Here are a few quickies to get the week started.
1. Mandi Bierly at Entertainment Weekly recently watched When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and, as she puts it, “had the surreal experience of realizing that I am now the same age as Sally.” I had that exact same experience seven years ago.
2. STV.tv reports that Cowboys for Christ, the follow-up to the original Wicker Man (1973) that was going to start shooting this month, was cancelled at the last minute due to financing concerns.
3. Anthony Baratta at ComingSoon.net has seen the first 35 minutes of WALL-E and spoken to director Andrew Stanton, and while he notes some positive things about the film, he also echoes what others have said, wondering how the film will play to the masses:
First the potential flaws: The premise of the movie is that Earth was so overrun with rampant commercialism and therefore garbage from all those purchases, that the inhabitants had to flee Earth. The population left in Starship (The Axiom) to wait out the cleanup efforts by the robots left behind. Even the cleanup robots fall into disrepair and WALL•E is the last one left, doing what he his programmed to do.
I’m not sure how the moviegoing public will react to such in-your-face preaching about the dangers of Wal-Mart and Costco. Nor the hints at weather run amok, like the hyper-dust storms that whip up out of nowhere to savage the city where WALL•E lives.
Also, within the Axiom – the logical conclusion of life without the need for physical movement is life as a couch potato – “slugs” plugged into their own personal Xbox/PlayStation.
Sci-Fi movies have preached before — Planet of the Apes; Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Soylent Green — and still they entertain. So WALL•E is just following along in a rich tradition. The question is will the love story between WALL•E and EVE stand above the distractions or be dragged down with the weight of them?
It sounds to me like the “premise” of the film should be more than a mere “distraction” — it should be, for better or worse, something that the audience is called to engage with, on some level — but oh well, I guess we’ll find out how it plays soon enough.
4. The Hollywood Reporter says Valkyrie, the World War II thriller directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise as a Nazi with an American accent, has had its release date put off again, to February 2009. It was originally going to come out this June, before it got bumped to October. Looks like the studio isn’t expecting the film to be a hit with audiences or with the Academy.
Valkyrie is the second film Cruise greenlit after he got the boot at Paramount and took the reins at United Artists; the first was Lions for Lambs, which flopped. If there is a third, no one seems to be talking about it.
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