Movie Make-out

On Friday, Mel Gibson will be returning to theaters for the first time since 2002’s Signs in Edge of Darkness. And it looks like he plans to further this reappearance in several ways in the coming year.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gibson is currently “negotiating with Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black and Universal to star in spy-thriller Cold Warrior.” The film, written by Charles Monday, would be Black’s second after the very-fun Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang in 2005, and apparently follows the usual formula for an aging action star in that Gibson would play “a Cold War Spy coming out of retirement to confront a domestic terror threat from Russia aided by a younger agent.”

Before that, though, we should be getting to see Gibson in Jodie Foster’s Beaver (ha), as well as in upcoming prison actioner How I Spent My Summer Vacation, which will have Gibson playing a criminal, “arrested after a high-speed, border-crossing chase, who has to survive any way he can in a drug and gang filled Mexican Prison.”

Related Posts: Mel Gibson, Leonardo DiCaprio to don horned helmets for Viking epic; Trailer Watch: Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness; Quick Cut: Summit to pick up Jodie Foster’s Beaver

As the sun set over the wintry and cold panorama of film goers, swag hunters, celebs, critics, actual movie fans, and some phonies in Park City, Utah at the Sundance film festival yesterday, three different sets of directors, cast members and producers could celebrate for they had all landed the best honor there is to be had at the festival: a domestic distribution deal.

The Kids Are All Right: Focus Features picked up this drama/comedy which stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple whose children do some sleuthing and find out that their biological father is Mark Ruffalo. I have to say that I love the premise of this movie because it’s rather unique among all the kinds of stories one could tell about the new nuclear family.

Directed by and co-written by indie-familiar Lisa Cholodenko, Focus will be releasing Kids in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and South Africa to the tune of $4.8 million but they haven’t announced when they would be doing so.

Hesher: I never thought I’d hear the word “hesher” ever again, but here it is as the name of Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s character in a drama about a motherless boy (played by Devin Brochu) who forms an unlikely friendship with Hesher and Natalie Portman’s character and what happens when their lifestyles collide. Newmarket Films picked up the U.S. distribution rights for $1 million and there’s apparently a deal in the works to bring the film to Canada as well.

Twelve: The only reason why the $2 million purchase of the domestic rights to Joel Schumacher’s teen drama—which hasn’t even made its public debut yet—would make sense to me would be if either the buyers received a private screening or if Hannover House is trying to capitalize on the “Let’s watch rich Manhattan teens ruin their lives” zeitgeist.

Based on the novel by Nick McDonell, the ensemble drama features a performance by Chace Crawford as a teenage drug dealer who sells pot to his rich prep school friends and takes place over the course of five days at the turn of the 21st century.

Sundance closes its festival this coming Sunday. (Source: Variety)

In one of his op-ed pieces, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman declared that thanks to Twilight: New Moon, the age of Hollywood trying to placate only the 18 to 34-year old male demographic was over.

I am understandably torn about this.

I think it’s totally awesome that Hollywood is starting to take young women’s needs seriously when it comes to entertainment. The success of the High School Musical TV franchise was built on the yearnings of teenage girls, and those yearnings also lead to the silver screen debut of the franchise earning over $90 million in the U.S.

With New Moon earning over $142 million in its opening weekend and shattering the record previously held by the similarly age-range targeted The Dark Knight, it proves without a doubt that young women will flock to the movie theaters just as much as young men will.

My problem is that what the average teenage girl normally wants out of her entertainment isn’t very good, nor would any of it pass a Bechdel test because the average teenage girl is mostly concerned with teenage boys and whether or not they’ll think she’s pretty due to the demands of her raging hormones and the societal pressure surrounding her. There’s only so many different kinds of movies one can make that would appeal to this inner need, and I doubt you’ll see any of them on an American Film Institute Top 100 list or winning any major awards.

The feminist within me is warring with my inner critic, mostly because when I add in this report that women are taking on stronger roles in TV production and actually making good series that a wide audience wants to watch, it would almost make me think that an increase in female studio presidents or chairs or an increase in the ranks of female directors and screenwriters would mean that there would be a corresponding increase in the variety of stories for female characters in movies.

And that’s where I’d be wrong. Read more

Or at least he’s in negotiations to do so.

According to Variety, Sam Worthington is currently working out a deal to star in Universal Pictures’ Dracula Year Zero which will be directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City, Knowing) from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless.

Though the trade says the exact plot of the movie is a secret, Steven James Snyder over at Techland.com had a conversation with Proyas where he revealed a bit more about how he’s approaching this most iconic of movie monsters:

It’s all about how Vlad of Transylvania became this creature; the choices that he made to make him into this tragic character. It’s so intriguing to me, to approach this as a character study on a huge, epic canvas. The script is from these two young guys who have never really done a script before, but they basically did their thing and have reinvented the whole context of this most familiar personality.

It’s worth it to note that the original novel by Bram Stoker was itself a reworking of the history of Transylvanian lore about Vlad the Impaler combined with subtle influences of Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, both of which preceded Stoker’s publication.

Of course, Universal’s re-telling of the vampire story is part of a major bid to re-establish the studio in the public’s eye as the place to go when you want to see a movie featuring monsters and I have a feeling that the fate of this new Dracula movie is going to rest with how audiences react to the upcoming The Wolfman in February.

Perhaps Robert Pattinson wants to expand his fanbase beyond the tween girl market. He’s apparently considering starring in a film version of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, alongside Sean Penn and Reese Witherspoon.

According to Total Film, Penn and Pattinson are in talks with Fox 2000 to join the cast, of which Witherspoon is already confirmed. Adapted by Richard LaGravenese (P.S. I Love You) and directed by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend), the film would follow the reminisces of Jacob, “a 90 year old former circus worker, who left college and joined the circus life during the great depression.”