Monday 11 January 2010

Hollywood Babble On & On #427: Mini Media Movie Money Musings

Welcome to the show folks...

COMIC CASTING COUCH CAVALCADE!

Actor Stuart Townsend has walked from the Marvel/Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Thor, citing "creative differences" which actually bodes well for the movie, because the movies that Townsend walks from tend to do way better than the films he
actually appears in.

Unlike Townsend, John Malkovich knows what butters his bread and confirmed that he will be playing villain The Vulture in Spider-Man 4. Now all they need is a freaking script!

UPDATE: Raimi and Maguire OUT! Spider-Man 4 canceled, to be rebooted in 2012 with new team.

And finally
Gossip Girl starlet Blake Lively has been cast as Carol Ferris, aviatrix and love interest for Ryan Reynolds' Hal Jordan in the movie version of Green Lantern. The part originally belonged to Stuart Townsend, but he walked at the last minute, citing "creative differences." Lucky for Miss Lively.

NBC: NO BLOODY CLUE

With Leno heading back to late night(?), the network's overall ratings sinking lower than Telemundo, they have announced some of their great ideas to reverse the network's recent ill fortunes.

And I'm not exactly impressed.

First thing, there's not much originality in their picks, especially in their choice to remake 70's PI show The Rockford Files.

I can think of several things wrong with that idea.

1. The original show was specifically created for James Garner, and designed around Garner's strengths. The sort of actor that can match Garner's everyman charm will be next to impossible to find.

2. The show was very much a product of the times, and captured those times well. To try to capture lightning in a bottle twice is an impossibility.

3. Why not just make a new show based on classic themes from scratch. CBS's The Mentalist is basically Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot with an American accent and a gimmick. A retro style PI show could work, but like The Mentalist, it needs a new hook to make it work for today's audience.

PANDORA'S BOX... OF ANTI-DEPRESSANTS

To paraphrase Canadian comic Wayne Fleming this story is just too mucking fuch.

Reports are coming in that certain fans of the movie Avatar, have been driven by the vast empty void of their intellectual/spiritual/emotional lives to bouts of depression.

Why are they depressed?

Because they're upset that Pandora is just a digitally rendered fantasy and not a real planet.

I think the picture I posted with this blog tells you what I think about that.

The whole "reality" of Pandora was lost to me from the commercial which showed a mountain floating in the air, and that mountain had a waterfall.

WHERE IS THE WATER COMING FROM?

You see, I'm not a nit-picking douche, I'm just saner than those overstimulated under-intelligent Avatar fans. If I'm going to be emerged into a fantasy, I at least need a reason for violating the laws of physics... and plot, and character development, and narrative cohesion.

Anyway, when James Cameron finally forms his cult and opens Pandora Town in Guyana, he'll at least have some people to share the kool-aid with.

MGM LIBRARY'S NOT SO GOLDEN RIGHT NOW

Things aren't looking well for MGM, its 4,000+ title movie library is not raking in the bucks as it once did. It's been hurt not just by falling DVD sales, but also by the lackadaisical performance of their DVD distribution partner 20th Century Fox. Those dwindling sales is hurting the value of the company, and may effect the auction of the near moribund company.

I still think that MGM can and should be saved, it just needs a path out of its crippling debt, and I hope that someone, somewhere is figuring that out.

1 comment:

  1. The Avatar-depression-thing doesn't really surprise me. As a geek myself, I know that geeks tend to go way too overboard in their like of some things - that that movie does have an awful lot of razzle-dazzle to get all dreamy-eyed about. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is being exaggerated, in some kind of inane marketing scheme.

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