Too lazy to read all
the wonderful news our insightful crew scours the globe to bring you every
day? Too outmoded to have an MP3 player for the podcast? Shame on you all!
However, being the generous lot we are, welcome to news:blended, your
weekly guide to the most interesting stories reported on Cinema Blend over the
last seven days.
Hey there! How are you? I feel unimportant. My family and I have yet to
receive the personal fury of Don Murphy for being critical of
Transformers. I'm not worried, it's a matter of time. Anyway, enough of
that, here's what's been happening in the world of Cinema Blend this week:
Remaking Couldn't Go Without A Hitch
Accepting that remakes (of both the nasty rehash or buying a cheap
third-party script and sticking a known name on it varieties) are here to stay
is hard enough. Accepting that some of the world's greatest directors' projects
are targetted for greasy-pawed remakes by MTV directors makes the job 1000 times
harder. Fair enough it is one of Hitchcock's early silent movies, we reported on
Monday,
which is in the firing line, but it all begs the question where does it stop?
Expect a hard-edged political thriller named Citizen Kane to be released
before 2010.
Elizabeth II: Annus Terriblus
There's an urban myth that they had to rename The Madness of George III to
The Madness of King George to avoid foreign audiences thinking it was a sequel.
So on Monday
when we revealed Helen Mirren would play Queen Elizabeth II in a movie hardly a
year after starring as Queen Elizabeth I in a TV mini-series, it's
understandable that Stephen Frears would opt simply for the title, The Queen,
for his movie. Helen Mirren is one of the greatest actresses around and ranks up
their with Judi Dench as those women sticking the bird to under-30s obssessed
Hollywood. The movie itself, following The Queen's life around the time of
Diana's death sounds like the worst kind of sunday afternoon melodrama, but you
can gurantee the delivery will be top notch if nothing else.
Richard Kelly's Career Goes South(land)
It's fair to say that when a studio demands you cut an hour from your movie
and you're not Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, you gotta
realise something's up. Especially when it comes on the heels of your original
three hour cut getting absolutely savaged by the usually lenient Cannes critics.
Well that's what's happened to Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, on Tuesday
he claimed that the studio has demanded cuts to Southland Tales or the
movie will never see the light of day, then changed his mind and decided the
cuts were great and all is rosy a few days later of course, probably when the
distributors threatened to revoke his paycheck. Could it be that Kelly, the
supposed next-big-thing, is actually a one-hit-wonder? Just because your first
movie is an eventual worldwide cult hit doesn't mean you should get free reign
on your next project, all good directors had to make their bones in TV or
crappy DTV before they hit the big time. Kelly's already shown that being
brought over-night success impairs his judgement with his totally unnecessary
"Director's Cut" of the excellent-as-it-was Donnie Darko. Add to that the
critical thrashing of
Domino
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/news-blended-3328.html
