The suddenly massive contingent of preteen female Comic-Con attendees swooned at the sight of Korean pop star/Ninja Assassin star Rain, and 300/RocknRolla hunk Gerard Butler, at Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment presentation. Jeremy Piven threatened to take his shirt off. Crickets.
Highlights:
–Dark Castle is investing in a bunch of direct-to-DVD sequels of moderate horror hits; judging by the reaction to The Hills Run Red, no one cares.
–”Korean music video sensation” Rain is a legitimate sensation. At least with the girls who were just still a little turned on from Twilight. Boys hold their hardons for “Gerry” Butler.
–Asking Joel Silver, Jeremy Piven and/or Guy Ritchie for words of encouragement is just about the biggest faux pas you can make as an attendee in Hall H.
–Joel Silver reveals the ten-words-or-less pitch that landed financing for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie.
–Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s relationship was solid enough during filming of RocknRolla that she was tasked with shooting syringes into Gerard Butler’s ass.
Rich at FourFour has made an amazing discovery. A little over a year ago, a Variety story announced that pop star Willa Ford had been cast in a biopic about Anna Nicole Smith. According to IMDb, Anna Nicole was completed in 2007, but as Rich points out, it apparently never even received so much as a DVD release. But Rich found the film on a torrent site, in a manner which, he says, “leads me to believe that no official release by way of DVD is even in the pipeline. I’m guessing that this thing really was just dumped online for free because no one would take it.” So he did what any upstanding member of the community would do: he edited the film down into seven minutes of pure, golden “campy crapiness.”
See the finished product above. I think it goes without saying that my favorite part is when Anna Nicole returns from the grave to ponder media coverage of her demise. “Hell,” breaths Ford, who, incidentally, is way too well-proportioned for the role. “Maybe they’ll even make a movie about me.” Wink!
Don’t criticize Chris Matthews when Jeffrey Wells is looking. Says the film blogger of the MSNBC anchor: “He’s the greatest free-associating blabbermouth provocateur on the airwaves right now. A brilliant shoot-from the hipper, an old-school boomer newshound, a Bill Maher facsimile, a sardonic preacher, a print guy from way back, an agitator, a stalker of evasion, a carrier of the old-liberal Kennedy nosalgia flag and a bullshit spotter par excellence.” Also, he really likes movies.
There have been so many tributes to the late Roy Scheider on the web today that by early-afternoon, I felt like I had nothing else to add. Self-Styled Siren offers her own, as well as a compilation of some of the best from other sites.
A female writer at Entertainment Weekly contends that an Amy Heckerling movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer is going straight to DVD because movies about middle-aged women are unmarketable. Erin at Steady Diet of Film calls bullshit on that, as well as the notion that Pfeiffer hasn’t worked in six years. “Uhm don’t tell that to anyone who saw Hairspray or Stardust (totaling $335M worldwide).”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Don’t criticize Chris Matthews when 
