Morning Deal Report: Borat vs. Iron Man

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

While his wife Madonna continues to dominate the tabloid covers, Guy Ritchie is keeping busy preparing for his Sherlock showdown. As we told you last week, Ritchie’s reboot of Sherlock Holmes is getting some competition from a rival production that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as the elementary Watson. Now Ritchie has landed his Sherlock: Robert Downey, Jr. As Variety reports, “Downey emerged as an action star with Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes also will take advantage of his physical skills as the character displays brawn as well as brains. The basis for the film is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales, but also the comicbook Sherlock Holmes.” The “comicbook” Variety refers to is an upcoming take by Lionel Wigram, not the classic DC version pictured here. Sorry, nerds.

Speaking of comics (and nerds): fans of the Elfquest series by Wendy and Richard Pini, commence sharpening your knives. Or swords. Or whatever it is elves carry. Dodgeball writer/director Rawson Thurber will bring your beloved Wolfriders to the big screen for Warner Bros., per the Hollywood Reporter. “The series -- which at certain points in its history was published by both Marvel and DC Comics -- attracted a more mature audience as it went along, with scenes of battles and sexuality that were intense for that time. Hollywood has long tried to adapt the series, and several attempts at an animated series or feature have been made over the years.” Hey, what could go wrong?

Who says print is dead? It’s not only comic books that are coming to the screen in droves. Remember the New York Times article 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' that was recently optioned by J.J. Abrams? Well, according to Variety, “Miramax Films has closed a deal to develop a movie from ‘This Strange Thing Called Prom,’ a Brooke Hauser article published in the June 22 edition of the New York Times. The article follows the prom adventures of high school seniors who came to Brooklyn from locales like Senegal, Venezuela, Tibet, Haiti, Poland and Gabon (one was a nomadic yak herder until age 12).” You may laugh, but don’t you think yak herding skills would have come in handy at your prom?

Related:
No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
The Summer of Downey

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

As the festival winds down, some quick notes on movies I didn't have time to address earlier. (I'm gonna include the walk-outs here, despite the wrath of one reader who believes that saying anything at all about a movie you didn't see from start to finish constitutes dereliction of duty. Obviously, you should take such judgments with a grain or two of salt — and maybe an entire shakerful in the case of Ballast, which I'll very likely see again, and in full, at some point. But at the same time, you can get a mighty strong sense of a film in thirty-five to forty minutes.)

Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North (Documentary Competition): Painfully earnest young woman with unbearably whiny voice — she narrates, alas — discovers that her esteemed ancestors were slave traders, corrals nine relatives for self-indulgent journey to sore spots from the family's past. For hardcore aficionados of liberal white guilt only. (W/O)

Time Crimes (Park City at Midnight): I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, but even I had trouble warming to this Spanish gloss on 2004 Sundance prizewinner Primer, in which a middle-aged schlub travels ninety minutes into the past and finds himself engaged in unwitting battle with other versions of himself who've developed wildly divergent agendas. Ineptly directed, for the most part, and the concluding twist is singularly unsatisfying. Come back, Shane (Carruth).

The Wave (World Cinema Dramatic Competition): German filmmaker Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony? One can't help but be riveted by the spectacle of ordinary teenagers willingly submitting to autocratic rule — their überhip teacher is attempting to demonstrate that the Nazis weren't anomalous monsters — but earmarking one kid as emotionally unstable from the get-go means that we're just twiddling our thumbs as we await the inevitable moment when he finally snaps.

What Just Happened? (Premieres): Hollywood made yet another mildly lacerating self-portrait, that's what. Loosely based on the memoirs of producer Art Linson (Fight Club, Into the Wild, several Mamet films), it boasts the most relaxed De Niro performance in ages and a smattering of truly hilarious jokes, most of them involving out-of-control entitlement. Too bad Bruce Willis, sporting a Grizzly Adams beard that he refuses to shave prior to the start of filming on a new picture, isn't nearly as funny as Alec Baldwin must have been in real life. (Read Linson's equally diverting book for the lowdown; it happened on 1997's The Edge.)

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Dramatic Competition): Michael Chabon's complicated first novel has been reduced (by Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thurber) to a simple bisexual love triangle, with two major characters — Arthur and Cleveland — melded into one, and another, the improbably named Phlox, distorted almost beyond recognition. And yet the movie still almost kinda works, mostly because Peter Sarsgaard commits himself so fully to his ludicrous bad-boy manipulator that we, like the dazed young protagonist, are completely taken in.

Downloading Nancy (Dramatic Competition): I'd had about enough of this repugnant exercise in nihilism at the point when Maria Bello, playing a masochistic housewife who's hired a stranger she found on the Internet (Jason Patric) to torture and kill her, walks barefoot into a mouse trap, over and over and over, shrieking with laughter each time it snaps on her toes. By all accounts from those who stuck it out, it gets much, much worse thereafter. At least the "revelation" that she was sexually abused as a child isn't saved for the final reel. (W/O)

The Screengrab : dodgeball

Morning Deal Report: Borat vs. Iron Man

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9