Paul Potts - The Movie

What Next Su-Bo the opera? well Simon Cowell is on board as producer...

According to Risky Business Paramount are going to try to rush through production in time for next summer's Britain's got talent final. They're describing it in "Rocky" terms as a triumph of the undergdog type schtick.

Frankly I think it's a load of nonsense. We don't need a film of this man's triumph, it's already been blanket documented! What more could a film possibly offer? who will they cast to play Potts? if he's to play himself can the fucker act? probably not.

Good news is, it's to be shot in England with English accents, I'm just not sure how well mawkish sentimentality with cheeky chappy awraight luv? englishness (i'm looking at you Matthew Vaughn...). At Least mooted director Julian Jarrold has some decent films under his belt (Red Riding most notably).

Besides all this, nothing's going to top his first audition. You can't remake that shit. That first audition is a climax that can't be stretched out over 90 minuets.

Paul Merton on Hollywood (?)

Paul Merton is to front a series of documentaries for the beeb to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of Hollywood industry. The series will focus on the influence of early cinema on today's movies, and in particular on comedy.


Paul Merton is a genius, and I'll watch anything he does. I haven't seen his previous work on cinema, 'Paul Merton looks at Alfred Hitchcock', and 'Silent Clowns', but now I want to. The Hitchcock piece focusses on the late great's early British work, a body of films sadly much ignored. The work that would come to define Hitchcock was so quintessentially Hollywood, many people forget he was English. Watch The Lodger: London Fog, Blackmail, 39 Steps, or Sabotage, and the great man's status is cemented beyond the familiarity of Psycho or Rebecca or Rear Window.


It should be interesting to see what Merton makes of Hollywood's early days, if he goes beyond the mythologising and cliche, whether he takes on the industrial wrangling as well as the sparkly stars and scandal. 

'Inbetweeners' the movie?

Apparently Film 4 are developing a feature length version of the painfully accurate teenage travails. Will it be just like Kevin ane Perry go large though? or will they stay true to the rather sweeter tone of the tv series. It's nice to see teenagers being treated with a little compassion but the feminazi boner killer in me just has to ask, when will teenage girls be granted the same kindness? 

Yum.

Stop the presses! Hollywood in targeting young males shock!

(from LPATCOABA)

Incredibly, it has emerged today that bosses at Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Have decided to focus thier attentions on the profitable 'young male' demographic. Hooking them into money spinning franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and Hot Wheels, with the promise of glistening lady parts, sparkly explosions, big booms, and loud noises. Once hooked it is believed that these 'young males' will gladly return again and again regardless of the ever dwindling quality as the succession of identi-flicks lumber on like some bloated and aging musical theatre diva still drawing the crowds in vegas. And lets not forget all the pretty toys that go along with the pictures, the little men made out of clay, the sip along snacks and sit along furniture, and the must-have-it-now-but-only-cos-I-is-ironic 10 year olds branded costume.


This is really nothing new. Way back when in the way old 80s  Arkoff and Nicholson at AIP formulate the 'Peter Pan theory" which pretty much spells it out.


a) a younger child will watch anything an older child will watch;
b) an older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch;
c) a girl will watch anything a boy will watch
d) a boy will not watch anything a girl will watch;
therefore-to catch your greatest audience you zero in on the 19-year old male


Groundbreaking huh? Does this mean we're officially back in the 80s now then? big bangs big boobs and big boys toys?


super.

Where the Wild things Aught to be.

The clever folks over at We Love You So have been running a competition asking clever photoshop whizzards to sent in images of where the wild things aught to be. It's like the loveliness from the book/film is seeping out into the world in tiny pieces. I'd like to imagine it's sort of real, being as the wild things are imagination embodied, it's plausible to me that they're everywhere already.


s'what i like to think anyway.

Jazz Hands! 'A Star is (re-)Born'

THR is reporting that Warner Bros have tapped up Will Fetters ('Remember me') to draft a new version of the classic tale of rise and fall in the Hollywood machine. Rumours abound that Beyonce could fill Judy's rather impressive boots, but frankly at this stage it's anybody's guess. 

Creation finally picks up a US distributor.

After receiving a largely warm reception at the Toronto Film Festival it was rather disappointing that the Darwin biopic failed to garner much interest from US distributors. It could have been that the religious right aren't really that keen on the whole 'evolution' thing... so a level or reticence was, perhaps, understandable. nobody wants to inflame that bunch of crazies. That said, it might have had more to do with Jen Con's permanently slapped face.

Indie film floggers Newmarket are the lucky puppies who've picked up the rights, and it should hit cinemas around christmas.

*coughoscarbaitingcough*

'Wuthering Heights', again.

I love this book with all my heart. I'm not sure actually just why I love it so much. I suppose Emily Bronte's only novel's status as a 'classic' exempts me from having to justify my ardour. 

The prospect of another adaptation may strike some as rather unnecessary, there is, after all, about twenty renditions in existence already. Numerous box office assaults, from the Lawrence Oliver's 1939 version, to Peter Kosminskey's 1992 version, have been made, as well as many televisual delights ranging from the traditional, to the 'moderne' (I'm looking at you MTV). 

One may well ask what this new venture has to offer, well what? Well i shall tell you. 

Ed Westwick. 

That's what. And Gemma Arteton, and the producers behind Becoming Jane and Charlotte Grey (Douglas Rae and Robert Bernstein). Both of which I think are pretty amazing.

plus, 

Ed Westwick.

Boom.

"Sweet Valley High - the teenage pregnancy years"?

(doesn't she look pleased?)       

Universal are on a roll, They've hooked Diablo Cody up with the rights to Francine Pascall's epic (150 books at last count) chronicle of adolescence in Sweet Valley, California.  No word on casting or plot, but they have a hell of a lot of hi jinks to get through. 


To be honest I never really got into SVH it was all a white bread and butter. At fourteen though I got fucking obsessed with Pascall's other series "Fearless", about a girl born without the capacity to feel fear. She was badass, and went round at night getting in fights and playing chess in the park with bums. The books are full of fuck ups, drug addicts, near incest, abandonment, murder, kidnap, extortion, crips, and crazies. And they're set in New York, which ass fucks Southern California with a rusty pole.