Yesterday I wrote of the news that Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov is helming an effects-heavy adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s not entirely shocking, but it does still seem like a cruel joke. More specifically, it sounds like something Jasper Fforde would jest about in his Thursday Next novels. Of course, the news came just as I’m in the middle of Fforde’s latest, First Among Sequels, in which Pride and Prejudice is turned into a reality TV show.

Although I’m not exactly well read as far as literary classics go, I’ve been wondering what other revered books (particularly those in the public domain) could be reworked as potential summer blockbusters. Obviously, there are certain sci-fi, fantasy and adventure novels that work, yet the fitting fictions of Verne, Wells, Burroughs, Dumas and others are already fodder for cheap movies with lots of action and/or special effects. Therefore, I’ve tried to limit my choices to those books that aren’t such easy candidates for a Memorial Day weekend opening.

1. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Dante’s epic poem has inspired a few films over the years, including the hugely successful 1911 silent L’Inferno, but it’s about time for Hollywood to bastardize the otherworldly tale with lots of computer-generated visuals. Maybe you’re thinking that What Dreams Come already made some attempt at this, and it failed at the box office. Sure, but it was still an awesome spectacle of a film. Now, think of something similar starring Will Smith as Dante. And some rewrites to allow for more fight scenes (yes, even in Heaven). The poem will be divided into a trilogy of films, of course.

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• Despite the rule that audiences prefer comedies during tough financial times, the box office winner over the weekend was the thriller Lakeview Terrace with $15.6 million. Director Neil LaBute had his best opening ever with the film, and it’s certain to be his highest grossing film overall, so business-wise he’s making up for Wicker Man. Meanwhile, of the new comedies, My Best Friend’s Girl debuted well below expectations (#3 with $8.3 mil.) and Ghost Town seems to have described its auditoriums (#8 with $5.3 mil.). My theory is that audiences were for some reason craving period pieces this past weekend (see the excellent per-screen averages for new limited releases The Duchess and Appaloosa) and went into Lakeview Terrace thinking it was something else entirely.
• Speaking of English period pieces, Nicolas Cage is set to star in one. But don’t suddenly think he’s back to Oscar territory, as the 14th century-set film reunites him with his Gone in 60 Seconds director, Dominic Sena. Titled Season of the Witch, it sounds like a cross between 3:10 to Yuma and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Unfortunately, it’s likely to be nothing of the sort.
• And finally, just because it also has to do with a period drama, and there’s not much else to get excited about in today’s trades, Miramax acquired the rights to Muchas Gracias, Bob Oppenheimer, which is set in Spain in the ’60s and deals with a miltary appeasement mission and a love affair. And yet somehow it’s likened to Saving Private Ryan.

• 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.

• Bangkok Dangerous opened with only $7.8 million over the weekend, but on the upside it still topped the box office chart and it was still better than Nic Cage’s last non-National Treasure movie, Next. Far more embarrassing is Babylon A.D.’s 58% drop and College’s 55% drop in their second week, as well as Hamlet 2’s 52% drop in its second week in an already disappointing attempt at wide release.
• Perhaps the Bard will have better luck with Paramount’s announced adaptation of the young-adult novel Spanking Shakespeare, which actually has even less to do with the playwright than Hamlet 2 does.
• The obvious pitch: Braveheart in Egypt. Will Smith is playing Taharqa, a pharaoh who led battles against the eventually successful Assyrian invaders, in The Last Pharaoh. Randall Wallace is currently writing a new draft of the project, and hopefully Smith is hard at work on the “Walk Like an Egyptian”-sampling plot song.
• Another soundtrack moment waiting to happen: “Hot for Teacher” playing as Jessica Alba becomes a second-grade math teacher in Marilyn Agrelo’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.
• Just as the latest Coen brothers film is about to open, the previous is back in the news. Unfortunately, it’s because Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount for more than $10 million, which he claims he’s owed for No Country for Old Men.

September is often used as a dumping ground for movies, but this year it also appears to be a dumping ground for once-great or once-promising talents who’ve lost their way. I’ve taken note of at least 10 individuals (actors, actresses and a couple filmmakers) who have new films out this month (I’m counting the Labor Day weekend, too) who are due for a visit from the Ghost of Movies Past.

More specifically, these people need to backtrack to the ‘90s, which is when most of them did their last truly great work. Perhaps they need to take a look at that earlier work and remember what it was they used to do. Or perhaps they just need to get advice from the Coen brothers, who similarly hit a slump in the new millennium, but who are now back on track with a few more Oscars in hand and a new comedy, Burn After Reading, which looks to be more in line with their ‘90s classic The Big Lebowski than their 2000s missteps Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.

Nicolas Cage (guilty September 2008 release: Bangkok Dangerous)

It could be argued that Cage made just as many worthless movies in the ‘90s as he has in the ‘00s. Also, considering his box office success with Ghost Rider and the National Treasure movies, plus his excellent Oscar-nominated dual role in Adaptation, it’s debatable that he’s “lost his way.” But it’s clear to me, at least, that he currently lacks any concern for the quality of his work, as evidenced by this month’s Bangkok Dangerous, which makes even Con Air look well crafted by comparison. In the ‘90s, Cage was doing much greater work for Scorsese, Lynch and even Michael Bay, and he won an Oscar for Best Actor, too. Unless he starts caring about the roles he chooses, he’s more likely to one day receive lifetime recognition by the Razzies than a lifetime achievement award from the Academy. Who he needs to work with again to get it back: the Coens; Uncle Francis (Ford Coppola); Scorsese; even Michael Bay would be good.

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• Or is it technically Ghostbusters IV? Columbia Pictures has hired writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, both of TV’s The Office, to script a new installment of the Ghostbusters series, which was previously thought to be hitting a final note with an upcoming video game (which Dan Aykroyd led us to believe was pretty much “Ghostbusters III”). The Hollywood Reporter claims that while the new sequel may involve the original cast, the main focus will be with a rookie cast of Ghostbusters.
• Paul Bettany, who played a kind of precursor to Charles Darwin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, will actually portray the famous evolution theorist in the biopic Creation (formerly titled Origin), scripted by Master and Commander’s John Collee and to be directed by Jon Amiel (The Core). Bettany’s real wife, Jennifer Connelly, will play Darwin’s wife/first cousin, Emma.
• Albert and Allen Hughes will finally follow-up their 2001 period-set From Hell with the post-apocalypse-set Book of Eli, which will star Denzel Washington as a man “who must fight across America to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption.”
• Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards script is pissing off the Germans.
• According to Variety, as long as male audiences aren’t too busy with the new football season or summer leftovers, Nic Cage and his latest crapfest, Bangkok Dangerous, should top the box office this weekend.

The first ever Summit Pictures Comic-Con panel, which was met with snores up until the Twilight segment began, and then really began amidst continuous Beatlemania-like screaming from fangirls. Oh, and we learned a few new things about Alex Proyas’ Knowing and Paul McGuigan’s Push.

Highlights:

• The Twilight actors are really into themselves.
• Robert Pattinson is one of the most wanted guys in the world.
• Robert Pattinson’s band might be providing a tune to the Twilight soundtrack.
• Nic Cage is in another movie about a foreseen disaster (Knowing).
• Alex Proyas is not directing The Silver Surfer.
• Dakota Fanning was the surprise guest (really she was just late), and she’s all grown up.

Read the liveblogging transcript after the jump.

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• The Happening had a much better opening weekend than expected (or is it feared?), coming in at third place with $32.1 million domestically, and actually beating The Incredible Hulk overall overseas. Meanwhile, Universal and Marvel insist that their superhero movie is a hit, even though it mad six million dollars less in its opening weekend than Ang Lee’s supposedly disastrous Hulk five years ago.
• Werner Herzog’s “don’t call it a remake” remake of Bad Lieutenant has found a female lead in Eva Mendes, who previously starred opposite new Bad star Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider. So, to recap: Werner Herzog is restaging an Abel Ferrara movie in New Orleans, with the cast of a comic book movie about a guy on a motorcycle with a fireball for a face. Sounds about right.
• Everything is Fine, one of my favorite films from Cannes, won the grand jury prize in the New Directors sidebar at the Seattle Film Festival this weekend.

“No tongue – my lipstick,” Diane Ladd’s conniving Marietta Fortune admonishes at the beginning of Wild at Heart, flirting with Harry Dean Stanton’s Johnnie Farragut, while perfectly setting the tone for the tantalizing sexual games to follow. Lynch’s typically bizarre noir contains one of the steamiest foreplay scenes ever to grace the indie screen. Strangely, this kinky non-sex scene involves not Laura Dern’s Lula and Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley (whose love scenes are saturated with such hyper-real color and artistic angles as to overshadow the screwing), but the childlike Lula and Willem Dafoe’s greasy, so-creepy-he’s-charismatic Bobby Peru (”Just like the country,” he drawls, introducing himself to Lula and Sailor outside the hotel they’re all staying at, sliding snakelike into Wild at Heart nearly an hour and twenty minutes fashionably late). Dressed in black, sporting a Clark Gable moustache, Bobby’s the ultimate contrast to Dern’s big blonde hairdo, red lipstick painted, 20-year-old piece of mentally damaged white trash. That the episode doesn’t culminate in predictable fornication only proves that the iconoclastic director truly understands how to harness the power of the erotic chase––that is, that it’s hotter than the catch.

I first saw Wild at Heart on the big screen at a more innocent time in my life, when S&M conjured up only images of women wearing corsets and stilettos, bearing whips and canes. But seeing the above scene between Bobby and Lula hit a nerve in me, in fact several. It was the only time I can remember actually feeling embarrassed at the movies, voyeuristically observing this charged encounter onscreen. The characters were both fully dressed, no fucking was taking place – so why did I feel like I was witnessing the dirtiest hardcore porn?

Probably because I was. Bobby and Lula engage in a power play game which renders Lula stripped psychologically naked. Instead of tearing off each other’s clothes they’re clawing at each other’s psyches. The sexual act pales in comparison.

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• You know how sometimes, things happen and you can’t really believe they’re happening, and you wonder if maybe you’re in a dream, or if maybe the universe folded in on itself and you got caught in some kind of warp in space and time that allows things to happen that wouldn’t be allowed on an ordinary plane? Um. Werner Herzog is remaking Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. With Nicolas Cage in the Harvey Keitel role.
• Tommy Lee Jones will “adapt, direct, produce and star” in a feature based on Ernest Hemmingway’s Islands in the Stream.
• James Garner, who is 80, is said to be recovering from a stroke. He had surgery on Sunday and his publicist says it went “great.”

• Over the weekend, a few critic groups united in naming No Country for Old Men the best movie of 2007. St. Louis, Utah and Florida all love the Coen Bros. movie, as well as Ellen Page, Amy Ryan, Daniel Day-Lewis and Ratatouille. They managed to mix it up a little bit, though, so as not to be completely identical/redundant/unnecessary. I’d give the most hugs to the gang in Utah for honoring The King of Kong if only they hadn’t disappointed me with their choice for best actress runner-up: Amy Adams. If I was booked to attend that little film festival of theirs next month, I’d totally change my mind and boycott. People just don’t know the lengths I’ll go to complain about this Enchanted kudos crap.
• Not surprisingly, National Treasure: Book of Secrets topped the holiday weekend box office with $65 million. I would have gone to see it, but instead I hung out at JFK airport for hours on end Sunday night and watched parts of Con Air on my iPod. I’ve decided that Nic Cage is a lot better suited for the small-small screen. Too bad such a strong opening means he won’t be making direct-to-iPod movies any time soon. 
• Perhaps this is a sign that studios will stop trying to find “the next Harry Potter franchise” and begin trying to find “the next I Am Legend.”: Potter actor Robert Pattinson (”Cedric Diggory”) will star opposite Kristen Stewart in Catherine Hardwicke’s teen vampire flick, Twilight. Too bad the Hollywood Reporter already gave us this story two weeks ago; too bad vampire movies have already been a monstrous trend in Hollywood; and too bad studios will never stop looking for “the next Harry Potter franchise.”

There’s good news and bad news for Darren Aronofsky fans, reports Twitch’s Todd Brown from the American Film Market. The good news is that the filmmaker has overcome the financial disappointment of The Fountain to work again. The bad news is that he seems to have foregone personal projects for the time being in order to direct a movie about “a washed out WWF wrestler”, starring (gulp) Nicolas Cage.

Speaking, no doubt, for many, Brown says “the idea of Cage playing a wrestler fills me with immense dread of the existential, I think I’m about to begin a slow transformation into a cockroach variety.” But Brown also notes that the project bears the mark of Aronofsky’s personal production company, which would indicate that “this is not a for-hire job put on him from outside but something developed internally.” We shall see.