Early this year we featured a list of franchises in need of a genre change. The Rambo series was not one of the five selected, but apparently Sylvester Stallone thinks it’s a good idea to take a turn into sci-fi for the fifth installment of the action franchise. This, after the Indiana Jones series took a disappointing leap into alien territory last year. This, despite the fact Moonraker is one of the worst James Bond films.

The funny thing is, it’s difficult to find a straight up action or action/adventure franchise that doesn’t have sci-fi elements anymore. So wouldn’t it be nice to have these few series remain grounded in reality if they started that way? We think so. That’s why we’re going to beat Hollywood to the punch on a few action franchises that have yet to add aliens, monsters or whatever to their world.

The following five premises are completely ridiculous, and that is the point. Hopefully the series’ respective studios will thereby see that it would be a bad idea to do anything of the sort.
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For their new film, Sugar, writer-directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden cast an actual Dominican baseball player for the lead role of Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos, a … Dominican baseball player. This employment of a non-actor with appropriate skill of course adds credibility to scenes depicting the sport while also qualifying Sugar as part of the current “neo-neorealism” trend. But Algenis Perez Soto is not the first real athlete to play a fictional athlete onscreen. Recall that before Shaquille O’Neal did his worst playing a genie and then a superhero, the NBA star played a college basketball player in Blue Chips.

Typically, though, casting a real player as a fictional player isn’t necessarily for authenticity; many pros end up starring in films as fantastical as Space Jam and Like Mike, and often they take a back seat to a Hollywood star in the lead sportsman role, whether that actor can truly play the game or not. If he or she can’t, it’s likely they’ll be made to look like they have the moves, and in many cases such an attempt at faking it fails. To illustrate why it might always be best for filmmakers to do as Fleck and Boden have done, we’ve selected five of the most unconvincing sports moments on film.
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Both are broadly classifiable as science fiction, but Alien is basically a horror flick and Aliens has all the conventions of a war film. That’s a pretty slick transition from one type of movie to another, especially since the switch was so immediate within the series. Most movie franchises don’t play with genre in such a way until they’ve gone through a number of sequels, and even then the series usually just simply takes its characters into outer space, a la Moonraker, Jason X and Leprechaun 4.

Genre jumping isn’t that easy, though, unless a franchise inhabits a whole universe in which to expand through. Like Star Wars, for example. Originally a film series, the Star Wars franchise spread out into novels, which has allowed for dips into the romance genre and now horror. That’s right, an upcoming novel by horror author Joe Schreiber, titled Deathtroopers, takes the Star Wars universe into frightening territory described by Schreiber as “in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.”

So, if Star Wars can venture into the horror genre, what other movie franchises should attempt a genre jump? To toy with the idea, we’ve selected five film series in need of a change and suggested a possible redirection of genre for each.
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Attending the press conference for Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, I had a Eureka moment that revealed my own naivety. A woman had asked Van Sant about his creative casting decisions, not just in choosing straights to play all the major gay characters (including a stunning Sean Penn as the gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk), but also in selecting the talented and out Denis O’Hare to embody homophobe extraordinaire John Briggs (the face behind the Proposition 6/Briggs Initiative to kick gay and lesbian teachers out of California’s public schools). I waited anxiously for the director to expound upon what the press notes referred to as “sexual-preference-blind casting,” a subversive twist that relates to Milk’s own modus operandi of rejecting divisiveness regarding sexuality in favor of bringing people together (or as Milk protégé Danny Nicoletta puts it in the notes, “It doesn’t matter what side of the fence you fall on. In fact, just tear the fence down; we all live in the same world.”)

Instead I was taken aback by Van Sant’s candidness. The point wasn’t to use O’Hare in some sort of queer jujitsu to sidestep criticism from the likes of Harvey Fierstein (who’s compared the casting of straights in gay roles to blackface), but simply to get as many homos involved as possible. Thus he wasn’t casting O’Hare so much in a straight role as in a small role. Or as the director so delicately put it, no gay actors have the “box office stature” that was required to get the film made. O’Hare either played straight or he didn’t play at all.

In other words, one of the few industries left in which gay white men (actors) don’t make pay (i.e., wield power) equal to that of their hetero counterparts has churned out a movie about a gay white man who demanded equal rights. Which is ironic enough. And yet even while homo thespians don’t make the serious money in Hollywood some of the biggest box office draws have been allowed to play gay!

To wit:

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It’s no secret that Obama is ahead in the polls. Democrats don’t want to jinx it by saying they’ve got it in the bag, and Republicans don’t want to loose hope that an upset is still possible. Still, at this late stage in the game, a lot is being said about the endorsements Obama is getting. Colin Powell and The Chicago Tribune are both big ones, but smaller endorsements are coming out of the woodwork as well. Neil Cicierega, internet-famous for his Potter Puppet Pals YouTube videos, has finally broken his silence and thrown his support behind Barack Obama. It seems like the above video also has something to do with Pokémon, and it may or may not cause epileptic seizures. Two observations:

One, I just did some math and found out that 18 year-olds who will be heading to the poles for the first time next month, those all-important young voters, were six years old when Pokémon made its American debut! Six! I feel really old now. I guess appealing to voters’ ironic/nostalgic connection to Pokémon is not so silly after all.

Two, I can’t help but wonder if this sort of thing will exist four years from now. Let’s just assume Obama is going to win (according to some polls, he has a 10 point lead with less than two weeks to go). Assuming his first term goes relatively well, can he expect the same kind of grass-roots support, especially from hipsters? How much of this kind of support is based on his policies, and how much is based on the fact that he’s not George W. Bush? Come 2012, will John Cleese, Matt Damon, and Hayden Penettierre produce viral videos where the message is, “Let’s keep things the same!” It’s hard to imagine.

• Michael Douglas will portray Liberace in a biopic written by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King) and directed by Steven Soderbergh, which is only slightly less bizarre than the news two years ago that Nicolas Cage was to produce and star in a Liberace film written by the partners in parody Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg (Disaster Movie). Soderbergh’s project will also involve his Ocean’s series producer, Jerry Weintraub, and Matt Damon, who will portray Liberace’s purported lover, Scott Thorson.
• The second deal announced this week regarding a sci-fi version of The Fugitive: this one is titled Karma Coalition, and it’s different from the Tuesday-announced project, in that it involves the end of the world rather than time travel, and it’s written by the lead singer of an indie rock band (Shawn Christensen of stellastarr*).
• Please tell me the Bugaloos are next! Just as Kevin reported from Comic-Con, the Sid and Marty Krofft show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters will indeed be made into a feature film from Universal, which also recently adapted the Kroffts’ Land of the Lost.
• By rereleasing The Dark Knight in January, Warner Bros. plans to make sure Academy voters don’t forget about Heath Ledger’s posthumous Oscar nomination.

We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.

Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Guns and played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.

Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.

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• Ain’t It Cool has pictures from the Morocco set of The Green Zone, a Paul Greengrass film about the war in Iraq starring Matt Damon. AICN’s tipster says the U.S. military has refused to provide props for the film because of the script’s critical stance towards the war. I don’t know that it’s exactly standard practice for the military to lend equipment to Hollywood productions anyway, but LIBERTAS says this is just one more sign that filmmakers who question the war are “enablers of evil willing to squander tens-of-millions in the hope of watching untold numbers of abandoned Iraqis fed into the meat grinder of death squads and terrorists.”
• Eugene at indieWIRE notices the similarities between the new poster for Baghead, and the poster for 60s sex farce Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (starring young Elliott Gould….drool). I think the Baghead poster is kind of awesome––I love it that it downplays the totally (and I’m sure somewhat intentionally) unconvincing horror aspect of the film.
• Vulture counts down budding filmmaker Madonna’s five worst in front of the camera contributions to the music video canon. The big loser is the partially-animated “Dear Jessie”, which is truly awful, but also enough of an oddity that it’s a shame it’s already been removed from YouTube.
• To close the day on the most prurient note possible: the tabloids say Lindsay Lohan’s drinking again, but Radar says she’s just an avid Facebook updater who takes both her sobriety and alleged lesbian lover Samantha Ronson very seriously.

Two of this year’s Oscar winning films were sequels. And only two Oscar-nominated films are officially slated for sequels. But only one film fits both of these truths. The Bourne Ultimatum, which was a bit of an upset in its winning of three Academy Awards, including the shocker of Best Editing (which Christopher Rouse certainly deserved), will definitely be getting a follow-up, if this Variety article from Friday is correct (via Cinematical and Empire). The possibility of a fourth Bourne installment has been floating around for awhile now, despite the fact that Ultimatum so nicely tied up the series’ storyline and despite implications from Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass that continuing the franchise is unnecessary. But considering Ultimatum was a box office hit, and a critical favorite (it was one of the best mainstream films of the year) and has now won three Oscars, it seems like a no-brainer that Universal should want to keep Jason Bourne running.

The same can’t be said for that other Oscar-winning sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Although director Shekhar Kapur has said he wants Elizabeth to be a trilogy, it’s unlikely that the third film will be greenlit anytime soon. Of course, the plan is to revisit the story after another decade and things could well be different in ten years. Even if it weren’t likely to be a box office or critical success, it could be worth making just for the Oscar glory. I know that Alexandra Byrne wasn’t the first costume designer to receive Oscar nominations for work on two different films in the same series (Ngila Dickson and Richard Taylor were both nominated for two LOTR films), but if she suited Cate up again for a third film, she might be the first to have that honor of making it three. Meanwhile, Cate could also be the first actor or actress to be nominated three times for playing the same character.

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I know I’m late, but I just finally saw the last of the Bourne movies this week, and I just had to comment on the casting of Albert Finney in The Bourne Ultimatum. Was it intentional to employ an actor that would be so confusing to viewers who would easily mistake him for Brian Cox, an actor who appeared in the first two films? It’s worth noting that our first look at Finney’s character is in a photograph, and so the ability to recognize him as a different actor than we’d previously seen in the series is less than if we were introduced to him in person.

As little as I figure out what purpose it serves, I think the lookalike casting had to have been a conscious decision. After all, who hasn’t mistaken the actors for one another at some point in time? When Cox first became a heavily used character actor, I mistook him for Finney. And according to a five-year-old Page Six write-up, Cox gets wrongly identified as Finney all the time (”But I’m much better looking,” he says). It wasn’t surprising that I have found countless reviews of The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as forum comments, that acknowledge the confusion regarding Finney’s appearance in the sequel. Unfortunately, I can’t find any discussion of the film that attempts to give a reason for the casting choice.

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• They’re not a trade, but they’ve got the biopic casting news everyone’s talking about: MTV reports that Anna Faris has won the starring role in a film about Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace. The last time I wrote about this project was in March 2005; at that time, Courtney Love was set to star.
• Brad Pitt will replace Matt Damon in The Fighter, a drama about an Irish lightweight boxing champion. Damon, according to Variety, “had too many projects on his dance card to make the film on the schedule Par[amount] wanted.”
• Brett Ratner is going to make a movie about Frank Sinatra’s long-suffering valet, and guess which Rush Hour veteran is set to star? It’s going to be based on a book by William Stadiem, who says of Ratner, “I think he’s channeling Frank sometimes.”
• Magnolia’s recently-announced genre label has made two new acquisitions, both starring martial arts star Marko Zaror: Kiltro and Mirageman.

The Bourne Ultimatum, the third installment in the series starring Matt Damon, broke a slew of records this weekend with its $70 million+ opening. It’s not only the best Bourne opening yet — it’s the best August opening weekend of all time. But even a hands-down victory is susceptible to multiple spins.

At some point, someone positioned the Bourne franchise as a direct competitor to the James Bond franchise. And so, Variety’s weekend post mortem opens by noting the new spy’s dominance: “[F]ilmmaker Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum nabbed the best August opening on record, outperforming the debut of any James Bond pic as well as the previous two installments in Universal’s Jason Bourne spy.” The Greengrass shout-out is, I think, also significant: when was the last time a Bond film was associated with its director? The implication is that the Bourne franchise–which was handed to Greengrass after the studio determined Bourne Identity director Doug Liman (who secured the rights to the Robert Ludlum novels, wrote the Identity script and actually operated the camera for a portion of the first film) was too difficult to work with — is succeeding in part because of the auteur vision behind it.

Ever bottom-line minded, Brandon Gray at Box Office Mojo notes that this third Bourne *needed* to open huge. “The Bourne Ultimatum’s production budget bulked up to well over $100 million, compared to $75 million for Supremacy and $60 million for Identity.” Blockbusters generally need to gross twice their acknowledged production budgets, in order to cover marketing and distribution costs before turning a profit. Nikki Finke thinks it may face tough competition from Rush Hour 3 next week (yes, seriously), but BOM’s outlook on that score is pro-Bourne. Gray notes that exit polls on Ultimatum had viewers rating the pic extremely high, which suggests that it’s got strong holdover potential in the weeks to come.

Last weekend’s winners showed a market lack of that holdover potential in this frame. The Simpsons Movie dropped an astounding 74 percent from Friday-to-Friday, and 65 percent for the weekend as a whole; it still ended up in second place, but only because the competition was equally weak. The Andy Samberg misfire Hot Rod opened in ninth place, with about $5 million on 2,600 screens; the BRATZ movie couldn’t even manage that. The biggest indie showing of the week came from El Cantante, which debuted in 12th place with $3.2 million on about 540 screens; indie holdovers such as Rescue Dawn and Sicko are falling fast, with the latter about to drop out of the Top 20.

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