Apparently Hollywood isn’t happy enough ruining my generation’s childhood, so it’s now also reaching back to my dad’s. Steven Spielberg is set to direct a remake of the 1950 classic Harvey , which stars James Stewart as an alcoholic who talks to an invisible, 6½-foot-tall rabbit. Based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the movie kept “Harvey” the rabbit up to viewers’ (and Stewart’s) imaginations, but many are fearing that this new version will feature a computer-generated character. Because that’s how Hollywood ruins childhoods best, with CG.
But this is Spielberg we’re talking about. No stranger to remakes — he redid A Guy Named Joe as Always, gave us an updated War of the Worlds and apparently did some second-unit work on Jan De Bont’s The Haunting — he’s still a lot classier than most Hollywood directors. He may go a somewhat boring route by casting either Tom Hanks or Will Smith in the lead, but there’s no way he’d show us Harvey. I think.
Check out what the rest of the film blogosphere is saying about this news after the jump:
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Yesterday, for the second time in two weeks, In Contention’s Kristopher Tapley confessed to being done with 2008 and noted a bunch of anticipated 2009 films. These aren’t necessarily titles he’s looking forward to seeing, though; it’s basically a preliminary jump on next year’s Oscar season. Because apparently this year’s Academy Awards are all but handed out, the winners properly predicted and expected, and now it’s time to think about what will be up for what in 2010. Those titles Tapley lists are Rob Marshall’s Nine, Peter Jackson’s Lovely Bones, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Clint Eastwood’s “Mandela“ (formerly The Human Factor), Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart and the latest from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant), Paul Greengrass (Green Zone), Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island) and James Cameron (Avatar).
Oh, and then Jeff Wells had to go and hint that Spielberg’s Lincoln is likely to arrive by year’s end. What and who else is being foreseen as nominated this time next year? Check out the links after the jump.
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When it was announced that David Wain would be directing Role Models — taking over from The Girl Next Door’s Luke Greenfield — there was room for disappointment. After all, for Wain to follow up his anarchic cult favorites Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten with a seemingly mainstream man-child comedy — one more suited to the talents of Todd Phillips or, well, Greenfield — was to crush his fans’ hopes for something more along the lines of his wacky web series, such as Wainy Days and Stella, or the old MTV sketch comedy show, The State.
But Role Models does look funny, probably because Wain ended up rewriting (with Paul Rudd and Ken Marino) Timothy Dowling’s original script. And it’s not as if Wain has suddenly gone and sold out with a bunch of really broad family films, as did his former State mates Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the screenwriting duo behind The Pacifier, Night at the Museum and Taxi. Still, many of us are holding out for that rumored State movie, or even better, a big screen adaptation of any of the following State sketches:
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From a McClatchy story from yesterday afternoon, long before Hillary Clinton’s “unexpected” win in the New Hampshire primary:
Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, a New Hampshire resident who’s endorsed Obama, said in an interview the day before the primary…that, if elected, Obama had the potential to be a Lincoln or a Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“He is the embodiment of our wish for ourselves, his ability to transcend the same-old same-old,” Burns said. “He’s a wonderful messenger who carries a complicated message to the rest of us of what we want to be . . . of a whole legacy of promise.”
I’m still trying to work out what it actually means for a messenger to carry me a message of who I want to be, but I do know that Burns has a thing about “transcendent presidents”––that’s the phrase used to describe Lincoln in the official synopsis of The Civil War.
