Big Screen Little Screen

Heaps of morning coffee spitting stories in the past 24 hours, though this was the most dubious: rumors were flying Tuesday evening that Paul Thomas Anderson was “circling” the upcoming film adaptation of the long running Playstation cash cow, Metal Gear Solid. Slashfilm talked to sources at Konami Games that reasserted that it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity between P.T. and the lesser Paul W.S. Anderson (with fistfuls of crap game-to-movie credits to his name already) and that the There Will Be Blood director was truly in play. Though as was to be expected, they later offered another update from Collider that refuted the whole thing: their source attached to the film’s production blew off the speculation as “completely false and ridiculous.”

Offer of dweebish consolation: The Cash and Carry Tournament of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh Tributes to There Will Be Blood.

And now, legitimate but equally hard to swallow headlines:

Nicolas Cage to star in Werner Herzog directed remake of Bad Lieutenant (Variety)

Michael Moore plans Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel, but sidesteps the Weinsteins (Anne Thompson)

Point Break: Indo (Hollywood Reporter)

Jonah Hill in talks for 21 Jump Street adaptation (Entertainment Weekly)

The Weinstein Company will take the 1980s Jim Henson property Fraggle Rock to the theaters in live-action musical form, reports Variety. Just as Forgetting Sarah Marshall director and star Nick Stoller and Jason Segel have been lined up by Disney to oversee another Muppet Movie, the Weinsteins have entrusted the cave-dwelling Fraggles to a relatively unproven talent in Cory Edwards, who has but the 2005 animated feature, Hoodwinked! to his credentials as a director. In the film, the Fraggles - consisting of characters from the original production - will be removed from their natural habitat and interact with humans, who mistake them for aliens. Edwards will also write the screenplay for the Jim Henson Company produced feature.

A day after getting serious with Morley Safer (Defamer) - until the line about being “a young man” by “60 Minutes correspondent terms” - Alec Baldwin counterbalances with The Hollywood Reporter, talking up his upcoming pilot: “a hybrid between Star Trek, Falcon Crest, and Girls Gone Wild.”

Former “modeling” dabbler and current “reality” show “celebrity” Audrina Patridge is the “first” participant of MTV’s The Hills to land “an acting job.” Partridge will join the cast of Into the Blue 2, the newest installment in the “prestigious” “franchise,” as “a no-nonsense, beautiful beach babe whose boyfriend caters to her every command.” (Hollywood Reporter)

For the cover feature in Paste Magazine’s June Issue, Scarlett Johansson expounds on the transformative effects that Bill Murray, Woody Allen, Tom Waits, Barack Obama, and Bob Dylan have had on her young career and future projects - including her new album, next project with Woody, and her directorial debut (Daily Mail) as one of the host of stars contributing short films for the upcoming New York, I Love You.

“My Five Dads” - Paste

You would have thought that David Chase - seven-time Emmy winner and creative parent to The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure, and The Sopranos - would have had a shot at a feature by now - whether by choice or by lack of opportunities, he hasn’t yet taken that leap in his thirty-plus years in the business. Yesterday, Paramount Pictures announced that Chase will finally get his shot - writing, producing, and directing his first film, which will not be a continuation of The Sopranos, and has only been described as “an original drama.” (L.A. Times)

Here’s your first seven minutes of The Wachoski Brothers’ cinematic hard candy.

“This is a deranged, steroid-cranked family-action movie…the work of madmen — undeniably brash and looney and, I feel, desperately in need of a quaalude. Speed Racer is a piece of very audacious, high-quality….I was going to say “torture” but it’s not. It’s extremely nervy filmmaking…The performances are okay, but I found more fascination in the face of Chim-Chim than anything the humans came up with. I loved that fucking monkey…” - Jeffrey Wells

“It’s a terrible stereotype… but it is quite fascinating to me that the negative reviews of Speed Racer all seem to sound the same.

‘It’s too loud!’

‘It’s too fast!’

‘It’s too long!’

‘Too many colors!’

I am sympathetic to complaints about the visual intensity of this film. Seeing the film in IMAX last night was a bit of sensory overload. Very intense. And exhausting. (And in many ways glorious.)” - “No Movie For Old Men” - David Poland

The Criterion Collection has sent out an email newsletter (via Video Watchdog) announcing their rollout of high-definition discs for selected titles, starting with 13 films, including Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, and Wes Anderson’s (aforementioned) Bottle Rocket. Says Criterion, the new editions to be released in October “will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.”

Other titles to be released in this first wave of Blu-Ray: The Third Man, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, El Norte, Gimme Shelter, The Complete Monterey Pop, Contempt, Walkabout, For All Mankind, The Wages of Fear. (via GreenCine Daily)

Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) directed this back-in-black comeback comedy with Rainn Wilson (because Jack Black was unavailable) as a long ago dismissed drummer given another shot at glory twenty years later - backing his reject nephew’s band (Jonah Hill, also unavailable). Cast includes Jeff Garlin, Will Arnett, Christina Applegate, Jason Sudekis, and Emma Stone (Superbad). Screenplay from Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky (stints at The Larry Sanders Show and The Simpsons, respectively). Scheduled release: August 1, 2008.

The Rocker trailer

“I was always fascinated by the infinite, strange and ‘scandalous’ ways
that insects copulate.”

Green Porno - Isabella Rossellini directed and starred in these eight, minute long shorts for the Sundance Channel. The network approached Rossellini to create experimental videos for small, mobile screens, and she came back to them with insect world Sex Ed spots: all Bjork-like, green minded head-scratchers that might be considered obscene if they weren’t so goddamn cute. See the internationally fawned-over actress costumed as a randy earthworm, dragonfly, and more, offering astute bug wisdom like “If I were a firefly, I would light up my ass at night.” (via Indie Eye)

“When I first heard…I assumed it was going to be a very broad and stylized joke-a-minute comedy at Rambo’s expense…The fact that it was so heartwarming is the result of brilliant filmmaking by its creators.” - Sylvester Stallone’s quick about face over Son of Rambow (trailer), from Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith (aka Hammer & Tongs). The filmmaking team who’ve created music videos for everyone from Beck and REM to Vampire Weekend faced licensing delays in the release of their 1980s throwback tale of a boyhood VHS tribute to Rambo: First Blood, but Sly and everyone else came around soon enough. Son of Rambow is out now in limited release. (L.A. Times)

“Bristles with the anarchic energy of late childhood and a genuine respect for the life-changing power of movies—even (or especially) the schlocky ones…Son of Rambow is about children but not necessarily for them. Like a vintage John Hughes movie, it’s best appreciated by those just old enough to look back on their school days with a cringing nostalgia.” - Dana Stevens, Slate

First Showing has a few early stills from the Coen Brothers’ new spy-comedy, Burn After Reading. John Malkovich, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand star in the picture, with Malkovich as an ex-CIA guy whose plans to write an intelligence memoir are bungled by his wife (Swinton) in her pursuit of a divorce. The loss of her husband’s classified notes sets off what looks to be a comedy of errors in which Pitt, McDormand, and Clooney (as the CIA’s cleanup man) inject themselves.

This morning, Apple is expected to announce that they have negotiated a new agreement with major studios to make movie rentals available on iTunes the same day as DVD releases. Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and New Line are speculated to be part of the new rental deal, with more to be announced. (Hollywood Reporter)

NPR’s Ira Glass has another season of This American Life (Showtime) primed for television. Premieres Sunday, May 4. This evening, Glass is also hosting a one-time live version of TAS, broadcast via satellite to select theaters. Locate and contact for tickets.

Previously: Season 1 review

A broken hip adds to my tour of medical adventures. My current plan is to take it easy, obey the doctors orders, and start writing reviews again.

Granted, the design isn’t easy on the eyes and the few early entries are on the dry side, but what else do you need to know? (via Kottke)

Stephen Soderbergh will pair again with Ocean’s Thirteen writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien for The Girlfriend Experience. The film will detail “the world of prostitution from the vantage point of a $10,000-a-night call girl.” (Variety) This is the second film for Soderbergh to be financed and distributed by Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment and HDNet companies, after his brilliant but overlooked small-scale production, Bubble (2005 - Trailer). Like Bubble, where he cast non-professional Ohio natives as leads, Soderbergh might also go the non-traditional route with Girlfriend: he’s considering using an adult-film actress to play a woman who makes a million a year as an escort.

Prior to The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh’s two Spanish language Che Guevara biopics, Guerrilla and The Argentine, with Benicio Del Toro cast as Guevara, will premiere at Cannes next month.

American Beauty writer and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball’s first directorial outing, based on Alicia Erian’s 2005 novel Towelhead, was originally called Nothing is Private. The film is led by newcomer Summer Bishil - playing 13 year-old Jasira, of Lebanese decent. Jasira is passed off by her mother (Maria Bello) in Syracuse to live with her father in the suburbs of Houston - where she learns about and obsesses over her sexuality, faces local racism, and endures abuse from three different men - her father, her mother’s boyfriend, and a neighbor played by Aaron Eckhart.

It screened for audiences at The Toronto International Film Festival in September and was reamed from both ends of the critical spectrum by Roger Friedman of Fox News and The Reeler’s Stu VanAirsdale. Freidman called the rookie effort from Ball a work that “verges on kiddie porn” from “its graphic depiction of sexual, mental and physical child abuse,” labeling it “the feel-awful movie of 2007.” VanAirsdale, much more highly regarded in film circles in regards to taste and range of palette, nonetheless bashed Private in his own way, stating it was “like Todd Solondz remaking Crash in a cul-de-sac, but with twice the tampons and a quarter of the self-respect.” His vitriolic response was even worse towards the director, whose film treatment stirred such rage in VanAirsdale that he wrote that he wanted to train as a projectionist to work the New York premiere of the film so he could “smuggle the last reel down to the seating level and BLUDGEON THE MOTHERFUCKER [Ball] TO DEATH WITH IT.”

Advanced word hasn’t been entirely negative across the board though - Cinematical’s Ryan Stewart called it an “alternately moving and bitingly funny portrait,” while Jeffrey Wells said it’s “obviously one of the most original, daring films about adolescent sexuality ever delivered by a quasi-mainstreamer.”

Back in September (indieWIRE), Ball said that he wanted to use the title Nothing is Private because using Towelhead would make the story more about race and ethnicity and less about his intended focus, “a universal coming-of-age moment in a young person’s life.” Fast forward to this year - Warner Brothers reverts the name back to Towelhead. Despite Ball’s surprise over the shocked responses (NY Post), he should know by now that Towelhead (scheduled for an August 8th release) has a couple things to be mindful of - the racially charged title, along with a “kiddie porn” tag, and a critic looking to jump out of hiding just to kick his ass.

Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space), who had his Idiocracy release virtually swept under the rug by Fox in 2006, has Jason Bateman lined up for his next comedy, Extract, to be distributed by Miramax. (Variety)

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener in Synecdoche, New York (Image via Anne Thompson). Nominated for three screenplay Oscars, and winning in 2005 for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman’s first directorial effort could be his biggest head-trip yet, or just a colossal mess - Hoffman, as theater director Caden Cotard, juggles a handful of women in his life while attempting to construct a full scale replica of New York inside a Manhattan warehouse (there’s your Kaufmanesque touch) for his next play. Premiering next month at Cannes, Synecdoche also stars Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Diversional