Movie Make-out

Diablo Cody and the producers behind the hit Juno are reuniting behind another interesting project.

According to Variety, Cody’s screenplay Young Adult has been picked up by Mandate pictures and they’ve decided that there is no reason to break up a winning team. The film will be produced by Cody and Mason Novick, as well as Russell Smith and Lianne Halfon, co-founders with John Malkovich of the Mr. Mudd production company.

While Variety says that details are of the story are still under wraps, Cody herself, in conversation with New York Magazine’s Vulture says, “I’m working on a movie about a woman who’s stalking her high-school sweetheart. It has elements of humor, but it’s pretty serious and fucked up.” Reuters goes further, stating, “The storyline involves a thirtysomething, divorced, young-adult fiction writer in Minneapolis who returns to her hometown to chase the ex-boyfriend that got away — and who’s now married with a kid.”

This will be the second collaboration between Cody, Mr. Mudd and Mandate pictures. Cody currently works on the brilliant television series The United States of Tara, the second season of which started this past Monday.

Dear Tim Burton,

Two years ago, Gordon wrote to you a letter where he was afraid you were going to totally fuck up a live-adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by casting a 17-year old girl in the titular role.

He eventually got over it when he saw the first trailers and understood the storyline, and a light bulb even snapped on over my head when someone revealed that the kooky character designs for the Mad Hatter weren’t just you or your art directors and/or your Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood faffing around but an updating of the animated characters’ look.

However, it’s my turn to be nervous after looking at The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and learning that Walt Disney Pictures and Alice screenwriter Linda Woolverton want to cast the same kind of adaptation magical spell onto Maleficent.

The wicked fairy godmother of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is my favorite Disney character; in fact, I adore the character so much that upon learning that someone I was meeting for a first date was in the original “Fantasmic!” cast and played the character before she turns into the dragon, it was sufficient reason to arrange for the second date.

This is where you come in, Mr. Burton. Borys Kit says that you’re not involved yet but that you were interested by the character while you were doing post-production work on Alice and that no one’s gone to your agents and said, “Let’s make a deal.” That’s fine.

The article goes on to say that a Woolverton script would feature a re-telling of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty from Maleficent’s point of view and I think I can understand what would make that kind of story compelling. I mean, after all, if Gregory Maguire was able to make a career out of the redemption of the Wicked Witch of the West, anything’s possible, right?

So, I guess this letter a tentative one of support for you becoming this movie’s eventual director, except for the part where I say that if you faff around too much with the best Disney villain who ever lived, I won’t invite you to my birthday party.

Yours,
Trisha Lynn

When the New York Times put an interactive Netflix map online, allowing me to search by zip code and see what my neighbors were renting, the top title was Milk, followed by such as The Wrester, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt and Rachel Getting Married. Think about that. Good movies. Transformers 2 was nowhere to be seen.

—Roger Ebert, explaining his new business venture/movie review TV show

Well, we have our Captain America. And it’ll make things really awkward if they ever decide to bring The Fantastic Four into this new, integrated Marvel film universe.

According to an exclusive at the Hollywood Reporter, and later elaborated on by Variety, Chris Evans (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The Fantastic Four) has signed on to become Captain America. The deal, which is still being finalized, would require that he star in at least three Captain America films, and presumably in all spin-offs as well.

The first would be The First Avenger: Captain America, coming on July 22, 2011,  introducing the character and setting him against Hugo Weaving (The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings) as the Red Skull. After that, presuming Marvel canon is followed, we’d see him de-iced in The Avengers, the ensemble film that Marvel Studios is working toward, bringing Cap, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and The Hulk (Edward Norton) together, on May 4, 2012. Preceding all of this, we’d see the aforementioned Thor on May 6, 2011.

The First Avenger: Captain America will be directed by Joe Johnston (The Wolfman).

Related Posts: Quick Cuts: Iron Man, Thor, share actors, and other stories, Kat Dennings is hot, also in Thor (updated), Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston join cast of Thor, Natalie Portman is Jane Foster in Branagh’s Thor.

Fans of Joss Whedon’s most recently canceled series “Dollhouse,” listen up! There’s a new movie project that may interest you.

As The Hollywood Reporter noted, screenwriters Doug Cook and David Weisberg (The Rock, Double Jeopardy) sold a script to Bold Films and the plot sounds a little familiar.

Slate, described as a female-oriented take on The Bourne Identity, involves the CIA which, in order to investigate a murdered female agent, implants the agent’s memories into the damaged brain of a female convict. The agent’s lethal abilities also are implanted, and soon the convict goes rogue to discover the truth about the murder.

I remember watching the first six episodes of “Dollhouse” and I never once blinked at the idea of all the memory erasing and re-writing that they did in that show because the technology was sufficiently “shiny” enough to where I decided to believe in it. Somehow, I can’t seem to wrap my brain around the idea that this would work in a feature film featuring the CIA. Mind you, this is coming from the same person who completely bought into The Men Who Stare at Goats and Stranger Than Fiction.

I’m also looking at Bold Films’ slate and am a little confused about who they are as a production company. The first film they produced was a drama called Slingshot (2005) which starred David Arquette, Thora Birch, Balthazar Getty, and Juliana Margulies which means that from the get-go, their producers had access to a lot of the right people.

However, they also produced the third sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers which went direct-to-DVD, and managed to enlist the talents of not only the original screenwriter to write and direct this one, but they brought back Casper Van Dien to play Johnny Rico and got him Jolene Blalock (T’Pol from “Enterprise”) to be his co-star. This says to me that they’ll produce almost anything to make a buck, but at least they’ll try to make it interesting.

Most recently, they released the Paul Bettany-starring Legion in January, which has a 19% fresh rating on the Tomatometer, but made $40 million in the U.S., adequately covering its $26 million budget.

This is so confusing to me. If the producers at Bold Films have the right people in the right place, have good relationships with screenwriters, and can pick out the average money-making scripts, why is it that their movies just haven’t been that good?