I’ve been a fan of Jeanne DuPrau’s Ember book series for several years now, having found them to be a great blend of post-apocalyptic dreariness and steampunk tomfoolery, and all in a young adult book. Tom Hanks’ Playtone production company must have thought so too, since they optioned The City of Ember and gave it to Gil Kenan (Monster House) to direct. I was able to see City of Ember at Fantastic Fest, and it’s sadly not the Ember adaptation I’d been hoping for.
Everyone loves Bill Murray, but only the die hard fans recognize the majority of his work. The rest, unfortunately, concentrate too much on his greatest films, such as Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translationand all of his collaborations with Wes Anderson. Yet while each of these films, and Murray’s roles and performances in them, are certainly deserving of their preferred and predominant praises, Murray is the kind of actor who is so talented and entertaining that he can be enjoyed in even the worst movies on his resume. In fact, he’s probably the only A-lister who could lend his voice to a bastardized CG version of a beloved cartoon character and get away with barely any contempt from his devotees.
This week, Bill Murray makes an appearance in the new kiddie sci-fi flick City of Emberas the selfish mayor of a doomed underground metropolis. And it’s sure to be one of his less-appreciated roles, whether because it’s in a children’s movie, because it’s a supporting part in an ensemble filled with many talented actors, or because it’s not Ghostbusters 3. But those who really love Murray will likely flock to the movie primarily to see him, just as they did and do for the rest of these movies with underrated Murray roles:
Wes Anderson has been hired out by Universal/Imagine to script a remake of Patrice Leconte’s Mon Meilleur Ami (My Best Friend), about a cabby hired out to pose as Daniel Auteuil’s pal. If Anderson also directs the film, I can see Bill Murray as either role, but let me suggest that the other be played by Richard Dreyfuss for a perfect What About Bob? reunion.
Pirates of the Caribbean collaborators Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp are apparently going the way of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, but better, for a computer-animated film titled Rango, which will feature motion-capture technology unlike anything we’ve seen before in an animated feature.
After sparking my interest again with Black Book, Paul Verhoeven is disappointingly returning to the genre of erotic thriller, according to Variety. He’s in talks to direct a movie about an intern who’s doing his boss’ wife, which is of course described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.
At the midway point of the Toronto Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter notes the fest’s lack of Oscar buzz, except for the awards talk surrounding The Wrestler, Martin Landau (Lovely, Still), Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) and even Dakota Fanning (The Secret Life of Bees).
Bill Murray jumped out of a plane last Friday as part of the opening of the 50th anniversary Chicago Air & Water Show. Surprisingly, there was apparently no kind of self-promotion involved. He wasn’t holding a sign advertising his villainous turn in this fall’s City of Ember, and he didn’t use the opportunity to announce being cast in The Bucket List 2 (which he’s not really in, and which hopefully isn’t even in the works). As far as I can tell, the only reason for Murray’s participation was that he’s originally from the area and he wanted to experience skydiving — even if strapped to an Army parachutist.
So, while there is seemingly nothing necessarily movie related about the jump, the video of Murray soaring through the air (check out the extended footage, lasting almost 6 minutes, here) did make me want to re-watch one of my favorite of his movies, the underrated What About Bob? I’m not sure if the audio on the camera would have picked it up, anyway, but I was hoping Murray would start screaming, “I’m flying! I’m flying!”
Video games today are great for recreating scenes from old films (such as The Godfather) and plopping you into the action. But how faithful do a game’s sequences need to be? From the way Sierra Entertainment is advertising its new Ghostbustersvideo game, I guess you want the gaming to be as close to the direction of the original film as possible. Not only does the new trailer for the game include many scenes from the first Ghostbusters movie, it displays side-by-side comparisons of footage from the film and the game. Because what would the game be without a near-identical shot of library catalog cards shot into the air?
Interestingly enough, the game is not actually a total video game remake of Ghostbusters. Instead, it’s “an all new story you won’t see in theaters,” featuring a script by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also wrote both the original and the sequel, and the voices of Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Brian Doyle-Murray, all reprising their roles from the films (I understand Sigourney Weaver opting out, but why no Rick Moranis?). Of course, it does require you to battle old favorites, such as Slimer, Gozer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Vigo (”master of evil”), but there will also be new villains, including the biggest paranormal problem the Ghostbusters have ever seen.
When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.
Walden Media is planning a huge blitz to promote their fall Bill Murray starrer City of Ember at ComicCon. The current plan is to “re-create the mythical city depicted in the film on a private two-car train that will transport 25 members of the media on a 2½-hour journey to the convention’s San Diego locale,” accompanied by the film’s director, screenwriter and producer.
Expect to be inundated with “Hulk Smash!” headlines on come Monday morning. Variety kindly suggests that The Happening “will likely play like a traditional horror film rather than a broad summer title”––read: $20 million opening––leaving the by all accounts imperfect but not that bad Hulk to reel in mid-five figures.
Sony Pictures Classics, the only studio other tha IFC to seriously stock their shelves last month at Cannes, has announced another acquisition: Palme D’or winner The Class.
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore,Lost in Translationand Broken Flowers, has been animated by a kind of communal, revisionist nostalgia. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola were teenagers during Murray’s first brush with fame in the early 80s, which would have made them extremely susceptible to the prototypical Murray character of the day, which hit its zenith with Ghostbusters.
Your Blogger is having some computer issues this morning. While I get sorted, check out this blog post from Roger Ebert , in which he ponders the never ending Democratic primary in cinematic terms. “It must have been a species of torture for the anchors at CNN, who seemed caught in a Groundhog Day loop… The problem with a screenplay based on these events is that there would be a merciless sameness.” That quote brought to mind two things. First, this has probably been done already, but someone should do some kind of linguistic/historical study, charting the evolution of references to that movie as a universally identified synonym for eternal recurrence. Also: YouTube! The above clip, Groundhog Day in 5 Seconds, which reduces the Bill Murray classic to nothing but merciless sameness.
Sundance just released their short film lineup, and though I’m still going through the release, I know for a fact that there’s at least one film on there that you can watch right this second. FCU: Fact Checkers Unit stars Bill Murray, Kristen Schaal, Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca; it was written by Karinen, Sacca and director Dan Beers. I watched it a couple of months ago on YouTube. It’s good; it didn’t change my world, but it’s polished and funny. In the 3+ months since it’s been available at YouTube and FunnyOrDie, it’s already been watched about 750,000 times. At that point, is playing at Sundance even a big deal? Depending on where it plays and how often, they’ll be extremely lucky if 1,000 people see it in Park City–but I guess the hope is that it’ll be the right 1,000 people.
In any case, it’s not like this is your standard viral video–it clearly has a budget, and did I mention it stars Bill Murray?–but this is, as far as I know, the first instance of a online video hit making the jump to a festival the size Sundance. Please correct me if I’m wrong. And watch the short above–I have a feeling it won’t be on YouTube for much longer.
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s video sharing site FunnyOrDie exploded over the summer with The Landlord, a one-joke short featuring Ferrell and a little girl with a dirty mouth. But the site has been widely criticized lately for failing to sustain the high levels of traffic delivered every time Ferrell is featured in a clip. A Hollywood Reporter piece last week pegged Landlord as both a blessing and a curse for the infant start-up: it attracted a huge amount of attention, but Ferrell and crew didn’t have enough quality content in the vault to keep visitors around, and though they’ve solicited successful contributions from stars such as Eva Longoria and Bill Murray, since there’s no compensation involved, no one with a Los Angeles mortgage to pay can afford to devote too much time to it. The conclusion: FunnyOrDie needs to pull from a wider talent pool in order to survive.
This week, they’ve expanded that talent pool with one key name, although whether or not it’ll solve Funny’s core problem is still debatable. In the clip above, Ferrell and McKay welcome Judd Apatow, writer/director of Knocked Up and producer of SuperBad. It’s a clever clip, clearly referencing if not the THR story specifically, then the general buzz that FunnyOrDie needs to become a money-making business, or die. But will Apatow, the busiest comedy producer in town, really prove to be a reliable fount of content?
I confessed my secret dream to write about Eyes Wide Shut for a living.
On this week’s episode of FilmCouch, we talked about Trapped in the Closet (which ended), Superbad, and a punk rock high school flick that you can watch on YouTube.
Inspired the news that Bill Murray was stopped in Stockholm on suspicion of drunkenly driving a golf cart (yes, seriously), I just spent an hour on YouTube watching fan tributes to the former Ghostbuster. It’s amazing how many of these somehow involve Bill Murray successfully or unsuccessfully attempting to save the world. The clip above is my favorite–I just think it’s really funny that even with the Power Rangers egging him on, our hero just isn’t very good at flying–but there’s also this clip, in which Bill Murray “rebuilds the WTC in godlike miracle.” And really: on some level, isn’t Lost in Translation just a little girl’s fantasy of Bill Murray rescuing her from adulthood? Especially if you assign any merit to this interpretation of the final scene.
Is the idea that Bill Murray will bail us out of catastrophe just ingrained in the collective consciousness of our generation? Has everybody really seen Ghostbusters as many times as I have? Or is it more of a Groundhog Day, “he’s A god, he’s not THE God” type of thing?
Self-professed “retarded bandwagon-y blogger” Wiley Wiggins has started a micro-blogathon of sorts, dedicated to First Film Crushes. I covered this territory during the Film Characters Who Changed My Life blogathon, but because I too am retarded and bandwagon-y, I’m reposting my answer here:
The afternoon that I watched Ghostbusters for the first time (on VHS, aged six) is my earliest memory of feeling sexual attraction to another human being. Bill Murray was hardly an adonis in 1984 (or ever), and even at six, I think I knew that, but I was drawn to this strange, pock-marked man nonetheless. I even remember the exact moment of the film that did it for me: Ray and Peter have just been kicked out of the University, and they’re standing on the steps to the library, passing back and forth a bottle of booze. Ray is afraid of getting a real job; Peter, rocking back and forth on his heels, tells his partner that they were destined to lose their jobs so that they could start their own paranormal investigation agency. To this day, I’m still attracted to wild-eyed drunks with crackpot schemes, but now I try to pick specimens with better skin.
Unfortunately, that clip is not on YouTube, but the “cats and dogs” speech embedded above is pretty good, too.
Walden Media is planning a huge blitz
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore, 
Way back on Monday, we introduced our entry in the 
