As long as X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a success this weekend (and despite all its “bad luck,” it should do very well), Fox will follow it with another X-Men spin-off, this one detailing the back story of Magneto. Outside of that project, which has been in the works just as long as the Wolverine film, there’s interest in solo movies for Gambit, Deadpool and Emma Frost (White Queen), as well as a spin-off about the original X-Men team as students.
Recently, in another list, we called for an Origins film focused on the shape-shifting villain Mystique, for which we even suggested Brian DePalma to direct. That spin-off is still our first choice, but since there are so many great mutant characters in the Marvel Universe, we’d like to pitch ten more X-Men origin movies to Hollywood (not just to Fox). To go along with the studio’s idea of hiring an unqualified filmmaker (Gavin Hood) for the job, we also recommend a barely appropriate director for each film.
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It was shut out of the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, but Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, now playing in New York City, could easily inspire a Hollywood film about the life of its heroic subject. And that dramatic version could potentially garner multiple Academy Award nominations. It wouldn’t be the first time a figure documented in a nonfiction film was later portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie. In fact, one of this year’s Best Picture contenders, Milk, is almost like a remake of the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.
Actual dramatic remakes of documentaries include Werner Herzogs’ Rescue Dawn, which revisits the subject of his earlier nonfiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Michael Caton-Jones’ Memphis Belle, which fictionalizes the story of William Wyler’s doc The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, and Martin Bell’s American Heart, which is loosely based on one of the subjects of his Oscar-nominated doc Streetwise. Also, the upcoming HBO dramatic film Grey Gardens was inspired by the Maysles brothers’ doc of the same name, and Hollywood has toyed with or announced remakes of the films The King of Kong, Murderball, Bra Boys and Sherman’s March.
To carry on the tradition, we’ve selected nine nonfiction films in addition to Blessed is the Match that would make great dramatic features.
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As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more
