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Guy Ritchie Gets Downey. Trade Roughage 07/10/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 3 months ago
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  • Robert Downey Jr will go straight from Iron Man victory lap to Guy Ritchie’s brave attempt to overcome his wife’s fatal pull Sherlock Holmes movie. The project is being fasttracked in order to beat that other Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Will Farrell and Borat, to the screen.
  • So much for “final offers”: the day after AFTRA ratified their deal with the studios, news breaks that the AMPTP has offered SAG a $10 million, retroactive-to-July 1 bonus if they agree to ratify the contract by August 15.
  • The NY Times is getting a cash infusion by selling the development rights of their stories to Hollywood studios. The most recent story to go on the block (and the 15th in two years) is “This Strange Thing Called Prom,” a June 22 piece about students at a multi-culti Brooklyn high school preparing for the big night. Miramax bought it, but hasn’t yet attached any talent.

Madonna Divorce Gossip Raises Question of Guy Ritchie’s Street Cred

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 7 months ago
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Guess what? Regurgitating gossip about Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s marriage is now fair game for movie blogs, because they’re both filmmakers now! Yay! Or, I mean, boo––I must protect my integrity and not get swept up in the promise of search-propelled page views. I don’t even know anymore! Oh, Madonna––life IS a mystery, isn’t it?

Anyway. Page Six is reporting that Madonna has fallen out of love with the man who remade Swept Away for her, because she’s realised that he’s not quite the street urchin she thought he was:

“Madonna is said to have lost respect for Ritchie when she found out he had embellished his past,” one in-the-know Briton told us. “Far from the tough, working-class London dude he adoringly echoed in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, he’s actually a privileged, prep school boy who chose to affect a gangland accent and walk with a street swagger. Brits can spot this at 100 yards, or hear it in an accent. Yanks, alas, can’t.”

I’m sure I don’t speak for all “Yanks”––I am half-British, after all––but I always thought that *was* Guy Ritchie’s schtick, that he was a suburban kid who had as much first-hand experience with actual gun runners and gangsters as Quentin Tarantino had with hit men and Japanese mafia queens. Is that, really, the reason why the then-happy couple’s Swept Away was so awful––beyond the fact that Madonna was in it, beyond the fact that Lena Wertmuller’s film really didn’t need to be remade––because Ritchie couldn’t wrap his head around what was sexy (or funny, even) about a rich woman being dominated by a proletariat?