For what it’s worth, it’s perfect casting, but there’s still something surprising about the news that Dakota Fanning is taking on the starring role in Floria Sigismondi’s film about ’70s girl group The Runaways. As 15-year-old rocker Cherie Currie, Fanning will continue to bait stories about how quickly she’s growing up, though really the part seems both ironic and appropriate for the former child actress. Currie, who fronted the band wearing a lot of low-cut tops and lingerie on the outside (before Madonna!), may have grown up too fast thanks to her sexualized image and early abuses of drugs and alcohol, but just because Fanning will play the part doesn’t mean she’ll be similarly thrust into adulthood. If anything, her masquerade as Currie will be more effective if audiences recognize that Fanning is still a little girl.
Fanning remains on track to be her generation’s Jodie Foster (who, interestingly enough, costarred with Currie in the movie Foxes), rather than her generation’s Drew Barrymore. And at best this could be her Taxi Driver(at worst, it’s actually her Foxes). Unfortunately, Fanning is a young girl in the age of creepy Internet comments and count-down clocks (not to mention the truly terrible examples of pedophilia to be found on the web), so much of the response to her casting is going to be stuck in predictably thoughtless concerns for her fading innocence and joked anticipation of her innocence lost.
Here are some of the blogged expectations for how the role will impact Fanning’s age and image:
This has been a good week for remakes (or a bad week, depending on how you feel about them), but while announced redos of our beloved mystery comedies, sci-fi actioners and neverending fantasy flicks are shocking enough, there’s not a blogger in the world who saw a new “contemporized” version of Damn Yankeescoming. Let alone one starring Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal as Mr. Applegate (aka Satan) and soul-selling baseballer Joe Hardy, respectively.
Yet Hugh Jackman and the rest of the all-singing-all-dancing stars of Sunday’s Oscars telecast did tell us that the musical is back, so maybe we should be making bets on what classic songfest gets reworked next (I’m putting money on West Side Story). This isn’t even the first musical remake we’ll be seeing in the next few years. New films of My Fair Lady, Carousel, Bye Bye Birdieand Jesus Christ Superstarare apparently already on their way to theaters. Anyhoo, let’s see how the ol’ blogosphere reacted to the Damn Yankees news today:
Behold! Set pics from Woody Allen’s new horror movie, in which 20 year-old Evan Rachel Wood and 60 year-old Larry David grab a knish. Looks like Ben Kingsley was just the beginning of the threat to Hollywood’s nubile youth. More at dListed, if you can stomach it.
The news [via Vulture] that Larry David has been cast in the lead of Woody Allen’s upcoming return to New York project makes me really happy for some reason. I mean, obviously, he’s been cast in the traditional role of Woody stand-in; and, obviously, there is going to be either a romance or some kind of hokey mentor relationship between he and the sure to be precocious-yet-neurotic sexpot played by Evan Rachel Wood. But still! If Woody *has* to make films about old men and the young girls who are inexplicably drawn to them, at least he’s found a pair where the girl has experience kissing up to a much creepier older man.
For a taste of what David can do when working alongside a canonical New York auteur, check out the clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm above.
Julie Taymor’s long-awaited Beatles-fueled musical seems to have split critics neatly into two camps. There are people like Aaron Dobbs and Anne Thompson, who give Taymor’s spin art 60s pastiche an A for effort, but ultimately concede that the film could, at the very least, stand to have some rainbow-hued fat cut. Then there are the full-on haters, like the journalist I spoke to immediately after yesterday’s press screening, who used the phrase “literally retarded,” and Glenn Kenny, who compares the “mortifyingly soft-headed” experience to “watching Sesame Street.”
They’re all right, and they’re all wrong. The first hour of Across the Universewas nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be; the remaining hour+ was worse. It’s not an experience I would recommend for any obsessive Beatles fan (you’d never be able to stand the fast-food commercial instrumentation), and Taymor’s refusal to deal with the dissolution of the counterculture will infuriate hippie cynics.
But I’m absolutely positive that a shorter cut, stripped of some of the forced multiculturalism and contemporary political references, would play like gangbusters in middle schools.
MTV’s Movie Blog is trumpeting two exclusive new trailers for Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s big budget period musical starring a pre-Marilyn Manson Evan Rachel Wood and set to the songs of The Beatles. These trailers are super different from the film’s international trailer, which Sony implanted on YouTube a few weeks ago. Where as the international spot seemed to play up the film’s non-musical elements (epic scope, romantic and political subplots, Taymor’s patented baroque psychedellia), these new trailers seem squarely aimed at the High School Musical crowd.
It’s probably a smart move for Sony to hedge their bets like this: the new, music-video-on-crack trailers have a shot at reaching the kids who are currently pushing Hairspray to $100 million, while the international trailer might lure their Boomer parents. But the both sets of trailers would seem to give credence to an idea disseminated by the hatchet job Nikki Finke wrote on Taymor back in March: it now seems probable that the movie Sony is unveling at Toronto next month is very different from the movie they hired Taymor to make.
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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This has been a good week for remakes (or a bad week, depending on how you feel about them), but while announced redos of our beloved mystery comedies, sci-fi actioners and neverending fantasy flicks are shocking enough, there’s not a blogger in the world who saw a new “contemporized” version of Damn Yankees coming. Let alone one starring Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal as Mr. Applegate (aka Satan) and soul-selling baseballer Joe Hardy, respectively.
