Seems like only yesterday I posted my last batch of these …
1. By now, you’ve probably heard the news: Guillermo Del Toro has officially signed on to direct The Hobbit and its sequel. You can read about it via the press release or via Variety. For his part, Jeffrey Wells is happy for Del Toro but says “there’s a downside to this deal” because it means Del Toro “won’t be making any adult-market, real-world-grappling, artistic-growth movies in the vein of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone for a long, lonnng time.”
2. The cast is coming together for Angels & Demons, the sequel or prequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006). In addition to Tom Hanks, who is reprising his role as professional “symbologist” Robert Langdon, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter say the film may star Ewan McGregor as an assistant to the late pope, and Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer as an Italian scientist who helps Langdon investigate the mysterious death of her father.
3. Superman Returns director Bryan Singer has said that he plans to “go all Wrath of Khan on” the sequel to that film — and now Thomas Tull, CEO of Legendary Pictures, the firm that co-produced the films with Warner Brothers, has said he wants the film to invoke the image of “an angry god”. Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, Superman star Brandon Routh recently told Collider.com he hopes to start working on the sequel early next year. Does that mean they’ve hired some writers, then?
4. Reuters and the Associated Press report that Yoko Ono is suing the makers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed for copyright infringement, because a few seconds of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ appear on the soundtrack. But as anyone who has seen the film can tell, the snippet that appears in the film is very, very short, and the film is clearly commenting on the song and not merely using it as background music — so this almost certainly falls under the category of “fair use”, as the filmmakers say it does.
5. When I first saw the headlines linking Paul Verhoeven and Jesus this week, my heart leapt with joy at the thought that he was finally going to make his life-of-Christ biopic and give religious film critics like me something to talk about for the next few years. But alas, no, he’s simply getting around to publishing that book about Jesus that he talked about writing over a year ago. Outlets like Fox News and the Associated Press have zeroed in on Verhoeven’s assertion that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier who allegedly raped Mary, but this is hardly a new idea; that theory was already advanced by Denys Arcand (or, rather, by his characters) in Jesus of Montreal (1989). Chris Thilk also notes that Verhoeven’s idea is “basically Monty Python’s Life of Brian, only taken seriously. . . . If the soldier’s name turns out to be Naughtious Maximus I think I just might die.”
6. Jeffrey Wells says the marketing team for Speed Racer is “facing an ironic challenge” because the film is “basically ‘a kid’s movie’ . . . but the tracking . . . says the biggest interest levels so far are with the over-25 crowd who grew up on the animated versions in various media.” So … wouldn’t that make this the kind of movie that would appeal to both kids and their parents? Wouldn’t that give the film broader appeal? Or would it have to be tracking well among the over-35 crowd for that to be the case?
7. Karina Longworth says some people are trying to turn Another Stakeout (1993) into a cult classic for apparently no better reason than the fact that they think they can do so. This reminds me, I have still never seen that film, even though part of it was filmed in a heritage home that my sister lived in for a while.
8. The Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, has an interesting story on eight silent films from the United States that were recently discovered in Australia — including a couple of early movie trailers.
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