Renowned for the meticulous documentation of his film projects (and for a fluctuating weight that puts Christian Bale to shame), New Zealand-born director Peter Jackson has kept excited fans well in the loop over the course of The Hobbit's production through the means of online video blogs, each one focused on an intricate aspect of its extremely complex construction. And now we've been granted the 9th (and presumably final) video blog in the series, because you didn't think these things would last forever, did you?
If you're even vaguely familiar with the feeling of being around something utterly average in every way, chances are you caught Marc Lawrence's rom-com Two Weeks Notice, which just about scraped the barrel (and then used the barrel itself because it had been scraped enough) when it came to employing all the genre's annoying cliches. Well, Hugh Grant, who took centre stage for such mediocre affairs, is set to re-join director Marc Lawrence for another rom-com, yet untitled. And the lovely Marisa Tomei is set to join him (and to presumably have sex with him at some point, because that's what you'll pay to see).
So you're just hanging out, watching a movie with a bunch of friends - nothing unusual to these proceedings at all. And then, woah, you're suddenly distracted. And not because the movie is bad and your attention is waning and you find it hard to sit still for two hours, but because you've noticed something about an actor on-screen. Is that thing you've noticed actually part of them, or is it something they've adopted for the sake of the movie? Because Owen Wilson's nose really does look like that, but Brad Pitt's neck scar in Inglourious Basterds is just part of an unexplained backstory.
Say what? David Cronenberg was asked to direct Return of the Jedi? As in, David "Body Horror" Cronenberg? Are you serious? Oh, we're deadly serious, more serious than we've ever been about any David Cronenberg-related news. Yep: A long, long time ago in a Hollywood far, far away, David Cronenberg's name somehow found itself associated with the third Star Wars movie, which is almost as bizarre a notion as a notion you'd find in one of his movies.
Richard Ayoade is known in Britain for his role on a show about computer nerds and his weird voice and glasses and big hair. He's known for a few of those things Stateside, too, and probably for being in that shitty alien movie The Watch with Ben Stiller and some others. Ayoade, whose name I know you're trying to pronounce out loud (and you'll never do it right unless you hear it said), made his directional debut Submarine, which found him favourably compared to a man named West Anderson. Oh, sorry, Wes Anderson. Will Ayoade take his place as the British version of said quirky director? We'd have to see another film to make such judgements, surely?
The internet tripped major balls back when Peter Jackson announced that he was splitting The Hobbit into two films, and doubly so when he decided that instead he was splitting it into three. But after you've had a beer or some drugs or whatever it is people have nowadays, you allow yourself to calm down and understand Jackson's logic: there are three major climaxes to the original 300-page story - and a whole bunch of appendices that explain things. Maybe three films will be okay after all, hm?
Ben Mendelsohn is one of those rising star types who you're starting to notice in absolutely everything. After first appearing in Aussie thriller Animal Kingdom, Mendelsohn could also be glimpsed in The Dark Knight Rises, Killing Them Softly and The Place Beyond the Pines. And now he's reportedly set to join his fellow Pines star Ryan Gosling for How to Catch a Monster, which will mark Gosling's debut as a director.
What with that equal rights thing going around and the fact that girl power is super-in right now, it was only a matter of time before an all-female version of Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables drop-kicked its way into theatres near you. And now Katee Sackoff has signed on to star in Adi Shankar's currently untitled flick which involves just that sort of thing (although we doubt these woman will be the same age as Stallone and company, given the sort of results a movie like that might produce).
Once upon a time in Hollywood, writer/director Frank Darabont wrote a script for Indy 4 that he believed to be a great continuation of the franchise. Steven Spielberg loved it. Harrison Ford loved it. George Lucas... well, he didn't love it so much. "You have a fantastic script," Darabont told him. "I think you're insane, George." George Lucas wasn't swayed. "You can say things like that to George, and he doesn’t even blink," Darabont later revealed. "He’s one of the most stubborn men I know."
Earlier this week we brought you the surprising news that Mike Myers had returned to the dreaded pit of former franchises in an attempt to, like, make a good movie for the first time since forever. The script for Wayne's World 3 had been completed by the man himself (apparently), so the world naturally presumed that shooting wouldn't be far off. If you were, of course, excited by that news in anyway, then prepare to be unexcited by this news in every way: the completed script story is just a hoax, according to pretty much everybody who tried to follow it up and were met with a fake email address and a confused EW reporter whose name was used to make it all seem legitimate. Oops.
