Movie Make-out

Hugo Weaving (of the Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies) has signed on to play a detective opposite Benicio del Toro (The Usual Suspects) and Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada) in the upcoming remake of the Universal Studios classic monster movie, The Wolf Man, according to Variety. The real question is, who’s playing Abbot and Costello? (Wait, wrong movie.)

Previously, the film was under One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek’s supervision. Since he quit back in January because of the budget and "other creative issues," he has been replaced by Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Jurassic Park 3), and it seems that David Self (The Haunting, Road to Perdition) has done a rewrite to the earlier Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven, Sleepy Hollow) "ballsy hard assed R" script, leading some people to suspect that the studio wants the $85 million film (after $15 mil in UK tax breaks) to be a more marketable PG-13 affair. Considering neither Self nor Johnston has made an R-rated film, this is almost certainly the case.

The film is still set for a March start date and is scheduled to hit theaters on February 13, 2009.

AOL Movies has the trailer for what looks to be a charming, funny indie comedy called Backseat, about two friends who "flee New York City on a three-day road trip to Montreal to escape their problems and meet the great Donald Sutherland.

ComingSoon gave me the heads up on the trailer for Blindsight, now at the film’s official site, an upcoming documentary from Lucy Walker (director of the Amish rumspringa doc Devil’s Playground) about blind mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer leading six blind Tibetan teenagers climbing one of the peaks of Mount Everest (specifically Lhakpa Ri, the tallest peak outside of the Himalayas). I have to get this bit of snark out of the way: "What do they do when they get to the top? Enjoy the view?" Sorry. I’m an asshole, but this actually looks like a very interesting documentary, and the film has already won a handful of awards on the festival circuit.

UPDATE: Variety Asia’s Kaiju Shakedown blog points out that the Donnie Yen starrer Flash Point starts is domestic limited release on March 14, 2008. The second Chinese trailer (found at YouTube) contains some examples of the action, and they are just ridiculous. (You can see it at the official site, too, but the stream is running a bit choppy for me.) It looks like some good, dumb fun. Apparently it’s in New York, LA, and San Francisco only, so if you live in any of those three cities, see it early! I need it to expand to Chicago!

David Wenham (Faramir in Lord of the Rings, 300, The Proposition) and Stephen Graham (Snatch, This Is England) have signed onto Michael Mann’s crime flick, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp (as John Dillinger) and Christian Bale (as FBI agent Melvin Purvis). which is based on the book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-43, by Bryan Burrough. (Considering Dillinger died in 1934, I’m taking a wild guess and saying it’s only based on a small part of the book.) The two join an already impressive supporting cast, including Marion Cotillard (Oscar-nominated for last year’s La Vie en Rose), Channing Tatum (as Pretty Boy Floyd), Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Dorff.

Wenham will play Harry “Pete” Pierpont, one of Dillinger’s gang (by some accounts its real leader), with an apparently violent disdain for all authority. Wenham has turned in solid performances in relatively thankless parts in Lord of the Rings (as Faramir) and 300, as well as a small role in The Proposition, one of my favorite films of the past several years.

Graham (pictured) will play Baby Face Nelson, which is absolutely perfect casting in light of his role as Combo in This Is England, one of my favorite films of 2007 (it didn’t make my list because I hadn’t seen it yet).

Public Enemies will begin filming (in Chicago — my town!) from March to May. It will be released sometime in 2009.

(Source: The Hollywood Reporter)

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis has signed to pen an adaptation of Michael Hornburg’s novel Downers Grove. The novel is about Chrissie Swanson, a "paranoid high school senior for whom graduating has become a matter of life or death": according to Booklist’s description, their high school is believed to be cursed: "each year before graduation, somebody in the senior class dies in a bizarre way." And when Chrissie beats up a jock who tries to rape her, he and his friends’ increasingly psychotic revenge tactics convince her she’s the curse’s next victim.

Violence-laden upper class surburban dark fantasy ensues, mixed with snarky faux teenage girl dialogue.… It’s like American Psycho meets Juno. Signing Ellis was a no-brainer.

Ellis has previously adapted Adam Davies’ The Frog King, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick) and directed by Darren Star (Sex and the City), which centers around a publishing industry wage slave who, you know, rises to the top or something — like The Devil Reads Bridget Jones’ Diary or something.

A film adaptation of one of Ellis’s own novels, The Informers, has just wrapped. That film stars Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, and Brandon Routh, in one of his first post-Superman Returns roles. (Routh has two other films currently in post-production — Lie to Me and Life is Hot in Crackdown — so after not seeing him for some time, we’re likely to be getting a whole lot of him in the next year or so. He’s also starring as Dylan Dog, the Italian horror comic, in the upcoming Dead of Night.)

Variety has confirmed an earlier report from Just Jared that Blackwing (a.k.a. Beak from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run) and Agent Zero have been added to the torrential downpour of characters set to appear in the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine film by Gavin Hood (Tsotsi). Dominic Monaghan (Lord of the Rings, Lost) is playing Blackwing, while Daniel Henney (My Father) is set for Agent Zero (pictured at left).

What’s interesting about this is that these two very recent additions to the X-Men universe are in it, with one of them playing a character who can only really function in the context of the X-Men (namely Beak — sorry, I liked him better when he was a featherless bird-like freakshow instead of just another dude in a super-powered suit). And Deadpool and Agent Zero are both mercenaries, so perhaps they’re both brought into the story to hunt for Wolverine…?

Anyway, their presence — as with Gambit’s — lends some weight to idea that the film takes place over a span of time, perhaps with the real origin story being revealed in lengthy flashback sequences. Anyway, that’s all just speculation. Thoughts?

Related post: Gambit, Deadpool and Wraith join Wolverine cast (updated)

Variety has reported that Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings) and Sally Hawkins have joined the cast of the upcoming BBC Films production, An Education, joining Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2), Rosamund Pike (Fracture), Emma Thompson (Sense & Sensibility), Olivia Williams (Rushmore) and the film’s star, Carey Mulligan, pictured at right. Mulligan has previously starred in the not-nearly-as-good-as-the-BBC-version Pride & Prejudice with Keira Knightly and the fan-favorite "Blink" episode of Dr. Who.

Directed by Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) from a Nick Hornby script, based on an article by Lynn Barber, the film centers around a 17-year old girl (Mulligan) in 1960’s London, who meets "an unsuitable thirty-something" (Sarsgaard) who sweeps her away with a taste of "the high life." The Hollywood Reporter’s write-up from last month, about the casting of Sarsgaard, Thompson, Mulligan, and Molina, contains a little more information about the plot of the film, which will begin shooting in late March.

A button-cute lead, a strong supporting cast, an interested premise, and a script by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity novel) make this film one to keep on your radar.

The Barber article, also called "An Education," appeared in Granta #82, in July, 2003; it is not on-line, but you can purchase the issue at Granta’s site.

A not-very-interesting article at the New York Times about various movie downloading devices pointed me at this article at iLounge on the differences in video quality between Blu-Ray, high def AppleTV, high def cable, (upconverted) standard def DVD, and standard def AppleTV — obviously teeming with comparison photos.As you would expect, Blu-Ray wins out in all comparisons, but seeing the difference is… uh… neat. What’s kind of surprising is how the color reproduction on the HD cable images is absolute shit.

One thing I would have liked to have seen, though, is images of non-upconverted standard DVDs, but whatevs.