With that in mind, I’ve devised a list of films that I’m excited to see (for the first time or not) and talk about in the coming 12 months. Later in the week, we’ll take a look at some movies we saw at festivals in 2008 which now have a release date in 2009, and also films which have no release date, but which we expect to see show up on the festival circuit in the coming months. But we’re going to get the macro out of the way first: after the jump, you’ll find three Big, Stupid Hollywood Movies which I’m assuming will be awful, but possibly in an interesting way. Do share the titles you have your own eyes on in the comments.
In her Variety column today, Anne Thompson contrasts Sam Mendes’ star-studded, Oscar-positioned, somewhat tonally revisionist adaptation of Revolutionary Road with the work and life of author Richard Yates. Thompson reminds what unlikely source material this is for a re-teaming of the beautiful young stars of the highest grossing film of all time, relating in detail the plight of “the long-suffering Yates,” who lived in “squalid” solitude, never sold more than 12,000 copies of a single novel, and hated the only produced film his writing ever had anything to do with.
In his day, Yates was asked by its editor to stop submitting fiction to the New Yorker, a publication which had no use for the writer’s “mean-spirited view of things.” In describing how Mendes and crew revised the material to make its protagonists “warmer and more sympathetic” (and chose to take their dreams seriously where Yates drily mocked and criticized), Thompson implies that Hollywood has no use for the acid element of Yates’ view, either.
Garrison Keillor’s sleepy-voiced radio monologues from the A Prairie Home Companion radio show might be the only way you know the native Minnesotan, but he’s also an author of more than 17 books. He’s published numerous short stories and poems since being published in the New Yorker in 1970, he hosts A Writer’s Almanac daily on NPR stations around the country, and posts regularly to his blog on the Prairie Home website. He’s also a daily columnist at Salon.com, which makes you wonder how he finds time for the rest of his life.
But despite all the books he’s written, Keillor hasn’t had anything made into a movie. Robert Altman directed a fictional feature film version of A Prairie Home Companion, but to a Keillor fan it came off as more of a parody of the radio show than anything else. So where are the movies? Here’s a guide to the five Keillor books I’d really like to see on the big screen.
I was reading Diablo Cody’s recent article in Entertainment Weekly about her love for Judy Blume, and started wondering why there haven’t been any movies made from anything she’s written. Earlier this summer my friend Jen Jones published a biography of Judy Blume, and when I rang her up about any Judy Blume films, she confirmed my fears: she’d been relegated to the world of made-for-TV movies and development hell.
Blume signed a multi-picture contract with Disney way back in March of 2004 (The New York Times talks about why it took so long), and since then we’ve neither seen nor heard a glimmer about the Deenie movie that was supposedly in development, nor anything about her other books. So in an effort to prime the pump, we’re going to present our top five dream casts for five of our favorite Judy Blume books. Check them out after the break.
Yesterday we pointed to a clip showing that everybody and their Pokémon-loving little brother seems to be endorsing Obama. Well not so fast, my friends, we’ve got them right where we want them. What if some legendary Hollywood directors produced attack ads for the McCain camp? Then we’ll see who has an eleven point lead! Folkinz points us to a clip of what it might look like if John Woo, Kevin Smith, and Wes Anderson went GOP. Although it would never happen in reality, anything is possible on the internet!
The Wes Anderson piece at the end is particularly good. If McCain just put guys in yellow jumpsuits running through the background in slow-mo in a few of his ads, I think he’d get at least a two point bump. The John Woo bit is pretty funny, but it could have used a much bigger budget, to the tune of ten million or so. But with McCain’s current fund raising woes, it’s not likely. Maybe Palin can hire Michael Bay to do some ads for her inevitable 2012 bid. They’d better start financing and preproduction right now.
In the 1980s it seemed like Hollywood hated everything that was going to compete with it: television, video games, books, comics, you name it. If it wasn’t being used as an ancillary product for a movie, then it was the enemy. Why would an executive want to embrace something like Spider-Man or Space Invaders and try turning it into a movie? Which, granted might be why so many movies from the 1980s were classic. Where’s our next John Hughes, already? If there was a video game announced tomorrow based on Ferris Bueller’s DayOff or Weird Science, I would retire this column for eternity. Unless the game sucked.
But what about movies that came out years ago that still live on through video games? Games have single-handedly managed to keep some franchises flush with cash, long before the currently Hollywood trend of retreading, prequelizing, and refurbishing movie happened. Now, you’re just as likely to have a game coming out day in date with the movie, if not a few weeks before in an effort to hype the buzz. But what about those that came before? Here are a few examples.
It wasn’t that long ago that Activision announced they’d struck a deal with Brett Ratner to develop movies based on their video games –– and that he wants to direct a Guitar Hero film. Now the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction as Electronic Arts just announced that they’ve struck a three video game deal with Zack Snyder.
We caught up with Zack at last night’s Watchmen event to find out the details. As it turns out, he’s a late-night gaming addict, even in the middle of trying to finish a huge Hollywood movie.
The doomsday scenarios in movies can be pretty outlandish, but some of them are actually plausible. After all, in world where pirates have tanks, Hollywood doesn’t need to stray far from reality for a good yarn.
Below the jump, we put five doomsday movie scenarios to the plausibility test. If you’ve always secretly thought Waterworld was a work of dead-on global warming prophecy, read on.
As the shit hits the fan on Wall St., a more gradual, but equally serious shake-up is happening in the world of independent film. Paul shares stories from Independent Film Week, a tumultuous clash of ideas about what the future of cinema sans Hollywood will look like.
Karina checks in to tell us about Fantastic Fest. Along with alcohol, karaoke, and BBQ, she’s enjoyed the films Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer.
Choke, the new film based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), comes out tonight. Is this Sundance alum truly provocative cinema, or just the same old thing with some extra sex thrown in?
There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
I’m a self-admitted board game junkie. Perhaps the Sears catalog from back in the 1980s is to blame. The photos of uber-happy families playing games together perverted my mind into thinking that everything that Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers put out was simply something I just had to have. Hell, they even made The Game of Life look like it was incredibly fun. So, now that I’m older and don’t have a parent telling me “no,” I’ve been collecting all these odd and old games. I was sorting through some of my stranger games today and spotted one I forgot I owned: Gosford Park: The Board Game. That’s right, they made a board game out of Gosford Park.
That made me wonder what the strangest movie to become a video game has been. You know, like if they’d made Little Miss Sunshine into a video game. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty fun game: get Olive to the beauty pageant on time while avoiding obstacles like Grandpa’s death, color blindness, and the realization that you have a failing career. Okay, maybe it’s not that great of idea, but still. Turning A Clockwork Orange into a game sounds strange as well, but someone has already thought about it.
Today Lionsgate releases Midnight Meat Train –– by all indications a cousin to the studio’s, um, classic fare like Saw and Hostel, but actually starring some name actors –– in just a hundred-something theaters, with no reviews. According to Grady Hendrix, it’s part of the studio’s effort to essentially slap the R-rated horror fans responsible for a decade’s worth of success in the face.
In the wake of the massive success of Stuff White People Like––the sometimes funny (but usually in a really annoying, condescending, post-collegiate know-it-all jerk-off sort of way) blog-to-book sensation that’s taken, um, seven or eight other blogs by storm over the pas six months––there have been, of course, imitators. The most recent is Stuff Hollywood Assistants Like, the most recent in a short line of semi0nonymous blogs which purport to offer tales from inside the drudgery of minimum wag Hollywood employment (see also Hollywood Temp Diaries, and wasn’t this the original gimmick behind Defamer?)
I like SHAL more than some of its competitors, if for no other reason than it actually has a voice and an idiosyncratic sense of humor … you know, like a blog should? Some recent entries of note: Earthquakes, Las Vegas, and Swingers (the diner, not the movie).
During Spout’s coverage of Comic-Con last week, my ears perked up during the Entertainment Weekly: Visionaries panel when Watchmendirector Zack Snyder started railing about the disconnect between video games and Hollywood. It’s nice to know that the director of next year’s mega-tentpole hopeful doesn’t want the marketing department at Warner Bros. to rush something craptacular to the waiting masses. Just like Steven Spielberg did in 1983.
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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Oh, 2008 … where has the time all gone to? It seems like just yesterday that we were cringing at the faux Golden Globes, learning about Sweding, and seriously debating Juno’s chance at winning Best Picture. What fools we were! Perhaps we ought to head into the last year of The Aughts with a better game plan.
In her Variety column today, 
Today Lionsgate releases 
