Time for another quick batch of goodies.
1. I haven’t a clue what the political situation is like in California right now, but apparently a number of people are really, really hoping that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger takes time out from politics to make a movie or two. Moviehole reports that he is not only being courted for Terminator 4 and Conan 3, but that screenwriter William Goldman has dusted off the screenplay he once wrote for Crusade, a film that was going to star Arnold and be directed by Paul Verhoeven in the mid-1990s. What, so soon after the disappointment that was Kingdom of Heaven? (I can’t quite call it a “flop”, because while it may have been only #62 at the North American box office last year, it was #18 worldwide.)
2. Reuters reports that Samuel L. Jackson will narrate Bob Saget’s R-rated Farce of the Penguins, essentially parodying Morgan Freeman’s narration of March of the Penguins.
3. IndieWIRE reports that ThinkFilm has acquired the rights to FUCK, a documentary about the famous four-letter word that features interviews with everyone from Pat Boone and Michael Medved to Ron Jeremy and Hunter S. Thompson; the film also looks at how characters as diverse as Bono and Lenny Bruce have generated controversy through their utterance of that word.
Just for the record, I have always had a fascination with profanity and the semi-arbitrary way society says some words are okay while other words are not; and there once was a time when I snapped up reference books and serious works of scholarship like Hugh Rawson’s Wicked Words, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word and Geoffrey Hughes’s Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English just for a little light reading. (Click here for some thoughts I typed up a few years ago on the use of profanity in film.) So I am definitely interested in this movie, though I don’t necessarily expect it to be all that good.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In