Movie Make-out

Not content to let the Predator franchise re-surge alone, 20th Century Fox has revived the Alien franchise with a script that will finally see original director Ridley Scott return.

According to Variety, untested screenwriter Jon Spaihts is the lucky sonuvagun who booked this job, after coming off two successful script sales that have Keanu Reeves attached to star (Shadow 19 at Warner Bros., Passengers at Morgan Creek).

From the article:

The film is set up to be a prequel to the groundbreaking 1979 film that Scott directed. It will precede that film, in which the crew of a commercial towing ship returning to Earth is awakened and sent to respond to a distress signal from a nearby planetoid. The crew discovers too late that the signal generated by an empty ship was meant to warn them.

The article goes on to say that the studio and Scott loved his take on the scenario and that it’s the first of the franchise to be directed by Scott, which really has me wondering: exactly what is in this script that’s so uniquely different from the original to keep the story fresh and yet something that isn’t in the existing sequels that hooked Scott enough to be interested?

Call me cautiously optimistic, but this could actually be something I’d be interested in.

This does not appear to be a faithful adaptation (even by a very liberally stretched imagination) and the stop-motion is a bit jerky, but it’s got a sort of charm to it. I kind of dig it, but I think I’m still on the fence.

The Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox will premiere at the 53rd edition of the London Film Festival (in October) before opening in the US on November 13, 2009.

The Coen Brothers are back and in dark comedy mode again, with A Serious Man, “the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV.”

It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry’s chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?

Man, is this trailer weird. A Serious Man is due on October 2, 2009.

The Coens have a few projects to choose from for their next film, including an adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a re-adaptation of True Grit, and an original Western “with a lot of violence in it,” according to Joel Coen. “There’s scalping and hanging…. it’s good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off.” Of course, it could also be something we’ve never even heard of before; you never know with those wacky Coens.

Related Post: Coens sign a pair of Serious men; Coens to adapt Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union

If you were hoping to do some howling at the moon this fall in anticipation of Benecio del Toro’s turn as the titular role in The Wolfman (which is a reboot of the classic Universal Pictures movie monster franchise), I’m afraid you’re going to be gravely disappointed.

According to Variety, the movie will now be released on February 12, 2010 as counter-programming to a slew of love-themed movies including the New Line’s star-filled romantic comedy Valentine’s Day, a Robert Pattinson-starring romantic drama called Remember Me, and Disney’s 3D re-release of Beauty and the Beast.

Moving into its November 6 timeslot this year will be an alien abduction drama starring Milla Jovovich called The 4th Kind, which the studio had picked up from Gold Circle Films.

Four other movies that got moved around on Universal’s plate include:

March 12: Green Zone — Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matt Damon, it’s the story of a pair of CIA agents who are trailing some WMDs and the foreign journalist who is following them for the story.

April 16: MacGruber — It’s based on skit which is a parody of a popular TV show which is also getting its own feature adaptation.

June 11: Get Him to the Greek — A sequel of sorts to Forgetting Sarah Marshall where the rock star who got in Jason Segel’s way is now the MacGuffin, er, “star” who needs to be escorted to the world famous Greek theater in L.A. by a neophyte intern.

Somewhere in the First Quarter 2010: Repo Men — Not to be confused with the 1980s punk cult hit and definitely not to be confused with Repo! The Genetic Opera with which it shares a basic concept—a future megacorporation which provides organ transplants on a payment plan also repossesses them if you fall behind in payments—the film stars Jude Law and Forest Whitaker and was once known as Repossession Mambo. I think I like the old name better.

According to a new release from Sony Pictures Classics (via Coming Soon), the production company has acquired To Live and House of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou’s upcoming “thriller-comedy” remake of Blood Simple, the first film by Joel and Ethan Coen. The release says the film is untitled, although a Hollywood Reporter article from June mentioned it was called San Qiang Pai An Jing Qi (The Stunning Case of the Three Gun Shots). My assumption is that the remake won’t be using a literal translation of that.

The remake, which started shooting last month, moves the action from the middle of nowhere in Texas to set “a Chinese noodle shop in a sand dune-specked desert.… The owner of the noodle shop’s seemingly simple plan to murder his adulterous wife and her lover quickly spins out of control after the introduction of a gun into the lives of characters more accustomed to knives and swords.”

You can watch a trailer for the original film here (obviously created a few years later):