Newsbites: Conquistador! Hilton! Doogal!

1. The Hollywood Reporter says Antonio Banderas is set to play Hernán Cortés (or Hernando Cortez, if you prefer) in Conquistador -- a historical epic, written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Andrucha Waddington, about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in present-day Mexico. Naturally, I can't help wondering what sort of double-bill it would make with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto -- which, granted, concerns Mayans, not Aztecs.

2. FilmStew.com reports that Indian director T. Rajeevnath wants Paris Hilton to star in his $11 million biopic of Mother Theresa. Um, okay, I guess she might capture an aspect of the famous nun that somehow eluded Geraldine Chaplin and Olivia Hussey ...

3. Something occurred to me after I linked to that story yesterday on that increasingly alarming trend whereby studios release movies without showing them to critics first. Reading the AP story more closely, I noticed this particular bit of nonsense:

Steve Bunnell -- head of distribution for the Weinstein Co., which released "Doogal" -- said that movie was not screened for critics because it was "literally being edited up until the last minute."

Um, actually, this film was screened for critics in Canada -- I saw it myself eight days before it opened -- so there is no reason it couldn't have been screened for critics in the States, too.

That said, I don't necessarily dismiss Bunnell's claim that the movie was being edited "up until the last minute." When I saw the film, I recognized one of the writers who was credited with re-writing the dialogue (the film is a re-dubbed version of a French cartoon called The Magic Roundabout), but when I e-mailed that person, they said that I must have seen an "early version" of the film because their work was supposed to be uncredited.

So, it is certainly possible that edits were still being made. And it would not be the first time a film was changed after it was shown to critics. Click here and here for my Kate & Leopold (2001) story.