Wonder Twin Powers, Activate. Form of: Pajiba!
The Daily Trade Round-Up / Dustin Rowles
Trade News | February 27, 2007 | Comments (25)
Good news for those of you who like to have your adolescent dreams crushed by a Hollywood that manages to take all that was good in our childhoods and massacre it with overblown, substance-deprived spectacles meant to trigger erections in the current crop of 13-year-old boys who have to carry their comic books with them to the theater to cover up their bulges. I speak, of course, of the filmic adaptation of the Justice League, or — for our xenophobes out there — The Justice League of America, an all-star roster of superheroes, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, and the Plastic Man. Personally, I was more fond of the “Super Friends,” a cartoon with a similar configuration of superheroes that also included — if I recall correctly — Apache Chief and The Wonder Twins, one of whom could miraculously take the form of a bucket of water, a formidable weapon against Solomon Grundy and the rest of the Legion of Doom (please take my vague recollections of the “Super Friends” with a grain of salt; I spent most of my childhood doing more important things than watching cartoons — getting beaten up on a daily basis, for instance). At the moment, Warner Brothers has only hired Kiernan and Michele Mulroney (the duo behind the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” television pilot) to write a script, and the particulars of which superheroes will be written in is unknown, though it seems unlikely that either Batman or Superman would appear, given the sequels they currently have in production. That, of course, means that it will probably be comprised of an unwieldy number of lesser-known members of the Justice League, like Hawkman, Green Arrow, Atom, and — of course — Urinia (The Princess of Pee) and Crystal Meth, who can clean a trailer home in under 30 seconds and kill a man with halitosis.
Elsewhere, to update an earlier item that Dan ran, after months of waffling, J.J. Abrams has officially signed on to direct the next installment of Star Trek, from a script he wrote himself. The story, as Dan wrote at a time when the joke was a bit more timely, “is rumored to revolve around the first meeting between Kirk and Spock at the Starfleet academy, including their semiannual fishing trips to the Wyoming mountains.” From what I understand from Abrams’ own statements, the film is meant to appeal to both hard-core Trekkies and people like myself new to the franchise, which is difficult to imagine, since I don’t give a shit about Star Trek.
Next: It’s hard to argue that a Will Ferrell flick deserved an Oscar nomination, but I was still a bit disappointed that Stranger Than Fiction didn’t even find some recognition with the Academy for Zach Helm’s screenplay. At any rate, Fiction was one of my favorite films of 2006, and now it’s out on DVD, along with a few films that were rightfully ignored by both the Academy and film-going audiences: Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, The Return, and A Good Year.
Finally, in the trailer watch, for those of you who have miraculously not tired of seeing Nicolas Cage crush us with his almost daily presence at the local multiplex, get ready for Next, a Philip K. Dick adaptation, featuring Cage — with a full-on Da Vinci hairdo — as a man who can see the future. I, too, can see in the future, and I can tell you that Next will suck, but that it will still earn over $100 million at the box office.
Dustin Rowles is the publisher of Pajiba. He lives with his wife in Ithaca, New York. You may email him, or leave a comment below.
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Comments
Posted by: Rich at February 27, 2007 10:16 AM
Yea I loved the Super Friends. I think there was the core four or five but then you would get the guest superfriend of the week, probably someone needing to pay the rent. The fact they would try to bring this to life in light of the other on going projects in each hero's franchise, tells you again that money is king and if they stumble onto quality then that is icing on the cake.
As for Star Trek, enough already..