Public Enemies - What Did You Think?
Want to be an Extra in David O Russell’s The Fighter? Want to see Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale fight it out in a boxing ring? Do you live near Lowell Massachusetts? Details after the jump.
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Maybe The Last Moneyball Update For A While: Soderbergh Is Off The Project, MLB Approval Still Pending
Posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 by Russ Fischer
Time to back away from Moneyball for a while: the New York Times reports that Steven Soderbergh is totally off the project, only hours after the LA Times published an interview with Sony head Amy Pascal, who reiterated the studio’s reasons for bailing on the project. And both the Times and Movieline talked to Major League Baseball (MLB), which has been in the process of negotiating with Sony to approve the use of official logos and team names. The whole convoluted story is after the jump. Read More »
With only two feature films and one TV show to his name, writer/director Jody Hill, is now synonymous with ignoring the boundaries and “genre rules” of modern comedy and creating anti-heroes that laughably burble with nihilistic rage, scary faux pas and hot-air egos. But there is also an internal depth to these macho doofuses played by Hill’s longtime pal and writing partner, Danny McBride, and comedy star Seth Rogen, to surpass the high art of a perfectly-timed and pronounced “fuck.”
Hill’s work on Observe & Report, The Foot Fist Way, and his cultural breakthrough, HBO’s Eastbound & Down, contains more glass-darkly social commentary and life-lived expression than the work of any hotshot young novelist in recent memory. Rather than document the cold realities and indulgent pleasantries of another big city with bright lights, Hill is set on exploring the very place that so many creative-types vacate upon the arrival of their first Visa card or college acceptance letter: the American South. Moreover, as many middle-class and broke white American males face sobering, if inevitable, realizations and disillusions about the future, laughing at Hill’s moronic, unhinged versions as they champion outdated movie/sports star heroics atop small-town kingdoms is like homemade medicine. When it comes to countering the monotony of the average day-to-day? Eastbound is harder to beat still. The sight of Kenny Powers “dancing” in a middle school gym under the influence of eggrolls and ecstasy or ejecting a topless broad from his Jet Ski is priceless. Like cheetah-spotted gold or “a bulletproof tiger, dude.”
A native of North Carolina, Hill is the latest progeny of the North Carolina School of the Arts, alongside McBride and creative partner Ben Best, fellow EB&D director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), and EB&D cinematographer Tim Orr. In the first part of my interview, we discuss the show in-depth, including some of the surprising and vile admissions and special features on the Season One DVD. We also talk about what it’s like to be a young director coming from, and staying in, the South, why so many comedians today are from there, and why the region was overdue for a proper comedic depiction.
Hunter Stephenson: Hey Jody, how are you?
Jody Hill: Hey Hunter. Good, good, good. Hey man, I wanted to say that I was sorry I wasn’t there when you visited down in Wilmington [Eastbound & Down set, 2008]. I remember the piece you wrote, and it sounded like a really good time. [laughs] Sucks I couldn’t there, man; I was editing my film (Observe & Report), and Warner Bros. wouldn’t let me go. When you have to do a director’s cut, they want to lock you up for 10 weeks. [laughs] Everybody said they had a blast…and I was editing.
Yeah. I expected to interview you there. And I didn’t know about the change, that David Green was now directing the majority of the episodes while you were in L.A. But it all worked out, he killed it. My first question: Legend has it that when you, Danny [McBride], and Ben [Best] first conceived of Kenny Powers you were sitting in a kiddie pool in North Carolina drinking beers. [laughs] Is that accurate?
Jody Hill: [laughs] Yeah, this was before we made Foot Fist Way or anything. We were trying to come up with ideas for shows. I was between jobs; I had been working this really shit reality show job, doing motion-control for Behind the Music and shit like that. [laughs] It was pretty lame. And so, yeah, we were in Charlotte, in the backyard of Ben Best’s house. And yeah, we were literally sitting in a kiddie pool with a case of beer. And Kenny was one of the ideas that, uh, we came up with. [laughs]
The Fighter has been struggling to make it to the big screen for the last two years, and is finally back on track with David O Russell at the helm. Production is set to begin in a couple weeks, and the final casting announcements are being made.
Academy Award-nominated actress Amy Adams is in final negotiations to star opposite Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg in the sports bio. Adams will play “a tough, gritty bartender and former college high-jumper” who ends up dating Wahlberg’s character. I can just imagine Adams performance now, complete with what I’m sure will be a very believable Massachusetts accent. But could it possibly rival Amy Ryan’s performance in Gone Baby Gone?
Warner Brothers, Paramount Pass On Soderbergh’s Moneyball
Posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 by Russ Fischer
Over the weekend, the biggest news in Hollywood was that Sony chief Amy Pascal had put the brakes on Steven Soderbergh’s baseball stats movie Moneyball, which had been set to begin shooting yesterday with Brad Pitt in the lead. Soderbergh was given the option to shop the movie to other studios over the weekend — ‘limited turnaround’ was the phrase used — and now thanks to the LA Times, we know that Warner Brothers and Paramount both passed. What it means for the movie, after the jump. Read More »
Sony Trashcans Moneyball Three Days Before Filming
Posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
Steven Soderbegh has been given the weekend to find a new home for his Brad Pitt baseball picture Moneyball. If another studio doesn’t step up by Monday, Columbia have the option to either fire Soderbergh and replace him or to stall the project indefinitely. The problem, according to Variety, is dispute over the shooting script. This latest draft by Soderbergh and Steve Zaillian has displeased Sony head honcho Amy Pascal so much that she’s taken the drastic measure of ditching what sounds like, to me, a golden opportunity. At the very least, this is a Brad Pitt vehicle from an Acadmey Award winning director and an equally Oscared screenwriter.
So, what doesn’t she like? Apparently that the script is innovative, that Soderbergh has some ambitious ideas and that the basic sport movie paradigm (yawn) simply doesn’t apply to this picture.
According to the Risky Business blog, producer Frank Marhsall has teamed screenwriter Gary Ross with the long-gestating Lance Armstrong biopic. “We knew Gary well from is work on Seabiscuit and thought he’d be perfect for this”, said Marshall. Yeah, you know - a man and a horse and a man and a bike. I’m pretty chuffed with this news because, as I’m sure I would have told you before, I’m a big fan of Ross. Can’t say I know too much about sporty cycling, though.
The film is to be based upon a 2000 biography, It’s Not About the Bike which Armstrong and his co-writer Sally Jenkins jammed full of his life’s many interesting stories. Both Matt Damon and Jake Gyllenhaal have reportedly been attached as stars for the lead role, though there’s no current casting announced. Rather curiously, though, it seems that some filming for the film took place rather a long time ago…
Trainspotting Author Irvine Welsh to Direct The Magnificent Eleven
Posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
It would seem that Irvine Welsh rather likes his sporting movies. The author of Trainspotting is set to follow up his directorial debut, the darts mockumentary Good Arrows with the football-themed comedy The Magnificent Eleven. Here’s the official blurb for Eleven from Angry Badger Pictures:
A modernization of the classic western in which the Cowboys are a struggling local amateur soccer team, the Indians run a nearby Tandoori restaurant and the bandits are a group of menacing thugs led by a maniac known simply as ‘Blonde Bob’.
Welsh didn’t originate the script, though he is going to work on another draft with original writers Pete and John Adams. I wouldn’t be surprised to see his regular collaborator Dean Cavanaugh to come along too.
Kevin Smith Wants to Make Hockey Movie - Hit Somebody
Posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Anyone who has been following Kevin Smith on Twitter, or listening to his Smodcast podcast (highly recommended), then you know that the New Jersey-born writer/director has recently become obsessed with the sport of Hockey and Wayne Gretzky (edit: Smith has always been a casual fan of the sport, but it has recently been taken to an extreme). But it isn’t just a pastime for Smith, he’s also developing a movie which he hopes to have in production in the next two years.
Many people believe that Hollywood, for the most part, is out of new ideas. Recently the big movie studios have been rumaging through popular board games and action figure properties for the next big blockbuster film. And now we learn that former Legendary Pictures chief marketing officer Scott Mednickis is developing an idea based on the television show American Gladiators.
An American Gladiators movie? Really?
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Key Character to Be Animated in Soderbergh’s Moneyball
Posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
I don’t know if you remember the various appearances by Dickie Fox in Jerry Maguire, the criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Bruce Springsteen popping up in High Fidelity but those were those were the first two things to cross my mind when I read a new MTV article on Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball. The film is a fictional narrative based upon a non-fiction book and recounts how the Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, as played by Brad Pitt, pioneers a new management system based upon an understanding of statistics.
This is where the toon comes in, because the book depends on the wisdom of Bill James, a stats master who provided the underlying knowledge and theory to make Beane’s plan viable, and rather than cast an actor as James in the film, Soderbergh has decided to have him animated.
Guillermo del Toro is in talks to produce and mentor commercial director Andres Muschietti’s horror film Mama for Universal, according to RiskyBiz. Andy is writing the English-language screenplay with his sister and producer Barbra. The movie will be based on their acclaimed Spanish-language short film Mama, which traveled the European festival circuit last year. The short film told the story of Victoria and Lily, two girls who are go on the run from a ghostly woman in a Gothic home.
JoBlo has gotten their hands on the original short film, which I’ve embedded after the jump. The majority of the 3-minute film appears to take place in one single camera take (although, I’m sure that it was seamlessly stitched together like some of the segments of Children of Men). I highly recommend you check it out.
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