Might as well get these items off my plate for now. 1. Variety says Angelina Jolie is set to star in a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. 2. Reuters reports that investors from six Arab countries plan to put up $200 million to produce over a dozen major Arabic movies in English: Malek Akkad said the project is aimed at promoting the nascent Arab film industry to the world and showcasing the region’s history and culture. “They’re... Read more

Variety reports that Mel Brooks is turning his sci-fi spoof Spaceballs (1987) into an animated series for MGM TV. The film came out only four years after the original Star Wars trilogy came to an end, when the franchise was still semi-fresh — Return of the Jedi had come out on video only the year before (this was back in the days when it sometimes took films a few years, not a few months, to make the transition from theatres... Read more

The big news story yesterday was that 20th Century Fox has started a new boutique label called FoxFaith — which, according to its website, specializes in “family and Christian films”, in that order. The existence of this label wasn’t news to me, since Tim Willson — a Christian film and video insider who compiles the monthly Crown Chronicle — has talked about the existence of this label before, and I, prompted by his updates, had already checked out the label’s... Read more

My sister’s gonna kill me, but I can’t help myself … A year and a half ago, I mentioned that my sister Monica had worked as an extra on a few films and TV shows while living in Toronto in the early 1990s, including the legal thriller Guilty as Sin (1993). Luckily for me, by the time the film came out in theatres, my sister had moved back home to Vancouver, so I was able to see her debut on... Read more

Another British sitcom gets an American remake. Quoth Variety: Fox has greenlit its first full-fledged comedy pilot of the fall 2007 development season: the Suzanne Martin-penned laffer “The Minister of Divine,” based on the U.K. hit “The Vicar of Dibley.” Laffer, from 20th Century Fox TV, revolves around a woman with a rebellious past who returns to her small Georgia hometown — Divine — to serve as the church minister. . . . “(Martin) did something smart — she set... Read more

I love John Woo’s Face/Off (1997), but one of the things I’ve always nitpicked is how a man could trick a woman into thinking she was sleeping with her husband, just by surgically altering his face. Wouldn’t there be, um, other things she might notice? Today, The Guardian suggests one way this trick might have been pulled off. And not surprisingly, just as the first person who received a hand transplant went on to have an identity crisis and to... Read more

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest. The Protector — CDN $1,204,470 — N.AM $9,059,180 — 13.3%The Illusionist — CDN $3,010,434 — N.AM $23,126,885 — 13.0%The Last Kiss — CDN $570,768 — N.AM $4,627,989 — 12.3%Crank — CDN $3,000,751 — N.AM $24,393,847 — 12.3%The Covenant — CDN $1,509,411 — N.AM $15,791,085 — 9.6%The Black Dahlia — CDN... Read more

The Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, on a recent script deal: New Line Cinema has preemptively acquired “God, the Devil, and Lucy,” a comedy from David Hubbard. The story follows God and the Devil who, tired of eternally fighting for human souls, decide to settle things once and for all by coming down to Earth as mortal men and competing for the love of one woman that they mutually choose. Without using any of their powers and relying only on human... Read more

I adore the Lord of the Rings films, I really do. But I have always suspected that Peter Jackson would be the wrong person to direct an adaptation of The Hobbit, just because it’s such a different kind of story. And now, this interview at Ain’t It Cool News proves it: If I was doing THE HOBBIT I’d try to get as many of the guys back as I could. I mean, there’s actually a role for Legolas in THE... Read more

From today’s installment of Anne Thompson’s Risky Biz Blog: Moore segued to the subject of Mel Gibson, revealing for the first time that Gibson cost Moore his chance to be a Time Man of the Year. “I got a call right after the ’04 election,” Moore said, “from an editor from Time Magazine. He said, ‘Time Magazine has picked you and Mel Gibson to be Time’s Person of the Year to put on the cover, Right and Left, Mel and... Read more