Time for a few more little blurbs.
1. FilmStew.com has a wonderfully insane idea. If Christian Bale — who is currently one of six actors playing Bob Dylan in I’m Not There — really does play John Connor in the next Terminator movie, then perhaps the studio could cast all the other actors who have played John Connor and hire I’m Not There director Todd Haynes to oversee the whole thing. It’ll never happen, but still.
2. German director Robert Sigl is developing The 13th Disciple, a “Horror/Adventure” film about archaeologists in India who discover that Jesus had an “evil twin brother” who is now alive again, reincarnated as the head of a religious sect. Jesus himself will reportedly be “only in the background” of the story, and will not be an active character. Matt Page at the Bible Films Blog has rounded up several news sites and official movie sites on the subject.
3. The Hollywood Reporter says Ben Stiller is developing a TV pilot called Gods Behaving Badly, described as:
. . . a contemporary comedic tale set in London, where the gods of ancient Greece have been living together in a house since the 1660s. They still are running the world, fighting with one another, but they are dangerously bored and living in much reduced circumstances. Apollo has turned a Goldman Sachs market trader into a tree after she refused casual sex with him. Aphrodite runs a telephone sex service.
” ‘Gods Behaving Badly’ has a rare comedic collision of the mythic, the mundane and the emotionally real,” Red Hour partner Stuart Cornfeld said. “We are very excited about moving ahead with this.”
I like the Greco-Roman myths, so this could be kind of fun, but I don’t know that I trust Stiller or his company to milk the best humour out of this concept. For one thing, they’d better not make all the jokes about sex. That’s too easy, too obvious. It’s one thing for the characters to be bored and uninspired, but the writers should be a little more clever than that.
4. I love contrarian readings of popular films — such as Jonathan V. Last‘s argument that the Empire, rather than the Rebellion, was ultimately on the side of good in the the Star Wars movies — so I have to link to right-wing New York Post columnist Kyle Smith‘s recent analysis of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946):
While watching the new colorization of “It’s a Wonderful Life” on DVD – this time they got it right; no longer do you get the feeling you’re watching a black-and-white film through stained glass – I thought: you know who would love this? Why, that visionary American innovator Henry F. Potter.
That’s right, Mr. Potter – the unsung hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the canny businessman who tried (and, alas, failed) to turn boring, repressed Bedford Falls – a town full of drunks, child beaters, vandals and racial and sexual harassers – into an exciting new destination nightspot called Pottersville. . . .
5. Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere notes that New Line Cinema’s “For Your Consideration” site — the site that invites members of the Academy to consider their films for the Oscars — is promoting The Golden Compass, Hairspray and… The Last Mimzy? That’s the lame children’s fantasy which happened to be the first film directed by the head of the studio in 17 years. In other words, it’s a true vanity project — and now, more so than ever.
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