” about the idea that cancer especially and death/disease in general “not caring” how important the afflicted is – “we’re all equal in God’s eyes” and all that. Honestly, I’ve never found that sentiment particularly comforting and certainly can’t see what’s “just” about it. Someone like Steve Jobs changed the entire world multiple times in just a few decades, how much further would we have moved ahead if he’d had a few more? There’s no “balance” in that… no “great mystery.” The whims of fate, destiny, whatever aren’t things we should happily going along with – we should treat them like obstacles to be overcome. To me, that’s what makes sense.

The titular hero of “War Horse,” a farm horse conscripted into the army during World War I who tries to fight his way back to his rightful owner, will benefit from being immediately sympathetic and likable just by virtue of existing. People will see the horse, people will like the horse, anyone who is good to the horse we will also like, anyone who is bad to the horse is worse than Hitler and we will hate them and cheer for their violent defeat… all without the star of the film having to utter a single line of dialogue.

With Steven Spielberg directing, Janusz Kaminsky shooting and John Williams scoring; you could probably say the same thing about the movie – everything from the setting to the subject matter to their prior collaborations is in-their-element, Tommy-at-the-pinball-machine stuff for this crew…

Some folks are already calling this an Oscar frontrunner and potentially Spielberg’s biggest hit in awhile. I see no reason to doubt either calculation.

Aquaintances of mine who’re fans of (or at least familiar with) Lee Childs’ “Jack Reacher” books are, I’m given to understand, immensely unhappy with the casting of Tom Cruise as the lead in Christopher McQuarrie’s adaptation of “One Shot,” the first official movie adaptation of the series about a former Military Police Major turned ass-kicking vigilante drifter; possibly because Reacher is described as a 6’5 heavily-built hardass and Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise.

I doubt the following news will necessarily change their minds, as Cruise still sounds fairly miscast, but the film has definitely jumped to the top of the hardcore film-geek must-see list: Variety reports that legendary director Werner Herzog has signed on to ACT in the film as the main bad guy. Holy Shit!

On paper, “The Lady” sounds like a snoozer – a Western biopic of an Eastern (Southeast-Asian, specifically) human-rights martyr timed for an Oscar-qualifying Fall release.

Two things make it worth paying attention to (for reasons other than the obvious sympathy/admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi, of course, which is an issue wholly-seperate from the movie) – it’s directed by Luc Besson, who “gets” that biopics of icons don’t need to be ponderous and staid; and it’s a non-action star vehicle for the great Michelle Yeoh.

Welcome to Schlocktober!

I am sometimes asked to explain how/why it is I don’t go about referring to myself specifically as a political “libertarian” anymore; usually in the context of an accusation that I (and others) mainly dropped it because it’s been adopted by the so-called “Tea Party” and thus no longer “cool” – which, to be fair, is at least partially accurate…

The thing of it is; while I am mostly simpatico with “small-L” libertarians on policy and civics details, where we seem to differ is when it comes down to broader worldview.

Simply stated, it strikes me that “name-brand” Libertarianism as it exists now is about “freedom” in general but regards absolutist ECONOMIC freedom – in the form of low-to-nonexistant taxation – as the most important form thereof. And while I’m as averse to wasteful spending as anyone I can’t quite go there with them. Entertained as I am by the fantasies of “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt’s Gulch (or Rapture, for that matter) is not my vision of a better world.

The “better world” I’M striving for is a world free not from the frequently irritating but largely practical economic limitations of a shared society; but rather freed from the unnecessary boundaries of outdated systems of “morality” and/or “consequences” rendered no-longer-mandatory by science.

To place it in less flowery language: My “highest freedoms” are the freedom of individuals to eat, drink, smoke, shoot WHATEVER they want (with the ALL IMPORTANT caveats of adulthood and responsibility) and to fuck, marry, divorce WHOEVER they want (with the ALL-IMPORTANT caveats of adulthood, consent, sound-mind, etc) impeded by as few unnecessary consequences as possible; and if a tax-funded “social safety net” is part of the aparatus necessary to make such freedom-from-unecessary-consequence possible… then, quite frankly, Uncle Sam can HAVE my goddamn money.

I dunno if there’s a “name for that position, but it’s mine.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Hero Complex has a short interview up with Kevin Tancharoen, currently living the dream of every fan-film maker (except, y’know, for the part about already being a professional film director) after his “Mortal Kombat” YouTube short (nobody is buying that the short was “accidentally” made public, yes?) got him put in charge of the new “Mortal Kombat” movie.

I’d joke that the piece reads like something I’d draft as a parody of everything wrong with genre film; but in this case it actually reads like a parody of everything wrong with genre film I already did.

It’d be tacky to repost the whole (short) article, so here are the choice bits (in boldface) from Tanchroen’s mouth:

“Yes, my sensibilities lean more toward realism as opposed to the more mythological stuff that Mortal Kombat automatically has.”

Kill me now.

“It will be more realistic and gritty than the last two movies, but also a very big story.”

I don’t even know what these words mean anymore…

“I want it to be bloody, but in a natural sense and not gratuitous, crazy spurting pools of blood. That takes it to a different level of camp.”

So, basically the only thing that originally distinguised the property – and the number one thing people agreed was missing from every earlier version – he doesn’t want to do. This is up there with the stories Kevin Smith tells about Jon Peters wanting Superman to never fly or wear his costume.

Well, at the very least he’s not shameless enough to name-drop Christopher Nolan – the go to “justifier” for this sort of thing. Oh, wait…

“Chris Nolan started the trend of making everything in this type of genre grounded.”

Someone needs to draft a special Guiness World Record for being the best movie ever to have an almost-entirely negative effect on it’s genre and just hand it to “The Dark Knight” at this point.

“What took most people by surprise with my shorts, I think, is that you never would think of putting Mortal Kombat in a realistic setting.”

Imagine that…

“But I believe it’s a fighting game and it’s meant for that purpose.”

I’m not even kidding here: If anyone has an english-language translation of what the hell that sentence is supposed to mean, I want to hear it.

What’s kind of infuriating is that, for the same bargain-basement price Warners is almost-certainly getting Tancharoen for, a producer who actually gave a shit about this material could’ve likely scooped up a mid-level action guy from the Hong Kong, Korean or even Japanese set that actually knows how to do this sort of thing. (Takeshi Miike could probably knock the best Mortal Kombat movie ever out in a weekend.)

Then again, maybe it’ll be good. Just this last week a movie I’d been fully-prepared to despise – with very good reason – turned out to be shockingly good (as in “this is pretty good, and I am shocked by this”) so who knows? Either way, I look forward to hearing the usual off-topic reminders that no video game originating prior to 2001 deserves to be a movie – don’t let me down, kiddies 😉

I’m of two minds about the new high-end breed of “fan films,” i.e. unlicensed adaptations of properties made by professional-level filmmakers. A lot of them are good, a lot of them are bad, and I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t relish to opportunity to take a shot at one myself had I the resources… but I can understand the criticism that people at that level might be better served coming up with their own material; particularly since the not-so-secret “dream” behind a lot of such projects – getting hired to make the “real” thing – hasn’t happened in any meaningful way yet.

Well, now it has. Warner Bros. liked Kevin Tancharoen’s “Mortal Kombat: Rebirth” short (or, at least, the online reaction to it) so much that they brought him on to do the “Legacy” webseries… and now he’s getting to helm the real thing – a feature-film “reboot” of the series.

Um… yeah?

I mean, good for him certainly, but I really, truly hated “Rebirth” – just the ultimate apotheosis of the “gritty realism” style of adaptation that I’m completely, utterly sick to fucking death of. Yes, fine, it was well-directed and it was nifty that he got “name” B-list actors to show up, but right around the point where Reptile – in the games a monster from another dimension – shows up as deformed serial-killer I checked the hell out. Fuck that shit. “Legacy” was marginally better, but never rose above “here are spot-on imitations of my favorite beats from recent genre-films but with Mortal Kombat guys in it.”

I’m hoping, at least, that the film is NOT a continuation of either previous effort and actually tries to capture the games a little better – part of the reason I loved the recent game reboot was that it so enthusiastically embraced the Kung Fu meets metal album-cover in a halloween store feel of the original games, with absolutely zero effort made to cover up the high-camp insanity of the premise and characters. A movie of that, basically an ultra-gory “Big Trouble in Little China?” THAT I want to watch.

In any case, the bigger story here is that if/when this actually works out, “make fan-film, get hired” is going to REALLY take hold in the up-and-comer film world – get ready to see a lot of recent filmschool grads flooding YouTube with high-gloss takes on their favorite games and old cartoons hoping to catch a rights-holder’s eye.

On a completely-unrelated note, anyone have a ballpark figure on what a photo-real CGI Bowser would cost?

Go see it.

“Intermission” is about release-dates.