It’s an appropriate week for Universal to announce they’re making an adaptation of the classic Atari game Asteroids, because chances are the thing will end up opening on a 4th of July weekend. Just like Independence Day and Armageddon. Actually, as far as I can tell a movie of that arcade game could very well be a sequel to Armageddon. Except that Universal won the four-studio bidding war, and Disney did not (I’m unsure if Disney was even one of the bidders, which also included Fox and Sony). But Disney should go ahead with Armageddon 2 anyway in order to give us another summer like that of ‘98. DreamWorks can also get in the game with a Deep Impact sequel, but it’d probably have to be distributed by Disney, so that might be an issue.

I have to concentrate on when this thing will be, because focusing on what this thing will be is futile. And that’s the primary reaction to the news today: what the hell will an Asteroids movie be about that will fill up a feature-length running time? And why did four studios fight over such a simple property? Check out some of these reactions from the film blogs after the jump:

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I always thought that nobody liked Drop Dead Fred. Even as a kid, when I liked everything, I knew this movie was terrible. It stars Phoebe Cates way past her pinup days, prominently features Rik Mayall, who is so obnoxious he almost ruins The Young Ones at times, and it involves some of the most childish slapstick ever put on film. It pretty much tanked at the box office, opening in sixth place (though it at least had a better per-screen average than both third-place Hudson Hawk and fourth-place Only the Lonely). Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 9%, and its IMDb rating is less than 5. Yet, as with any movie Hollywood decides to remake, people are whining. Really? At this rate, I believe that even if someone announced a remake of SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 we’d see complaints about it online.

All I can say is that Universal has picked the perfect person to fill Mayall’s shoes, because Russell Brand is definitely this generation’s most annoying British comedian. What they shouldn’t do, though, is say this new version is going to be more like Beetlejuice. It’s going to be very easy for them to outdo the original DDF, and I applaud Hollywood for trying to improve on a failure for once, especially when it fits with a quote from the film (”You see when something’s not working right, the best thing to do is tear it apart to make it better.”). But there’s no sense comparing this to Tim Burton’s masterpiece. That’s absolutely the wrong way to pitch this thing.

Read what others are saying about this latest remake announcement after the jump.

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A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.

Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.

Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played.
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Are you one of the many sci-fi and comic book geeks who’d be more interested in Push were it not for Dakota Fanning? Sure, the precocious child star is now a teen actress (she’s about to turn 15), yet that probably makes you even more worried about her appearance in the movie. But what can you do? She’s literally everywhere this week – voicing the title character in the animated Coraline and starring in two new video releases, Hounddog and The Secret Life of Bees, both of which were released Tuesday. In the tradition of child actors continuing careers into adolescence, it’s only a matter of time before she ruins a movie that would have been better without her.

We’ll have to wait until this weekend to see if that time is now, with Push, but in the meantime let’s take a look at some of the past offenders in this tradition. Most of the following former child actors (our definition: actors that began their career below the age of 13) have done great things in their adulthood, but each has done at least one film that could have been better without him or her. You may disagree with some of these picks, and you may think we’ve forgotten some (was Christian Bale really the worst part of The Dark Knight? did Mary-Kate Olsen’s disturbing kiss with Ben Kingsley take away from The Wackness?), so do share your own thoughts on former child stars below. We just ask that you keep your comments somewhat tasteful and law-abiding.
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• Analysts are expecting opening week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. Why do we care? Because, as Ben Fritz puts it at Variety, that’ll be “close to, if not above, the No. 1 film bow of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which grossed $404 million worldwide in its first six days. For a taste of what the fuss is about, check out the game’s trailer above.
• After the massive success on the site of the film’s soundtrack, Juno became the first Fox film to became available for download-to-own on iTunes yesterday, the same day as its DVD release.
• Universal’s Vivendi Entertainment has made its first theatrical acquisition with New York, New York, that omnibus thing with the Natalie Portmans and the Scarlett Johanssons and the etcs.

• A bunch of actors (including Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, Hayden Christensen, and Olivia Thirlby, aka The Other Broad From Juno) will direct segments of the omnibus feature, New York, I Love You.
• As part of a gambit to make the kids aware of The Love Guru, his first movie in roughly forty years, Mike Myers will host the MTV Movie Awards.
• The Weinsten Company has purchased All Good Things, the debut fiction feature from Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, which begins filming this month.

• “From the grave of Queer Cinema emerges the gay zombie movie, in the form of German-Canadian co-production Otto; or, Up with Dead People,” declares Matt Riviera. His aim is to defend Bruce LaBruce’s latest “intentionally bad film” from critics who refused to engage with it. “I wonder if some of the folk who didn’t get Otto simply missed the second layer of satire beneath the obvious metaphor of capitalist, consumerist societies turning today’s youth into zombies (kids who feel ‘dead inside’).”
• Jeffrey Wells reminisces about his brief stint as a publicist for New Line: “I grew up under the domain of an alcoholic dad, and can tell you that I felt the same disturbed, frazzled, self-loathing aura. But at the same time I was relieved that New Line wasn’t a chilly corporate place.”
• At Big Media Vandalism, Odienator offers a recap of Black History Mumf.
• “4:43p Scarlett Johansson gets married. Tells Anne she is scared about tonight (cause of the sex, in case you’re slow)…4:45p Scarlett’s husband says “lie down.” That’s it. Wow, sex was awesome back then.” Ricky and Alex at 23/6 live blog The Other Boleyn Girl.

Craig McLean’s 3668 word profile of Natalie Portman in the Guardian is chock full of anecdotes about what a Great Person the actress is: she was nominated for an Oscar! She went to Harvard, and also reads books! She’s a vegetarian, and she’d stop eating eggs in a minute if it wasn’t so hard! But then there are the immediate fanboy takeaways…

First and foremost, Portman talks at length about her decision to disrobe for Hotel Chevalier, her feelings about the finished film, and the aftermath of being naked in a video distributed on the internet. “It’s not that I regret the actual thing. But it really depresses me that…it can be used afterwards for different purposes. My picture ended up on porn sites.” Which is pretty much what I said two months ago.

Portman also says she was hurt by negative reviews of her performance in the Star Wars prequels, which “made my confidence in myself go down, [with] people thinking I sucked after that!” Interestingly, she goes on to say that playing a stripper for Mike Nichols made it all better. More here.

• It’s official: The Writers Guild will strike, as soon as Monday morning. It still seems like the impact will be focused on TV, at least for the time being. Les Moonves insists that CBS doesn’t need writers to make it through the season (although he didn’t comment on how the strike will effect late night shows like David Letterman’s). SAG is pledging solidarity, but has advised its members that if they’re under contract, they must go to work. The Teamsters say they won’t cross picket lines, to which ABC responded: “If you make a decision not to cross a picket line by another union such as the WGA, know that you are refusing to perform your duties on a day that you have a call and that the Studio has the right to replace you.” More on this clusterfuck as it unfolds.
• Natalie Portman has signed a two-picture deal for her production company with Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions. She’s separately setting up her feature directorial debut, an adaptation of Amos Oz’s memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. The script will be written by Naomi Foner, who is the mother of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
• David Fincher will direct an adaptation of the graphic novel The Killer for Paramount.
• Variety confirms a rumor that was in the NY Post a couple of days ago: THINKFilm has shelved a planned theatrical microrelease for Bordertown, and will only distribute the film on DVD. It’s the reteaming of Jennifer Lopez with her Selena director, Gregory Nava, and it was allegedly booed at the Berlin Film Festival.

• This week in Natalie NudeGate: Her nude scene is coming to the big screen! She maybe wishes she hadn’t done it!
• Great World of Sound tops the Gotham nominations.
• Manohla Dargis on the films of Andy Warhol.
• MySpace gets into the softcore Real World-ripoff game.
• John Kerry has bad taste in movies.
• Alfred Hitchcock is this year’s Truman Capote.
• Netflix used to say they wanted an indie revolution. Do they still?
• Redacted is being marketed much differently than its forebear, Medium Cool.
• Dumbledore may not be the only fictional character with a secret.
• It took two years, but Wristcutters: A Love Story is finally taking the indie box office by storm.
• An entry in the Close-Up Blogathon, on David Fincher’s music videos.
• Why the Golden Globes don’t care about world cinema — and why they shouldn’t.
• Mark Cuban’s latest reign as a reality star is over.
• There was a lot of adultery at NYFF.
• Shlock factory Troma is moving to Queens.
• A look at an incredibly candid shot doc about a single woman’s life in Baghdad.
• Do critics really have a problem with Tyler Perry? Or does Lionsgate have a problem with critics?
• Fox Searchlight is releasing Juno like an awards-bait indie. Meanwhile, Diablo Cody has sold yet another project.
• On FilmCouch, Kevin reviews Lynch and Karina talks to Richard Brown, whose series Movies 101 is coming to DVD.
• The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles has been reborn as an impeccably programed rep house. They’re showing films from a batch of our favorite new American filmmakers in December.
• Sidney Lumet’s latest is now in theaters.
• An entry in the Totally Unrelated Blogathon, on Karina’s past life as a foodie.

Several movies that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are opening in theaters today:

• Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, has been widely hailed as a “return to form” for director Sidney Lumet. That’s probably not inaccurate, but the last thing Devil feels like is the work of an old man recycling old tricks. Ballsy and occasionally incredulous in its illustration of extreme, self-manufactured desperation, Devil’s not exactly a masterpiece, but if can roll with its plot contortions, it’s a deeply satisfying bit of pulp melodrama. And it’s got the opening sex scene to end all opening sex scenes. Read my NYFF review here, and listen to Lumet talk about his late-career embrace of digital video here.
• The Darjeeling Limited expands yet again this weekend, but the real news is the theatrical unveiling of Hotel Chevalier. See a review of the feature here, and coverage of Wes Anderson’s short here, here and here.
• Saw IV’s opening box office has been positioned as a test of the lasting allure of the torture porn genre. But it’s also a test of the power of sex to sell blood.

A couple of blogs and pseudo news sources have picked up a story from WENN (the World Entertainment News Network, kind of a Reuters for gossip, except, as far as I can tell, WENN does very little original reporting and mostly culls news items from magazine interviews) claiming that Natalie Portman “regres” her “nude scene” (it seems imprecise to call a single pose, shot in slow motion, a “scene”) in Hotel Chevalier.

I say we can safely take this with a grain a salt. The WENN story doesn’t site a source, and just three days ago, Portman was quoted in a Hollywood Reporter story as saying the nudity “felt right.” But more importantly: Natalie’s not stupid–she went to Harvard. She’s gotta know that if she’s really serious about launching an online startup which may or may not involve lifecasting, then she couldn’t have engineered a better early promotion than getting naked on the internet.

Previous coverage of Natalie Nudegate^TM
:

• Chevalier Goes Theatrical, Fox Seeks Oscar Loophole
• Review of The Darjeeling Limited from the New York Film Festival
• Hotel Chevalier is not porn

For a recap of our NYFF coverage thus far, click here. Everything else you might have missed from the week gone by is linked below:

• Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales may not be a debacle any longer.
• Jesse James’ family slam Warner Brothers, lurve Brad Pitt.
• Brian DePalma declines to meet the NYFF press.
• Fosse!
• Harvey Weinstein moves a rook in his Oscars 2008 game, which right-wing bloggers drastically misinterpret.
• Sidney Lumet’s latest, dressed up like Saul Bass.
• When Michel Gondry has bills to pay, he sells recycled versions of his movies to cell phone companies. I’d *love* to get in on that racket.
• Billionaire indie film mogul Mark Cuban went on a reality show dressed as a hobo.
• Making fun of Mickey Rooney in Asian-face never gets old.
• Cover your windows in twee, courtesy of Miranda July.
• Sofia Coppola tries to sell her canned champagne via YouTube.
• The Showtime series that brought you voting zombies is moving to NBC.
• The stoner comedy of the year is going straight to DVD. How is that a bad thing for stoners?
• The extremely slim Natalie Portman unrobed for Wes Anderson’s short film, causing the entire internet to transform into twelve-year old rib cage fetishists.
• Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated There Will Be Blood premiered this week in Austin to rave reviews.
• On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin take a look at movie greed, by way of Wall Street and The Price of Sugar.
• The computer containing the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s next project has been stolen.
• Rueing the day you sunk your chunk of change into the ApplePaperweight? Jaman is here to help.

To skip straight to images and audio from the NYFF press conference for The Darjeeling Limited, click the “Read More” link at the bottom of the page.

The plot of Wes Anderson’s fifth feature concerns the misadventures of Jack, Francis and Peter, three 30-something brothers who gather on a train in India. It’s been twelve months since they last met, at their father’s funeral. They’ve been brought together by Francis (Owen Wilson), who, in the intervening year, almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident; he arrives on the train with his head bandaged like he’s had a lobotomy. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is fresh off a self-destructive tryst in a Paris hotel room with an ex-girlfriend; he’s grown a George Harrison mustache but walks around barefoot, like Paul McCartney on the cover of Abbey Road. Peter is about to be a dad for the first time; he insists on wearing his late father’s prescription sunglasses, even though they give him tension headaches.

All three are heavily medicated, trading black market Indian opiates at the dinner table before soup is served. Francis first tells Peter and Jack that they’re in India to reestablish their brotherly bonds by visiting a number of “spiritual places,” an itinerary which has Jack planning to jet off to Italy at the first snag. Francis then reveals that they’re actually on their way to find their mother, who is living in a convent in the Himalayas and who, for reasons unknown, failed to show up at their father’s funeral.

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