…and, um, there’s just one of him. Bear with me here: A slimmed-down Kevin James , who’s actually looking kind of handsome here (or am I crazy?), plays a high school teacher who enters the octagon to raise cash as a mixed martial arts fighter. He’s basically Joel Edgerton in last year’s MMA pic Warrior , only — lucky for us — he’s still Kevin James, so it’s a broad comedy and not a gut-wrenching drama and instead of Tom Hardy he’s got Salma Hayek to wrestle with. Sigh . The other depressing Here Comes the Boom – Warrior point of comparison: This is going to make so much more money than the under-seen and under-appreciated Warrior . At least there are no talking gorillas (that we know of). Here Comes the Boom (seriously, do people really use that phrase?) rolls into theaters on October 12 and is directed by Frank Coraci ( The Wedding Singer , Waterboy , Zookeeper ). [via Fandango ]
A flurry of online reports today revealed that filmmaker Nora Ephron was battling illness in a New York hospital and not expected to survive the night. The Washington Post now reports that Ephron has died six years after being diagnosed with the blood disorder myelodysplasia. Ephron was nominated for an Oscar three times for writing Silkwood , When Harry Met Sally… , and Sleepless in Seattle . As a director she helmed eight features, including popular romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail . Ephron had also earned acclaim as a journalist, essayist, and blogger, and most recently directed the foodie biographical drama Julie & Julia . Remember Ephron with a spirited clip from the 2007 documentary Dreams on Spec , in which she vividly compares screenwriting and filmmaking to making a pizza. [ Washington Post ]
In Tuesday evening’s round up of news briefs, Emily Blunt teased she would consider the second Devil Wears Prada under one condition. Also, the Austin Film Festival added details on its October event while Outfest rounds out its upcoming edition next month. The Avengers passes a domestic high water mark and Catherine Keener is set for role opposite Mark Ruffalo. Austin Film Festival Unveils First Round of Panels D.C. vs. Marvel, Hollywood Horror Stories, Crowd Funding Your Indie Film and Writing for Video games are among the topics that will be discussed at the 19th Austin Film Festival taking place October 18 – 25. Among this year’s participants so far are Shane Black ( Iron Man 3), Paul Feig ( Bridesmaids ), Saca Gervasi ( Anvil: The Story of Anvil ), Michael Green ( The Green Lantern ), and Damon Lindelof ( Prometheus ). For more details, visit the festival’s website . Outfest 2012 Adds to its 30th Edititon Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival will screen a never before seen episode of ABC’s comedy Happy Endings with cast members and creators present. Also added to the festival’s line up is Eytan Fox’s acclaimed Israeli film, Yossi , the sequel to the director’s hit Yossi and Jagger . Around the ‘net… Avengers Passes $600M in U.S. The mega-hit crossed the $600 million mark in the domestic box office. It is currently number three in the world in the box office and it has yet to open in Japan, Deadline reports . Catherine Keener Joins Mark Ruffalo in Can a song Save Your Life? Keener will play Mark Ruffalo’s estranged wife in the drama directed by Once filmmaker John Carney. She joins Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Hailee Steinfeld and Adam Levine on board the project, THR reports . Emily Blunt May Be In for Another Devil Wears Prada She said she “might be interested” in another go around playing Miranda Priestly’s spirited assistant Emily Charlton in the sequel to the comes-drama. She noted that Meryl Streep said she’d do it if she didn’t have to lose the “f***king weight,” and agreed. Huff Post reports . Prometheus and The Hunger Games Stars Set for Indie Son of the South Rafe Spall ( Prometheus ) and Jacqueline Emerson ( The Hunger Games ) will star in the new indie drama by Barry Alexander Brown with Spike Lee on board to executive produce. Based on Bob Zellner’s autobiography chronicling the author’s life in Alabama where he grew up as a son of a minister and a grandson of a KKK member before joining the Civil Rights movement, Variety reports .
If you’re in the mood for something new to keep you up at night worrying (and who isn’t?), Jessica Yu’s new documentary Last Call at the Oasis will neatly do the trick of refreshing your sense of impending doom. Aside from times of drought, water never seemed as urgent a problem as climate change, peak oil, deforestation and the other issues on our path to world destruction. But Last Call at the Oasis makes a convincing case that we’re on the verge of both Waterworld and large scale Erin Brockovich -style scenarios. The real Brockovich appears on-screen in Last Call at the Oasis , along with experts and activists like Peter Gleick, Jay Famiglietti, Robert Glennon and Tyrone Hayes, who guide the doc through its various sources of alarm. As a topic, water issues are sprawling and more than one feature can really handle — the film bounces between the imminent failure of the Hoover Dam due to the steadily dropping level in Lake Mead to the possibility of draining an area in North Nevada to continue providing water in Las Vegas. California’s Central Valley is the site of a debate between farmers furious their water has been cut off and environmentalists and fisherman trying to protect the watery ecosystems being devastated by the process. Satellites show groundwater disappearing; hormones and steroids from medication aren’t being processed out of what we all then drink; chemicals from factories and pesticides get into the water supply and poison people and animals. Basically, as one scientist puts it, “We’re screwed.” Last Call at the Oasis has more than the usual share of gloom, though it’s too steady with the facts to ever come across as alarmist — and some of its imagery is downright haunting. Hayes, a professor at UC Berkeley, was first hired to research the impact of the pesticide Atrazine on amphibian populations, and took his findings public when the company wanted him to hide his discovery that even at levels deemed safe for human consumption the chemicals caused male frogs to develop female characteristics. Then there’s the green water coming out of the taps of homes in Midland, Texas, indicative of the carcinogenic hexavalent chromium. Manure pools from concentrated animal feeding operations in Michigan bleed chemicals into the ground; dead fish clot watersides. Not even bottled water is safe. Last Call at the Oasis is a Participant Production, and its determined US-centricity seems both calculated and closed-off. The film wanders abroad only to explore situations as they relate to the States. There’s the cautionary tale of Australia, where a decade of drought has shut down dairy farms, their owners weeping and sometimes, as a troubling stat notes, committing suicide. Singapore shows up because it has successfully trained its population to accept recycled water. A visit to the Middle East shows that Yardenit, the Jordan River baptism site, is downstream from heavy pollution, and that some families go for months without water. It’s an irritating way to look at a global problem, especially since, as the film notes in the beginning, America has “the biggest water footprint in the world.” But there’s also something canny (if cynical) about it — problems elsewhere are other people’s problems, and what better way to motivate a population than by showing it things that have only to do with them? Yu is a step above the average problem-doc director — her earlier nonfiction films In the Realms of the Unreal and Protagonist showcased unusual visual ambition, touches of which show up in this more traditionally structured work. Lakes drain before our eyes, leaving a dock jutting out into the air; dreamy vintage footage shows children wriggling along underwater in a pool. The opening credits appear over shimmering, slow motion shots of splashes of liquid, and a sense of the power of imagery can also be found in the more standard footage: For example, a worker at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn opens up a hatch to show the condoms bubbling up to the surface of the to-be-treated water. Having presented so much widespread impending disaster, Last Call at the Oasis can’t quite make its final argument that “the glass is still half full” — there doesn’t seem to be any turning this ship around, only slowing it a little. The film offers some hope in the form of reclaimed water, the most economically and environmentally sound means of slowing our water consumption. It’s sewage water that’s been treated and purified to the point of being potable, though as a psychologist notes, there’s a serious public reluctance to be overcome before anyone will actually want to quaff it — the film even brings in marketing teams and Jack Black to test out what kind of marketing it would take to make it work. Like many of the angles in the film, it’s a question of short-term gains versus long-term survival — arguments about jobs, keeping the Las Vegas Strip in working fountains or squeamishness about where your drink came from start to seem trivial when you consider not having enough safe water to live. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
One good ammo-riddled torrent of multiplex marketing deserves another, right? Never mind. Ready or not, and on the heels of this afternoon’s wild End of Watch spot , behold a new trailer for The Expendables 2 . It’s got more bullets than brain cells, and someone literally died in one of these explosions (or at least one like them), but who can argue with Arnold Schwarzengger quipping, “I’m back!” or Jason Statham issuing a smirking pronouncement of “man and knife”? I’m pretty sure this is the first trailer to ever give viewers PTSD — and that’s just after Sylvester Stallone’s intro. [ IGN ]
While talking up this month’s Men in Black III – in which he does an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones impersonation playing Jones’ ‘60s-era younger self – Josh Brolin took a moment to discuss the upcoming project that makes him nervous just to think about: Spike Lee ’s Oldboy , the remake of Park Chan-wook’s ultraviolent 2003 film, for which Brolin says he sought Park’s blessing before taking on the Hollywood remake. “I love Oldboy and I’m close with Chan-wook Park and I emailed him a couple months ago just asking for his blessing to do this movie,” said Brolin, “because if he had said no I wouldn’t have done it. I really respect his movie and we’ll make a little different movie, and this whole idea of a more Hollywood version of it, whatever – we’re just going to do a different version and have respect for the initial story and premise.” “I’m talking about it nervously because it makes me nervous.” Brolin will be joined in the cast by rising ingénue Elizabeth Olsen and District 9 ’s Sharlto Copley , the latter of whom sent his own message to Brolin when he joined the cast. “He just wrote me an email and was like, ‘Look, I’ve got to get this out of the way – Goonies was my favorite film! Now I’m going to make 20 years of your life miserable,’” Brolin said. The details of just how much Lee’s remake will stay true to the original film remain a mystery, though Brolin did confirm that their version will keep the infamous hammer fight scene. “Yes, by the way,” he said. “Yes. It’s a hammer, a knife, and all that stuff. Will we keep the octopus and the other stuff? You know, there are some changes and all that. But I think it’s really good. It still makes me throw down the script halfway through.” Filming begins in October on the anticipated project, and while Brolin seems confident that the remake will remain true to the source material while carving its own path, he knows a thing or two about woulda-coulda-shoulda thinking. Elsewhere in the conversation, Brolin brought up the specter of his 2010 bomb Jonah Hex unprompted. “I think that was a snowball effect,” he said, citing the film’s meteoric plunge in the media. “It got so much negative press, because we did so many reshoots, we did a ton of reshoots, man. I’m going to stand behind any movie that I do, and I do like the character. If I go back and see it now, I go, ‘That’s an interesting character.’ It’s not the movie I would have made. My intention was to make an Eastwood/Leone-esque really gritty $5-7 million film that I think would have been massively profitable, but you don’t have control over these things all the time.” Despite all that, Brolin learned a long time ago to embrace the serendipity of perceived failure – like when he lost the lead in 21 Jump Street to Johnny Depp . “ 21 Jump Street was between Johnny Depp and I,” he recalled. “Johnny got it, but we were in his apartment waiting to find out which one was going to actually leave on a plane that night.” Asked how he dealt with the disappointment of losing that gig, he laughed. “I love that you think 21 Jump Street was a huge disappointment! Johnny called me a year later and said, ‘Dude, this is awful!’” Stay tuned for more from Brolin, Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Barry Sonnenfeld on Men in Black III . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is looking to bring Little Shop of Horrors to the screen and a distributor nabs U.S. rights to Robert Pattinson’s thriller Cosmopolis . Those are among the stories in Thursday afternoon’s Biz Break. Also in the mix are highlights from upcoming festivals in Brooklyn and Austin, casting news and soundtrack details for Moonrise Kingdom . Sleepwalk with Me and Rock ‘n’ Roll Exposed Bookend BAMcinemaFest 20 New York premieres and one North American premiere will screen at the event taking place June 20th – July 1st in Brooklyn. Benh Zeitlin’s Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild will screen as a Spotlight. Highlights include Jonathan Caouette’s Walk Away Renée , Jonathan Lisecki’s Gayby , Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s Radio Unnameable , Keith Miller’s Welcome to Pine Hill , Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act and Tim Sutton’s Pavilion . Austin Film Festival Unveils Panelists for October Event The Austin Film Festival announced initial panelist details for its 19th annual event this October. Dozens of writers, filmmakers, agents and managers are on the list of featured participants at the festival, which places a focus on screenwriting. Among those attending are John August ( Frankenweenie ), Alec Berg ( The Dictator ), Scott Z. Burns ( Contagion ), Etan Cahoon ( Men in Black III ), Evan Daugherty ( Snow White and the Huntsman ) and Hilary Winston ( Happy Endings ). More panelists will be added. For a complete list with bios, visit their website . Some Curious Facts from The Avengers ‘ Facebook Page The Avengers fanatics are out full tilt on the movie’s Facebook with over 5 million playing the new Marvel’s The Avengers game via the social networking site. And the cha-ching is looking very promising following hordes of fans overseas . 41% say they plan to see the movie more than twice. And which of the superheroes would most like to be? 37% said they’d like to be Robert Downey Jr’s character Iron Man. Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow brought up the rear with only 13%. Oh, come on, fanboys! From around the ‘net… Joseph Gordon-Levitt Developing Little Shop of Horrors The actor is developing the project, in which he will possibly star. Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa will pen the script, while Marc Platt ( Wicked ) will produce. THR reports . EOne Takes Cosmopolis Rights US and UK rights to the Cannes-bound thriller Cosmopolis have been nabbed by Entertainment One. Directed by David Cronenberg, the film stars Robert Pattinson , Juliette Binoche and Paul Giamatti, Deadline reports . Demian Bichir Circles Two Projects Oscar-nominated actor Demian Bichir ( A Better Life ) is in talks to board Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills and will star in William Friedkin’s indie thriller Trapped ,” Variety reports . Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack Revealed The bulk of the Moonrise hit list includes new compositions from Alexandre Desplat, classical pieces, country classics and French pop. Previous Anderson films like Rushmore , Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic were scored by DEVO member Mark Mothersbaugh, HitFix reports . Julie Pacino Take Rights to Mary Pickford Biopic Julie Pacino and Jennifer DeLia’s Poverty Row Entertainment and producer Said Zahraoui are developing the untitled feature from a script by Josh Fagin, which DeLia will direct, Deadline reports .
While at the Austin Film Festival to pimp this week’s Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary , star Johnny Depp grabbed his guitar and took to the stage with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top for a surprise rock show. Because that’s how you get the kids to come to your new period movie, folks! Viral marketing meets rock ‘n’ roll! Johnny Depp can do no wrong! Watch the video and stick around for more Buzz Break.
