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Weekend Movie News Wrap Up: February 1st, 2009

Niall Browne — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:51:58 +0000

It’s February and Sunday and that means it’s Wrap Up time.

This week:

We look at the box office and Mickey Rourke sees Broken Horses; a Watchmen star watches women; Puss in Boots shuffles forward and Bryan Singer says Logan’s Run is slow.

Box Office

Liam Neeson’s Taken surpassed expectations and shot up an impressive $24 million over the weekend – despite the Super Bowl.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop arrested another $14 million bringing its total to $84 million. I’m guessing that at some point somebody will start talking sequel.

The Uninvited grabbed $10 million, while New In Town was pretty much ignored with a $6.5 million weekend. Looks like Rene Zellweger will be talking about Bridget Jones 3.

Gran Torino crossed the $100 million milestone and made another $8.5 million. Looks like Clint is going out on a career high.

Oscar hopeful Slumdog Millionaire made $7 million and managed to come within spitting distance of $70 million. $100 million is now almost a given.

Movie News

1. Mickey Rourke is in negotiations to star in Gangster film Broken Horses.

Indian director Vidhu Vinod Chopra will direct.

I’m guessing that the producers will offer Rourke more than $250,000.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

2. Watchmen star Jeffrey Dean Morgan will star with Hilary Swank in The Resident. The Hammer Horror film will be directed by Antti J. Jokinen.

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“The story centers on a young doctor (Swank) who moves into a loft in Brooklyn where mysterious occurrences lead her to suspect that she is not alone in her home. She discovers that her seemingly charming landlord (Morgan) has developed a dangerous obsession with her, resulting in a terrifying game of cat and mouse. “

The last horror film that Morgan and Swank starred in was PS I Love You.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

3. Shrek fans rejoice! The Puss In Boots film has got a writer. Tom Wheeler will write the Shrek spin off. In the meantime Shrek Goes Fourth opens on May 21, 2010.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

4. If you’ve been looking forward to Bryan Singer’s Logan’s Run then you might be unhappy to learn that the film is far away. If it’s even in the distance.

Also, it looks like Superman isn’t on Singer’s plate either as the director plans to take some time off. Speaking to LA Times writer Chris Lee Singer said:

“At the moment, I haven’t decided. I really don’t know. I’m taking a genuine break. The last four years have been really busy with the miniseries, the TV and the movies. I’m taking a few months to collect myself and figure out what I’m going to do in that regard. We did a lot of development on that movie and a lot of work. To start it up again, I wouldn’t start it up again without a full commitment. So I have decisions to make. Right now, that’s just hanging around.”

Source: LA Times

That’s it for now. See you at the movies.

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Logan’s Run: The Teen Years

Vic Holtreman — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:00:17 +0000

I last mentioned the plan to remake Logan’s Run in August, and it looks like although there’s been no news on it since then it’s still “on.”

MTV Movies sat down with producer Joel Silver and they chatted about his vision for the remake.

Disclaimer: I have not read the orginal story that the movie was based on.

In the original film, the story was about a society consisting exclusively of young people. At age 30 they would go to “Carousel,” which they thought was a passage to some higher level of existence, and thus went willingly, but was in fact forced euthanasia and they were just killed instead. It was an interesting concept and for its time (pre-Star Wars) it was a really cool flick. Sure, it’s a bit dated looking now so I’m not totally opposed to the idea of a remake…

But I really don’t like Silver’s idea for the movie.

Why?

Because in this version, instead of being killed at age 30, he’s going to drop the age down to 21.

I’ve heard of appealing to the younger demographic, but given me a freaking break. Here’s his logic:

“It’s the story of a very young culture that is controlling the world, very young people [who] never really become adults. They just stay youthful. We’re in a world today where everyone wants to be young.”

Now excuse me, but on what planet is 29 years of age (the max age of life in the original movie) not considered young? Sure, from the point of view of a 15 year old, it seems “old,” but making the max age of characters 21 in this thing is really stupid as far as I’m concerned.

Seriously, you only really start to experience life in your early twenties, and most people don’t even know who they really are until their late twenties. Brilliant idea killing off the population just about the time that they’re old enough to drink and vote, don’t you think?

I mean really, even in the original film 30 was too young an age if the point of the forced killing was to not have anyone in the population who was infirm, deteriorating due to age or otherwise unhealthy – it could easily have been set at 40. Although I do think that putting it at 30 was a good compromise from the point of view that they really wanted to nip things in the bud and emphasize to the audience how terrible it was. But 21? Please. That’s just retarded and it’s silly to set the age to a level where most people are just hitting their stride physically and mentally.

From a backstory point of view it just makes no sense and unless something changes I’m labeling this a stinker far in advance.

Source: MTV Movies

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Tron 2: A Tough Road Ahead

Vic Holtreman — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:40:29 +0000

A few days ago news of a new Tron movie started popping up on the net and today we have more detail on what’s happening with the movie.

The original Tron came out 25 years ago (if you can believe it!), released by Disney and went on to become a cult hit. The story was about a videogame developer (Jeff Bridges) who was sucked into the virtual reality world of computers, where he discovered that the programs there were actually sentient and living under the dictatorship of the Master Control Program. At the time the effects and concept were both cutting edge. Keep in mind that at the time the movie was released, the big games in arcades were Pac-Man and the first version of Donkey Kong!

It was directed by Steven Lisberger, who hasn’t done very much in the movie industry since making that groundbreaking film.

The video game which the movie spawned actually earned much more money than the film itself… that was back in the days when movies inspired video games instead of vice versa, anyone remember that? Anyway, for years fans asked for an updated version of a Tron videogame and finally around 2002 the game Tron 2.0 was released to fairly good reviews.

Now there is renewed interest in revisiting the Tron universe on the big screen and the director that has been tapped to helm it is Joseph Kosinski, who is also supposed to be directing the Logan’s Run remake. I didn’t particularly think he was a great choice for Logan’s Run, but his background in highly stylized and futuristic commercials may actually be a great fit for Tron.

Supposedly this will be a continuation of the story, so I can only assume that they will be contacting Jeff Bridges to resume his role from the original film (if they don’t, I’ll consider that their first misstep in this project). I don’t see how they could get Bruce Boxleitner to resume his role since he portrayed a virtual character in the first film and therefore should not age.

It will be written by a couple of writers from the TV series Lost: Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, and Lisberger will be involved as a producer on the film. Much like how Lisberger created test footage of the neon-glowing frisbees of death to help pitch the original, Kosinksi has been tasked with coming up with test footage of updated lightcycles to establish a vision/look for the new film.

Like I said in the title, I don’t envy these guys. In today’s environment of hyper-realistic games like Halo and realistic motion capture movies like the upcoming Beowulf, how do you make a Tron sequel stand out from the pack and be as cutting edge today as the original was for it’s time?

Source: Hollywood Reporter

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Logan’s Run To Be A Two Hour Long Commercial

Vic Holtreman — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:27:41 +0000

Ok, so not really – but the guy who’s been handed the keys to the movie, Joseph Kosinski has only directed commercials up until this point. Logan’s Run will be his first feature film.

Peter over at /Film put together a number of videos highlighting Kosinski’s commercial work. My impression of them is that for the most part they are quite classy and visually interesting… but in the end, boring.

Most of them do have a futuristic and antiseptic sci-fi vibe to them that is probably one of the reasons he was tapped to helm this. I just hope he brings a lot more life to the movie than he has in the commercial material he’s created.

In the past I haven’t been impressed with the first theatrical movie efforts of directors whose prior experience has consisted of only either commercials or music videos. I don’t want to disparage the guy, he may do a good job on the film, but I’m just saying – the track record isn’t great IMHO for this transition.

The original Logan’s Run came out way back in 1976 and at the time was quite successful and considered a pretty cool movie (I thought it was awesome). The premise is that of a Utopian society, populated only by people under 30 years old. Of course there’s a flip side to any Utopia-themed story and here it’s the fact that those who hit the magic number think they’re going to experience a “rebirth” but are in fact exterminated. Some people don’t believe the government-sponsored rebirth story and go on the run. “Sandmen” are an elite police force whose job it is to track down Runners, and one of them develops his own doubts as he approaches 30 years of age and he ends up becoming a Runner as well.

It starred Michael York and the very sexy Jenny Agutter, along with special effects that would now be considered quite cheesy. Still, I think it’s worth checking out if you’re at all interested in the fact that a remake is on the way.

Source: Hollywood Reporter via Spoutblog

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