Rosie Huntington-Whiteley replaces Megan Fox in Transformers 3
Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley has been cast as Megan Fox’s replacement in Michael Bay’s Transformers 3. She has no acting experience – not that that would be a requirement for her kind of role in that kind of movie.
Megan Fox and director Bay had an ugly public rift following Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. A few weeks ago, Paramount announced it wasn’t renewing Fox’s contract. The actress then retorted that she was the one who decided to quit the series because she was no longer willing to work with Bay. Fox will next be seen opposite Josh Brolin in Jonah Hex.
Huntington-Whiteley, who had previously worked with Bay on the Victoria’s Secret ad “A Thousand Fantasies,” will play Shia LaBeouf’s romantic interest in this third installment of the Transformers franchise.
Also in the Transformers 3 cast: Josh Duhamel, Patrick Dempsey, Alan Tudyk, John Turturro, Ken Jeong, Peter Cullen, Kevin Dunn, Oscar winner Frances McDormand (Fargo, 1996), and nominee John Malkovich.
Currently in production in the Los Angeles area, Transformers 3 should come out in July 2011.
Rachel Huntington-Whiteley image: Beach Bunny Swimwear.
Peter Jackson possibly to direct The Hobbit
Peter Jackson – or rather, Sir Peter Jackson (since late December 2009) – may end up directing The Hobbit.
According to Mike Fleming at Deadline.com, “Peter Jackson has decided to direct two installments of The Hobbit, trusted sources are telling me. His deal is being negotiated right now with Warner Bros , New Line, and MGM.”
Following Guillermo del Toro’s departure from the project less than four weeks ago – reportedly because of del Toro’s time constraints and MGM’s shaky finances – all sorts of names have been bandied about as possible replacements for the director of Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. Those ranged from Christopher Nolan and Neill Blomkamp to absurdities such as Quentin Tarantino and the ghost of Cecil B. DeMille.
At the time of del Toro’s departure, Jackson’s manager Ken Kamins told EW.com that “as for Peter directing, that’s not something he can consider at this time as he has other commitments to other projects. But make no mistake, Peter and Fran’s commitment to the franchise is total and [they] will do everything necessary to protect the films and the investment made by New Line, [parent company] Warner Bros. and MGM.”
Christopher Nolan to attend Hero Complex Film Festival 2010
On Saturday, at the Hero Complex Film Festival, which runs June 11–13 at the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood – between screenings of Insomnia and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan will discuss his career and answer questions from the audience.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Ken Watanabe, Nolan’s sci-fi thriller Inception opens July 16.
Also at the Hero Complex Film Festival, on Friday special guest Leonard Nimoy will be in attendance for a screening of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – a timely presentation considering the ongoing whale and dolphin hunting, the fact that overfishing is destroying multiple marine species, and the Gulf Coast oil catastrophe.
On Sunday, Ridley Scott will be in attendance as the festival will present two of his sci-fi classics, Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver, and Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. The former may or may not have inspired Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Bella giving birth to the hybrid fetus that grows into Renesmee); the latter may or may not have inspired the recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
The Most Dangerous Man in America on DVD
On June 20, First Run Features will release the DVD of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s Academy Award-nominated documentary was the 2009 winner of the National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award.
The Most Dangerous Man in America traces high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to risk his freedom so as to make public top secret U.S. government documents exposing its countless lies about the Vietnam War.
Daniel Radcliffe & the end of the Harry Potter franchise
Daniel Radcliffe, who joined Katie Holmes at the 2010 Tony Awards to hand out the best featured actress in a play award to Scarlett Johansson (for Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge), finished working on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this past week.
“Everyone was really devastated. It was really, really sad,” Radcliffe remarked. “[We] were crying quite a lot.”
Feng Xiaogang vs. Harvey Weinstein
Golden Horse winner Feng Xiaogang, among whose credits are A World Without Thieves, Assembly, and If You Are the One, called US mogul Harvey Weinstein “a cheater in the eyes of many Chinese moviemakers,” according to Jonathan Landreth at The Hollywood Reporter.
Feng voiced his criticism at a discussion held at the 2010 Shanghai International Film Festival. Weinstein wasn’t present at the time, though the Hollywood producer had briefly showed up at the discussion before leaving to catch a plane.
Weinstein had been at the festival to push Mikael Håfström’s pre-World War II Casablanca-like spy thriller Shanghai (shot in 2008), starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Gong Li, John Cusack, Chow Yun-Fat, Ken Watanabe, and Franka Potente.
According to a source cited in Landreth’s piece, Weinstein paid $500,000 for the rights to Feng’s Hamlet remake, The Banquet, Hong Kong’s submission for the 2007 best foreign language film Academy Award. Just a couple of days ago, his company bought the North American rights to Su Chao-Bin and John Woo’s upcoming Reign of Assassins, starring Michelle Yeoh.
Landreth adds that Feng also dismissed Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as “Hollywood movies,” and complained that US companies bought Chinese films without the intention of actually selling them.
The Shanghai Film Festival has had its share of controversies this year. Just last week, Taiwan pulled several films from the festival’s line-up.
Photo: Shanghai (The Weinstein Co.)
Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze in Jerry Zucker’s Ghost
Demi Moore Memoirs Coming Out
Demi Moore’s memoirs will be (tentatively) published by HarperCollins in 2012, according to The Associated Press.
Moore, whose age is reported to be 47 – old enough for her to write a book of memoirs, it seems – is best known for movies such as St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), with Rob Lowe; Ghost (1990), with Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg; A Few Good Men (1992), with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson; Indecent Proposal (1993), with Robert Redford and Woody Harrelson; and Ridley Scott’s flopG.I. Jane (1997), in which she costarred with Viggo Mortensen. Recently, she has had roles in The Joneses and Happy Tears, and has done quite a bit of twittering.
Moore’s book will reportedly cover both her life and career. Moore was married to Bruce Willis for a number of years. Her current husband is fellow twitterer Ashton Kutcher, whose Killers opened to so-so business this past weekend.
According to HarperCollins, Moore’s memoirs will be “framed by her complicated relationship with her mother, Virginia King.”
Photo: Ghost (Paramount)
Penelope Spheeris & Henry Selick to present 2010 Student Academy Awards
Along with The Hurt Locker actor Jeremy Renner, Oscar-nominated animator Henry Selick (Coraline, James and the Giant Peach) and director Penelope Spheeris (Wayne’s World, The Decline of Western Civilization) will be presenters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 37th Annual Student Academy Awards on Saturday, June 12. The 2010 ceremony will take place at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
As per the Academy’s press release, “while U.S. winners know they will each receive an award, their placement – Gold, Silver or Bronze – will not be revealed until the June 12 ceremony. Gold Medal award winners receive cash grants of $5,000, Silver Medal award winners receive $3,000 and Bronze Medal award winners receive $2,000. The Honorary Foreign Film winner receives a $1,000 cash grant.”
The 37th Annual Student Academy Awards ceremony on June 12 is free and open to the public, but advance tickets are required. More information at: www.oscars.org.
Penelope Spheeris image: Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Guillermo del Toro not to direct The Hobbit
Guillermo del Toro is out. Who will be directing The Hobbit when – or perhaps if – it goes into production, remains a mystery. Names mentioned as possibilities include Alfonso Cuarón, Sam Mendes, Darren Aronofsky, Tim Burton, and, of course, Peter Jackson. But that’s all speculation and wishful thinking – until an official announcement is made.
“We have been caught in a very tangled negotiation,” del Toro remarked at a news conference a few days before he publicly announced he was no longer going to direct The Hobbit. “Now I have been on the project for nearly two years. We have designed all the creatures, the sets, the wardrobe, animatics and planned action sequences and we are very, very prepared for when it is finally triggered. We don’t know anything until the MGM situation is resolved.”
The Hobbit (to be split into parts one and two to be shot back-to-back) has been a project “in the works” for about four years. Del Toro has finally called it quits (at least as the film’s director), partly as a result of MGM’s troubled finances. (The latest James Bond has been another casualty.)
The old studio, founded in 1924 as an amalgam of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Productions, is both up for sale and $3.7b in debt. It also co-owns (with New Line Cinema) the film rights to The Hobbit, which was scheduled to start production late this year.
Del Toro has told The Lord of the Rings fansite TheOneRing.net, that both The Hobbit films are still slated for release in December 2012 and December 2013. He added that he’ll continue to work alongside Peter Jackson and fellow screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.
Also at TheOneRing.net, Peter Jackson explained that “the bottom line is that Guillermo just didn’t feel he could commit six years to living in New Zealand, exclusively making these films, when his original commitment was for three years.”
Jackson, the director of the three Lord of the Rings film adaptations released in the early 2000s, is at this point an unlikely replacement for del Toro.
Entertainment Weekly reports that Jackson’s manager Ken Kamins informed them that “as for Peter directing, that’s not something he can consider at this time as he has other commitments to other projects. But make no mistake, Peter and Fran’s commitment to the franchise is total and will do everything necessary to protect the films and the investment made by New Line, [parent company] Warner Bros. and MGM.”
And here’s a brief explanation about The Hobbit, found in The Guardian:
It’s one of those tedious Lord of the Rings books, isn’t it? Full of portentous fantasy and made-up place names. It’s the original novel to which TLOTR trilogy is the sequel.
Tom Cruise’s Les Grossman possibly to star in his own movie
Tom Cruise’s crass, crotch-scratching Hollywood mega mogul Les Grossman stole the show at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, dancing with Jennifer Lopez, getting his arm broken by Jaden Smith, and saying something of other about clay, diamonds, and butt cheeks.
All that, after having done a couple of promo spots in which Grossman (reportedly inspired by Viacom’s Sumner Redstone) berates the Twilight Saga stars Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner – the former for wanting to bathe and wash his hair, the latter for claiming he’d be busy on awards night.
Now comes Paramount Pictures and MTV Films with the announcement that Les Grossman will be the star of his own movie, with Cruise as Grossman and Ben Stiller as his costar. As you may recall, Grossman was first seen on screen in a cameo in Ben Stiller’s 2008 action comedy Tropic Thunder, a solid domestic performer starring Stiller and Robert Downey Jr.
Both Cruise and Stiller will also be two of the as-yet-untitled film’s producers. Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) is slated to write the screenplay.
Paramount has sent out a colorful press release, in which Grossman explains: “To quote my great friend Kirk Lazarus [Downey Jr.’s character in Tropic Thunder], ‘I don’t read the script, the script reads me.'”
Now, I can’t think of a truly great Hollywood satire since Robert Altman’s The Player back in 1992. This one, however, could work. (But couldn’t they get Robert Pattinson or Matt Damon or Chace Crawford or Justin Bieber or Whoopi Goldberg or anyone to replace Stiller?)
The plot could be about a mega movie star (Stiller, apparently) who has an ugly falling out with the head a major media conglomerate (Cruise’s Grossman) who refuses to renew the actor’s contract and publicly badmouths him.
Time moves on, old grudges are forgiven (or at least set aside), behind-the-scenes deals are made. The actor is eventually rehired to appear in both a popular action franchise and, most shocking of all, is personally selected by the mega mogul to play himself (the mogul) in a biopic.
In the Los Angeles Times, Steven Zeitchik doesn’t seem to find the Grossman spinoff a very idea, no matter the plot. “There are seemingly a dozen reasons why this wouldn’t seem to be a good idea, starting with the fact that the character is based on a single joke that, no matter its satiric value, doesn’t seem capable of carrying an entire feature,” Zeitchik remarks, adding that “characters based on sketches, no matter how viral or beloved, also tend to make wobbly and unsuccessful features.” He cites recent flop MacGruber to make his point.
Also, take a look at this piece in TheWrap about the Cruise/Redstone Affair.
Tom Cruise as Les Grossman image: MTV Movie Awards
Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, The Proposal
June 8: After smooching it up with Scarlett Johansson at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards this past Sunday, Sandra Bullock told the crowd: “Now that I have done that, can we please go back to normal … Go back to making fun of me. I don’t care. It’s time to go back to normal.”
Bullock, this year’s Oscar winner for the sleeper blockbuster The Blind Side and Razzie winner for the box office disappointment All About Steve, had been turned into a hapless victim by the media following revelations that husband Jesse James had been unfaithful.
The Los Angeles Times’ Steven Zeitchik has quickly taken the actress up on the “back to normal” offer. In his Times article “With Sandra Bullock’s New Role, Hope Sinks,” Zeitchik complains that Bullock has decided to follow her Oscar win with a role in one more action-comedy, Most Wanted, costarring her The Proposal love interest, Ryan Reynolds.
In Most Wanted, Bullock will play a criminal on the lam. Reynolds will be the cop accompanying her.
“You get a magic ticket and this is how you use it?,” Zeitchik wonders. “On a movie that puts you back squarely in territory of The Proposal … or Miss Congeniality, another broad comedy with fugitive elements?
“… Certainly after a best actress win, you don’t immediately go back to the multiplex ghetto from which an Oscar had just helped you escape, right?”
Apparently, wrong. Back to normal.
Photo: The Proposal (Kerry Hayes / Touchstone)
The Ghost Writer DVD
Roman Polanski’s political thriller The Ghost Writer will be Summit Entertainment’s first single-disc, Blu-ray/DVD Combo release. Starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton and Eli Wallach, the critically acclaimed The Ghost Writer, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, will be available on Aug. 3. The film will also be available as a standard single-disc DVD.
Written by Polanski and Robert Harris from Harris’ novel The Ghost, The Ghost Writer tells the story of a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) hired to pen the memoirs of a former Tony Blair-like British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who has numerous deeply hidden, decomposing skeletons in his closet.
Bonus Features include the featurettes “An Interview with Roman Polanski” and an interview with best-selling author Robert Harris titled “The Ghost Writer: Fiction or Reality?”