Far, far too many newsbites now. I’ll try to be brief.
1. There’s been a fair bit of coverage in anticipation of tonight’s premiere of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen at the Toronto film festival. Check the Canadian Press, Reuters, and the National Post.
2. Reuters says MGM is planning to make five new sequels:
Wednesday’s announcement included the unveiling of thrillers “Species 4,” WarGames 2, “Into the Blue 2” and romance “Cutting Edge 3,” along the “Legally Blonde” title which, Sands said, will not star Oscar winner Witherspoon.
At least two of these movies will be follow-ups to earlier sequels that went straight to video, so it’s a safe bet that these new movies will go straight to video, too. But wait a minute — WarGames 2!? The other movies are all sequels to films that came out no more than three years ago — but the original WarGames came out all the way back in 1983! No doubt there are all sorts of interesting things one could do with computer hackers, nuclear proliferation and national security issues nowadays … but how are they going to tie in the Matthew Broderick character? And will “Joshua” still be around, trying to figure out how to win at Tic-Tac-Toe now that there are, as it were, more than two people playing the game?
3. The Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail report that an American company and a German director have made a horror movie called Killer Pickton, based on the alleged crimes of Robert Pickton, a pig farmer who is currently on trial for the murder of over two dozen women, many of them prostitutes, in Vancouver. Somehow I expect this will be even worse than that movie about Karla Homolka, which I mentioned here, here, here and here.
4. StarWars.com provides a seemingly exhaustive list of the changes made between the 1977 and 1997/2004 versions of the original Star Wars. How many did you know about already?
5. My friend, colleague, and fellow Bible-movie buff Matt Page makes an interesting point regarding The Ten, an upcoming comedy inspired by the Ten Commandments:
Firstly, it seems that although this is the type of movie that will probably draw criticism from certain quarters, it will ultimately uphold the importance of the Ten Commandments. By contrast, Kieslowski is distinctly ambivalent on the worthiness of some of the commandments in the Dekalog.
6. Stephen Holden of the New York Times reviews Saint of 9/11 — an Ian McKellen-narrated documentary about a gay Catholic priest who was killed by falling debris in the twin towers.
7. Reuters reports that the government of Cyprus is withholding funds from Akamas, a movie about forbidden love between a Turkish Cypriot man and a Greek Cypriot woman, because a scene of Greek guerillas executing a man takes place in a church and not, as the government-approved screenplay had it, in a coffeeshop.
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