Pages tagged “film release”

Outside of journalists, Katharine Graham still isn't that well-known. But for those in the industry, she remains a hero if only for her Washington Post leadership during the Watergate Scandal and her support of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their investigation.

According to the Hollyood Reporter, Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa are set to join their fellow Hamlet 2 producer Eric Eisner in the production of a biopic about Jerry Garcia. The three have just signed on to produce the as-yet unnamed project, which promises a revealing look at the Grateful Dead frontman's youth.

If the inherently morbid 6,557 mile cross-country trek in Killing Yourself to Live had one lesson for Chuck Klosterman, it was the old trope that the journey is more important than the destination. Still, the destination has been pretty nice for Klosterman; five books into his career, he's the reigning king of pop-culture addicts. He'll be adding another feather to his cap (probably a Kiss hat) soon too: Half Shell Entertainment has nabbed film production rights to Klosterman's rock memoir/romantic confessional.

After years of talks, Marvel Studios has officially hired Joe Johnston to direct First Avenger: Captain America, part of an ambitious slate of major comic adaptations the studio is set to finance over the next several years.

Although some have pegged his latest, Changeling, as more or less a horror movie, Clint Eastwood is in talks to direct Hereafter, a new supernatural thriller to be produced by Steven Spielberg.

Some things date a movie horribly: rear projection, clearly hand-drawn animation for special effects, Shelley Duvall in a starring role, etc. But there are some films that contain none of these elements but are still, in and of themselves, a piece of pop-culture ephemera from another time and place. This is where Karate Kid firmly lands. Its premise is ridiculous, and pretty much everything about the film seems to exist more for the pleasure of lousy VH1 Remember the __s programs than as an actual attempt at making a movie. That being said, it sure is a fun and quotable flick.

In Sept. 2007, we reported on the first news of the next Simon Pegg/Nick Frost collaboration, to be called Paul. At the time, all we knew about the film was that the Hot Fuzz stars' typical roles would be reversed: Frost would take the lead role and Pegg plays the incompetent sidekick. Or, as Pegg put it in an interview with MTV's movies blog, "It's different actually. I'm the bitch in this one."

You have to hand it to Nicole Kidman. In her career, the Aussie actress has juxtaposed standard Hollywood fare (often box-office disasters) with challenging, non-traditional roles in independent films with little to no commercial appeal. For every Cold Mountain, there's a Birth, where she played a woman convinced her dead husband had been reincarnated into the body of a 10-year-old boy; or a Dogville, the Lars Von Trier's three-hour melodrama on human nature at its worst; or a Fur, an "imaginary portrait" of famed photographer Diane Arbus that saw her lover, Robert Downey Jr., covered head-to-toe in hair. Even her Oscar-winning role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was a bit of a gamble.

There has been perhaps no better match between a comedian and a project this decade than with Jack Black and School of Rock. Sure, Will Ferrell's been memorable in a number of things, like Old School and Elf. Vince Vaughn was funny in Wedding Crashers, but his wisecracking motormouth shtick has since grown tiresome. Bill Murray found the role of a lifetime in Lost in Translation, but the film was more of a melancholic meditation on life and loneliness than a full-blown comedy. For our money, Black's infectious and warm performance in Richard Linklater's film is simply pure, unadulterated brilliance. Anyone who can make the cello joke at the two minute mark work deserves our praise. (Let's just pray the proposed sequel doesn't taint it.)

British director Michael Winterbottom has yet to really break out in the American box office, but that's probably because he couldn't care less. His films run the gamut from purposefully difficult (A Cock and Bull Story) to pitch dark (The Road to Guantanamo). However, his next picture, The Killer Inside Me, may be just the thing to pick up more than trifling interest stateside.

It's a bit of a surprise to hear of a new game adaptation being announced so soon after Max Payne flopped both critically and commercially. On the other hand, game-to-film adaptations are becoming so numerous these days it's becoming almost noteworthy when a gaming company tries to maintain its integrity and not attempt a transition to the big screen. Latest on the slate is Electronic Arts' Army of Two, which, by all reports, isn't all that great in the first place.  However, the game has sold more than two million copies.

By turns adventurous and steadfastly conventional, Antonio Banderas has had a diverse and often puzzling international career, swerving from aberrant sex comedy in early Almodóvar films to old Hollywood lothario stints in movies like The Mask of Zorro. He's been confined mostly to light paternal roles since, but Variety reports that he is in talks to take the title part in Dali, a third new biopic about the famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali that could be one of the biggest parts of his career.

Word of mouth for Revolutionary Road is pretty hot right now, not to mention interest surrounding what else Sam Mendes may be up to in the future. But strangely enough, that's not the only of his works that's getting some notice from the studios. EMO Films announced that it will be expanding his Road to Perdition into a trilogy, with the writer for Perdition's comic book Max Allan Collins (which it was adapted from) on board as director.

Undeterred by the chilly reception of their last attempt to revive a classic comedic property, the Farrelly brothers have finalized a deal with MGM to bring the Three Stooges back to theaters. The new movie, long in the brothers’ eyes, already has a script and looks to be ready for a Thanksgiving 2009 release.

Film's always had its great directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Quentin Tarantino, and its embarrassments, from Ed Wood to Uwe Boll. But rarely are the truly mediocre talents, the ones who fill out the rest of a studio's yearly output, celebrated for what they add to the field. For our day and age, there is perhaps no greater creator for mediocrity than Chris Columbus. The director of Home Alone 2 and Rent, Columbus has now announced the next project he plans on tapping with his magical wand of passable entertainment: Ripley's Believe It or Not.

After playing at some festivals both here and abroad (including Telluride and Toronto), Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska skipped a theatrical run and went straight to YouTube, where it premiered in early October. The film is a companion piece to A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, currently playing in select theaters.

As close as a Preacher film has been to getting made, it's always seemed like a prayer that would never be answered.  It's not that the cross-country, nihilistic, confrontational comic book couldn't be filmed, but more that given its content, a studio would have to be pretty insane to throw up the kind of money it would take to do it right. But then, the same thing was said about Watchmen, a similarly dense and literate comic, so who's to say what gets greenlighted these days.

The video game hasn’t even been announced yet, but several Hollywood studios have already burned through a bidding war for rights to make a movie from a new EA project with the working title Dante’s Inferno. Universal Pictures snapped up rights, beating out major bids from Paramount, MGM and others.

Right around the time Mark Wahlberg started to make out with an ape-suited Helena Bonham Carter in Tim Burton’s remake of Planet of the Apes (pictured above), it was clear 20th Century Fox had failed to reignite the old franchise. The movie posted decent numbers, but even with a gotcha twist ending that suggested the possibility of another movie, it felt distinctly like a one-time gig.

As far as remakes go, few directors have had their works re-imagined as many times as Akira Kurosawa. The most famous of these, A Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven, have been almost as successful as the originals. Since Kurosawa sticks to such universal themes and does so with a self-consciously Western eye, it's no surprise that as time goes by more directors are looking back to Kurosawa for future inspiration.

As details for Serge Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (Vie Héroïque) continue to come together, one thing is for sure: director Joann Sfar (of Ignatz-winning Rabbi's Cat fame) would prefer this biopic not be traditional. According to The Playlist, he refuses to use the word "biopic" at all, and his film will use special effects by the team that worked on Pan's Labyrinth. How this will color his 40-year sweep of Gainsbourg's life (from the early '40s to the '80s, stopping short of the poet/songwriter's death in 1991) is not as clear, but Sfrar insists that this won't be work in the vein of La Vie en Rose or Ray.

Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black must have made a good team on the upcoming political biopic Milk, because the two have already made a deal with Fox Searchlight to reunite.

With a four-hour Che epic, a top-shelf legal thriller and a porn-star-led comedy all ahead of him, Steven Soderbergh's next movie had to be big if he wanted to keep up the attention he’s received in recent years. And big it is. The director has tapped Catherine Zeta-Jones, Hugh Jackman and disbanded indie-rock outfit Guided by Voices for Cleo, a 3D rock musical about Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony.

We've been anxiously awaiting Boondock Saints 2: All Saint's Day for years, but forgive us if we were skeptical it would ever actually get made. Not only had director Troy Duffy pissed off seemingly everyone in Hollywood, but the movie had been in production hell so long that it was starting to tread into Chinese Democracy territory. Or maybe Duke Nukem Forever.

With a new Oscar for No Country for Old Men and a prized art-house role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona behind him, Javier Bardem has cemented his status as a marquee star of the specialty industry. The prolific Spanish actor is set to continue his ascent in Biutiful, the new film from Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Prior to Pineapple Express, most people probably thought they had David Gordon Green pegged as one of American cinema's up-and-coming indie auteurs. His modest, somber debut, George Washington, was one of the best-reviewed films of 2000. His directorial follow-ups—All the Real Girls and Undertow—garnered favorable reviews as well, and prompted Green's biggest cheerleader, Roger Ebert, to say the following: "He has made three films of considerable power and has achieved what few directors ever do: after watching one of his films for a scene or two, you know who directed it."

Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno will be out on Halloween, but the surprisingly busy Smith is already hard at work on his next project. Make that his next two projects, since despite interest surrounding Red State still hasn't found a studio for funding. Couple this with his third lecture DVD's release and a limited series run Batman comic book out early next month to make this perhaps Smith's busiest period ever.   

In the season three finale of The Office, Michael Scott (Steve Carell) competes with a couple of his co-workers for a prestigious new job at Dunder Mifflin corporate. "I am by far the most qualified person they're interviewing," he says. "Jim and Karen are here, which is cute. They're like kid actors, tagging along with daddy at the big audition, hoping to be discovered. Except daddy is the best actor around. Daddy is Meryl Streep."

At first, it sounds pretty routine: Variety reports that Brad Pitt has added a new adaptation of The Odyssey to his roster as a producer, and Warner Bros. is reportedly trying to maneuver him into the lead role. Sure, his previous Homer adaptation Troy (pictured above) took its time making back its budget, but these are the kind of evergreen epics almost guaranteed a profit. Nothing to see here.

With the year-end assault of prestige movies upon us, three major awards contenders—The Road, Defiance and The Soloist—have taken a more tentative place in the annual grind over concerns about release dates.

Love her or hate her, Julie Taymor, director of Across the Universe and Frida, has long been one of the few female filmmakers in Hollywood who has taken the industry by its throat and used it to her own ends. Even when that doesn’t necessarily sit well with major studios, she usually gets her way. So when, on her new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, she decided she wanted to cast Helen Mirren in the lead role of Prospero—a man—that’s precisely what she did.