It’s Getting Kind of Hard to Believe Things Are Going to Get Better
The Daily Trade Round-Up / Daniel Carlson
Trade News | May 1, 2008 | Comments ()
Summer is definitely beginning to make itself known here in sunny SoCal: The California tourism commercials are increasing in frequency, “The Hills” is back on the air, and those of us without central air are learning once again just how glorious ceiling fans can be. But aside from all that, we’re just hours away from the start of the summer movie season, and as if to make us enjoy the onslaught of tentpoles even more, the news out of Hollywood has been boring and douchey and generally uninvolving. I mean, Uwe Boll is suing Billy Zane. It’s impossible to care less than I do about how that turns out.
It seems that Ewan McGregor is in talks to join Angels and Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. There’s probably some kind of plot to Angels and Demons, but honestly, I don’t know anyone who’s read it, or who’s brave enough to admit having done so. My guess is that there’s a conspiracy involving the Catholic Church and some kind of car chase. Whatever happens, I think we can all agree that McGregor seems like a nice man who shouldn’t put himself through the ordeal of starring in another bad movie. Don’t do it, Ewan.
In a bid to bring in every last drop of revenue from teens who are too dumb to know better, Rogue Pictures has preemptively picked up a spec script titled Drill Team from Gregory Anderson. The logline reads thusly: “A female-driven teen dance movie set in the competitive world of high school drill teams.” There’s something just so overwhelmingly depressing about this whole concept that any attempt to understand it flies right by the obvious question of who cares about drill teams and winds up making you just feel sad for the kids who are gonna get taken in by this.
Here’s something random: Anna Chlumsky is going to star in In the Loop, a political satire for BBC Films. She’ll be starring with James Gandolfini and some other people, but who cares about them. The point is that the star of My Girl has, inexplicably, returned to the business. On one hand, it’s easy to dismiss the casting, especially since it’s tough to know how she’ll hold her own onscreen against anything other than the ghost of Macaulay Culkin. But I’m looking on the bright side, especially since Chlumsky drifted through a couple of low-level editing jobs after college. I guess there’s hope for us all.
Keeping the 1990s theme going, Christian Slater, best known for pumping up our volume, will star in Dolan’s Cadillac, an adaptation of the Stephen King short story. Joining him will be Wes Bentley and Emmanuelle Vaugier. Bentley will play a guy out to avenge his wife’s murder by a Las Vegas mob boss, played by Slater. Erik Canuel is directing the film, written by Richard Dooling. There’s little chance that the film will be any more suspenseful or engaging than a pleasant walk in the park on an April afternoon. “Dolan’s Cadillac” is from King’s collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and though the book isn’t the meandering waste of his later works, it certainly lacks the firepower of his earlier stories.
First up in today’s trailer watch is actually a user vid featuring images cribbed from Google and set to Jason Segel’s “Dracula’s Lament” from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. For the past two weeks, my roommate and I have occasionally burst forth with cries of, “And if I see Van Helsing, I SWEAR TO THE LORD I WILL SLAY HIM!” It’s pretty much the only thing getting me through the day:
Next is the trailer for The Escapist. Every time I read that title, I think someone’s made an adaptation of the comic character from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and I always get a little sad when I realize that’s not the case. Still, the real film in question looks pretty good. It’s got Brian Cox and prison breaks; what else do you need?
Daniel Carlson is the managing editor of Pajiba and a low-level employee at a Hollywood industry magazine. You can visit his blog, Slowly Going Bald.
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