Time for another news round-up.
1. Yesterday’s National Post has an item on Un dimanche à Kigali, a Canadian film currently in production that is based on a book by Gil Courtemanche about the Rwanda massacre. Could make an interesting double-bill with Hotel Rwanda (my review).
2. Reuters reports that March of the Penguins, with over $12 million in the till already, is well on its way to becoming the 2nd-highest-grossing documentary of all time in North America. The highest is Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (my review), which grossed a phenomenal $119.2 million last year.
3. Batman Begins was supposed to help us forget the films of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, but nooooo, the Hollywood Reporter says the studio is seizing the opportunity to release brand-new 2-disc versions of all four films on DVD.
4. Remember how McDonald’s wanted to play the field once its exclusive 10-year contract with Disney expired next year? The Associated Press reports that they have signed a deal with DreamWorks to promote Shrek 3 in 2007.
The agreement will include promoting DreamWorks films with toys in Happy Meals. But it will go beyond typical marketing efforts to include pairing pitchman Ronald McDonald with Shrek and other DreamWorks characters in ads.
It will be the first time McDonald’s iconic “chief happiness officer” has shared the spotlight with non-McDonald’s characters.
Sounds hideous. Expect to hear Mike Myers say or do something that will stress the Scottishness of Ronald McDonald’s name.
5. Reuters has an interesting piece on Jim Jarmusch and his new film, Broken Flowers, which opens next week:
Jarmusch dislikes his main character, which he created expressly for Murray. He abhors retrospection yet has his protagonist confront his past four times over and sheds his ‘guy film’ image by using an array of actresses including Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton and Frances Conroy.
In “Broken Flowers,” devout bachelor Don Johnston has been dumped by his latest lover and resigns himself to being alone. But an ex-lover’s anonymous letter telling him he fathered a son 19 years earlier moves Johnston to confront his past.
Goaded into action by his Ethiopian neighbor, played by Jeffrey Wright, Johnston seeks out his former lovers, getting a glimpse of his past and a taste of what might have been.
“I don’t identify at all with Don Johnston at the beginning. I don’t even like him. That’s very unusual for me. In all my films, no matter how damaged or socially inept characters may be, I really feel for them. I love them.
“I don’t love Don Johnston. I don’t care about some rich guy that made money off computers, had pretty girlfriends and doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
So topsy-turvy was the experience that Jarmusch did the editing process in reverse — starting from the last scene and working backwards.
“I didn’t feel for him in the beginning, but I want to feel for him in the end,” Jarmusch said about his protagonist. “It was six weeks of editing before we started looking at the film’s beginning.”
6. This week’s Georgia Straight pursues the religion angle in its coverage of the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard movie:
The looniest arm of the U.S. Christian right appeared to be aligning itself with the Taliban recently when John Conner, a spokesperson for a conspiracy group calling itself the Resistance, said singer Jessica Simpson was a “whore”. Conner made the comment after seeing a video for “These Boots Were Made for Walking”, which Simpson sings during the end credits of her film debut, The Dukes of Hazzard. . . .
This is the same Jessica Simpson whose father is a pastor and who announced, prior to her 2002 marriage to pop singer Nick Lachey, that she was a virgin despite having dated Lachey for almost five years. In an interview room of a New York hotel, she says the Christian right has been criticizing her since she was a teenager.
“I couldn’t even sign a gospel deal at 14 because some people thought I was too sexy,” she says, “so this is not new. What I have realized is that [name-calling] is not a very Christian thing to do, or to go to the press and say that about someone.”
This would be the same father who publicly said Simpson owes her success partly to the fact that she’s got big boobs? (His exact words: “Jessica never tries to be sexy. … She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double D’s! You can’t cover those suckers up!” The sermons at his church must have been something else.)
FWIW, she goes on to say that she can ignore the tabloids because, as a preacher’s kid, “I had to deal with gossip and rumours and mean girls at a very young age. That prepared me for now.”
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