LOST is absolutely my favorite show of all time. It’s critical adherence to excellence, their willingness to accept blame whenever they cut corners, and their dedication to their fanbase is above and beyond any show like it (except perhaps Buffy The Vampire Slayer). I mean, I have a Dharma tattoo for godsakes. So imagine how crestfallen and heartbroken I was not being able to attend their last year at the Con. Seriously, I’m one of those sleeping on the street all night people. So enough about me and my gushing over-praise of LOST, and onto the full panel in its entirety. Ahead of time, most of the pre-taped footage and skits are edited out of the piece, but I’ve managed to track down quite a few of them.
Present at the panel were executive producers Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof, castmembers Jorge Garcia, Michael Emerson, Josh Holloway, and Nestor Carbonell. It’s pretty entertaining, as always, and doesn’t touch on much of what we can expect in it’s final season. However, they did show some VERY interesting viral clips that hint at what may have happened after Juliet, pissed at losing the hottest guy on the island, hit a nuke with a very big rock several times. By the way, Juliet is confirmed to be seen in the final season as will twitchy-physicist, Daniel Farady. As are “several castmembers we haven’t seen since the first season.” Um. AWESOME!
Probably the only movie I’m anticipating even more than James Cameron’s Avatar is Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic Where The Wild Things Are. Apple has posted a short piece in which Maurice Sendak talks about his great work, and his collaboration with Jonze. It’s a sweet, interesting little look at the dynamic between the two and there’s a few new shots tucked away in the short “interview.” With Avatar, Tron: Legacy, District 9, Alice In Wonderland, and Iron Man 2 taking up much of the post-Con conversation one film this film got a bit lost in the shuffle. However, reviews for the ten minutes of footage shown at Comic-Con have been extremely positive.
I didn’t actually read the book until last year, so I’m still a little fuzzy on why it was so popular and why it was so praised. I get it, but I don’t understand it? Anyway, whatever. What’s hard to love about a story where a little boy runs away to an island made of monsters where he is king? That story in Spike Jonze’s hands (who is probably closer to Peter Pan in spirit than Michael Jackson was ever able to force) is exactly why I’m excited. Working from a script by Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers, the story of young Max and his adventure in the land of the Wild Things is fleshed out into one of extraordinary wonder.
The search for the director of Robert Rodriguez’s reboot of the Predator franchise is finally over. After a couple of weeks, director Nimrod Antal (Kontroll, Armored) has come out the victor. In an exclusive conversation between Rodriguez and Ain’t It Cool honcho, Harry Knowles, Rodriguez talked at great length about the project. And I think you’ll be pretty pleased.
ON ANTAL
First of all, on a personal level I found him to be an outstanding presence, a great communicator full of ideas, and upon meeting him you can immediately understand how he is able to wrangle cast and crew and get the best out of everyone. I always loved Kontroll, where he proved himself to be a very resourceful and original filmmaker. When I saw Armored, I could tell he’s also great with action and has a keen eye for casting. He reminded me of Quentin with how he was able to work with a group of very strong, singular actor talents and make it look effortless. I know he’ll be able to get the most out of what we want to be an outstanding cast.
ON STORY
I can’t go too much into the story right now, because we’re still writing. But it still involves a very intense group of people stranded on a Predator planet discovering unspeakable horrors (that are not always from outside their group). So like the original movie, the title does have a double meaning. Aliens was a different take on the Alien idea, and an original movie in it’s own right, and that’s what we want to do with this. As to how this movie will be viewed, one of the guys at Fox told me “No one is ever going to talk about AVP again after this film, I will stake my life on it.” And he’s a really nice guy, so I don’t want to see him dead. Now that lives are at stake, it’s no longer a job it’s a mission. Failure is not an option. We really want to go with a character driven action movie, because that’s what we all remember about the original Predator, and we want to take it even further with this.
ON LOCATION
Any stagework will be done here, and to take advantage of the new Texas incentive program, we’ll need to shoot at least 60% of the movie in Texas. So sorry, Harry, you’re gonna be tripping over predators this fall.
If you didn’t already know, JJ Abrams is the man currently leading a geek takeover through Hollywood. Recently, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman spoke about how they might approach a sequel to the critical and financial juggernaut, Star Trek, and stated that they were exploring all possibilities of the new timeline they’ve created. “The great thing is we’re all open to anything,” Abrams said. “I think the fun of where we are with Trek is that it can and should just be fully explored. So I think to limit ourselves to only new adventures would be a mistake.” Orci and Kurtzman spoke, of course, of whether all the adventures would be new or if there would be altered versions of things we’d already seen, i.e. How would the Kirk/Kahn story play out in this universe?
It was also recently announced that JJ Abrams and Tom Cruise would be teaming up to produce a fourth installment of Mission: Impossible, but declares he doesn’t plan to direct. He didn’t plan to direct Star Trek either, and look how well that panned out. “There’s no director attached to the movie yet,” Abrams said. “We’re just developing an idea, which I think is very cool, so we’re just starting it out, but it’s exciting. It’s a fun idea, and it’s always an honor to work with Tom. We would definitely produce the movie together, and details from there we’re still figuring out.”
Finally, Abrams touched on Fringe and how the reveal of the still standing Twin Towers (which made me go meh) would be addressed in the second season. “You have to watch to see how that plays out,” Abrams said. “That was a big decision for the show, because it was obviously a potential sensitive kind of choice. But I feel like, given what our story is, given the world of Fringe, I think it will be very satisfying.”
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Harvey Weinstein was asking Quentin Tarantino to chop forty minutes from his World War 2 opus, Inglourious Basterds, over mounting concerns that The Weinstein Company was approaching near bankruptcy. In an interview with GQ, Weinstein dismissed the rumors outright: “Here, read my lips: That is nuts. There’s no truth to any of this. He’s not gonna cut.’
So uh, awesome. But what exactly is Tarantino doing to the film then? “He’s just reorganizing some scenes. I mean, the guy had six weeks to cut his movie [for Cannes]; most guys take six months. Most guys take a year. Quentin Tarantino cuts a movie in six weeks? Come on, there’s shit on that cutting-room floor that’ll blow your brains out. I was telling Quentin the opposite—”You should put that shit back in the movie.” There’s scenes with Brad Pitt and the Basterds, and I’m praying he puts that shit back in, ‘cause it’s un-fucking-believably great.”
In terms of length, it seems that Tarantino being granted final cut still stand. “Listen—this movie will be between two hours and twenty minutes and two hours and twenty-seven minutes. I know he’s putting footage back into the movie. I know he’s got some cool shit that he didn’t get time to address.”
The interview also touches base on a prequel/sequel to Basterds. Apparently, the plan was to have it be a Band Of Brothers-type mini-series, 16 hours or such on HBO or Showtime. Harvey wanted the movie, Bob [Weinstein] & Quentin wanted the mini-series. So what happened? “I just think that it was such a big undertaking that it dawned on him that it was time to say, you know what? This piece, unto itself, can make a movie,” Weinstein said. “After that there’s a bunch of places you can go. He can do the pre-story; he can do the post-story, too. I don’t want to jump to conclusions on his behalf, but I know he’s talked about the past and the future of the Basterds.”
Frank Marshall, Hollywood producer and pretty avid Twitter updater, recently spoke with SciFi Wire about a few projects currently in development. Marshall told reporters that he currently has about ten projects in development, including Bourne 4. “I’m moving it forward. We’d like to shoot next year, but it’s trying to get everyone’s schedules in the right place and getting the script right,” Marshall said. “We’ve done pretty well with these scripts that are loosely put together, but I would like the script to be really solid this time before we go forward, so we are spending a lot of time on story.”
When asked about a fourth installment of Jurassic Park, Marshall simply responded: “We’ll have to see if they can come up with a story,” Marshall said. “We don’t have a story yet.” I don’t see that as a flat out denial. Anything is possible, and if a really good script came across his desk I’m sure there’d at least be a bit of consideration. The Neverending Story update seems to be more a rights issue than anything else. “We love the book,” he said. “We’ve always thought there was an opportunity there to tell a lot of elements that were in the book that weren’t in the [original] movie. It’s another one where we are still working on the rights. Once we get that, we’ll bring on a writer. But it’s off in the distance, but it’s a great story.”
Marshall said a new deal with Sony will soon be another resource for development ideas. “It’s been very exciting, because we are looking at their old libraries and looking at things they have that have stalled out and we may get back on track,” he said. He’s currently in production on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, then in July he’ll be off to Europe spend some time with Lance Armstrong in prep for their upcoming biopic, before starting work on Peter Morgan’s directorial debut The Special Relationship about the relationship between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, as played by Michael Sheen and Dennis Quaid. Talisman is percolating, too,” he said about the proposed TV mini-series based on the Stephen King/Peter Straub novel, though he was concerned about the recent reports of certain studios not having development money.
The trailer for The Last Airbender premieres next week with prints of Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen.
Moveline recently caught up with Catherine Hardwicke, the woman responsible for bringing Twilight to the screen to the joy of tweens everywhere, to talk about about plans for her update of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Emile Hirsch. Facts gleaned from the short interview: the film will be a bit of a supernatural thriller, a bit more violent, and a shorter tighter version than the Ethan Hawke update that was released awhile back.
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Hey, as long as the movie doesn’t have a goddamn intermission I’m there. Kenneth Branagh, I’m looking at you.
I never get tired of listening to James Cameron talk about this movie.
Here’s a James Cameron interview from E3 which is pretty much just more of the same from his E3 presentation, but near the end his enthusiasm level jumps a bit as he starts talking about an Avatar sequel and co-generating ideas with lead game designers, Ubisoft. Last week, Guillermo del Toro stated in an interview that the future of storytelling would be told across many multimedia platforms. Looks like Cameron will be at the forefront of that as well.
The LA Times is reporting that a film based on critically acclaimed videogame Bioshock might not be coming to the screen as soon as we all hoped. Gore Verbinkski, who is currently in production on animated feature Rango with Johnny Depp, talked with the paper recently about making the transition from films to videogames and his hopes to start developing videogames. Bioshock is already on hold pending budgetary concerns, but even if the film did find funding which would most likely come from overseas, Verbinski doesn’t think he’d want to spend the year plus in production shooting in another country.
This upsets for a number of reasons:
1) Bioshock is ripe for big screen adaptation. The immersive experience of playing the game will never be matched, but it would be a sight to behold. An absolutely gorgeous, dark underwater tale about a nightmare induced by ambition.
2) Gore Verbinski is a great director. The Ring is still one of the scariest films ever made and his return to horror would be championed.
3) Verbinski’s talent has been squandered and wasted on the useless pile of camp that is the Pirates Of The Carribean trilogy.
I guess we’ll see, but it’s all looking very grim right now. I honestly can’t think of anyone better to direct of Bioshock, except of course Guillermo del Toro but he’s booked until the end of the century.
Anthony Stewart Head who played librarian/watcher Rupert Giles for eight years under Joss Whedon all but bashed the recently announced remake. Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz who directed the feature film which bombed, are currently in development on this remake/reboot. Funny thing is they’re not using Joss Whedon. They’re not even using his characters or mythology, which revived and pretty much reduced the horrible memory of the first film to little more than a joke. Here’s Anthony Stewart Head’s take on the upcoming film:
“I wouldn’t want to see it, no,” Head admits. “The Kuzuis didn’t do a great job on the movie the first time around. It was Joss’ script at the age of 19, but they changed a lot of it. They said, ‘Look, we know best and we know how to make this movie,’ and it became quite schlocky and high camp. The bottom line is if a movie was ever to be made, it should be made with Joss Whedon, whether it’s a retrospective or not. But it would be madness to do it without him. [The Kuzuis] have the rights to because they have the rights to the original movie, but it should be interesting to see. It may be a bit like watching a car wreck.”
I’m gonna have to say I agree. I wonder how many Buffy fans are going to boycott this movie?
Source: Youtube
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Cinemafique 