Movie Make-out

Anything Arthurian is epic, right? Details are slim, but Authority scribe Warren Ellis dropped word on his blog that he is currently writing a treatment for an untitled Arthurian project its producers are referring to as Excalibur. (It does not appear to be a remake of the 1981 film.)

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Illusionist director Neil Burger is in talks to write a new screenplay adapted from the Newberry Medal-winning 1972 children’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which was previously adapted as The Secret of NIMH by Don Bluth back in 1982.

THR sums up the story thusly: “The story centers on a mouse — the titular Mrs. Frisby, re-named Mrs. Brisby in the MGM movie [because Wham-O is a bunch of assholes] — faced with a crisis when her son falls ill and she must move her family to escape a farmer’s plow. Mrs. Frisby enlists a group of former lab rats, whom she soon discovers run a highly evolved society, who possess advanced technologies and divide labor in the manner of a human community.” The trade speculates that the film will be a live-action/CGI combination, but doesn’t source the comment in order to back it up.

While I’m usually loathe to see widely beloved movies remade — you can watch The Secret of NIMH for free on Hulu if you haven’t seen it — I’d be interested in seeing an even darker, more faithful adaptation of the book than Don Bluth’s film provided. (I would be surprised if that happens, though; the production company behind all this is Walden Media — whose third Narnia film heads into production today.)

Neil Burger is also currently developing a Bride of Frankenstein remake (why?!) and an adaptation of Alan Glynn’s Dark Fields (with screenwriter Leslie Dixon).

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According to Variety, Mad Men’s Don Draper (a.k.a. Jon Hamm) and Vicky Christina Barcelona’s Rebecca Hall have joined the cast of Ben Affleck’s Prince of Thieves adaptation, The Town. (For more about The Town, click through to the related post.)

Ben Affleck directs and stars in the film as “a bank robber who becomes smitten with the teller of a bank he held up. She makes him want to go straight, but she is also the FBI’s golden ticket to catching Boston’s most wanted bank robber.” Hamm plays an FBI agent “who also becomes infatuated with the bank employee (Hall).

Affleck also re-wrote the script from a draft by Peter Craig and Prince of Thieves author Chuck Hogan.

The film starts shooting next month in Boston.

UPDATE (7/30): Still basking in the glow of his breakthrough starring role in the widely acclaimed Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner is apparently in negotiations to join The Town, as well, as Affleck’s “doomed best friend, a member of the gang.” I think that means he dies.

Related Post: Ben Affleck back behind the camera with The Town

Variety is reporting that Eagle Eye and Disturbia director D.J. Caruso is attached to direct a feature film adaptation of the 2008 sci-fi horror video game Dead Space. Not being a gamer, I didn’t know anything about this, but it’s described as being about “an engineer who responds to a distress signal from a mining ship finds the vessel infested with monstrous creatures called Necromorphs. The creatures are human corpses, reanimated by an alien virus.”

While Variety logline makes it sound a bit like Event Horizon (or Alien) meets 28 Days Later, but the game trailer (below) reveals something much different, and a bit more gross (but in a cool way). I think Caruso is a solid genre director who hasn’t gotten much in the way of scripts yet, so hopefully this will let him really cut loose. The producers and Caruso are currently looking for screenwriters, so this could be a while off. (Buried in the article is news that Caruso is also developing a Gary Witta drama called Defender for Dreamworks, which I can’t find a thing about.)

I hope they use some Sigur Rós in the film’s soundtrack. Sigur Rós makes everything better.

Okay, so what if this movie just looks like Used Cars 2: NEW CARS? This shit is funny.

Jeremy Piven stars in Neal Brennan’s The Goods: Live Hard * Sell Hard. Ving Rhames, James Brolin, David Koechner, Kathryn Hahn and Jordana Spiro fill out the cast. August 14th: Be there. (via Funny or Die, obviously)