The Twilight actor will star in Tatua based on an original script. Also in Tuesday’s round-up of film news, John August is eyeing an adaptation of Wonder. Ang Lee is set for a Sound Editors fete and more.
Twilight’s Kellan Lutz to Star in Tatua
The Twilight Saga’s buffets vampire has signed on to star in indie genre film Tatua, based on an original concept. The story revolves around a man with a rare blood type that can handle being tattooed with a powerful ink that allows him to pull weapons straight off his skin allowing him to be an effective covert assassin, Deadline reports.
John August Eyes Wonder Adaptation
Lionsgate is in final negotiations to pick up rights to R.J. Palacio’s debut novel Wonder and is in talks with Frankenweenie writer John August to adapt the pre-teen story about a 10 year-old boy whose facial deformity prevents him from attending a mainstream school. The story explores the theme of bullying and told from multiple points of view, Variety reports.
Ang Lee to be Honored by Sound Editors
The Life of Pi filmmaker will receive the 2013 Filmmaker Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors at the group’s 60th MPSE Golden Reel Awards on February 17th in Los Angeles. Lee won an Oscar for Best Director in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain, THR reports.
Larry Hagman Remembered Privately
Two private services will take place in Dallas and L.A. for the actor best known for playing J.R. Ewing in Dallas. He played the scheming oil tycoon on the popular television series beginning in 1978 through the ’80s. He took up the character in a Dallas reboot 20 years later. His film roles include Fail-Safe, Nixon and Primary Colors, BBC
Daniel Day-Lewis may specialize in weighty roles, but that doesn’t mean he’s without a sense of humor. The star of Lincoln cracked up the crowd at the BAFTA Los Angeles Britannia awards on Wednesday when he referenced Clint Eastwood’s now-famous empty chair speech at the Republican National Convention this past summer.
After Steven Spielberg presented Day-Lewis with the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film, Day-Lewis motioned to an empty chair sitting next to the podium, as if he were urging someone sitting in it to stay seated. The crowd seemed to immediately get the joke.
Day-Lewis explained that he’d been up since 2 a.m. watching CNN, and turning once again to the chair, said he was “extremely glad and grateful” that the “recently reelected president of this country was able to make it here tonight.”
He then told the audience, “I love Clint Eastwood. This is no satirical comment on him or his politics or anything else, but I have to say that when I saw him talking to a chair in front of a room full of strangers, I thought: I’ve got to try that!”
Check out the video of Daniel Day-Lewis’ chair speech below:
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Three decades and change after publishing his 1977 classic The Shining (which made its way into horror movie history a few years later courtesy of Stanley Kubrick), Stephen King has set a release date for his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. “Scribner and Hodder & Stoughton have established September 24, 2013 as the official first publication date,” King’s official website announced today.
In Doctor Sleep, King catches up with little Danny Torrance, who’s now in his forties and uses his abilities to help the terminally ill in his work as a hospice caregiver. Also: Vampires are involved! Because of course.
Last fall, King gave a surprise reading from Doctor Sleep at George Mason University:
Stephen King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying.
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Full Story »Three decades and change after publishing his 1977 classic The Shining (which made its way into horror movie history a few years later courtesy of Stanley Kubrick), Stephen King has set a release date for his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. “Scribner and Hodder & Stoughton have established September 24, 2013 as the official first publication date,” King’s official website announced today.
In Doctor Sleep, King catches up with little Danny Torrance, who’s now in his forties and uses his abilities to help the terminally ill in his work as a hospice caregiver. Also: Vampires are involved! Because of course.
Last fall, King gave a surprise reading from Doctor Sleep at George Mason University:
Stephen King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying.
…
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Mark your calendars, movie nerds: November’s “An Academy Salute to Stanley Kubrick” event, hosted by Malcolm McDowell, will kick off a film retrospective accompanying LACMA’s exhibition dedicated to the films and work of Stanley Kubrick: “Kubrick’s films will be represented through a thoughtful selection of archival material, annotated scripts, photography, costumes, cameras and equipment, set models, original promotional materials, and props. The interdisciplinary exhibition draws attention to Kubrick’s fixation with historical research and his visionary adaptations of influences from the fine arts, design, and architecture, and enables visitors to experience the cinematic journey of one of the great artists of the twentieth century.” [Deadline]
This weekend welcomes Snow White and the Huntsman to theaters, mere months after Relativity’s Mirror, Mirror preceded Universal’s Kristen Stewart film in the race to produce live-action versions of the fairy tale that Disney animators arguably perfected decades ago. And odd as it is to behold this practice of two serpents eating the other’s tail, stranger still is the thought of a studio executive ensconced in a corner office, slamming his fist down on the old-growth polished conference table, and bellowing to the suits, “Dammit! Where in the hell is OUR Snow White script!?!?!”
Yet variations on this scenario are not so unique in Hollywood. Many of the actions surrounding these productions — wrestling over promotions, insistence of originality, chess games played with release dates — have played out for generations. Find below some of the more notable occasions when studio execs didn’t let redundancy stop them from flashing the green light:
1964 – The Cold Shoulder War: Dr. Strangelove (Jan.) / Fail-Safe (Sept.)
With the Cold War at its peak, it came as little surprise that movies of the time might reflect the American public’s fear, dread and paranoia. But these competing efforts bore many similarities for such wide, ripe terrain: Each had a major young director at the helm, a cast choked with stars, and a storyline about a rogue mission that may spark a global conflict. Stanley Kubrick’s ambitious Strangelove, based on the book Red Alert, took shape as a satirical indictment of the geopolitical climate. Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, meanwhile, sporting more of a spartan stage setting and relying on close-ups, hewed closer to the tense spirit of its own eponymous source novel. Many people found them more than similar — and for good reason.…
At long last, the meeting of influential cinema icon Stanley Kubrick and the amorphous multi-headed entity known collectively as The Kardashians has occurred, and here is the photographic evidence: Kendall and Kylie Jenner, younger sisters of Kim Kardashian and the other two from that show you know you watch when no one else is looking, pose a la the creepy twins from The Shining with matriarch Kris Jenner as… uh, you tell me.
This particular photo shoot from the lesser Kardashians’ guest visit to America’s Next Top Model required its model-contestants to pose as toddlers. Naturally some genius dreamed up this scenario. I mean, all of the classic Kubrick signatures are here in this image, from the bright playroom colors to the clown lurking in the background to the leggy model-contestants posing at Kris’s feet to the pastel cut-outs proclaiming “GLAMOROUS” on the wall. “Glamorous” is what Kubrick was all about, right?
[Celebuzz]
Full Story »Between the rise of digital media and the shortcuts many theaters have taken to alleviate waning profits – forgoing film rigs for digital projectors, replacing projectionists with button-pushers, lowering projection-bulb levels to cut replacement costs – many filmmakers are concerned about the state of their industry. Visual effects veteran and filmmaker Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, The Tree of Life), for one, is doing something about it: He hopes to bring back the spectacle of the theater-going experience – and revitalize the industry in the process — with a project he’s shooting at 120 frames per second, in 3-D, to be projected at seven times the luminosity often seen in theaters today.
Trumbull rocked the visual effects community with his big ideas for change while accepting the Georges Méliès Award at the annual Visual Effects Society Awards last night in Beverly Hills. Named after the cinema pioneer whose groundbreaking work in motion-picture art was celebrated in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated Hugo (which, incidentally, took home top honors for Supporting Visual Effects), the Méliès Award “honors a special individual who has pioneered a significant and lasting contribution to the art and science of the visual effects industry.”
Trumbull, who collaborated with Steven Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ridley Scott on Blade Runner, and most recently contributed mesmerizing effects to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, pointed to his work on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the kind of moviegoing experience he hopes to recreate with his 120 FPS, 3-D project. The key, however, and the element that makes many a filmmaker cringe when their product is released into the world, is the substandard light level at which many theaters project 3-D films, which Trumbull argues diminishes…
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Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is masterly, accomplished, stirring, a real bang-up, show-off job — and watching it, I kept wishing it had been made by someone else, someone younger who hasn’t already proved dozens of times, beyond the point of redundancy, how much he cares about what he puts on the screen.
Because Spielberg does care, and not just about the movies he makes himself. His forebears are with him every step of the way: With War Horse he tries on many masks, including those of David Lean, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick and David O. Selznick, just because he’s Steven Spielberg and he can. He wants to be everyone and everything at once: At times it’s way too much, but at others it’s a relief. In an Oscar-grabby end-of-year movie landscape littered with itsy-bitsy fuzzy-wuzzy literary adaptations and colorless apologias for lady monsters (I’m looking at you, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Iron Lady), why shouldn’t there be room for an old-school road-show picture with crazy-ass classical-filmmaking values? There’s something to be said for just sitting back and delivering yourself into the hands of a guy who creates a dissolve in which a piece of bumpy knitting transforms itself into a rock-strewn, hardscrabble landscape. Who else today would dare?
Maybe it’s that unapologetic cornpone aesthetic, even more than all that virtuoso filmmaking, that makes War Horse so engaging. From the moment you see the foal Joey, having only recently squeezed forth from his mother’s womb, finding his matchstick legs on sturdy English soil, you’re either in the game or you’re not. Later, when Joey’s a bit older, he’s bought by an impoverished farmer, Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), to spite his arrogant landlord (David Thewlis), who also had been eyeing the horse at auction. The purchase is immediately…
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Accepting an award last weekend at George Mason University, novelist Stephen King treated the audience to a reading of a passage from Dr. Sleep, his still-in-progress follow-up to The Shining. Remember little Danny Torrance, running from his deranged father (Jack Nicholson) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version? Well, Danny’s all grown up now, using his gift to help people die peacefully. And there are vampires, because why not?
Release information hasn’t yet been divulged for the sequel, which King is still writing, but this much is known: Danny is now an adult, and comes into contact with “a traveling group of vampires called The Tribe.” Not sold yet? Give a listen to King reading an excerpt from his manuscript:
“How many times have you found yourself behind a lumbering R.V., eating exhaust and waiting patiently for your chance to pass?” Well guess what — those were vampires!!
Chime in below and sound off — is this like anything you ever imagined a Shining sequel would be?
• Stephen King Brings ‘Shining’ Sequel ‘Dr. Sleep’ to Life at Book Festival[THR]
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