The blog for Peter T. Chattaway, film critic, journalist, religion junkie, etc. Not all posts will be film-related, but film will always be just around the corner.
Whatever I might think of the film, I have always thought that the character WALL•E was as cute and charming as they come. And if my kids were just a little older, I'm sure we'd have fun putting this paper model of him together. Ah well, I'll just have to do it for them, I guess, and hog all the fun to myself. You can download the necessary graphics here. Hat tip to the Upcoming Pixar blog.
I have mentioned it here before, but until tonight I had never seen Harrison Ford's fourth appearance as Indiana Jones, in the bookends to the 'Mystery of the Blues' episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1993).
Although it was filmed only a few years after his third appearance as Indy, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), this fourth appearance takes place quite a bit later in the official Indy chronology; the first three films all take place between 1935 and 1938, while this section of the TV episode takes place in 1950.
Ford's fifth appearance as Indy, in this year's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was filmed a decade and a half after this TV episode but takes place just a few years later, in 1957.
Anyway, here is the opening bookends sequence:
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And here is the closing bookends sequence:
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The teaser for Terminator Salvation went online today, and while it doesn't give you a chance to look at anything very clearly or for very long, the QuickTime format thankfully allows you to go through it almost frame-by-frame, if you so choose.
So, first of all, the teaser gives us our first good look at Christian Bale as John Connor -- and for what it's worth, I have added the image above to my John Connor gallery so that Bale can take his place alongside Dalton Abbott, John DeVito, Edward Furlong, Thomas Dekker, Nick Stahl and Michael Edwards, all of whom have played Connor at some point in his life or other.
Second, I have isolated some of the brief glimpses that this teaser gives us of the machines against which our heroes will do battle. These apparently include a giant claw that punches through a wall so that it can pick someone up off the ground ...
... and a somewhat ungainly robot that looks rather like the big wheeled things that attacked our heroes in the third movie ...
... and, of course, at least one red-eyed biped:
I do appreciate the fact that Connor, in the voice-over that begins the teaser, acknowledges the fact that the war he is now fighting is not the war that his mother warned him about. This is a whole different future, thanks to the choices that were made during the second film -- choices that sent the timeline going in a whole different direction.
So with any luck, the filmmakers will explore the fact that Connor really doesn't have a destiny any more -- his destiny was on that other timeline that no longer exists -- and he therefore ought to be asking himself some serious questions in the new films. Does he need to do this? Is he necessarily the best man for the job any more? And so on, and so on.
That's just one of several interesting bits in this profile of Gary Oldman, who used to be typecast as "the bad guy" in films like Léon: The Professional (1994) and Air Force One (1997), but has lately become more of a heroic father-figure type, thanks to his supporting roles as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies and as Lt. Jim Gordon in the current Batman movies.
I especially like the broader quote from which that line comes:
With his second turn as Batman ally Gordon in "The Dark Knight" Oldman, 50, feels as though he has finally broken ranks with the bad boys and put to rest his typecasting as a go-to guy when filmmakers needed a villain.
"No, I don't hear it anymore. I mean look, Rolling Stone said, `Oldman is so skilled he makes virtue look exciting,'" Oldman said in an interview with The Associated Press, quoting the magazine's review of "The Dark Knight" from memory. "You know what? That's the best review I've ever had. ... I'll put that on my tombstone. `Makes virtue look exciting.' That's pretty good.
"In the past, I've had my share of good reviews, but it's always the crazy, scary, weirdo guy. I don't even know how it happened. Look at me. I mean, when I'm naked, I look like a bald chicken. How did I get to be a scary bad guy?"
I don't know if I would call Oldman's performance in the Batman movies "exciting" -- it's a bit too subtle and low-key for that -- but his portrayal of a man trying to be noble and virtuous in an evil and cynical world certainly resonates on a pretty deep level.
And if both films have left me with a lump in my throat, it is partly due to how Oldman embodies his half of the Batman-Gordon relationship. "I never thanked you." "And you'll never have to." Gets me every time.
Playbill reports that an open casting call has gone out for the Spider-Manstage musical that Julie Taymor plans to direct from a score written by Bono and The Edge, of the band U2.
I can never think of Bono and The Edge working on franchises like this without thinking of the theme song that they wrote for the James Bond film GoldenEye (1995), so here is the music video for that song, performed as it was by Tina Turner:
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Now there's a franchise that would make a great musical ... or at least an interesting one ... maybe ... though it must be admitted that some critics are already complaining about Pierce Brosnan's singing in Mamma Mia!, which opens this Friday.
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.
Cruising Bar 2 -- CDN $1,560,000 -- N.AM $1,560,000 -- 100% Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- CDN $26,910,000 -- N.AM $310,487,614 -- 8.7% Wanted -- CDN $9,460,000 -- N.AM $112,455,060 -- 8.4% Get Smart -- CDN $9,230,000 -- N.AM $111,564,176 -- 8.3% Kung Fu Panda -- CDN $15,550,000 -- N.AM $202,154,311 -- 7.7% Journey to the Center of the Earth -- CDN $1,550,000 -- N.AM $21,018,141 -- 7.4% Hancock -- CDN $12,070,000 -- N.AM $164,115,004 -- 7.4% Hellboy II: The Golden Army -- CDN $2,500,000 -- N.AM $34,539,115 -- 7.2% WALL·E -- CDN $10,800,000 -- N.AM $163,055,900 -- 6.6% Meet Dave -- CDN $252,412 -- N.AM $5,251,918 -- 4.8%
A couple of discrepancies: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Cruising Bar 2 were #8 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (the former film was #11 in North America as a whole, and the latter film does not appear on the North American chart at all), while The Incredible Hulk and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl were #9 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #13 and #17 in Canada).
Last month, Empire quoted Christopher Lee to the effect that he would be willing to play Saruman again -- probably not in The Hobbit, per se, since Saruman never appears in that book, but perhaps in that rumoured second film that would bridge the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003):
“I’ve read the books time and again,” said the 86-year-old. “Originally Saruman The White and the rest of the wizards, or the Istari as they call them, were immortal. There were five of them, two of them never appear, I know their names but they never appear, and the only three that are mentioned are Saruman The White, Gandalf The Grey and Radagast The Brown who you never see – so basically it’s two wizards.
“They lived for thousands of years and they were sent to the earth and they are virtually immortal. When it all started, Saruman was the noblest, the finest, the bravest, the most dependable and reliable of them all, he was number one. But somewhere, somehow, and it was never actually explained, he turns and it’s probably the Palantír (the wizard’s crystal ball thingy) that makes Saruman realise that if Sauron can do this, why can’t I do it and Saruman wants to become The Lord Of The Rings himself.”
“I’d be interested in seeing how that transition from good to evil occurred and, yes, of course I would return to the role if I was asked.”
Now, however, Lee seems to be singing a somewhat different tune -- and for reasons that are quite understandable, given his age:
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Christian Bale has been making the rounds lately, promoting The Dark Knight, but along the way, he has talked a bit about his role in the upcoming Terminator movies as well. ComingSoon.net recently posted this interview snippet:
CS: What attracted you to another big franchise like "Terminator?" Christian Bale: Well, initially, actually, that was NOT an attraction. I felt that I wasn't sure where it could go to. Before I gave an answer, I went back and reviewed the other movies. I felt like "Okay, unlike 'Batman Begins,' this would be something where we would be respecting the previous mythology." Certainly of one and two, not so much number three – but certainly you would be recognizing that mythology, unlike "Batman Begins" where we were saying that this is the beginning, right here. But what I view in it, and what has ultimately made me make the choice to make it, is that I see the same potential for reinvention and for breathing new life into the mythology. That's what I view our responsibility as filmmakers to be. It's pointless if we don't succeed in doing that.
CS: How is filming going? Bale: Good, good. They're a number of weeks in. I'm just a week and a half in... It's going well. It's a tall order, it really is, and I recognize that and we have a lot of work to do, and I've just begun on it, because I only just finished working on "Public Enemies" a couple of weeks back.
It is curious that Bale would say the new film is going to "respect" the mythology of the first two films but "not so much" the third, since there wouldn't even be a war between the humans and the machines now if it weren't for the third film. Plus, Bryce Dallas Howard is co-starring in the new film as John Connor's wife Kate, a character who didn't even exist until the third film. Who knows, perhaps Bale is hinting that the new film will re-invent the events of the third film or something, which would be fair enough I guess, considering how the third film re-invented the first two films.
Also interesting is Bale's revelation that he has just started work on the film, which began shooting way back on May 5. The Mansfield News Journal reported a few weeks ago that cameras will probably be rolling on this film until some time in September -- so it would seem that Bale will be on set for a little more than half of the production schedule, if that. This may or may not have some bearing on those conflicting reports regarding whether or not John Connor will be the movie's central character.
Outlander stars Jim Caviezel as an alien who crash-lands on Earth in Norway in the year 709. And he brings a monster with him, too. So Caviezel the alien teams up with some Vikings, played by the likes of Hellboy co-stars John Hurt and Ron Perlman, to go hunt the monster down. Awesome. Watch the trailer here.
I haven't got time to say much about Hellboy II: The Golden Army right now, but suffice it to say that it might be my favorite comic-book movie of the year so far.
I mention it now simply so that I can link to this interesting interview that Twitch did with Doug Jones, who plays Abe Sapien and a couple of other characters in the film:
Guillén: When Guillermo and I sat down to talk, we spoke a bit about the Catholic underpinnings prevalent in much of his manifested world. I’m aware that you are also a practicing Christian, are you Catholic?
Jones: I’ve been a lot of denominations over the years but I call myself a generic Christian, yes, and am attending a church now that would remind you of Catholicism. It’s more orthodox. On the first Hellboy, when I was given the script the first day and was told to go home and read it that day and get back to him that night, I’m reading the script called Hellboy and he’s a demon from Hell. I’m thinking, “Okay, I have to respectfully find a way to tell Guillermo I can’t do this movie.” That was my first thought before I cracked open the script. Then I started reading it and realized, “Oh my goodness, I am so not offended by this. In fact, I’m enlivened by it. I’m finding my faith being nurtured and challenged by this story. This is good.”
I loved seeing images in that first movie, where Hellboy had a decision to make. He was being enticed and tempted by the nemesis in that film to regain his princely place in Hell. “Here is the power you can have. Here is what you were meant to be really. And here’s what I can offer you.” That’s when his horns grew back, during this decision, when he was feeling tempted by that offer. Well, that’s when our young agent Myers was watching this, got Hellboy’s attention, and tossed him the rosary that his father Professor “Broom” had given him and that he grew up with as a boy demon. Hellboy caught that rosary in his hand and the image of the cross was burned into his palm. Looking down at his palm is when he realized who he is now and what decisions he had made in the life he’d chosen for himself. That was such beautiful imagery for me. Anyone who comes from the faith that I come from can relate to it and understand.
Guillén: Guillermo excels at expressing the rockbed of faith within even the lapsed Catholic. He pronounces these lines of faith so clearly and—as you said—respectfully in his visual imagery. While filming in Budapest, was your faith heightened by the proximity of orthodox practice?
Jones: Being in Eastern Europe—or Central Europe, as they’re calling it now—has always done that, yes. I love walking around in an old city like that and walking past a cathedral that has so much history. In Budapest, as well as Prague where we filmed the first Hellboy, a dear friend of mine, Brian Steele—who has played a lot of creatures alongside of me over the years; he was Sammael in the first Hellboy and plays Wink and three other creatures in Hellboy II as well—he knew I was a churchgoer and on Easter Sunday while we were shooting the first Hellboy movie he said, “I’d like to go to this Catholic cathedral you’ve been attending for Easter, if I can join you?” I said, “Of course! Come with me.” We walked into this old cathedral, which was absolutely ornate and gorgeous with art work that has been handed down through centuries, and sculptures of Jesus and angels, amazing art work, a building that had so much history to it, and had been active with church services happening almost on a daily basis for hundreds of years, Brian walked in there with me and he said, “Wow!"—we’re whispering in the back of the church because the service had already started—"You can tell a lot of prayers have been answered in this building.” So, yes, that part of Europe is steeped in tradition like that and with history.
Marvel Comics has been having lots and lots of success lately, first with its standalone franchises such as X-Men (2000-2006) and Spider-Man (2002-2007), and now with Iron Man and, to a lesser extent, The Incredible Hulk, the two of which Marvel plans to bring together in a few years with a couple more superheroes for a major, major cross-over called The Avengers.
Meanwhile, what is DC Comics doing? They've got a successfully rebooted Batman franchise, of course, but beyond that? There are rumours of all sorts of superhero projects in the works -- from Wonder Woman and The Flash to Green Lantern and the Justice League -- but it's not clear which of these projects are related to each other and which are not. And in any case, everything -- even the Superman franchise, which Bryan Singer tried to revive a couple years ago -- seems to be stuck in development hell right now.
Well, it sounds like someone at DC Comics or Warner Brothers, the studio that has dibs on all of DC's properties (both companies are owned by Time-Warner), has had enough of this confusion too. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter say "a big shake-up" could be in the works, as the head honchos of both companies have been meeting recently "to discuss a new direction for film adaptations."
Meanwhile, there has been some buzz over an interview that Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier gave in France, where he seemed to suggest that Warner had asked him if he would be interested in making the next Superman movie.
This comes only a week or so after comic-book writer Mark Millar said that he and a "very well known American action director" were pitching a Superman reboot to Warner. Is Leterrier, who is French but recently made the move to Hollywood (having just rebooted the Hulk franchise, he is now attached to Warner's remake of Clash of the Titans), the "American action director" in question? Or is that a whole different round of discussions?
And is Warner still talking to Bryan Singer, as well?
Well, whatever is going on with that franchise, it's probably safe to say no particular project will be greenlit until DC and Warner have come to some sort of agreement on their master plan.
One of the weirder trends these days is the one that has studios releasing DVDs of older films with CDs of music that came out during the same decade but otherwise have nothing to do with the movies in question.
Now, apparently, there are lots of other films in this series too, but these particular films all happen to be famous for their music: The Graduate has a classic soundtrack by Simon & Garfunkel; Fiddler on the Roof was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time at that time; and the original soundtrack album for When Harry Met Sally... introduced Harry Connick Jr. to the world, featuring nothing but his covers of classic songs made famous by Sinatra etc.
But do the CDs that accompany these DVDs reflect any of this? Do they contain any music that is featured within the films themselves? No, no, of course not, no. Instead, each disc is a miscellanous grab bag of whatever was popular on the radio at some point in that decade; if memory serves, the songs included on each disc are not even necessarily tied to the specific year in which the film came out.
The "Decades Collection" is put out by MGM. And now, according to Lou Lumenick, Paramount is getting in on the act too, releasing new "I Love the '80s" editions of Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and various other films, each of which will come with a CD that includes a-ha's 'Take On Me', Echo & the Bunnymen's 'Lips Like Sugar', INXS's 'Need You Tonight' and Erasure's 'Chains Of Love'.
Note: all of these songs were originally released between 1984 and 1988, which in pop-culture terms is a whole different era from the one that produced films like Reds.
The decade thing becomes even more absurd when you consider titles like, well, Fiddler on the Roof and Reds, both of which may have been produced in my lifetime but take place at least partly before my 93-year-old grandmother was born -- and in a foreign country where the American popular culture of that time might not have had that much of an impact to begin with.
The good news: The young generation that consumes all sorts of entertainment via iPods and the internet is doing more than anyone else to keep the big-screen experience alive. Rather than undermine the movie industry, these "third-screen" technologies are actually supporting it.
The bad news: Theatres are increasingly catering to this generation by creating "rowdier, text-friendly auditoriums" that encourage this generation to do all sorts of rude but increasingly common things like chatting and sending text messages while the movie is still in progress.
I am vaguely reminded of how, at the Wanted screening I attended a couple weeks back, a guy sitting across the aisle and a few rows down from me pulled out his cell phone and lit up its screen, and a security guard came up to him and asked him to turn it off. "But it's silent," the guy replied, as though that were the point. Never mind that the phosphorescent glow of his cell-phone screen was taking my eyes and many other people's eyes off of the movie that we were all there supposedly to watch.
For the serious Battlestar Galactica fan, a limited-edition toaster that "brands" your toast with an image of a Cylon. And it's only $65. Sweet. Hat tip to Mark Verheiden.
I've been meaning to post something about WALL•E for a while now -- and I will post something, I hope, in the near future -- but life has been busy and the mountain of WALL•E commentary to sift through has grown impossibly large.
In the meantime, however, I commend to you this piece by Noah Millman, who lists many of the flaws with this film that had occurred to me already as well as many that hadn't, before concluding:
I may be grading WALL•E too hard, measuring it by the apparent scale of its ambitions rather than rating it against other kiddie flicks of the season, but that’s what higher ambitions will get you: more serious critical attention. And WALL•E, while it has wonderful things about it – just for having brought back the silent movie, it deserves high praise – just didn’t impress me as the work of art it’s being praised as.
There is some interesting discussion in the comments, too.
I am also somewhat relieved to find that as esteemed an animation expert as Jerry Beck seems to share my mild reaction to the film, acknowledging that there is much to "admire" in the film, as there usually is in a Pixar movie, but that it also left him "a little cold" and "a little disappointed".
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.
Cruising Bar 2 -- CDN $1,150,000 -- N.AM $1,150,000 -- 100% The Love Guru CDN $3,410,000 -- N.AM $29,331,000 -- 11.6% Sex and the City -- CDN $15,450,000 -- N.AM $144,864,000 -- 10.7% Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- CDN $26,360,000 -- N.AM $306,590,000 -- 8.6% Wanted -- CDN $7,300,000 -- N.AM $90,775,000 -- 8.0% Get Smart -- CDN $7,850,000 -- N.AM $98,115,000 -- 8.0% Kung Fu Panda -- CDN $14,480,000 -- N.AM $193,395,000 -- 7.5% The Incredible Hulk -- CDN $9,070,000 -- N.AM $124,917,000 -- 7.3% Hancock -- CDN $6,830,000 -- N.AM $107,321,000 -- 6.4% WALL*E -- CDN $7,860,000 -- N.AM $128,132,000 -- 6.1%
A couple of discrepancies: The Love Guru and Cruising Bar 2 were #9 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (the former film was #11 in North America as a whole, and the latter film does not appear on the North American chart at all), while Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and You Don't Mess with the Zohan were #8 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #13 and #11 in Canada).
Right off the bat, they talk about Gort, the robot who was at one point rumoured to be missing from the film but can now be seen clearly, if briefly, at the end of the new trailer:
The last shot in the trailer is a hero shot, although strangely not of Keanu Reeve’s character Klaatu, but of his trusty robot Gort. The look of the character deliberately recalls his look in the 1951 original.
“It was intentional,” Derrickson said. “I certainly took a lot of time to explore other possibilities. It wasn’t just a foregone conclusion in my mind that we would be sticking to the original. I tried looking at a lot of different possibilities, worked on a lot of different ideas with artists and just always a nagging sense that there was something right about the way the original, that there was something about this alien entity choosing a human form or being in a human form that had value even by modern standards, not by 1950 standards. I also am such a fan of the original film. You have to also just have some respect for Gort. Gort is Gort. There’s no question what we designed pays homage to the original.”
They also discuss the new film's environmental theme:
In an interview with MTV News in March, Reeves told us that Klaatu’s message to Earth was very different from the one in the original, that he was bringing with him a warning to stop destroying the environment. Here it looks like the environment is destroying us (or Giants Stadium, at any rate) — which is it?
“It’s both and even more,” Derrickson explained. “I think that this film in some ways is an attempt to address a number of issues that are amongst the most pressing issues for the human race. The original being a Cold War film was addressing what was clearly the greatest threat for the human race at that time, mutual nuclear destruction, and that’s not the most pressing threat that we face now. It’s also man vs. man. We are destroying each other as well. Our country’s at war right now. There is certainly the issue being addressed in the movie of our treatment of one another on the planet. I think it’s a movie about human nature as much as anything else and how human nature is acting itself out in the world right now.”
Finally, they ask him about the possible religious allegory -- and while they don't mention it here, Derrickson happens to be a Christian whose previous directorial effort was The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), so his answer on this point is particularly interesting:
The original was a not-so-subtle allegory for Christ (the alien’s human name is Carpenter, he calls for peace, he is resurrected at the end, etc.). Is Derrickson’s version as overt?
“I don’t think you can really escape that metaphor,” Derrickson said. “I think the Christ-myth stories make great stories, whether it’s ‘The Matrix’ or ‘Braveheart,’ they all are tapping into some kind of deep myth in our DNA, and by myth I don’t necessarily mean false. I mean something that has mythological power and that’s definitely part of the story and part of what attracts me to it. My approach to that was to not discard that, but to be not quite as direct as the original.”
One fascinating thing about this is that Robert Wise, who directed the original film in 1951 (my comments), claimed he had no idea about the Christological elements in his film until other people pointed them out to him after the film was finished. So he was unintentionally overt about them, whereas Derrickson, from the sound of it, will be intentionally subtler about them.
1.MTV Movies Blog notes that Pixar may run into some difficulties on Cars 2, due to the rumoured health problems that may or may not be plaguing Paul Newman, who provided the voice of Doc Hudson in the original film.
The blog doesn't mention it, but the series may also be affected, one way or another, by the recent death of George Carlin, who provided the voice of Fillmore, and the rumoured suicide attempt last year of Owen Wilson, who provided the voice of Lightning McQueen.
This would not be the first time a Pixar franchise has had to press on without some of its original members. Jim Varney, who provided the voice of Slinky Dog in the first two Toy Story movies (1995-1999), died eight years ago. I have no idea whether the character will appear in Toy Story 3, which is currently in production, but the actor certainly won't.
2.The New York Times takes a look at Terminator Salvation and the producers' determination to keep filming even though there is the possibility that an actors' strike could start at any moment. The story includes a couple nice photos of the film's post-apocalyptic exterior sets in New Mexico, including a ruined 7-Eleven sign.
3.The Dark Knight is such a highly anticipated film, it's kind of nice to hear at least one person, i.e. Devin Faraci, express the view that the film isn't as "revolutionary" as some people have been saying it is -- though he says it is still very good, etc. By all means, let us keep our expectations realistic.
Meanwhile, Variety looks at the age-old issue of how the makers of the Batman films need to toe a fine line between edginess and family-friendliness, while the MTV Movies Blog asks whether any future film in the Chris Nolan - Christian Bale series of Batman films should even think about bringing Robin the Boy Wonder into the storyline. Reportedly, Bale himself has said that he will refuse to be involved with any film that features the character.
4.Cinematical reports that Mark Millar, author of the comic-book mini-series that inspired Wanted, has said that he and an anonymous "very well known American action director" are pitching a reboot of the Superman franchise to Warner Brothers. This is interesting, as Bryan Singer and Brandon Routh have both been talking as though they were still working on a sequel to Superman Returns (2006). Paul Christian Glenn ponders what should and shouldn't be salvaged from Singer's previous film, regardless of who makes the next one.
But it is the second movie that is the treasure trove of possibilities. I believe the second movie will be present as an opportunity of enthusiasm and creation. I frankly look forward to that one so much. I really want us to prove that we have a solid concept for that, but the promise of that land is absolutely mind-boggling! I can't wait to mount on the horse and ride, and I hate horses!
"We believe there is a second movie," del Toro said during a discussion at the Majestic Crest. "If there isn't, there will not be. If we find it, we will shoot it, but by God, if we do not find it, we will not shoot it. I am anxious to shoot the book, and I'm willing and able to dedicate myself to shooting the [second film]."
Not very reassuring, we don't think — especially for MGM, which needs the prestige and profit of a Hobbit two-fer, like, yesterday. It's trickier than it sounds, though; the second film, which would apparently bridge the gap between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, can only draw on the novels to which Jackson holds the rights. The rest of the background or ancillary literature (and there's a lot) is off-limits. "In the four books that are in the domain of the copyright, there are appendices and ideas and things that can be traced without risk," del Toro said. "But I have to be careful not to overstep. We believe there is a way to create this film and make it interesting, but it's too early."
So, does it sound like the second film will happen, or won't happen? Who knows. But don't count on the Tolkien estate making it even remotely easy for the filmmakers to use any of that other ancillary literature. The Los Angeles Times has an update on the Tolkien estate's lawsuit against the filmmakers, which isn't scheduled to be heard in court until October 2009.
Speaking of George Lucas's ongoing milking of this franchise, a few weeks ago my priest referred me to Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, an in-depth, 532-page PDF file on the creation of the franchise and Lucas's almost Stalinist efforts to revise the history of how the franchise came to be.
Example: Lucas likes to give the impression nowadays that he had the prequels in mind all along, but Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker's father were two different people until Lucas wrote the second draft of The Empire Strikes Back, which was then known as Episode II and not as Episode V, in March or April 1978.
I've only had time to read bits and pieces of Kaminski's book, so far, but much of it seems plausible and fits with my own memory of how the original trilogy was promoted back in the day. Check it out.
8. Eddie Murphy tells the MTV Movies Blog that Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) was "a crock of sh-t" and he wants the currently-in-development Beverly Hills Cop IV to be "special". Meanwhile, director Brett Ratner tells Latino Review that the rumours of the new film being PG-13 are false: "Believe me, this is going to be a hard core 'R' Beverly Hills Cop."
9.Variety reported last week that Robert Rodriguez was going to remake Red Sonja (1985) with his current main squeeze Rose McGowan, who he met on the set of Grindhouse (2007). Then reports surfaced that they had broken up. Now People assures us that they are still together and their plans for making this movie are ticking along just nicely. Thank goodness for that.
Number Six was originally played by Patrick McGoohan, who reportedly turned down the part of James Bond for moral reasons related to his Catholicism, and Caviezel is a well-known Catholic who has also refused to do love scenes -- coincidence?
McGoohan was also reportedly offered the part of Gandalf, but turned it down for health reasons; in the end it went to McKellen, of course.
McKellen, for his part, is an atheist, so I wonder what kind of conversations he and Caviezel might have on the set? Could be interesting. At any rate, they have both played prophetic wonder-workers who died and came back to life!
I jest, of course. I've got many other news bits stockpiled at the moment, but let's get these ones out of the way, for now.
1.The Hollywood Reporter says Jesse Bradford, Steven Weber, Bob Odenkirk and Edward Herrmann have joined the cast of Son of Morning, the indie satire starring Joseph Cross as a dissatisfied ad copywriter who, because of some sort of environmental crisis, is somehow mistaken for the Messiah.
The Reporter notes that the title has been slightly modified from what it was before, and Matt Page notes that changing a single letter in the title could have huge implications for the tone of the overall film. As he puts it:
Originally this film was due to be called Son of Mourning which has connotations of "Man of Sorrows", but now it seems that the title has changed to Son of Morning - a possible reference to Isaiah 14:12 which many interpret as being about Satan. I'm curious to see how [great a] shift in the filmmakers' thinking this represents.
2.Matt Page also notes that Abel Ferrara's Mary (2005), starring Juliette Binoche as an actress who loses herself in the role of Mary Magdalene, has just come out on DVD in Germany, and he compares and contrasts the packaging of the German disc with the packaging of the French disc. There is still no word on when the film will come to North America, though, as far as I can tell.
The twins have really fallen in love with The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) over the last few weeks. They sing along to the movie, they raise and lower their arms along with Pooh's exercise regimen at the beginning of the film, and Thomas in particular even recites the dialogue along with the film, sort of; he doesn't know most of the words yet, but he does make phonetic sounds that approximate the words spoken by the characters, and he does this in near-perfect sync with the rhythms and cadences of the film.
So familiar have they become with the film, in fact, and so often do they watch it, that the wife and I have begun to itch for opportunities to introduce them to other films. Among other things, we are seriously considering getting some of the sequels to Winnie the Pooh -- the theatrical ones, not the straight-to-DVD ones -- so that we can stick with these characters while introducing some fresher stories into the mix. Have we given into Disney's evil scheme, whereby the studio makes a quick buck by churning out cheap knock-offs of its proven hits? Well, maybe, but I do think at least a few of those sequels are interesting in their own right; click here for a glimpse of the theological hay I made of The Tigger Movie (2000) way back when.
But we haven't actually acquired any of those sequels yet. First, we turned to our existing library -- and we settled on Peter Pan (1953). I'm not a particularly big fan of this film myself, but I thought it would be relatively innocent, compared to some of the darker and more intense Disney movies, so we popped it in the player -- and then came all the stuff about the Native Americans, who are depicted in somewhat broad and unflattering caricature, even more so than the pirates and the mermaids. Now, I have never thought of myself as a particularly politically correct kind of guy, but seeing my kids watch this film as the characters sang 'What Makes the Red Man Red?', I did get qualms.
Of course, at least two of the Indians escape racial caricature, at least of the more extreme sort. One of them is Tiger Lily, the sexy young thing who is one of the many girls and women competing for Peter Pan's attention. The other is a girl, briefly seen, who is virtually identical to Tiger Lily but is apparently attached to a different man -- and she has a mother who happens to fit the stereotype of the ugly and overbearing mother-in-law that was a staple of 1950s humour. So that's another thing that rubs my modern sensibilities the wrong way.
So now my kids are equally addicted to Pooh and Pan, and I'm hoping I can wean them off of Pan in the near future, so that they can get used to other kinds of stories and images for a while, and then, down the road somewhere, when they're older and have more of a "context" for this sort of thing, maybe we can reintroduce them to Peter Pan.
In the meantime, and jumping topics somewhat, I have found myself thinking lately that the characters in Winnie the Pooh don't have the most creative or imaginative of names. Winnie and Eeyore at least sound like proper names, but Rabbit, Piglet and Owl seem to be mere labels, rather than names; Kanga and Roo are in a similar though not quite identical situation, and Tigger is saved from mere-label-ness simply because of an error in spelling.
I don't necessarily mind all this, but I do find myself wondering if my children will be confused when they read other stories with rabbits named Rabbit and owls named Owl, etc. Are these the same characters? Is it possible for different people in different imaginative worlds to have the same name? Can the same name signify different people and thus different personalities and maybe even different meanings? What if one story's Piglet is good while the other story's Piglet is evil? And so on, and so on.
In the midst of these musings, I came across this item by David Robinson on the "meta-ness" of Bolt, a Disney cartoon formerly known as American Dog that is coming out later this year. And he tells a fascinating anecdote about Sesame Street and Big Bird that kind of ties into what I've been pondering:
If you’ve read The Tipping Point (and you have… c’mon…. admit it), you may recall a related vignette about a certain episode of Sesame Street, in which Big Bird searches for a new name. The plot of the episode was fun for adults—-Big Bird, in a moment of existential ennui, concludes that his name is oddly functional and lacking in character, and spends the rest of the episode looking for a new one. But the story was confusing to young children, who speed up their learning about the world by assuming (usually correctly) that the things they encounter have one consistent name apiece. The layering was overkill. It makes for an interesting vignette because most of us have long since forgotten what it would be like to lack layers, to view the world as a simple place where the distance between things-as-they-are and things-as-described doesn’t hold a lot of inherent interest.
The rest of Robinson's thoughts, on Bolt etc., are interesting too. But I like what he has to say here about the world having and lacking layers, depending on one's age. In this context, I guess it's not such a bad thing after all if the rabbits are named Rabbit, and so on. They need to learn what a rabbit is, period, before they can start telling rabbits apart -- just as they need to learn that not all bears are named Pooh, no matter how many times my daughter might say "Pooh!" while pointing to one of her teddy bears.
A few months ago, I got to visit the set of the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was being shot here in the Vancouver area. Not for the first time, I marvelled at how it took hours and hours to produce maybe a few seconds of actual movie. A few of those seconds -- showing military vehicles moving into position, in what I think is supposed to be Central Park -- appear in the trailer below, which is reportedly playing before Hancock in some theatres right now, at least on the American side of the border:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
JUL 4 UPDATE: The trailer has now been officially posted here.
Some interesting developments on the ancient-Greek movie front.
Variety and the Hollywood Reporter say Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton, the producers of 300 (2006), are now collaborating on War of Gods, "a mythological tale set in war-torn ancient Greece, as the young warrior prince Theseus leads his men in a battle against evil that will see the gods fighting with soldiers against demons and titans." The film will be directed by Tarsem Singh, director of The Cell (2000), The Fall (2006) and the music video for R.E.M.'s 'Losing My Religion' (1991).
As it happens, there is another Greek-mythological epic in the works right now, over at Warner Brothers, namely the remake of Clash of the Titans (1981) -- and, thankfully, I think, this film has a new director since I last mentioned it here. The old director was Stephen Norrington, who brought Sean Connery's career to a less-than-glorious end with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003); the new director is Louis Leterrier, whose last job was this summer's okay but basically unremarkable reboot of The Incredible Hulk. This Greek-mythic movie concerns Perseus, who "must overcome a series of obstacles to save his beloved Princess Andromeda, including cutting off the serpent-tressed head of Medusa, who can turn a man to stone with a single glance."
Meanwhile, the folks at Collider got the producers of 300 to reveal last week that they are actually talking to writer Frank Miller and director Zack Snyder about making a sequel, or prequel, or something, to that movie. This could be difficult, since nearly everybody who mattered was dead by the end of that film, but who knows. My friend Paul Christian Glenn has some fun thoughts on the possible directions a sequel might take.
Born, raised, married, and still living in Vancouver, British Columbia. I reviewed films for the Vancouver Courier '99-'03 and have been on the staff of BC Christian News since '99. In addition to a 2005 Evangelical Press Association award-winning film column for the latter paper, I also review films for Christianity Today's website and for ChristianWeek, and I have been a semi-regular contributor to Books & Culture since '98. My articles have also appeared in Bible Review, Faith Today, The Vancouver Sun, and Beliefnet.com. Plus, I am a member of the Faith and Film Critics Circle.
