The world premiere of your first feature film — in the hypercritical climes of the New York Film Festival, no less — would be nerve-wracking for any director. But Simon Curtis isn’t any director. He’s a BAFTA – and Emmy-nominated television and stage veteran who’s worked with a who’s who of British acting royalty, a noteworthy group of whom appear in Curtis’s feature debut My Week With Marilyn .
Twelve years after critics found it to be totally decent (and refreshingly stereotype-free) and audiences made it a solid $34M box office hit, the 1999 Taye Diggs vehicle Best Man will be getting a sequel! So if you’ve been holding your breath to find out what happens after interpersonal secrets and scandals among friends come to a head on one dramarama-filled wedding day, you’re in luck. Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee is set to script and helm Best Man 2 for Universal, and reportedly got the idea after a cast reunion dinner; take that as good indication that the likes of Diggs, Morris Chestnut, Terrence Howard, Sanaa Nathan, and Nia Long might reprise their characters. [ Deadline ]
We may not know whether Bill Murray will reprise his role of Peter Venkman in the highly anticipated, highly rumored Ghostbusters 3 but we do know that the notoriously reclusive actor will spontaneously conduct an Ivy League marching band if the Ghostbusters theme song is in their set list. Video evidence from last weekend’s Harvard-Cornell game follows.
Monday brought more bad news to the reportedly beleaguered production of the zombie flick World War Z , produced by and starring Brad Pitt , when SWAT in Budapest raided a warehouse storing prop guns for the film. The problem: they weren’t props, but fully-functional military-style assault rifles. Oops!
What happens when you let Academy Award winner Roman Polanski confine three Oscar winners (and one lonely nominee) in a single house to film an entire argument-driven black comedy? Carnage , the upcoming feature from the controversial filmmaker which stars, on one side, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, and on the other side, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, as two sets of parents who meet to calmly discuss — and then outright argue — over their sparring school children.
Happy Monday! Also in today’s edition of The Broadsheet: A Pixar alum gets the closest of close reads… Tortured Oscar logic… Awesomely ridiculous new reality stars… The $24 million Korean humanist marathoner WWII film you have (or haven’t) been waiting for… and more.
You might’ve realized it by now, but Real Steel is a ridiculous premise for a movie. So ridiculous it worked , in fact. Twitter blew up this weekend with comments about Hugh Jackman’s and the sweet science of robo-jousting, and Ryan Gosling’s effectiveness in The Ides of March . We tally the best five tweets after the jump.
“[T]he veneration accorded to Paris by Americans is puzzling. Like other grand cities, this one certainly has an aura — yet its cultural credentials are hardly the world’s most impressive. If anything, its most enduring characteristic is a distinct whiff of merde de taureau . It wasn’t Paris that delivered Bach, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Leonardo, Marx, Michelangelo or the Beatles. Instead, the city has given us the likes of bohemianism, deconstructionism, symbolism and the nouvelle vague. All of these were quite fun at the time, but in retrospect seem somewhat less than the real deal. The city’s aesthetic soul appears to have more to do with Gitanes, cafe society and elegant posturing.” Wait — symbolism is over? And Roman Polanski lives there? Sacrebleu! [ The Guardian ]
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings probably wasn’t prepared for the earful (or Internetz-full) he received last month when he announced plans to spin-off Netflix’s DVD rentals into a new company called Qwikster. “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult,” he wrote in a blog post today. “So we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVD s.” Read on for more flip-flopping, and rejoice?
Our sister blog Deadline is reporting that the surprise sneak screening tonight at the New York Film Festival — showcasing a “work in progress from a master filmmaker” — will be Martin Scorsese’s Hugo . If true, it would be Scorsese’s second film to screen at this year’s NYFF (after George Harrison: Living in the Material World ) and a considerable risk for Paramount, which would be exhibiting the uncompleted 3-D film in one of the tougher filmgoing environments known to man. Movieline will be there in any case; check back with us later on for a report. [via @NikkiFinke ]
