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Sylvester Stallone Thriller 'Headshots' & Steve Carell Comedy 'Burt Wonderstone' Both Lose Directors

  • By Oliver Lyttelton
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  • April 6, 2011 1:21 AM
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  • 1 Comment
It's got to be hard for a director to walk away from a feature-directing gig. If you're lucky, you get to make a film once every couple of years, and, while some helmers are able to boost their income with rewrite work or commercials, or TV and music videos gigs, sometimes that one feature is your only income. But at the same time, you only get to make a certain number of movies in a career, and if the stars aren't aligning correctly, sometimes the only thing you can do is pack your bags. It's not an uncommon occurence -- Guillermo Del Toro leaving "The Hobbit" and Darren Aronofsky bailing on "The Wolverine" being two recent examples -- and it's just happened on another pair of A-lister-led projects.
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More: Films, Actors, Wayne Kramer, Charles McDougall, Headshot, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Carell

Addison Timlin In Talks For 'Odd Thomas'; Tim Robbins To Join Too?

  • By Oliver Lyttelton
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  • April 6, 2011 1:04 AM
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  • 1 Comment
The trouble with the new transparency of the casting process -- the stories that break at every stage of the process, from wishlist, to shortlist, to meetings, to screen-tests, to offers, to negotiations, to signing on -- is that you can sometimes think that an actor's firmly on board on a project based on one of these stories. More often than not, offer-stories lead to an actor actually being in the film, so when we reported a few weeks back that Lily Collins, rising star of "The Blind Side," had been offered the female lead in "Odd Thomas," the adaptation of Dean Koontz's mystery series about a short-order cook who can communicate with the dead, from "The Mummy" director Stephen Sommers, we'd filed it away, assuming that the offer was a formality, and that Collins would end up on the marquee for the picture, alongside Anton Yelchin, who's playing the title role.
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More: Films, Actors, Actresses, Stephen Sommers, Odd Thomas, Anton Yelchin, Tim Robbins, Lily Collins, Addison Timlin

Michael Fassbender & Liam Cunningham To Star In Northern Irish Punk Movie 'Good Vibrations'

  • By Oliver Lyttelton
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  • April 5, 2011 12:59 PM
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  • 1 Comment
David Holmes To Write The ScoreConsidering the way in which punk rock changed the music world so comprehensively, it's surprising that relatively few films have been made following the great bands of the era. There have been great documentaries, from "The Filth and the Fury" to Ramones doc "End of a Century" and "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," and a handful of dramatic features -- "Sid and Nancy" and "SLC Punk," while both flawed, have much to recommend them. But for the most part, the genre has produced films closer to the terrible Ian Dury biopic "Sex & Drugs & Rock and Roll" than to anything else.
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More: Films, Actors, Composers, The Playlist UK, Good Vibrations, Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, David Holmes

David Gordon Green Talks His Musical Dream Project, Reveals Script Remake Of 'Ice Station Zebra'

  • By Edward Davis
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  • April 5, 2011 8:40 AM
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  • 10 Comments
Director Wants To Make A Musical About Rival Musical Families In Branson, MissouriDavid Gordon Green's early career is a wet dream for up-and-coming, aspiring filmmakers. Lyrical, poetic and still loose and beautiful in its form, most filmmakers would kill to have something as good as his debut film "George Washington" (which is part of the Criterion Collection) in their oeuvre. 2003's "All the Real Girls" continued in this vein, but injected a sense of subtle comedy (which we would see later) and indie quirk thanks to strong performances by Zooey Deschanel, Paul Schneider, Danny McBride (in his debut) and Patricia Clarkson.
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More: Films, David Gordon Green, Your Highness

Mae Whitman Joins Emma Watson & Logan Lerman In 'The Perks Of Being A Wallflower'

  • By Kevin Jagernauth
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  • April 5, 2011 8:05 AM
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  • 4 Comments
Summit knows the tween market better than anybody else these days and with their mad money franchise "Twilight" drawing to a close, they're trying to find other ways to lure that all-important dollar from young moviegoers. They picked up the adaptation of "The Perks of Being a Wallfower" during Sundance earlier this year, and now it's gearing up to shoot and has added another cast member to Emma Watson and Logan Lerman who were first attached last spring.
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More: Films, Actresses, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Mae Whitman

Catherine Zeta-Jones & Judy Greer Are 'Playing The Field' With Gerard Butler

  • By Kevin Jagernauth
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  • April 5, 2011 7:39 AM
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  • 2 Comments
'The Kids Are All Right' Writer Stuart Blumberg Penned Newest Draft Of ScriptThe field is getting crowded (terrible pun, fully intentional) for Gerard Butler's upcoming soccer comedy "Playing the Field" as 24 Frames reports that Catherine Zeta-Jones and Judy Greer have also joined the film that also includes Uma Thurman, Jessica Biel and Dennis Quaid.
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More: Films, Actresses, Playing The Field, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Judy Greer, Stuart Blumberg

Keanu Reeves Says 'Bill & Ted's 3' Script 6 Weeks Away, Reveals Small Plot Details

  • By Kevin Jagernauth
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  • April 5, 2011 6:53 AM
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  • 3 Comments
It seems that people looking for a nostalgia-fueled sequel have found something else to focus their attention on since "Ghostbusters 3" is dead for now until Bill Murray decides to get around to giving the script a read and maybe throwing his old pals a bone by agreeing to show up and do what he's asked. So instead, we have "Bill & Ted's 3," another sequel that everybody wants to talk about but does anybody actually want to see it?
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More: Actors, Keanu Reeves

Keepin It Real: Kelly Reichardt Called Bullshit On Modern Equipment For Anti-Western 'Meek's Cutoff'

  • By Christopher Bell
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  • April 5, 2011 6:50 AM
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  • 1 Comment
And 7 Other Things We Learned From Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan & The Director Who Kept Her Actors In The Dark Back in September of 2009, we heard the quiet rumblings of a new Kelly Reichardt film, thanks to an interview with confidante/sometimes-producer Larry Fessenden with the A.V. Club. The film sounded like a micro-budgeted, anti-Western and we set it high on our anticipated list, waiting patiently for more inklings of news.
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More: Films, Actresses, Interview, Kelly Reichardt, Meek's Cutoff, Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan

Allegations Of Infidelity In Paul Greengrass' 'Memphis' Script Troubled Martin Luther King Estate

  • By Kevin Jagernauth
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  • April 5, 2011 5:52 AM
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  • 10 Comments
Lee Daniels' 'Selma' Also Ran Afoul Of MLK FamilyWe wished it was some kind of cruel April Fool's Day joke, but last Friday it was revealed that Universal was bailing on "Memphis," the Martin Luther King Jr. pic that was written and set to be directed by Paul Greengrass. The project was a big one. It was being prepped to start shooting in June with a release date already targeted for MLK weekend in February 2012. Universal pulled funding and claimed tight scheduling as an issue, however Deadline revealed that the estate of the late civil rights leader was "highly critical" of the film and threatened to openly and publicly condemn the project if it ever went in front of cameras. And now, more details have come to the fore.
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More: Films, Film Studios, Lee Daniels, Memphis, Universal

Review: 'Your Highness' Is Fantasy That's Gloriously Absurd, Hilarious & Balls-Out Irreverent

  • By Drew Taylor
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  • April 5, 2011 5:41 AM
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  • 12 Comments
The potential failure of something calling itself "Your Highness" and being marketed, in the most blatant of terms, as a medieval stoner movie, is fairly, er, high. These are untapped waters, and a fairly ballsy decision for Universal, after several big-budgeted near-bombs, to make a big budget, very-R-rated comedy that riffs on the esoteric spate of sword-and-sorcery movies from the 1980s (like Playlist favorite "Krull"). In short: it could have been truly, eye-rollingly awful.
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More: Films, Review, Your Highness

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