The Week In Geek: Ben Affleck To Direct The Stand? Dark Tower Back On?? Independence Day 2 & 3??
The Evil Dead Remake
A little bit of horror news just in time for Halloween. We’ve known for awhile that a remake of The Evil Dead was coming, and that original director Sam Raimi was coming on board as a producer along with original star Bruce Campbell. They had hinted several times in interviews that this would not be a straight up remake, but that there would be some kind of twist to make it different. Bloodydisgusting.com seems to have the scoop on just what this twist will be…so fair warning, this is SPOILER territory:
“the “new spin” is the motivation behind the trip, with the lead character taking his younger sister to the family’s cabin to help her kick her drug addiction. Without her drugs she becomes insane and difficult to control, which makes it impossible to see that she’s actually possessed.”
I dunno if that’s big enough to count as a “twist.” More like a wrinkle maybe. I should add that I still feel robbed of a Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash movie, so if we’re getting Bruce Campell as anything but Ash in his promised cameo for this new version, I’m gonna be disappointed for sure. This is pretty much his last chance.
Ben Affleck May Take On Stephen King’s The Stand
There have been rumors going around now for several months of a big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel The Stand over at Warner Brothers. The last time The Stand was produced it was for a 1994 television mini-series. Now it seems that Warner Brothers have found their choice of director; the job belongs to Ben Affleck….that is, if he wants it.
After making two successful ensemble dramas, Gone Baby Gone and The Town, Warner Brothers figures he can tackle a similarly large cast for King’s epic. But this will be on a larger scale than Affleck is used to. Both Gone Baby Gone and The Town were miniscule budgets in comparison to what The Stand would no doubt require. Maybe Affleck doesn’t think he’s ready for this kind of movie yet. Or maybe he wants to only do smaller films and not studio tentpoles. After all, this week it was also announced that Affleck was looking to direct a bio pic on Boston crime kingpin Whitey Bulger. A lot of people are reading this as his way of telling Warner Brothers “not interested in your apocalypse movie”. A crime movie seems more in his wheelhouse. Of course, it is possible he’ll find a way to do both. Just five years ago, the thought that the other half of “Bennifer” and the star of Pearl Harbor and Paycheck would attempt to direct Stephen King’s classic would have sent shivers up the spines of geekdom, but with just two movies Affleck has proved his directing chops. There are a lot of worse choices out there.
In other Stephen King related news, it looks like Ron Howard’s ambitious version of the The Dark Tower as both a movie and a television series, which was recently cancelled by Universal due to an astronomical budget, is back on again. This time with the televsion portion winding up on cable. “We’re going to do it with HBO,” producer Brian Grazer said in an MTV interview. “We’ll do the TV with HBO, and we’ll do the movie with — to be determined. We’ll do it right.” Since HBO is part of the overall Time/Warner company, I’d say it is a safe bet the movie will be a Warner Brothers film. Grazer also said that he thinks Javier Bardem will still be on board to star as protaganist Roland Deschain. With the success of Game of Thrones, I can easily see HBO wanting in on this in the worst way. In addition, Grazer says that $50 million has been shaved off the budget and that the ending has been changed in an effort to woo the studios and get this baby made.
Welcome to Erff…..Again!
Listen up, you children of the 90’s…it looks like you are getting your long rumored Independence Day sequels from Fox after all. It seems now that ID4 director Roland Emmerich has finally done his “serious” film (the just released Shakespeare conspiracy movie Anonymous) he has been able to tear himself away from his mansion full of teenage male hustlers (just trust me) long enough to write an outline for not only an Independence Day 2 but also a part three. Because, you know, everything needs to be a trilogy. Right now, the big sticking point for Fox is whether or not they can get Will Smith to return apparently. (why just Smith? No love for Jeff Goldblum?) See, Smith wants not only $50 million for both movies, which would shoot back-to-back, but wants parts in the movie for his wife Jada and his daughter Willow (God help us). Fox is trying to decide whether to proceed without him or just re-write the whole thing from scratch and save themselves a ton of money. Fox is notoriously cheap, so I’m guessing no Will Smith and the clan for this one. But I could wind up being wrong.
I honestly have no horse in this race, as I never much cared for the original Independence Day. It felt like a pale imitation of the great sci-fi blockbusters of the late 70’s and 80’s from Spielberg and Zemekis and Lucas, but with none of the heart and half the brains. It was so trying to be the 90’s generation’s Star Wars moment, but that came three years later with The Matrix instead. Are the children of the 90’s as eager for this as mine was for a new Star Wars to arrive sixteen years past the last one? I guess we’ll find out.
It would be awesome though if the movie takes place like fifty years later, after humanity has regrouped and rebuilt all their precious monuments and created a new peaceful world government, only to have the aliens come back and blow all the same shit up right after they finish the Empire State Building II or something. I’d totally watch that shit.
Stephen Spielberg Admits that Indiana Jones 4 Sucked
Well, okay…not really. But c’mon. Read between the lines of this quote that he gave this week about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
“I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been… I sympathize with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin (the Alien artifacts) because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don’t believe in it – I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”
*Sigh* First off, the MacGuffin wasn’t so much what sucked. It didn’t matter that the Crystal Skulls were alien, anymore than it mattered that the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail were God’s lost toys, or the Shankara Stones from Temple of Doom belonged to….well, whoever the fuck they belonged to. What sucks is that we SEE the aliens, and their damn ship, in all their bad CGI glory. That would have been like if we saw God with a flowing white robe and long beard show up at the end of Raiders to melt the Nazis, instead of just showing his handiwork. The mystery was taken out. That is what made it suck, along with Shia swinging with the monkeys, exotic locations that are clearly CGI, and flying nuked fridges. To Spielberg’s credit, he admits that the nuking the fridge was HIS idea, so he doesn’t blame it all on Uncle George.
“What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying “jump the shark”. They now say, ‘nuked the fridge’. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”
Spielberg pledges to do better with Indy 5, but this best way to do better is to not do it at all. Having said that, if George Lucas wants to make a CGI Indiana Jones Adventures series, set in the 30/40’s by the same team who brought us Clone Wars, that I am totally down for.
Where Art Thou, Wally West?
And finally, a small tidbit for you comics fans: If you’re a fan of the Wally West version of The Flash, don’t hold your breath for his return; it appears that despite a proposal on the desk of EIC Dan Didio from the current Flash creative team of Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato, Wally isn’t seeing the light of day at DC any time soon. Here is what they told Comic Book Resources in an interview this week: “The pitch (for a Wally West series) is on Dan Didio’s desk…lets see if he finds it! That’s all there really is to say!” Why is it there can be multiple Green Lanterns but only one Flash? Anyone at DC wanna answer that for me?
