Posted on Tuesday, June 18th, 2013 by Angie Han
2013 is turning out to be a pretty good year for people who were glued to their TV sets in the mid-aughts. First Arrested Development made its highly anticipated return on Netflix with a 15-episode fourth season, and now the long-promised Veronica Mars movie sequel has finally started shooting.
To mark the first day of filming, the official Veronica Mars Twitter account has uploaded a couple teaser-y images from the production. Elsewhere on the web, the first batch of set photos hint at a reunion between Veronica (Kristen Bell) and her onetime love Logan (Jason Dohring). Check ‘em out after the jump.
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I’ve said it before: if you get a chance to option an article written by David Grann, do it. The guy’s got a masterful nose for story, or one hell of an editor at the New Yorker), and his articles are almost universally being used as the basis for films.
(Other Grann work in development includes The Old Man and the Gun, The Lost City of Z, The Yankee Comandante and The Brand; his article The Chameleon inspired The Imposter.)
One piece, True Crime, was optioned by producers Brett Ratner and David Gerson, who once had the project set up at Focus. That situation didn’t work out, but now they’ve landed Christoph Waltz to star. The story tells of a Polish writer who was targeted as the prime suspect in a cold case murder thanks to his novel in which the details of one character’s murder lined up surprisingly well with those of the real case.
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Anton Corbijn‘s two feature films have been pretty firmly aimed at the arthouse, but with his John le Carré adaptation A Most Wanted Man, the director may find himself with a slightly larger audience. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in a story about a ”young ex-prisoner who arrives illegally in Germany, practically destitute.” Hoffman’s character harbors significant suspicions — or paranoia — about the young man’s backing and intentions, and sets out to find out what he’s really all about.
Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Bruhl and Robin Wright co-star in the film which, from this footage, appears to make a nice companion to the other recent le Carré adaptation Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There are differences, obviously, but this film appears cold and soaked in fear, and like it gets the tone right. It looks good on this cast, too, and I’m excited to see what Corbijn has really achieved here. Read More »
Nearly forty years after his 1975 death, few names in genre circles carry the same weight as Rod Serling. The writer/producer/host created a cornerstone of the modern age of television with The Twilight Zone, and his approach to storytelling echoes today. (Sadly, his best tendencies are rarely emulated, but that’s the way it goes.)
Now J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot have made a deal with the Serling estate to develop one of his lingering unproduced screenplays as a television mini-series — sorry, “event series.” The Stops Along the Way is described by Serling’s widow Carol Serling as “one of my husband’s favorite pieces,” and the story is one that Abrams has wanted to tackle for some time, and has been a focus of his long discussions with the Serling estate. Read More »
The films of Denis Villeneuve stick with people. Movies like Incendies, Polytechnique, and Maelstrom demonstrate a knack for plunging recognizable characters into difficult situations (some based in reality, some purely fictional) and exploring the outcome in ways that most audiences won’t readily forget. His work is strong enough to attract an incredible cast to Prisoners, a drama in which two young girls go missing, shattering the complacent lives of their parents.
Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Viola Davis, Melissa Leo, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Paul Dano are the core cast, and the film was shot by the stunningly talented Roger Deakins. This first trailer for the movie is very intense, but may also give away more than you’d like to know. (Or it gives that impression, at least; I bet there’s a lot more than we see here.) I stopped watching 2/3 through, but what I saw was enough to confirm the September release as a must-see. Check out the footage below. Read More »
Briefly: You’ve seen a lot of casting reports for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice. The writer/director is assembling an impressive cast to live in the story of a burnout private detective who is drawn into an increasingly weird web of disappearances and underhanded business deals. Josh Brolin is the latest addition to the cast led by Joaquin Phoenix, and which also includes Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Jena Malone, Martin Short, Reese Witherspoon and (reportedly) Sean Penn.
Brolin will play a “significant role,” but as with most of the casting so far we don’t have specifics. The film is set to shoot this summer, so once cameras roll we might learn more. By the way, it’s worth reiterating that this is the first major adaptation of a Pynchon novel — and the author’s first novel was published in 1963. As difficult as his books can be, that Pynchon’s work has taken fifty years to hit the big screen (a few films that take him as an influence aside) is pretty remarkable. [Deadline]
Few things are better than well-done magic, but celebrities doing magic is pretty good. Not celebrity magicians, mind you, but actual celebrities learning and performing magic. For the upcoming thriller Now You See Me, stars like Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Mark Ruffalo and Mélanie Laurent all had to learn a bit of magic for their roles. So now, to help promote the May 31 heist film, a few of them have released videos performing these very tricks. Read More »
Almost every year at Cannes, there’s a film that gets attention for pure WTF-ness. This year it could have been Ari Folman’s The Congress, but by the time everything is said and done it may actually be Borgman. The Dutch film has some of the same tone seen in other notable Cannes entries such as Dogtooth, Sightseers, Holy Motors, and several films from Michael Haneke — it’s a modern film that takes place in a recognizable, seemingly “normal” world. And yet there’s something very off in the air.
Alex van Warmerdam directs Jan Bijvoet as a homeless man who makes a simple request of a bourgeois family, leading the husband (Jeroen Perceval) to reject him even as his wife (Hadewych Minis) is more supportive. The man works his way into the family’s life, and then things get weird.
Here’s a trailer for the film that shows some (but by no means all) of the quiet beginning, and quickly escalates into stuff that, let’s just say, you probably wouldn’t want happening in your own house. Read More »
