SpeedCine

by Annie Young Frisbie

Veteran indie publicist Reid Rosefelt is launching a site called SpeedCine, which will launch in July as a database of all the movies that are legally available for viewing online. This will be a great resource for anyone who has moral issues with the so-called "free" content that the internet makes available.

Until then, Reid is blogging about the industry. He's a fount of information on the movie business, and a great writer as well. So if you like to read about Hollywood and Indiewood, check out his blog here.

Tom Hanks: Pawn of Satan?

So says author in reference to 'Angels & Demons.' And the Donohue-Howard feud continues.

by Mark Moring

"It's sad that a great actor like Tom Hanks has become a pawn of Satan and is aiding the cover-up of the existence of the Illuminati today and is a part of Dan Brown's fraud."

So says Mark Dice, author of The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction, of the movie star's role in the upcoming film version of Angels & Demons, based on Brown's book of the same title. A&D is a prequel to The Da Vinci Code.

Dice went on to say that "Brown's book, as well as the film, serves only as disinformation and a whitewash of the real Illuminati."

Dice is founder of something called The Resistance, which on its website calls itself "a conservative political and media watchdog and activist organization focused on preserving family values and upholding the Constitution of the United States."

Take Dice's words with a grain of salt. A loose cannon who also goes by the pseudonym "John Conner" (a la the Terminator saga), Dice has called the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. "an inside job" by the U.S. government. He has also demanded that demanded that Duke University change the school nickname of "Blue Devils" because it's "offensive to the Christian community." (No report on whether he has a problem with Wake Forest's "Demon Deacons" or Arizona State's "Sun Devils" or . . . Oh, nevermind.)

It's not the first attack on Angels & Demons. The Catholic League's William Donohue dissed the film, prompting director Ron Howard to respond last week. And now Donohue has responded to Howard's response:

"Ron Howard must be delusional if he thinks Vatican officials are going to like his propaganda - they denied him the right to film on their grounds," says Donohue. "Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard's crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism. It's time to stop the lies and come clean."

Somehow, I don't think Howard is waiting in the batter's box to step up and take the next swing. But I also bet we haven't heard the last of this, either.

Newsbites: The '80s live forever edition!

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1. Arnold Schwarzenegger has confirmed that he may very well appear in Terminator Salvation when it opens May 21 ... but because the Governor of California is busy with other things at the moment, he has done no acting for the new film. Rather, his performance will be an entirely digital creation, based on a body-cast mold that was made for the first movie in 1984. If you ask me, this is all for the good, as Schwarzenegger's physical appearance did change somewhat over the course of the first three films -- which, when you think about it, is a little odd, since all three of his characters were supposed to have come off an assembly line at the exact same time in the future. -- Los Angeles Times, Variety, WENN

2. Robert Rodriguez is developing a "reboot" of the Predator franchise called Predators. The original film came out in 1987 and spawned either one sequel or three, depending on whether you count the Alien Vs. Predator cross-overs (2004-2007) as part of the original canon. At any rate, 20th Century Fox has already given the new film a release date, namely July 7, 2010. -- IESB.net, Ain't It Cool News (x2), Variety, ComingSoon.net

3. Leonard Nimoy provided the voice of Galvatron in the animated Transformers movie that came out back in 1986. So naturally, the guys who've been writing the live-action movies want him to come back and voice one of the characters in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which comes out June 24. And since those guys also happened to write the upcoming Star Trek movie, they've had a chance to talk to Nimoy about this personally. What makes the whole thing even stranger and even more inter-connected is that Nimoy's wife, Susan Bay, is a cousin to Transformers director Michael Bay -- but the director says he hasn't approached Nimoy about doing the part directly yet; for now, he prefers to let his mother serve as a go-between. -- Sci Fi Wire, MTV Movies Blog

4. Photos from the Vancouver set of Tron 2.0 have begun to pop up on the internet. Meanwhile, a number of blogs recently discovered this story that the Vancouver Sun ran three months ago, which claims that Tron 2.0 has a budget of $300 million. That figure was later revealed to be in Canadian dollars, but even so, that still comes to something like $240 million in American money. That seems like an awful lot to spend on a sequel to a movie that came out 27 years ago and didn't even rank among the Top 20 films at the box office that year. -- SlashFilm, Ain't It Cool News, TrekMovie.com

5. Rooney Mara, sister of Kate Mara, will play the female lead in next year's "re-imagining" of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). -- Bloody-Disgusting.com, Hollywood Reporter

6. Eric Heisserer, who did some work on the Nightmare on Elm Street script, has been hired to do a rewrite "from scratch" of the prequel to The Thing (1982). The previous draft was by Battlestar Galactica producer Ronald D. Moore. -- Bloody-Disgusting.com, Eric Heisserer

7. New Line Cinema is developing a feature film version of the 1980s TV series MacGyver. -- Hollywood Reporter

WWJD: The Movie

Upcoming film based on classic Charles Sheldon book, In His Steps

by Mark Moring

According to a press release from Nasser Entertainment, Charles Sheldon's classic Christian book, In His Steps, is being made into a film called What Would Jesus Do?

Production by Nasser Entertainment begins in May, but no potential release date was given. The company specializes in made-for-TV programming.

The film will feature John Schneieder (Nip/Tuck, CSI, Bo Duke in TV's Dukes of Hazzard), country singer Adam Gregory, and Maxine Bahns (The Mentalist, The Lost Tribe).

The film will closely follow the story of In His Steps, following four individuals -- a singer, a newspaper editor, a wealthy philanthropist, and a minister who lost his faith - all vowing to walk in the steps of Jesus, with every decision based on the one question, "What would Jesus do?"

Joe Nasser of Nasser Entertainment said that when he was fighting cancer some time ago, the Bible and In His Steps brought him comfort.

Nasser writes, "I promised God if he thought he should heal me I would make the movie and spread the question WWJD? to as many people as possible. Well God healed me and I intended to keep my promise."

Odysseus without the odyssey?

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Warner Brothers sure likes its Greek myths and legends. After making a buck or two on Troy (2004) and 300 (2006), and after putting the gears in motion for their upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans, the studio has now acquired Odysseus, a spec script that would seem to be based on Homer's epic poem The Odyssey.

It may not be quite what you'd expect, though. While Odysseus is best known for the ten years he spent wandering around the Mediterranean on his way home from the Trojan War, it sounds like the movie may skip all that and focus on the second half of Homer's epic, which takes place after Odysseus has arrived incognito on his home island of Ithaca. The Hollywood Reporter reports:

The story centers on the legendary hero Odysseus, famed king of Ithaca, who returns to his island after 20 years of fighting the Trojan Wars, only to find his kingdom under the brutal occupation of an invading force. Odysseus single-handedly defeats every last man and takes back his wife, his son and his kingdom. . . .

The intent is to make not a sleepy swords-and-sandles epic but a bloody relentless revenge movie, something akin to "300" meets "Taken."

The script is by Ann Peacock, who may be best known for writing an early draft of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005); and the director attached to the project is Jonathan Liebesman, who is currently directing the alien-invasion flick Battle: Los Angeles.

Incidentally, Warner Brothers is also behind that futuristic, outer-space version of The Odyssey that was announced six months ago, starring Brad Pitt. I wonder how that one's coming along?

Yet another Nativity movie in the works.

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Three years ago, New Line Cinema produced The Nativity Story. Next month, MGM will begin shooting Mary, Mother of Christ.

And now, according to Variety, Fox Searchlight is "fast-tracking" the gospel musical Black Nativity, based on the Langston Hughes show that has been playing continuously in various cities since it premiered on Broadway in 1961; it was, in fact, one of the first plays written by an African-American to open there.

The studio intends to release the movie as early as this Christmas, which sounds awfully fast, indeed.

Just for comparison's sake, MGM doesn't plan to release Mary, Mother of Christ until next April; and the fact that The Nativity Story was similarly fast-tracked -- the studio bought the script in January and showed the finished movie to journalists in November -- was blamed, in hindsight, for that film's disappointing performance at the box office.

And here it's almost May, and Fox Searchlight is only planning now to make this movie in time for a December release date? Hmmm, well, if they rely to any degree on the casts and crews that have been staging this musical for decades already, then that might help expedite things.

At any rate, the film will be directed by Kasi Lemmons, an actress whose previous directorial credits include Eve's Bayou (1997), The Caveman's Valentine (2001) and Talk to Me (2007).

Side note: The Wikipedia page for this musical states that "Mary's contractions are echoed through the use of African drums and percussion." That's interesting, as I can't think of any films prior to Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) that depicted Mary going into labour -- whether out of general squeamishness and/or tasteful discretion around that subject, or perhaps out of respect for the ancient tradition that says she didn't suffer any labour pains. But apparently this musical had already gone in that direction a good 16 years earlier.

Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw to play real-life evangelical couple

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Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times reports that Warner Brothers is making a movie based on The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, a book by Michael Lewis about "Michael Oher, a 6-foot-5, 350-pound African American teenager who is transformed from a homeless vagabond to a star football player, largely thanks to Leigh Anne Tuohy, a dynamic evangelical Christian who helps provide him with a surrogate family and a shot at success in life." While the bulk of Goldstein's column looks at Quinton Aaron, the 24-year-old, 6-foot-8 and 380-pound actor who has been hired to play Oher, Goldstein also mentions that Sandra Bullock is set to play Tuohy, and Tim McGraw will play Tuohy's husband Sean. It's anybody's guess how prominent the religious themes will be in the film itself, but for what it's worth, when Collin Hansen reviewed the book for Christianity Today two years ago, he called it "a gripping tour through the world of college recruiting, professional football strategy, and the volatile mix of faith and sports" -- and the film is being written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who also directed the Dennis Quaid baseball movie The Rookie (2002), so that bodes well, at least.

Newsbites: The biblical and religious edition!

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1. Marlon Wayans has been hired to produce and star in the film version of The Year of Living Biblically. This is worrying, for two reasons: First, his surprisingly decent performance in Requiem for a Dream (2000) aside, Wayans is best known for really dumb comedy, whether as a supporting character in movies like Dungeons & Dragons (2000) or as a collaborator with his brothers on lowbrow fare like White Chicks (2004) and the first two Scary Movies (2000-2001). Second, Sammy Davis Jr. aside, black Americans tend to be Christian, not Jewish, and the story of a Christian who tries to follow all of the Bible's rules is bound to be somewhat different from the story of a Jew who attempts the same. I haven't read A.J. Jacobs' book yet, so I can't say quite how it would be different -- but, for example, I have read that Jacobs did not approach the New Testament the same way he approached the Old because, as a Jew, he could not obey the command to follow Jesus. At any rate, it is certainly possible that the film version could clear these hurdles, but for now, I'm not counting on it. -- Hollywood Reporter

2. The Catholic Bishops Conference of India has called for a ban of Angels & Demons, the upcoming sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006). Meanwhile, director Ron Howard has written an editorial for the Huffington Post in which he says the new film's negative assertions about Catholic history cannot be "lies" because they are "fiction". (But they can still be negative, right?) And now word has come that author Dan Brown has finally finished the third book in the series, and the studio that produced the first two movies is already planning to make the third; the new book is called The Lost Symbol and it comes out in September. -- Hollywood Reporter (x2), Huffington Post, Variety

3. Last week was not a particularly good week for Mel Gibson. By now, everyone has heard about the divorce suit filed by Robyn, his wife of 28 years, and Mel's revelation that he and Robyn have been separated since August 2006 -- four weeks after he was busted for drunk driving, three weeks before their daughter got married and a few months before the release of Apocalypto. Less publicized, however, was the latest development in the ongoing lawsuit launched by Benedict Fitzgerald, Gibson's co-writer on The Passion of the Christ (2004) and a producer of the upcoming Mary, Mother of Christ (which is not related to Gibson in any way, shape or form). Fitzgerald has "amended his lawsuit" and is "now demanding to see the accounting records" for The Passion; Fitzgerald claims Gibson lied to him about the cost of that film, in order to reduce Fitzgerald's writing fee, and he claims Gibson is still lying about what that film cost to make. -- Studio Briefing

4. Kings, the TV series that modernizes the story of Saul and David, has been bumped to the summer. The show began in mid-March, with four episodes broadcast on Sunday nights; then it was "moved" to a single Saturday night a few days ago. But now it is being put on hold yet again, and it won't resume until June 13. -- Hollywood Reporter

5. The makers of Year One, the "biblical comedy" that features several characters from the Book of Genesis, have posted a new clip from the film that does not feature any characters from the Book of Genesis. -- ComingSoon.net

6. Christopher Hitchens will pitch a film version of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, in May. Hitchens has already debated Christian apologist Douglas Wilson and co-starred with him in a documentary called Collision. -- Hollywood Reporter

7. Rod Dreher has interviewed Matt Baglio, whose book on Catholic exorcists, The Rite, is being made into a film written by Michael Petroni and directed by Mikael Håfström. Meanwhile, Terry Mattingly has interviewed Father Gary Thomas, the priest who is the subject of Baglio's book. -- Rod Dreher, Terry Mattingly

Slumdog's Young Star for Sale?

British tabloid says her dad tried to sell her for millions, but he denies it

by Mark Moring

News of the World claims that the father of Slumdog Millionaire child star Rubina Ali tried to sell his 9-year-old daughter to become a millionaire himself.

The British tabloid got the alleged story by having a reporter pose as an Arab "sheik," from whom the girl's father supposed demanded millions of Indian rupees--worth about $300,000 in the U.S.

NOTW quoted the father, Rafiq Qureshi, as saying he wanted his family to escape Mumbai's slums, adding, "I have to consider what's best for me, my family and Rubina's future."

But People magazine says Qureshi refutes the report, saying it was a "lie made up by foreign journalists playing games with me."

He told People there had been an offer but insisted that he had feigned interest out of politeness: "In India, you never say 'no' directly, least of all to guests. You try not to offend people by refusing to help. They said they were childless and desperately fond of Rubina after seeing her in the film. I felt sorry for them, but I was never going to give her up."

Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture and other awards at this year's Oscars.

Ron Howard Fights Back

Producer responds to Catholic League's William Donohue re: 'Angels & Demons'

by Mark Moring

Catholic League president William Donohue has been dissing the upcoming Angels & Demons--the prequel to The Da Vinci Code--for a couple of months now, claiming the film to be a "smear" on the Catholic Church. For the most part, the filmmakers have taken the high road and remained silent.

No longer. In a measured but strongly-worded op-ed today in The Huffington Post, A&D director Ron Howard responds by saying that Donohue should essentially zip it till he sees the movie.

Howard writes that Donohue "is on a mission . . . to paint me and the movie I directed, Angels & Demons, as anti-Catholic . . .

"Let me be clear," Howard continues. "Neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?"

Donohue has written a booklet, Angels & Demons: More Demonic Than Angelic (available for a $5 donation to the Catholic League), which he said that A&D "details the myths, lies and smears that are made against the Catholic Church [in A&D]. It also provides evidence of the anti-Catholic animus harbored by those associated with the film.

"Author Dan Brown and director Ron Howard are . . . obsessed with Catholicism. It is not enough to criticize it - they are hell bent on demonizing it. It is not enough to drag out dirty laundry - they invent it. And the fact that they pay absolutely no price for their propaganda shows beyond dispute that anti-Catholicism is the one bigotry Hollywood likes."

Howard says Donohue needs to lighten up and recognize a work of fiction for what it is: Just fiction.

"Mr. Donohue's booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago," Howard writes. "It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades). And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!

"I guess Mr. Donohue and I do have one thing in common: we both like to create fictional tales, as he has done with his silly and mean-spirited work of propaganda. "

Howard concludes with these words: "I know faith is believing without seeing (and a boycott would be disbelieving without seeing). But I don't expect William Donohue to have faith in me, so I encourage him to see Angels & Demons for himself. Then he will finally witness, and perhaps believe, that what I say is true."

Newsbites: The fantasy edition!

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1. It has been public knowledge for years now that the studios behind the film version of The Hobbit want to make it a two-movie series that will connect in some way to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) -- but there has been much speculation as to what sort of two-movie series it will be. Will one movie be devoted to The Hobbit proper, followed by another movie that "bridges" the gap between the two stories? Or will The Hobbit itself be spread out over the two films? Jackson and Hobbit director Guillermo Del Toro have now announced their decision, and the answer is: the second option. Says Del Toro: "We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur." Adds Jackson: "We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie . . . The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the trilogy." -- Empire

2. Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, each film in that series was released to DVD three times: once in its shorter theatrical version, once in its longer "extended" version, and once in a format that included both versions. Now it is time for the trilogy to come out on Blu-Ray -- and apparently the series will go back to square one, with a shorter-version-only edition; the "extended" versions will not come out on Blu-Ray until closer to the Hobbit release date. -- High-Def Digest, Digital Bits

3. 20th Century Fox has revealed that it will release three films in 3D in 2010. They have not yet said which films they have in mind, but one of their biggest movies that year will be The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so some of the online speculation has pointed in that direction. -- CinemaBlend.com, NarniaWeb

4. Rhys Ifans has joined the cast of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Meanwhile, producer David Heyman has confirmed that some of the actors who began this series as prepubescent children will look more grown up than they have ever looked before in the final film. (Let the reader understand.) -- ComingSoon.net, MTV Movies Blog

5. Emma Thompson may have skipped the last Harry Potter movie in order to make a sequel to Nanny McPhee (2005), but she's bringing some of her fellow Potter alumni -- such as Ifans, Maggie Smith and Ralph Fiennes -- along for the ride. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Asa Butterfield have also joined the cast of Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, which will take place during World War II, several decades after the previous film. -- Variety, ComingSoon.net

6. Michael Sheen, who is perhaps best-known for playing Tony Blair in The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006), has been cast as a vampire in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which recently began shooting in Vancouver. Prior to this, Sheen had played a werewolf in the Underworld series (2003-2009). There is no word yet on who will direct Eclipse, the next film in the Twilight franchise, but Drew Barrymore recently stated that she is no longer in the running for that job. -- Variety, ComingSoon.net, Entertainment Weekly, MTV Movies Blog (x2)

7. Catherine Keener has joined the cast of Percy Jackson; she will play the title character's mother. His father, the Greek god Poseidon, is being played by Kevin McKidd. -- Hollywood Reporter

8. Watchmen co-writer Alex Tse is working on an adaptation of the graphic novel Battling Boy, which concerns "the son of a god who comes down from the top of a mountain at his father's urging to rid the giant, continent-sized city of Monstropolis of a plague of beasts." -- Hollywood Reporter

9. The sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) will be based on a spec script that is, in turn, "based on the fantasy conceit that the literary tales 'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Treasure Island' and [Jules] Verne's own 'Mysterious Island' all occurred on the same island." -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter

10. Twenty-five years ago, Brian Grazer produced Splash (1984), the story of a mermaid who falls in love with a human being. (It was also the first Tom Hanks movie to be directed by Ron Howard; they have since done Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons together as well.) Now, Grazer has picked up a script called Merman, which "follows a merman who comes to land so he can win back his mermaid fiancee, who has left him for a real man." And no, it's not a sequel. -- Variety

11. Catherine Hardwicke, whose last film was the original Twilight (2008), now has at least two more fantasies on her plate: Maximum Ride, based on the James Patterson series about "six teens, known as the Flock, who are genetically altered so that they are part human and part bird"; and If I Stay, based on Gayle Forman's novel about "a gifted classical musician and her indie rockstar boyfriend who's forced to choose between life and death when she's in a car accident with her family." -- Hollywood Reporter, Variety

Michael J. Fox and The 700 Club.

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I happened to spot Michael J. Fox's new book Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist at the drug store the other day, and since he's a fellow Vancouverite, I gave it a quick look.

I was particularly intrigued by the chapter on "faith". While it's more or less what you'd expect from a Hollywood celebrity, it still has some interesting tidbits, such as Fox's description of himself as a lapsed Protestant who now attends a Reform Jewish synagogue with his wife and kids, or his references to the evangelists and Christian musicians he met or knew in Vancouver while growing up here; I'm only nine years younger than Fox, and I grew up in the evangelical milieu here myself, so I can't help wondering if I may have crossed paths with any of these people, too.

Fox also makes at least two references to The 700 Club, in contexts that suggest he probably isn't all that interested in watching the show or being one of its guests -- but one thing he doesn't mention, at least not that I noticed, is that he once co-starred in a prime-time TV special produced by The 700 Club in the early 1980s. You can see a fragment of that performance above.

The reason I remember Fox's appearance in this special is that, in a weird sort of way, it helped me to get more involved in "secular" pop culture when I was still in my early teens. No doubt Pat Robertson and his cohorts hired people like Fox to appear in this special as a way of luring "secular" audience members in to hear their message -- yet for kids like me, who grew up in the evangelical ghetto and rarely watched prime-time TV, shows like this opened us up to the wider world of mainstream entertainment. When I finally began to watch Family Ties a year or two after this special aired, I could tell myself it was probably okay partly because Fox had played a part, however small, in a Christian TV show. (The fact that Family Ties co-star Michael Gross had gone even further and proclaimed his faith on The 700 Club itself also came into play there somewhere.)

Thankfully, I haven't felt the need to "justify" my interest in popular culture like that in a long, long time. I do, however, still wonder sometimes about those places where the "secular" culture and the evangelical culture bleed into one another. For example, I think the VeggieTales videos are reasonably amusing and morally instructive, but I cannot help but wonder how old I should let my kids get before I clue them in to the fact that some of the gags in those videos come from R-rated films like Scarface and The Blues Brothers.

The subtleties of subtitles.

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If you're like me, you tend to watch DVDs with the subtitles on -- whether because the kids are awake and the house is too noisy, or because the kids are asleep and the house needs to be quiet, or for some other reason altogether. And if you're like me, you can't help but wonder sometimes just what was going through the subtitlers' minds.

Case in point: Two nights ago, I was watching Peyton Place (1957), a surprisingly edgy-for-its-time (but still rather tame, compared to its source material) movie about adultery and incest and gossip and, um, "miscarriages" in a small New England town -- and in one scene, as two women and a boy go to church, we hear the choir in the distance. See if you can figure out what lyrics the choir is actually singing as these people approach the church:

And that's where the scene fades out. Had it continued, though, I suspect the subtitlers might have noticed that "heavenly fold" doesn't exactly rhyme with "Son and Holy Ghost." And hey, even if they had heard the lyrics correctly, didn't they choose a rather strange place to put the line break?

This isn't the only oddity in the subtitles, though. Consider the bit below, from the scene where Rodney tells Allison that he promised to dance with Betty, the "tramp" that he recently broke up with in order to please his father:

Admittedly, the actor playing Rodney speaks rather quickly here, but even if he skips or compresses his syllables, shouldn't it be obvious he's referring to the "intermission" at the high-school dance? Or is he putting off dancing with Betty until after he has seen some test results for a cancer treatment or something?

Snippets: Saving Lives, Ice Castles, and More

A movie about making a difference in a teen's life, a remake of an ice flick, and more.

by Mark Moring

Two weeks ago, a 17-year-old friend of our family--and a best friend to both of my teenage sons--took his own life. We've been reeling and processing it ever since. (The young man is now in heaven, so that certainly helps the grieving process.) So when I heard about a new film coming this fall called To Save a Life, about how schoolmates react in the wake of a teen's suicide, I was intrigued. Apparently the overriding theme of the indie drama addresses what teens can do to reach out to their lonely, hurting classmates. The website includes some links to Christian sites for help, and veteran Christian musician Charlie Peacock has signed on to helm the music for the project. Peacock doesn't associate himself with schlock, so I have hopes that the movie will be reasonably good.

Remakes On Ice!: Not sure why it had to be remade, but 1978's Ice Castles is getting a makeover. Sony Pictures Worldwide will star newcomer Taylor Firth, a U.S. figure skating whiz who also just happens to be a Christian. Former skating champ Michelle Kwan will have a cameo in the film, which is scheduled to release sometime around the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Remembering the Martyrs: A new documentary, Malatya, tells the story of two Turkish Christians and a German missionary who were tortured and killed inside a Bible publishing hours in Malatya, Turkey, in 2007. Two of the surviving wives, who have forgiven the killers, both contributed to the film, which releases to DVD on Saturday.

Newsbites: The medieval and historical edition!

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1. William Hurt has joined the cast of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood; he will play William Marshall, the first Earl of Pembroke, "a historical figure who was one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshall was a servant to the Plantagenet kings and one of the best jousters of the era." -- Hollywood Reporter

2. Showtime has renewed The Tudors for a fourth and final season; it will consist of ten episodes that "dramatize King Henry VIII's last two tumultuous marriages, to Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr." After that, series creator Michael Hirst plans to develop a series based on Camelot. -- Hollywood Reporter

3. Speaking of Camelot, the Cartoon Network is developing a live-action movie that will set the legend of King Arthur in the present day; it is tentatively titled Reborn. -- Hollywood Reporter

4. James Franco will reunite with Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green and co-star Danny McBride for the medieval-fantasy comedy Your Highness. The story concerns "two spoiled and arrogant princes" who are "forced to go on a quest to save their family and the kingdom" after "an evil wizard casts a spell on their father and kidnaps the older prince's fiance". -- Variety

Newsbites: The Terminator edition!

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1. Terminator Salvation director McG says the ending of his film will be "challenging" and "elliptical" -- and it will leave the door wide open for a couple more sequels: "It’s not a happy little bow of an ending at all. The ending is tough and requires reflection, and in some degrees it bifurcates the audience. You walk back to the car and one person thinks it means this, and the other person thinks it means that." -- MTV Movies Blog

2. The ratings for The Sarah Connor Chronicles went up a bit a few weeks before the season finale, but did not pick up on the night of the finale itself. Some insiders say the show is as good as cancelled, now, but there will be no official indication of that until Fox announces its fall schedule May 18. -- Ace Showbiz, Hollywood Reporter, TV by the Numbers, Entertainment Weekly, io9

3. Thomas Dekker, who plays -- or played? -- John Connor on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is in final negotiations to play a swim-team jock in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. -- ShockTillYouDrop.com

4. A settlement has been reached in the lawsuit between Terminator Salvation producer Moritz Borman and his fellow producers Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek. -- Variety

Film Premiere Hits Home

by Lisa Cockrel

American Violet, out in limited release today, faced protests from the KKK when it recently premiered at a church in the small Texas town where the movie is set. The NPR reporter who broke the true story the movie is based on covered the event and you can listen to his report here.

The backstory: filmmaker Bill Haney was listening to the radio during his commute in Boston when a story on NPR caught his attention. The story focused on a poor young woman in Hearne, Texas, who was charged with drug possession. She faced intense pressure to plead guilty despite a lack of solid evidence. And she decided to fight back. That young woman's name was Regina Kelly and her story became American Violet, a movie Haney wrote.

Kelly's story shines the light on the racially tense environment in Hearne and on the untold numbers of innocent casualties of the war on drugs. Kelly's faith played a big role in her ability to go up against the local legal establishment and my interview with Kelly and Haney was posted on Tuesday.

Music and Moviemaking

by Lisa Cockrel

Calvin College recently hosted its biennial Festival of Faith and Music in Grand Rapids. It was a weekend full of rich conversation and wonderful music with participants including Cornel West, Lupe Fiasco, David Bazan, Over the Rhine, David Dark, Charlie Peacock, Andy Crouch, and so many more.

Nathan Johnson, who used wine glasses and household junk to compose the score for the neo-noir film Brick and also scored the upcoming The Brothers Bloom (both directed by his cousin Rian Johnson), gave an excellent behind-the-scenes look at composing music for independent film. He explored specific creative challenges regarding structure, technology and the constraints of small-scale music production.You can listen to his workshop here.

On a more personal note...

by Lisa Cockrel

Barbara Nicolosi, the founder of Act One and a prominent Christian voice in Hollywood, announced her engagement to Norris Archer Harrington just this morning.

She writes: "One of my friends said, 'So, now you have a date for the apocalypse.'

"Yeah, it's hard not to think of Jesus saying, 'But in the end times it will be as in the days of Noah, when they were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage right up until the rain started to fall.' So this is my part in filling out Biblical prophecy for the last days?

"Cool!"

Cool, indeed. Congrats Barb!

Terminator odds and ends.

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The final episode of the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles aired tonight, but I won't be seeing it just yet, since I only started catching up on this year's episodes about a week ago. It's been fun blitzing through the season so far, though; while there's a certain hit-and-miss quality to the series as a whole, it does explore some fascinating ideas, and I am particularly intrigued by the way it has introduced explicitly religious elements in places where I always thought the original films were somewhat lacking.

For example, when former FBI agent James Ellison tries to teach the artificial intelligence known as John Henry that it is wrong to let someone die, he bases this assertion on his belief that human life is made in the image of God and is therefore sacred. The viewer may or may not share Ellison's belief in this regard, but to my ears, this is at least a more potentially engaging argument than the one John Connor made in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), when he tried to persuade the reprogrammed Terminator that you can't go around killing people "because you just can't, okay?"

I still have several episodes to watch, so I can't say much more about the series just yet. But for now, let me say that I am one of the many people who hopes Fox renews this show for at least another season, despite its low ratings.

Meanwhile, in other news, io9 (via Carmen Andres) has posted a chart that attempts to show the entire history of the Terminator franchise, including all the timelines that have been revealed in the movies and TV episodes to date. It looks fun, but if I were to take it at all seriously, I think the chart makes three errors:

First, it assumes that the various shows agree on the elements that ought to be common to all of the timelines, including the birth of John Connor. But this is not so; while the first two movies established that John Connor was conceived in May 1984 and born in February 1985, the TV series has pushed his date of birth back to November 1983, and the third movie seemed to push it even further back, to the late 1970s.

Second, it assumes that the various shows are all part of the same continuity, even if that continuity is constantly being rewritten by the multiple jumps back in time. But everything I have heard indicates that the franchise hits a fork in the road after the second movie, and that all the subsequent movies are completely separate from the TV show. There simply does not seem to be any cross-pollination between the timeline of the later movies and the timelines of the TV series.

Third, it seems to assume that the franchise has followed a consistent approach to temporal mechanics, such that every leap back in time creates a new and slightly different timeline; the chart even goes so far as to refer to a "first John Connor" who existed before Kyle was sent back in time to become the father of all the other John Connors. But one of my own longstanding complaints about the second movie is that it radically disagreed with the first movie on this point. The first movie -- like other time-travel films of its era, such as The Final Countdown (1980) and The Philadelphia Experiment (1984) -- followed an old-fashioned closed-loop approach to temporal mechanics, wherein the future fulfills the past and vice versa; but the second movie posited that one could break free of that loop and act in ways that rewrite the future. To keep the franchise going, the subsequent movies and TV show have had to find some sort of middle ground between the two approaches, and they haven't always been successful.

Let's put it this way: If the John Connor who existed before Kyle came back in time was not the John Connor who existed after Kyle came back in time, then what do we do with that photo of Sarah Connor that Kyle fell in love with before he came back in time? You know, the photo that was created after Kyle had come back in time and impregnated Sarah with John?

If we follow the io9 chart, then we would have to posit that the photo was created on the second timeline but somehow ended up in Kyle's possession on the first timeline -- but that doesn't seem very likely.

Turning to other news -- and speaking of the photo! -- SlashFilm reports that that famous snapshot of Sarah Connor will make an appearance in the fourth movie, Terminator Salvation, which opens May 21. CHUD.com also reports that Linda Hamilton, the actress who played Sarah Connor in the first two movies, has recorded a brief voice-over for the "very beginning" of the new movie.

As for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original Terminator, whose possible involvement in this film has been the subject of much speculation over the past few years, former football star Terry Crews recently told the MTV Movies Blog that both he and Arnold will have cameos in the film -- but the shoot was so secretive, Crews says he has no idea what sort of cameo Arnold will have.

Meanwhile, Moviehole reports that the ending to Terminator Salvation has been completely changed because a major spoiler got leaked last year. And if there was ever any truth to that spoiler, then I have to say, I'm kind of glad it's been written out of the movie.

Finally, you can see a new poster for the upcoming movie here, the first five pages of the comic-book adaptation here, and one of three brand new TV spots here:

Click here if the video file above doesn't play properly.

Year One gets a PG-13 rating after all.

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Year One was originally rated R in the United States for "some sexual content and language". Producer Judd Apatow and writer-director Harold Ramis appealed the rating a few days ago, but to no avail.

Now, says the Hollywood Reporter, the quasi-biblical comedy has been re-cut and successfully re-rated PG-13, for "crude and sexual content throughout, brief strong language and comic violence".

Note how the R-rated version only had "some" sexual content, according to the MPAA, whereas the PG-13 version -- the one with less footage, and specifically less of the "adult" footage -- has crude and sexual content "throughout".

No doubt this reflects how extremely relative the ratings process is, and how each rating brings a different set of expectations to the movie: As R-rated movies go, this one was apparently kind of mild, but as PG-13 movies go, it's right there on the edge.

Oh, and apparently "comic violence" doesn't even bear mentioning in an R-rated film, but when it turns up in a PG-13 movie, it becomes the sort of thing that the MPAA figures parents might want to know about.

The deleted footage will no doubt see the light of day on DVD, of course.

Newsbites: The time travel edition!

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1. Mike Newell is attached to direct The Box of Delights, an adaptation of a 1930s children's novel "about a boy entrusted with a magic box that allows him to travel through time", among other things. The story was previously adapted for British radio in the 1940s and for British TV in the 1980s. -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter

2. Disney has picked up Wouldn't It Be Nice, a family comedy about "a teenage couple who, just before they plan to run away together and pursue their dreams, are magically zapped 20 years into the future only to discover that their lives didn't necessarily turn out as expected. In their mid-30s but with teenage minds -- and dealing with three kids and everyday worries -- they learn that maybe they weren't as grown up as they once thought." If they are zapped into the present day, then presumably they were teenagers in the late 1980s or early 1990s -- so why is the movie named after a 1960s pop song? Oh, and question: If they discover that they weren't "ready" to be married after all, what will they do if and when they return to their original age and original time? Will they decide not to get married and have kids -- in effect, blotting out the existence of the three children that they had been dealing with for the bulk of the movie? I'm getting a certain The Family Man (2000) vibe here. Or, if you prefer, this movie could turn out to be the polar opposite of Back to the Future (1985). -- Hollywood Reporter

3. Groundhog Day (1993) director Harold Ramis says a stage musical version of that movie is in the works. -- MTV Movies Blog

Newsbites: The war movie edition!

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1. Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. have joined the cast of Red Tails, the George Lucas-produced World War II movie based, however loosely, on "the first all-black aerial combat unit". This is at least the second time Gooding has been involved with a film on this subject; in 1995, he co-starred with Laurence Fishburne and others in a TV-movie called The Tuskegee Airmen. -- ComingSoon.net, Variety (x2), Hollywood Reporter, Associated Press

2. Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer have bought the screen rights to Horse Soldiers, an upcoming book about "a band of elite special forces and CIA operatives who secretly invaded Afghanistan post-9/11 on horseback and helped Afghan fighters capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and topple the Taliban." This would not be the first time Bruckheimer, best known for his action and fantasy movies, has tackled this sort of subject matter; he previously produced Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001) and acquired the film rights to a magazine article on 'Jihadists in Paradise'. -- Variety

Clash of the Schindler's List veterans!

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Schindler's List (1993) made Liam Neeson a star and introduced the world to Ralph Fiennes. Now, according to the Hollywood Reporter, the two actors will reunite, in a manner of speaking, for Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans (1981). Neeson, who has spent the past few years providing the voice of Aslan in the Narnia movies, will play Zeus, king of the gods; while Fiennes, who has spent the past few years playing the evil Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies, will play Hades, the "ruler of the underworld who aims to overtake Zeus and rule over all." Zeus was played in the original film by Laurence Olivier, but the part of Hades is new to the remake, which can probably be taken as a sign of just how different this new film will be from its predecessor.

Newsbites: The quasi-biblical (or not) edition!

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1. The ratings for Kings, the TV series that modernizes the story of Saul and David, have not been very good -- so NBC has decided to move the show from its current Sunday-night slot to Saturday night, "where expectations are extremely small." Four episodes have been aired so far; the fifth will hit the airwaves April 18. -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter

2. The MPAA has upheld the R rating it gave to Year One, despite an appeal from producer Judd Apatow and writer-director Harold Ramis for something more lenient. The film, a comedy about a couple of prehistoric hunter-gatherer types who wander through the Book of Genesis, received the rating for "some sexual content and language." -- Hollywood Reporter

3. Warner Brothers has acquired Methuselah, an "action adventure" named after the biblical figure who lived to be 969 years old. The film itself will concern a man who "ages at a similarly slow rate and has used all the extra time to develop an incredible set of survival skills." -- Variety

Snippets: Baseball, Egypt, and More!

The best baseball movies, a controversial Egyptian film, and more.

by Mark Moring

Now that baseball season has begun, it might be time to watch some great films from that genre.

Guideposts magazine has picked its list of the top five inspirational baseball movies of all time, and while their choices (including The Rookie and the original Angels in the Outfield) are good ones, I don't see how they could've possibly missed Field of Dreams, arguably the best and most inspiring baseball movie ever. Fortunately, CT Movies compiled the perfect baseball movie list several years ago. Check it out.

Controversial film: NPR reports that a new Egyptian film "is stirring controversy in the minority Coptic Christian community for its frank portrayal of the difficulty Christian couples face in getting divorced or remarried." According to the story, "a group of Christian attorneys tried to block [the film], arguing that it demeaned the sanctity of Coptic marriage."

Doorpost Voting Begins: Online voting has begun at The Doorpost Film Project, an annual short film contest. Check it out; I was a judge for this contest last year, and was very impressed with the high caliber of films.

Expression of the day: Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

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I can't recall whether I have ever heard this expression before, but I doubt I'll forget it now. 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl', a term coined by Nathan Rabin a few years ago after seeing Natalie Portman in Garden State (2004) and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), popped up twice in my news feed this morning. First, Christopher Campbell looked at how Zooey Deschanel, who I adore, has come to embody this character type; he then listed ten MPDGs who were not played by Deschanel but, in his opinion, should have been (including, yes, the Portman character in Garden State and the Dunst character in Elizabethtown). And then, Glenn Kenny praised the Kristen Stewart character in Adventureland for not being the MPDG that she could oh-so-easily have been. If a third person had used the term this morning, we'd officially have a trend on our hands, but for now, these two citations will have to do.

Herod the Great and his Cleopatra cameo.

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Lou Lumenick reminds us that a "75th anniversary edition" of Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934) is coming out on DVD tomorrow -- along with a number of other films that were made in the early 1930s, right around the time the movie industry was beginning to enforce the morality code that would dominate American films up until the 1960s.

I happened to watch Cleopatra for the first time a few months ago, and I was surprised when, a little more than an hour into the movie, Herod the Great showed up. In his first scene, he says that he has come directly from Rome, and that he is on his way back to his kingdom in Judea, but while he is in Egypt, he has a message for Cleopatra: namely, Octavian wants her to kill Mark Antony.

In the next scene, Herod and Mark Antony share some drinks and some laughs, and then Herod, still laughing, tells Antony that Octavian wants Cleopatra to poison him -- a message that Antony himself laughs off, until a later scene in which he discovers that Cleopatra is testing different kinds of poison on her prisoners.

So Herod gets to be friendly with all the major political figures -- Octavian, Cleopatra, Mark Antony -- while at the same time disturbing the two political figures with whom he shares actual screen time. And you get the impression that he rather likes disturbing his friends, even though they are all discussing serious matters of life and death. The important thing, for Herod, is that he has influential connections, that he can flaunt those influential connections, and that he can keep those influential connections.

I have no idea whether there is any historical basis for these particular scenes. But for what it's worth, Wikipedia indicates that Herod secured his position as "King of the Jews" with help from both Mark Antony and Cleopatra between 40 and 37 BC, and that, when civil war broke out between Antony and Octavian, Herod switched his allegiance to Octavian in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra would go on to die in 30 BC, after losing their war with Octavian, while Herod continued to rule Judea until his own death in 4 BC. Octavian, who went on to become the Emperor Augustus, did not die until AD 14.

The Herod cameo in this film is particularly interesting for two reasons: One, I am not aware of any other Cleopatra movie that has included Herod as one of its characters. And two, both Herod and director DeMille are often associated with biblical epics, yet this is the only DeMille film that depicts Herod -- and it is not, strictly speaking, a biblical epic! Even DeMille's one life-of-Jesus movie, The King of Kings (1927), never gets around to depicting Herod the Great, because it focuses exclusively on Jesus' adult ministry and never depicts the Nativity.

Herod, incidentally, is played here by Joseph Schildkraut, who had previously played Judas Iscariot in The King of Kings. Cleopatra, of course, is played by Claudette Colbert, who had previously bathed nude in asses' milk as the Roman Empress Poppea in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932) -- and would soon go on to win an Oscar for starring opposite Clark Gable in Frank Capra's classic screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934).

Cleopatra was previously available on DVD as part of a five-disc set of DeMille films that also included The Sign of the Cross, Four Frightened People (1934), The Crusades (1935) and Union Pacific (1939).

Newsbites: The reimagined characters edition!

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1. Two -- not one, but two -- movies about the Easter Bunny are now in the works. Universal is developing I Hop, a live-action film about "an out-of-work slacker who, while driving home late one night, runs over the Easter Bunny. When the bunny can’t hop because his leg is broken, the slacker must train to take over the job and save Easter." Meanwhile, Sony Animation has picked up Hip Hop, in which "the Easter Bunny decides to retire and hides out as a pet with a suburban family, turning their lives upside down." -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter

2. Emma Stone is in talks to star in Easy A, a modernized high-school version of The Scarlet Letter. The film "centers on a student who sees her life paralleling Hawthorne's heroine Hester Prynne after she pretends to be the school slut in hopes that she'll benefit from the notion she's promiscuous." -- Variety

3. NBC is developing Dorothy Gale, a modernized version of The Wizard of Oz. The show will follow "the story of Dorothy, a girl from Kansas who tries to tackle modern-day Manhattan (her version of the Emerald City). Dorothy finds a job in the art world -- and must deal with a wicked boss." -- Variety

4. Emily Blunt, who is playing the Princess of Lilliputia opposite Jack Black's Lemuel Gulliver in the upcoming Gulliver's Travels, says the film will show how Gulliver "contemporizes the whole palace setup" when he comes to Lilliput. -- MTV Movies Blog

5. Photos of Nicolas Cage in his modernized Sorcerer's Apprentice garb surfaced on the internet recently, prompting some people to compare his get-up to Hugh Jackman's outfit in Van Helsing (2004). -- Cartoon Brew, Just Jared

6. Vanessa Redgrave has joined the cast of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of Kings Richard and John; the character was famously played by Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter (1968). John himself is being played by Oscar Isaac, who played Joseph in The Nativity Story (2006). Meanwhile, Russell Crowe recently revealed that he has cut off the hair that he had been growing for the title role. -- Hollywood Reporter, WENN

7. The lobbying by Nightmare of Elm Street fans has paid off: Jackie Earle Haley, most recently seen as Rorschach in Watchmen, will play Freddy Krueger in the remake of Wes Craven's 1984 horror film. -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter

8. Ellen DeGeneres will play Mother Nature in an original comedy being developed by Walden Media, in which the character "will return to Earth for the first time since the planet's creation." -- Hollywood Reporter

Gibson to Film 'Passion' Sequel

CT Movies exclusive: 'Resurrection of The Christ' due Easter 2010

by Mark Moring

Editor's note: Now that April Fool's Day is behind us, we'll fess up: This "news" story is a spoof. The 10-point "acrostic" below should've been evidence enough: Read the first letter of each line, going down vertically. Get it? Happy April 2nd.

CT Movies has learned that Mel Gibson is planning a sequel to The Passion of The Christ, to begin filming in May in southern Italy.

The film, titled The Resurrection of The Christ, is scheduled to release around Easter of 2010. Though the script has not yet been finalized, a source close to Gibson told us that the film will pick up where The Passion left off - with Christ in the tomb, rising from the dead. The storyline will include Christ's appearance to his disciples and many others, and carry through to the Ascension.

James Caviezel, who played Jesus in The Passion, is not available to resurrect the role, the source told CT Movies. When asked who was being considered for the part, the source said that Mickey Rourke, recently nominated for an Oscar in The Wrestler, was on the short list. He also said that Russell Crowe, Ewan McGregor, and "an unknown actor from Australia" were being considered.

The source told CT that Gibson wanted to accomplish 10 things in the new film:

A mazing miracles
P assionate acting
R esurrection power
I nspirational images
L ove of the Lord
F ollowing Jesus
O ne way to Heaven
O mniscience of God
L asting impressions
S alvation from sin

The source also told CT Movies that although the mainstream media might ridicule Gibson for this decision, the director was clinging to his favorite Scripture passage about being "fools for Christ" (1 Cor. 4:10).

CT Movies will continue to monitor the story, and report any new developments should they arise.

Newsbites: The Star Trek edition!

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Note: There may be spoilers here if you have not yet seen any of the ads or read any of the recent prequel comic books.

1. Paramount is so confident that the new Star Trek movie will be a success when it opens five weeks from now that they have already commissioned a sequel, to be produced and written by the same guys who made the current movie. They are currently aiming to release the sequel in two years. -- Variety

2. Paramount has released new trailers aimed at the action-movie and kid-friendly crowds, and the ads contain new images of pointy-eared babies and planetary destruction, among other things. -- TrekMovie.com (x2)

3. Some of my fellow Trekkies, incidentally, have complained that all the planetary destruction feels too much like Star Wars -- the Death Star and all that -- and not very much like Star Trek. But to that, I would reply that the villain in one of the previous movies, Star Trek: Generations (1994), wiped out not just planets but entire systems, and of course the original series included episodes such as 'The Doomsday Machine', in which the destruction of entire planets might not have been shown, presumably for budgetary reasons, but was certainly part of the plot.

4. Speaking of planetary destruction, the third and fourth issues of Star Trek: Countdown have shown how the loss of his homeworld turned the Romulan character Nero into the revenge-seeking villain that we will see in the movie. -- Ain't It Cool News, TrekMovie.com (x2, x3)

5. Paramount has also released several images from the upcoming set of movie collector's cards made by Rittenhouse -- and some of those images seem more spoiler-ish than anything we have seen so far. -- MTV Movies Blog, TrekMovie.com

6. The town of Vulcan, Alberta -- which I visited with my family two years ago -- was hoping it could host the world premiere of the new movie, and they even had Leonard Nimoy himself campaigning on their behalf, but alas, it was not to be. For one thing, the town doesn't even have a movie theatre. No worries, though; the studio says it will arrange a screening for the residents of Vulcan in nearby Calgary. The actual world premiere will take place at the Sydney Opera House in Australia on April 7. -- Canadian Press (x2), Calgary Herald, Globe and Mail, Reuters, TrekMovie.com

7. People are already beginning to speculate that, if the new movie is a success, it could lead to a new TV series. -- Hollywood Reporter

8. Harlan Ellison -- who wrote 'City on the Edge of Forever', one of the most acclaimed Star Trek episodes ever -- is suing CBS Paramount for failing to pay him for using elements of that episode in their merchandising. -- Variety, TrekMovie.com (x2)

9. More and more Star Trek fans are putting command chairs in their living rooms. -- New York Times

Newsbites: The demons and monsters edition!

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1. Swedish director Mikael Håfström -- whose last film was the Stephen King adaptation 1408 (2007) -- is set to direct Last Rite, based on the true story of an American priest who studied at an exorcism school in Italy. The script is by Michael Petroni, who was recently hired to re-write The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. -- Variety

2. Paul Bettany, having played an albino assassin monk in The Da Vinci Code (2006) and the archangel Michael in the upcoming Legion, will now star in the horror western Priest as "a warrior priest . . . who turns against the church to track down a murderous band of vampires who have kidnapped his niece." Based on a TokyoPop comic book, Priest will be directed by Scott Stewart, who also directed Legion. -- Hollywood Reporter

3. The English subtitles on the American DVD version of the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In (above) are very, very wrong. -- Icons of Fright, Jeffrey Wells

4. Several Native American actors have been cast as members of the Wolf Pack, a group of werewolves who protect humans from vampires, in New Moon, the first sequel to last year's mega-hit Twilight. Meanwhile, British actor Jamie Campbell-Bower has been cast as one of the Italian vampires. -- Variety (x2), Hollywood Reporter

5. Summit Entertainment, the company behind the Twilight franchise, is also developing the vampire-themed Elevator Men. Screenwriter Marc Haimes describes his film as "a reaction to all of these stories now -- TV shows and movies -- that play this kind of romantic, fantastical, sexy aspect of getting involved with monsters. This is the dark, sinister version of what really happens when you decide you're going to get close to really bad things." -- Hollywood Reporter

6. Watchmen co-writer David Hayter plans to direct a werewolf movie called Slaughter's Road through his newly-formed Dark Hero Studios. -- Variety

7. Sam Fell, co-director of the animated films The Tale of Despereaux (2008) and Flushed Away (2006), is attached to direct Demonkeeper, a live-action film about "a Seattle teen who inherits responsibility for a house filled with demons." Naturally, some kids break into the house and set the worst of the demons loose. -- Variety

8. Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and co-starred in the first two Ghostbusters movies (1984-1989), says the much-rumoured third movie will probably revolve around a new generation of slimefighters, but the original cast will still be on board as "sage mentors" to the new guys. -- MTV News

9. Adam Marcus -- best known, if that's the word, for directing the not-so-correctly-titled Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) -- has been hired to direct the remake of Val Lewton's classic I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Somehow I doubt it will have the subtlety or thematic potency of the original. -- Variety

SpeedCine

Tom Hanks: Pawn of Satan?

Newsbites: The '80s live forever edition!

WWJD: The Movie

Odysseus without the odyssey?

Yet another Nativity movie in the works.

Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw to play real-life evangelical couple

Newsbites: The biblical and religious edition!

Slumdog's Young Star for Sale?

Ron Howard Fights Back