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.
Victory lies in the soul of the human spirit, not in the hands of the machines.
A phrase like "the soul of the human spirit" sounds a little redundant at first, but when you hear it contrasted with "the hands of the machines", it sounds more emphatic than anything else -- and its meaning seems clear enough. As far as John Connor is concerned, machines are defined entirely by their physicality, their material qualities, their bodies, but humans are defined by something more invisible, something more intangible, something more spiritual.
Incidentally, this isn't the first time John Connor has referred to the "hands" of his opponents. In a trailer that was released late last year, John Connor remarks, "The devil's hands have been busy," and then proceeds to say some not-very-friendly things to a man who may or may not be a Terminator.
Is the man in question really a Terminator? John Connor certainly seems to think so, at least in that scene. But other trailers released since then have indicated that this man might be something else, either a human-machine hybrid or a machine that has achieved an unprecedented degree of consciousness, such that he is now virtually indistinguishable from a human being.
Either way, it seems John Connor may have to rethink the sharp line he has drawn between "human" and "machine" in this film.
Note, also, that this TV spot goes on to include a line from Kyle Reese, spoken as he points to his head and then, presumably, to his chest, just below the frame:
Stay alive, in here [head] and in here [chest].
Once again, the trailer suggests that true "life" is not simply to be found in the body; it is not simply a matter of keeping all the physical parts working. Instead, it is to be found in something more intangible, tethered though it may be to the body: in this case, the mind and the heart.
But who is Kyle talking to in that clip? John Connor? One of the other human resistance fighters? Or is it possible that he is speaking to the mechanical man? If so, does Kyle know the man is at least partly mechanical when he says this line? What does Kyle believe about the human-machine dichotomy in general, and about how it might apply to this man in particular?
I guess we'll learn the answers to at least some of those questions in three weeks. In the meantime, the trailers have certainly given us a fair bit to chew on.
And for what it's worth, I can't resist noting the irony that almost all of the humans depicted in this film will probably be played by actual people who were physically present in front of the camera, while many of the machines will be digital creations that exist only in the minds of the computers that generated those images.
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.
17 Again -- CDN $5,240,000 -- N.AM $39,823,333 -- 13.2% Crank: High Voltage -- CDN $1,430,000 -- N.AM $11,735,952 -- 12.2% Earth -- CDN $1,620,000 -- N.AM $14,472,792 -- 11.2% Fighting -- CDN $1,180,000 -- N.AM $11,024,370 -- 10.7% Hannah Montana: The Movie -- CDN $6,760,000 -- N.AM $65,655,057 -- 10.3% Fast & Furious -- CDN $13,240,000 -- N.AM $145,367,040 -- 9.1% Monsters Vs. Aliens -- CDN $15,910,000 -- N.AM $174,813,830 -- 9.1% State of Play -- CDN $2,270,000 -- N.AM $25,081,890 -- 9.1% Obsessed -- CDN $1,470,000 -- N.AM $28,612,730 -- 5.1% The Soloist -- CDN $478,511 -- N.AM $9,716,458 -- 4.9%
1. Arnold Schwarzenegger has confirmed that he may very well appear in Terminator Salvation when it opens May 21 ... but because the Governor of California is busy with other things at the moment, he has done no acting for the new film. Rather, his performance will be an entirely digital creation, based on a body-cast mold that was made for the first movie in 1984. If you ask me, this is all for the good, as Schwarzenegger's physical appearance did change somewhat over the course of the first three films -- which, when you think about it, is a little odd, since all three of his characters were supposed to have come off an assembly line at the exact same time in the future. -- Los Angeles Times, Variety, WENN
2. Robert Rodriguez is developing a "reboot" of the Predator franchise called Predators. The original film came out in 1987 and spawned either one sequel or three, depending on whether you count the Alien Vs. Predator cross-overs (2004-2007) as part of the original canon. At any rate, 20th Century Fox has already given the new film a release date, namely July 7, 2010. -- IESB.net, Ain't It Cool News (x2), Variety, ComingSoon.net
3.Leonard Nimoy provided the voice of Galvatron in the animated Transformers movie that came out back in 1986. So naturally, the guys who've been writing the live-action movies want him to come back and voice one of the characters in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which comes out June 24. And since those guys also happened to write the upcoming Star Trek movie, they've had a chance to talk to Nimoy about this personally. What makes the whole thing even stranger and even more inter-connected is that Nimoy's wife, Susan Bay, is a cousin to Transformers director Michael Bay -- but the director says he hasn't approached Nimoy about doing the part directly yet; for now, he prefers to let his mother serve as a go-between. -- Sci Fi Wire, MTV Movies Blog
4. Photos from the Vancouver set of Tron 2.0 have begun to pop up on the internet. Meanwhile, a number of blogs recently discovered this story that the Vancouver Sun ran three months ago, which claims that Tron 2.0 has a budget of $300 million. That figure was later revealed to be in Canadian dollars, but even so, that still comes to something like $240 million in American money. That seems like an awful lot to spend on a sequel to a movie that came out 27 years ago and didn't even rank among the Top 20 films at the box office that year. -- SlashFilm, Ain't It Cool News, TrekMovie.com
Warner Brothers sure likes its Greek myths and legends. After making a buck or two on Troy (2004) and 300 (2006), and after putting the gears in motion for their upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans, the studio has now acquired Odysseus, a spec script that would seem to be based on Homer's epic poem The Odyssey.
It may not be quite what you'd expect, though. While Odysseus is best known for the ten years he spent wandering around the Mediterranean on his way home from the Trojan War, it sounds like the movie may skip all that and focus on the second half of Homer's epic, which takes place after Odysseus has arrived incognito on his home island of Ithaca. The Hollywood Reporter reports:
The story centers on the legendary hero Odysseus, famed king of Ithaca, who returns to his island after 20 years of fighting the Trojan Wars, only to find his kingdom under the brutal occupation of an invading force. Odysseus single-handedly defeats every last man and takes back his wife, his son and his kingdom. . . .
The intent is to make not a sleepy swords-and-sandles epic but a bloody relentless revenge movie, something akin to "300" meets "Taken."
Incidentally, Warner Brothers is also behind that futuristic, outer-space version of The Odyssey that was announced six months ago, starring Brad Pitt. I wonder how that one's coming along?
APR 26 UPDATE: I just remembered, Warner Brothers was also the studio behind Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) -- though that one didn't do so well at the box office. Even so, it's just further proof that, as the Hollywood Reporter puts it, someone at that studio "clearly has an affinity for feta."
And now, according to Variety, Fox Searchlight is "fast-tracking" the gospel musical Black Nativity, based on the Langston Hughes show that has been playing continuously in various cities since it premiered on Broadway in 1961; it was, in fact, one of the first plays written by an African-American to open there.
The studio intends to release the movie as early as this Christmas, which sounds awfully fast, indeed.
Just for comparison's sake, MGM doesn't plan to release Mary, Mother of Christ until next April; and the fact that The Nativity Story was similarly fast-tracked -- the studio bought the script in January and showed the finished movie to journalists in November -- was blamed, in hindsight, for that film's disappointing performance at the box office.
And here it's almost May, and Fox Searchlight is only planning now to make this movie in time for a December release date? Hmmm, well, if they rely to any degree on the casts and crews that have been staging this musical for decades already, then that might help expedite things.
At any rate, the film will be directed by Kasi Lemmons, an actress whose previous directorial credits include Eve's Bayou (1997), The Caveman's Valentine (2001) and Talk to Me (2007).
Side note: The Wikipedia page for this musical states that "Mary's contractions are echoed through the use of African drums and percussion." That's interesting, as I can't think of any films prior to Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) that depicted Mary going into labour -- whether out of general squeamishness and/or tasteful discretion around that subject, or perhaps out of respect for the ancient tradition that says she didn't suffer any labour pains. But apparently this musical had already gone in that direction a good 16 years earlier.
First, How to Make a Baby, by PDI/DreamWorks animator Cassidy Curtis and his wife, Raquel Coelho:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
Second, A Wolf Loves Pork, by Takeuchi Taijin:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
I love the first video partly because the first animated film I ever tried to make, at the tender age of 10 or 12 or thereabouts, also revolved around a human body being inflated like a balloon; but rather than a photographic riff on a woman's pregnancy, the film I made was a chalkboard illustration of a man blowing a balloon, hiccuping, accidentally inhaling all the air that passed from the balloon back into his body, and then popping.
And I love the second video for all sorts of reasons -- the ending, in particular, gave me a "whoa! I've got to rewind that and play it back right now" feel -- but I am particularly curious to know how off-limits that apartment became during the shoot. Did friends have to stay away, to avoid upsetting all the photos strewn about the place? Did it affect the artist's social life? If so, I'd say the sacrifice was almost certainly worth it.
Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw to play real-life evangelical couple
Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times reports that Warner Brothers is making a movie based on The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, a book by Michael Lewis about "Michael Oher, a 6-foot-5, 350-pound African American teenager who is transformed from a homeless vagabond to a star football player, largely thanks to Leigh Anne Tuohy, a dynamic evangelical Christian who helps provide him with a surrogate family and a shot at success in life." While the bulk of Goldstein's column looks at Quinton Aaron, the 24-year-old, 6-foot-8 and 380-pound actor who has been hired to play Oher, Goldstein also mentions that Sandra Bullock is set to play Tuohy, and Tim McGraw will play Tuohy's husband Sean. It's anybody's guess how prominent the religious themes will be in the film itself, but for what it's worth, when Collin Hansen reviewed the book for Christianity Today two years ago, he called it "a gripping tour through the world of college recruiting, professional football strategy, and the volatile mix of faith and sports" -- and the film is being written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who also directed the Dennis Quaid baseball movie The Rookie (2002), so that bodes well, at least.
Phil Nugent at The Screengrab makes my favorite comment about the controversy over Angels & Demons to date:
Now, we don't really have a dog in this race. And make no mistake about it, we here at the Screengrab are just crazy about blasphemy and try to encourage it whenever we can. What's discouraging, though, is [Ron] Howard's good-natured, reasonable tone: yeah, we kind of dis your church's history and make your guys look like nut jobs and gangsters, but we don't mean anything by it! It's just necessary to the plot of a good thriller. What are you saying, that you don't like good thrillers? Go dig Hitchcock up and blow shit at him! Some real moviemakers like Bunuel risked their careers, their standing in the community, and maybe even their lives to make blasphemous movies, and somebody like Howard flirts with it, out of commercial necessity--somebody is going to make movies out of Dan Brown's bullshit--and expects everybody to understand that it doesn't really mean anything to him, so it shouldn't give offense to anyone. I myself am no fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, either as a movie or as an historical argument, but I'll give it this much: I'm willing to believe that the murder of John Kennedy is something that Stone is, or was, genuinely freaked out about. it's understandable that Howard would be baffled and even offended by William Donahue's assertion that he's actually a hater and propagandist against the Catholic church instead of a guy trying to make a buck with a pre-sold property, but if he would open his mind up a little, he might be able to see that, in his way, Donahue is paying him a compliment by suggesting that he's a serious enough man to believe in his own crap. As Al Pacino put it in Dog Day Afternoon, if somebody's going to blow my brains out, I hope it's somebody who does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.
Meanwhile, some new clips from the film have been posted here.
1. Marlon Wayans has been hired to produce and star in the film version of The Year of Living Biblically. This is worrying, for two reasons: First, his surprisingly decent performance in Requiem for a Dream (2000) aside, Wayans is best known for really dumb comedy, whether as a supporting character in movies like Dungeons & Dragons (2000) or as a collaborator with his brothers on lowbrow fare like White Chicks (2004) and the first two Scary Movies (2000-2001). Second, Sammy Davis Jr. aside, black Americans tend to be Christian, not Jewish, and the story of a Christian who tries to follow all of the Bible's rules is bound to be somewhat different from the story of a Jew who attempts the same. I haven't read A.J. Jacobs' book yet, so I can't say quite how it would be different -- but, for example, I have read that Jacobs did not approach the New Testament the same way he approached the Old because, as a Jew, he could not obey the command to follow Jesus. At any rate, it is certainly possible that the film version could clear these hurdles, but for now, I'm not counting on it. -- Hollywood Reporter
2. The Catholic Bishops Conference of India has called for a ban of Angels & Demons, the upcoming sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006). Meanwhile, director Ron Howard has written an editorial for the Huffington Post in which he says the new film's negative assertions about Catholic history cannot be "lies" because they are "fiction". (But they can still be negative, right?) And now word has come that author Dan Brown has finally finished the third book in the series, and the studio that produced the first two movies is already planning to make the third; the new book is called The Lost Symbol and it comes out in September. -- Hollywood Reporter (x2), Huffington Post, Variety
3. Last week was not a particularly good week for Mel Gibson. By now, everyone has heard about the divorce suit filed by Robyn, his wife of 28 years, and Mel's revelation that he and Robyn have been separated since August 2006 -- four weeks after he was busted for drunk driving, three weeks before their daughter got married and a few months before the release of Apocalypto. Less publicized, however, was the latest development in the ongoing lawsuit launched by Benedict Fitzgerald, Gibson's co-writer on The Passion of the Christ (2004) and a producer of the upcoming Mary, Mother of Christ (which is not related to Gibson in any way, shape or form). Fitzgerald has "amended his lawsuit" and is "now demanding to see the accounting records" for The Passion; Fitzgerald claims Gibson lied to him about the cost of that film, in order to reduce Fitzgerald's writing fee, and he claims Gibson is still lying about what that film cost to make. -- Studio Briefing
4.Kings, the TV series that modernizes the story of Saul and David, has been bumped to the summer. The show began in mid-March, with four episodes broadcast on Sunday nights; then it was "moved" to a single Saturday night a few days ago. But now it is being put on hold yet again, and it won't resume until June 13. -- Hollywood Reporter
5. The makers of Year One, the "biblical comedy" that features several characters from the Book of Genesis, have posted a new clip from the film that does not feature any characters from the Book of Genesis. -- ComingSoon.net
6. Christopher Hitchens will pitch a film version of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, in May. Hitchens has already debated Christian apologist Douglas Wilson and co-starred with him in a documentary called Collision. -- Hollywood Reporter
7. Rod Dreher has interviewed Matt Baglio, whose book on Catholic exorcists, The Rite, is being made into a film written by Michael Petroni and directed by Mikael Håfström. Meanwhile, Terry Mattingly has interviewed Father Gary Thomas, the priest who is the subject of Baglio's book. -- Rod Dreher, Terry Mattingly
For those keeping track of this sort of thing, the stats are in and it looks like the new Star Trek movie will be the second-longest entry in the franchise to date. Film classification boards in British Columbia and the United Kingdom have both indicated that the film's running time is 127 minutes -- or, to be more precise, 126 minutes and 39 seconds.
Only the first movie in the franchise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), was longer, ranging anywhere from 132 to 143 minutes depending on whether you saw it in a theatre, on TV, or on DVD. And none of the other movies have ever crossed the two-hour line -- not even after a couple of them were expanded for home video:
1979 -- Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- 132 minutes in theatres, 143 minutes on TV, 136 minutes on DVD
Star Trek is also about the same length as J.J. Abrams' last movie, Mission: Impossible III (2006) -- which, like Star Trek, was based on a Desilu-produced 1960s TV show that co-starred Leonard Nimoy. Hmmmm.
Anyway, back in October, Abrams promised Star Trek would be only two hours long because he's not a fan of the recent trend towards epic-length action movies -- and if we forgive him those extra six-and-a-half minutes, which could very easily be accounted for by the end credits, then it would seem he has kept his word.
In other news, Star Trek has become the third film in the series to be rated PG-13 in the United States, following First Contact and Nemesis; all of the other films were rated PG, with the partial exception of The Motion Picture, which was rated G in 1979 but was re-rated PG when the "director's edition" came out on DVD in 2001.
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.
I Love You, Man -- CDN $7,740,000 -- N.AM $64,614,979 -- 12.0% 17 Again -- CDN $2,670,000 -- N.AM $23,722,310 -- 11.3% Dragonball: Evolution -- CDN $837,419 -- N.AM $7,934,562 -- 10.6% Crank: High Voltage -- CDN $717,409 -- N.AM $6,963,565 -- 10.3% Hannah Montana: The Movie -- CDN $5,710,000 -- N.AM $56,874,039 -- 10.0% Knowing -- CDN $6,920,000 -- N.AM $73,795,283 -- 9.4% Fast & Furious -- CDN $12,260,000 -- N.AM $136,205,795 -- 9.0% Monsters Vs. Aliens -- CDN $14,620,000 -- N.AM $163,063,465 -- 9.0% Observe and Report -- CDN $1,570,000 -- N.AM $18,812,239 -- 8.3% State of Play -- CDN $1,090,000 -- N.AM $14,071,280 -- 7.7%
A couple of discrepancies: Dragonball: Evolution was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while The Haunting in Connecticut was #10 on the North American chart (it was #11 in Canada).
1. It has been public knowledge for years now that the studios behind the film version of The Hobbit want to make it a two-movie series that will connect in some way to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) -- but there has been much speculation as to what sort of two-movie series it will be. Will one movie be devoted to The Hobbit proper, followed by another movie that "bridges" the gap between the two stories? Or will The Hobbit itself be spread out over the two films? Jackson and Hobbit director Guillermo Del Toro have now announced their decision, and the answer is: the second option. Says Del Toro: "We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur." Adds Jackson: "We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie . . . The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the trilogy." -- Empire
2. Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, each film in that series was released to DVD three times: once in its shorter theatrical version, once in its longer "extended" version, and once in a format that included both versions. Now it is time for the trilogy to come out on Blu-Ray -- and apparently the series will go back to square one, with a shorter-version-only edition; the "extended" versions will not come out on Blu-Ray until closer to the Hobbit release date. -- High-Def Digest, Digital Bits
3. 20th Century Fox has revealed that it will release three films in 3D in 2010. They have not yet said which films they have in mind, but one of their biggest movies that year will be The Chronicles of Narnia:The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so some of the online speculation has pointed in that direction. -- CinemaBlend.com, NarniaWeb
4. Rhys Ifans has joined the cast of Harry Potterand the Deathly Hallows. Meanwhile, producer David Heyman has confirmed that some of the actors who began this series as prepubescent children will look more grown up than they have ever looked before in the final film. (Let the reader understand.) -- ComingSoon.net, MTV Movies Blog
5. Emma Thompson may have skipped the last Harry Potter movie in order to make a sequel to Nanny McPhee (2005), but she's bringing some of her fellow Potter alumni -- such as Ifans, Maggie Smith and Ralph Fiennes -- along for the ride. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Asa Butterfield have also joined the cast of Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, which will take place during World War II, several decades after the previous film. -- Variety, ComingSoon.net
6. Michael Sheen, who is perhaps best-known for playing Tony Blair in The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006), has been cast as a vampire in The Twilight Saga:New Moon, which recently began shooting in Vancouver. Prior to this, Sheen had played a werewolf in the Underworld series (2003-2009). There is no word yet on who will direct Eclipse, the next film in the Twilight franchise, but Drew Barrymore recently stated that she is no longer in the running for that job. -- Variety, ComingSoon.net, Entertainment Weekly, MTV Movies Blog (x2)
7. Catherine Keener has joined the cast of Percy Jackson; she will play the title character's mother. His father, the Greek god Poseidon, is being played by Kevin McKidd. -- Hollywood Reporter
8.Watchmen co-writer Alex Tse is working on an adaptation of the graphic novel Battling Boy, which concerns "the son of a god who comes down from the top of a mountain at his father's urging to rid the giant, continent-sized city of Monstropolis of a plague of beasts." -- Hollywood Reporter
10. Twenty-five years ago, Brian Grazer produced Splash (1984), the story of a mermaid who falls in love with a human being. (It was also the first Tom Hanks movie to be directed by Ron Howard; they have since done Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons together as well.) Now, Grazer has picked up a script called Merman, which "follows a merman who comes to land so he can win back his mermaid fiancee, who has left him for a real man." And no, it's not a sequel. -- Variety
11. Catherine Hardwicke, whose last film was the original Twilight (2008), now has at least two more fantasies on her plate: Maximum Ride, based on the James Patterson series about "six teens, known as the Flock, who are genetically altered so that they are part human and part bird"; and If I Stay, based on Gayle Forman's novel about "a gifted classical musician and her indie rockstar boyfriend who's forced to choose between life and death when she's in a car accident with her family." -- Hollywood Reporter, Variety
I was particularly intrigued by the chapter on "faith". While it's more or less what you'd expect from a Hollywood celebrity, it still has some interesting tidbits, such as Fox's description of himself as a lapsed Protestant who now attends a Reform Jewish synagogue with his wife and kids, or his references to the evangelists and Christian musicians he met or knew in Vancouver while growing up here; I'm only nine years younger than Fox, and I grew up in the evangelical milieu here myself, so I can't help wondering if I may have crossed paths with any of these people, too.
Fox also makes at least two references to The 700 Club, in contexts that suggest he probably isn't all that interested in watching the show or being one of its guests -- but one thing he doesn't mention, at least not that I noticed, is that he once co-starred in a prime-time TV special produced by The 700 Club in the early 1980s. You can see a fragment of that performance here:
The reason I remember Fox's appearance in this special is that, in a weird sort of way, it helped me to get more involved in "secular" pop culture when I was still in my early teens. No doubt Pat Robertson and his cohorts hired people like Fox to appear in this special as a way of luring "secular" audience members in to hear their message -- yet for kids like me, who grew up in the evangelical ghetto and rarely watched prime-time TV, shows like this opened us up to the wider world of mainstream entertainment. When I finally began to watch Family Ties a year or two after this special aired, I could tell myself it was probably okay partly because Fox had played a part, however small, in a Christian TV show. (The fact that Family Ties co-star Michael Gross had gone even further and proclaimed his faith on The 700 Club itself also came into play there somewhere.)
Thankfully, I haven't felt the need to "justify" my interest in popular culture like that in a long, long time. I do, however, still wonder sometimes about those places where the "secular" culture and the evangelical culture bleed into one another. For example, I think the VeggieTales videos are reasonably amusing and morally instructive, but I cannot help but wonder how old I should let my kids get before I clue them in to the fact that some of the gags in those videos come from R-rated films like Scarface and The Blues Brothers.
If you're like me, you tend to watch DVDs with the subtitles on -- whether because the kids are awake and the house is too noisy, or because the kids are asleep and the house needs to be quiet, or for some other reason altogether. And if you're like me, you can't help but wonder sometimes just what was going through the subtitlers' minds.
Case in point: Last night I was watching Peyton Place (1957), a surprisingly edgy-for-its-time (but still rather tame, compared to its source material) movie about adultery and incest and gossip and, um, "miscarriages" in a small New England town -- and in one scene, as two women and a boy go to church, we hear the choir in the distance. See if you can figure out what lyrics the choir is actually singing as these people approach the church:
And that's where the scene fades out. Had it continued, though, I suspect the subtitlers might have noticed that "heavenly fold" doesn't exactly rhyme with "Son and Holy Ghost." And hey, even if they had heard the lyrics correctly, didn't they choose a rather strange place to put the line break?
This isn't the only oddity in the subtitles, though. Consider the bit below, from the scene where Rodney tells Allison that he promised to dance with Betty, the "tramp" that he recently broke up with in order to please his father:
Admittedly, the actor playing Rodney speaks rather quickly here, but even if he skips or compresses his syllables, shouldn't it be obvious he's referring to the "intermission" at the high-school dance? Or is he putting off dancing with Betty until after he has seen some test results for a cancer treatment or something?
1. William Hurt has joined the cast of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood; he will play William Marshall, the first Earl of Pembroke, "a historical figure who was one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshall was a servant to the Plantagenet kings and one of the best jousters of the era." -- Hollywood Reporter
2. Showtime has renewed The Tudors for a fourth and final season; it will consist of ten episodes that "dramatize King Henry VIII's last two tumultuous marriages, to Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr." After that, series creator Michael Hirst plans to develop a series based on Camelot. -- Hollywood Reporter
3. Speaking of Camelot, the Cartoon Network is developing a live-action movie that will set the legend of King Arthur in the present day; it is tentatively titled Reborn. -- Hollywood Reporter
4. James Franco will reunite with Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green and co-star Danny McBride for the medieval-fantasy comedy Your Highness. The story concerns "two spoiled and arrogant princes" who are "forced to go on a quest to save their family and the kingdom" after "an evil wizard casts a spell on their father and kidnaps the older prince's fiance". -- Variety
1.Terminator Salvation director McG says the ending of his film will be "challenging" and "elliptical" -- and it will leave the door wide open for a couple more sequels: "It’s not a happy little bow of an ending at all. The ending is tough and requires reflection, and in some degrees it bifurcates the audience. You walk back to the car and one person thinks it means this, and the other person thinks it means that." -- MTV Movies Blog
2. The ratings for The Sarah Connor Chronicles went up a bit a few weeks before the season finale, but did not pick up on the night of the finale itself. Some insiders say the show is as good as cancelled, now, but there will be no official indication of that until Fox announces its fall schedule May 18. -- Ace Showbiz, Hollywood Reporter, TV by the Numbers, Entertainment Weekly, io9
3. Thomas Dekker, who plays -- or played? -- John Connor on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is in final negotiations to play a swim-team jock in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. -- ShockTillYouDrop.com
4. A settlement has been reached in the lawsuit between Terminator Salvation producer Moritz Borman and his fellow producers Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek. -- Variety
Can it really be almost a year since Cedar Park Church in Delta, BC hosted the first Breath of Life Animation Festival? Yes, I guess it can -- and that must mean it's almost time for the second festival. Accordingly, festival organizer (and stop-motion expert) Ken Priebe posted the following trailer at his blog yesterday:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
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 final episode of the second season of Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles airs tonight, but I won't be seeing it just yet, since I only started catching up on this year's episodes about a week ago. It's been fun blitzing through the season so far, though; while there's a certain hit-and-miss quality to the series as a whole, it does explore some fascinating ideas, and I am particularly intrigued by the way it has introduced explicitly religious elements in places where I always thought the original films were somewhat lacking.
For example, when former FBI agent James Ellison tries to teach the artificial intelligence known as John Henry that it is wrong to let someone die, he bases this assertion on his belief that human life is made in the image of God and is therefore sacred. The viewer may or may not share Ellison's belief in this regard, but to my ears, this is at least a more potentially engaging argument than the one John Connor made in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), when he tried to persuade the reprogrammed Terminator that you can't go around killing people "because you just can't, okay?"
I still have several episodes to watch, so I can't say much more about the series just yet. But for now, let me say that I am one of the many people who hopes Fox renews this show for at least another season, despite its low ratings.
Meanwhile, in other news, io9 (via Carmen Andres) has posted a chart that attempts to show the entire history of the Terminator franchise, including all the timelines that have been revealed in the movies and TV episodes to date. It looks fun, but if I were to take it at all seriously, I think the chart makes three errors:
First, it assumes that the various shows agree on the elements that ought to be common to all of the timelines, including the birth of John Connor. But this is not so; while the first two movies established that John Connor was conceived in May 1984 and born in February 1985, the TV series has pushed his date of birth back to November 1983, and the third movie seemed to push it even further back, to the late 1970s.
Second, it assumes that the various shows are all part of the same continuity, even if that continuity is constantly being rewritten by the multiple jumps back in time. But everything I have heard indicates that the franchise hits a fork in the road after the second movie, and that all the subsequent movies are completely separate from the TV show. There simply does not seem to be any cross-pollination between the timeline of the later movies and the timelines of the TV series.
Third, it seems to assume that the franchise has followed a consistent approach to temporal mechanics, such that every leap back in time creates a new and slightly different timeline; the chart even goes so far as to refer to a "first John Connor" who existed before Kyle was sent back in time to become the father of all the other John Connors. But one of my own longstanding complaints about the second movie is that it radically disagreed with the first movie on this point. The first movie -- like other time-travel films of its era, such as The Final Countdown (1980) and The Philadelphia Experiment (1984) -- followed an old-fashioned closed-loop approach to temporal mechanics, wherein the future fulfills the past and vice versa; but the second movie posited that one could break free of that loop and act in ways that rewrite the future. To keep the franchise going, the subsequent movies and TV show have had to find some sort of middle ground between the two approaches, and they haven't always been successful.
Let's put it this way: If the John Connor who existed before Kyle came back in time was not the John Connor who existed after Kyle came back in time, then what do we do with that photo of Sarah Connor that Kyle fell in love with before he came back in time? You know, the photo that was created after Kyle had come back in time and impregnated Sarah with John?
If we follow the io9 chart, then we would have to posit that the photo was created on the second timeline but somehow ended up in Kyle's possession on the first timeline -- but that doesn't seem very likely.
Turning to other news -- and speaking of the photo! -- SlashFilm reports that that famous snapshot of Sarah Connor will make an appearance in the fourth movie, Terminator Salvation, which opens May 21. CHUD.com also reports that Linda Hamilton, the actress who played Sarah Connor in the first two movies, has recorded a brief voice-over for the "very beginning" of the new movie.
As for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original Terminator, whose possible involvement in this film has been the subject of much speculation over the past few years, former football star Terry Crews recently told the MTV Movies Blog that both he and Arnold will have cameos in the film -- but the shoot was so secretive, Crews says he has no idea what sort of cameo Arnold will have.
Meanwhile, Moviehole reports that the ending to Terminator Salvation has been completely changed because a major spoiler got leaked last year. And if there was ever any truth to that spoiler, then I have to say, I'm kind of glad it's been written out of the movie.
Finally, you can see a new poster for the upcoming movie here, the first five pages of the comic-book adaptation here, and one of three brand new TV spots here:
Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.
1. Mike Newell is attached to direct The Box of Delights, an adaptation of a 1930s children's novel "about a boy entrusted with a magic box that allows him to travel through time", among other things. The story was previously adapted for British radio in the 1940s and for British TV in the 1980s. -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter
2. Disney has picked up Wouldn't It Be Nice, a family comedy about "a teenage couple who, just before they plan to run away together and pursue their dreams, are magically zapped 20 years into the future only to discover that their lives didn't necessarily turn out as expected. In their mid-30s but with teenage minds -- and dealing with three kids and everyday worries -- they learn that maybe they weren't as grown up as they once thought." If they are zapped into the present day, then presumably they were teenagers in the late 1980s or early 1990s -- so why is the movie named after a 1960s pop song? Oh, and question: If they discover that they weren't "ready" to be married after all, what will they do if and when they return to their original age and original time? Will they decide not to get married and have kids -- in effect, blotting out the existence of the three children that they had been dealing with for the bulk of the movie? I'm getting a certain The Family Man (2000) vibe here. Or, if you prefer, this movie could turn out to be the polar opposite of Back to the Future (1985). -- Hollywood Reporter
3.Groundhog Day (1993) director Harold Ramis says a stage musical version of that movie is in the works. -- MTV Movies Blog
1. Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. have joined the cast of Red Tails, the George Lucas-produced World War II movie based, however loosely, on "the first all-black aerial combat unit". This is at least the second time Gooding has been involved with a film on this subject; in 1995, he co-starred with Laurence Fishburne and others in a TV-movie called The Tuskegee Airmen. -- ComingSoon.net, Variety (x2), Hollywood Reporter, Associated Press
2. Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer have bought the screen rights to Horse Soldiers, an upcoming book about "a band of elite special forces and CIA operatives who secretly invaded Afghanistan post-9/11 on horseback and helped Afghan fighters capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and topple the Taliban." This would not be the first time Bruckheimer, best known for his action and fantasy movies, has tackled this sort of subject matter; he previously produced Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001; my review) and acquired the film rights to a magazine article on 'Jihadists in Paradise'. -- Variety
Year One was originally rated R in the United States for "some sexual content and language". Producer Judd Apatow and writer-director Harold Ramis appealed the rating a few days ago, but to no avail.
Now, says the Hollywood Reporter, the quasi-biblical comedy has been re-cut and successfully re-rated PG-13, for "crude and sexual content throughout, brief strong language and comic violence".
Note how the R-rated version only had "some" sexual content, according to the MPAA, whereas the PG-13 version -- the one with less footage, and specifically less of the "adult" footage -- has crude and sexual content "throughout".
No doubt this reflects how extremely relative the ratings process is, and how each rating brings a different set of expectations to the movie: As R-rated movies go, this one was apparently kind of mild, but as PG-13 movies go, it's right there on the edge.
Oh, and apparently "comic violence" doesn't even bear mentioning in an R-rated film, but when it turns up in a PG-13 movie, it becomes the sort of thing that the MPAA figures parents might want to know about.
The deleted footage will no doubt see the light of day on DVD, of course.
Schindler's List (1993) made Liam Neeson a star and introduced the world to Ralph Fiennes. Now, according to the Hollywood Reporter, the two actors will reunite, in a manner of speaking, for Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans (1981). Neeson, who has spent the past few years providing the voice of Aslan in the Narnia movies, will play Zeus, king of the gods; while Fiennes, who has spent the past few years playing the evil Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies, will play Hades, the "ruler of the underworld who aims to overtake Zeus and rule over all." Zeus was played in the original film by Laurence Olivier, but the part of Hades is new to the remake, which can probably be taken as a sign of just how different this new film will be from its predecessor.
1. The ratings for Kings, the TV series that modernizes the story of Saul and David, have not been very good -- so NBC has decided to move the show from its current Sunday-night slot to Saturday night, "where expectations are extremely small." Four episodes have been aired so far; the fifth will hit the airwaves April 18. -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter
2. The MPAA has upheld the R rating it gave to Year One, despite an appeal from producer Judd Apatow and writer-director Harold Ramis for something more lenient. The film, a comedy about a couple of prehistoric hunter-gatherer types who wander through the Book of Genesis, received the rating for "some sexual content and language." -- Hollywood Reporter
3. Warner Brothers has acquired Methuselah, an "action adventure" named after the biblical figure who lived to be 969 years old. The film itself will concern a man who "ages at a similarly slow rate and has used all the extra time to develop an incredible set of survival skills." -- Variety
4. Megan Fox -- having played Mother Teresa, sort of, in a movie-within-the-movie in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) -- is now set to play an angel in the indie drama Passion Plays. The film, set in 1950s Los Angeles, will star Mickey Rourke as "a down-on-his-heels trumpet player" and Fox as "a slender beauty with wings who is part of a carnival", in whom Rourke finds redemption after he tries to save her from a gangster. -- Hollywood Reporter (x2)
5. Julia Roberts will produce Jesus Henry Christ, a feature-length expansion of a similarly-titled short film by Dennis Lee. The story concerns a 10-year-old boy named Henry James Hermin who was "conceived in a petri-dish and raised by a loving, left-wing feminist", but who is now looking for his biological father. What this has to do with Jesus Christ, I have no idea. -- Hollywood Reporter
I can't recall whether I have ever heard this expression before, but I doubt I'll forget it now. 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl', a term coined by Nathan Rabin a few years ago after seeing Natalie Portman in Garden State (2004) and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), popped up twice in my news feed this morning. First, Christopher Campbell looked at how Zooey Deschanel, who I adore, has come to embody this character type; he then listed ten MPDGs who were not played by Deschanel but, in his opinion, should have been (including, yes, the Portman character in Garden State and the Dunst character in Elizabethtown). And then, Glenn Kenny praised the Kristen Stewart character in Adventureland for not being the MPDG that she could oh-so-easily have been. If a third person had used the term this morning, we'd officially have a trend on our hands, but for now, these two citations will have to do.
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.
A couple of discrepancies: Watchmen was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #13 in North America as a whole), while Sunshine Cleaning was #10 on the North American chart (it was #15 in Canada).
1. Two -- not one, but two -- movies about the Easter Bunny are now in the works. Universal is developing I Hop, a live-action film about "an out-of-work slacker who, while driving home late one night, runs over the Easter Bunny. When the bunny can’t hop because his leg is broken, the slacker must train to take over the job and save Easter." Meanwhile, Sony Animation has picked up Hip Hop, in which "the Easter Bunny decides to retire and hides out as a pet with a suburban family, turning their lives upside down." -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter
2. Emma Stone is in talks to star in Easy A, a modernized high-school version of The Scarlet Letter. The film "centers on a student who sees her life paralleling Hawthorne's heroine Hester Prynne after she pretends to be the school slut in hopes that she'll benefit from the notion she's promiscuous." -- Variety
3. NBC is developing Dorothy Gale, a modernized version of The Wizard of Oz. The show will follow "the story of Dorothy, a girl from Kansas who tries to tackle modern-day Manhattan (her version of the Emerald City). Dorothy finds a job in the art world -- and must deal with a wicked boss." -- Variety
4. Emily Blunt, who is playing the Princess of Lilliputia opposite Jack Black's Lemuel Gulliver in the upcoming Gulliver's Travels, says the film will show how Gulliver "contemporizes the whole palace setup" when he comes to Lilliput. -- MTV Movies Blog
5. Photos of Nicolas Cage in his modernized Sorcerer's Apprentice garb surfaced on the internet recently, prompting some people to compare his get-up to Hugh Jackman's outfit in Van Helsing (2004). -- Cartoon Brew, Just Jared
6. Vanessa Redgrave has joined the cast of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of Kings Richard and John; the character was famously played by Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter (1968). John himself is being played by Oscar Isaac, who played Joseph in The Nativity Story (2006). Meanwhile, Russell Crowe recently revealed that he has cut off the hair that he had been growing for the title role. -- Hollywood Reporter, WENN
8. Ellen DeGeneres will play Mother Nature in an original comedy being developed by Walden Media, in which the character "will return to Earth for the first time since the planet's creation." -- Hollywood Reporter
Born, raised, married, and still living in Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition to a 2005 Evangelical Press Association award-winning film column for BC Christian News, my articles have appeared in such publications as Books & Culture, Christianity Today, Bible Review, Faith Today, ChristianWeek, the Vancouver Courier, the Vancouver Sun, the Georgia Straight and Beliefnet.com. I am a member of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle and the Faith and Film Critics Circle.
