It looks like Clint Eastwood is facing another empty space, but this time the repercussions could hit the wallet. Beyoncé Knowles has quit his forthcoming remake of A Star is Born – and it’s even for the second time. The musical take on the well-known tale has been made three times by Hollywood. The superstar singer and actor is thought to have ended her involvement in the production due to delays in setting a start date for the film. The pic still lacks a male lead despite a three year search that has sailed through the names of a slew of top stars including Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Robert Downey Jr., Eminem, Christian Bale, Jon Hamm and Bradley Cooper, according to The Guardian. This is not the first time Knowles took her leave from A Star is Born . She actually came back on board when Eastwood was named director in January last year after departing over production delays prior to the announcement. Eastwood hopes to pattern the latest Star in the vein of the 1976 version, which starred Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, which moved the story from the film biz to the music industry. The original version filmed in 1937 starred Fredric March and Janet Gaynor as an aging Hollywood actor who takes the young budding star under his tutelage. James Mason and Judy Garland took on A Star is Born in 1954. Speculation has now turned to jazz musician Esperanza Spalding as a replacement, but Warner Bros. wants to lock down a male lead before moving on with finding Beyoncé’s replacement. Bradley Cooper was the latest in the long line of male contenders to surface as the eventual choice. One of music’s most recognizable stars, Beyoncé made a box office splash with 2006’s Dreamgirls , which took in almost $155 million worldwide. Her starring role in thriller Obsessed took in a cool $73.83 million domestically in 2009, but not all has been box office gold. Cadillac Records bombed with only $8.1 million domestically. [Sources: Variety , The Guardian , Box Office Mojo ]
Uwe Boll is coming! Uwe Boll is coming! And what better platform could there be for his latest opus, Bailout: The Age of Greed , than an indie film festival that will also see the world premiere of a loving 2k restoration of the infamously so-bad-it’s-good Manos: The Hands of Fate ? LA’s New Beverly Cinema will play host to the Teutonic Terror this December as the enfant terrible of bad movies brings Bailout: The Age of Greed — a Wall Street thriller, naturally — to premiere at the 2012 Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival . Bailout: The Age of Greed “looks at the effects of Wall Street’s 2008 financial crisis on an average American pushed to the brink when he loses his savings and decides to take revenge.” (You might say he goes… Postal .) Dominic Purcell, Edward Furlong, Erin Karpluk, John Heard, Keith David, Michael Pare, Clint Howard, Natassia Malthe, Michael Eklund and Eric Roberts star in the film, and according to a press release they’ll all be in attendance alongside Boll at the December 3 North American premiere. I’m guessing the “entire cast and crew” won’t be there, but expect to see as many human beings as will fit on the dais of the Quentin Tarantino-associated institution. The following day on December 4 the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival will play host to another, perhaps more culturally relevant cinematic experience: The debut of a digital restoration of 1966’s Manos: The Hands of Fate , whose cult status was sealed by MST3K (see below). A Q&A will follow with Ben Solovey, the mastermind behind the 2k digital facelift, who guarantees it to be the “best print ever screened.” The best presentation of one of the worst films of all time! HRIFF is held Dec 3-10th 2012 in Los Angeles, CA and will feature over 70 films in this year’s program. For more information head here .
Movieline would like to introduce The Player , a recurring feature in which we look at the crossroads where video games and moviemaking intersect. We’ll regularly be looking at games that inspire movies, movies that inspire games and a lot of fun stuff in between. For our first foray, Luke McKinley writes on Manos: The Hands of Fate , an excruciatingly bad 1965 micro-budget film that manages work well as a video game. “The game of the movie” is a worse curse than Cruciatus , and usually causes more pain. It’s such a guarantee of failure that even the Street Fighter movie game sucked, and that started with one of the greatest games of all time. They’re terrible because the studio has to acquire the license, and when any company spends most of its budget on lawyers, the lawyers are the only ones who get to have any fun. Once the rights are secured, there’s usually enough cash left in the kitty for a design team of two interns and a crayon. FreakZone Games found a way around this: Start with the worst movie of all time. That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate. (To watch the entire movie, if you dare, scroll down to the YouTube video below). This abomination was made when an insurance and fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren bet that he could make a horror movie for less than $20,000. He failed spectacularly. The results would have less painful — and more coherent — if he’d filmed himself drinking $20,000 worth of tequila. The actors are so bad that they can barely talk. One is so bad he can barely walk. John Reynolds, who played Torgo, handyman and henchman to the villainous “Master,” appeared to have taken his acting classes from electroshock therapy. Reynolds’attempts to look supernatural make his appearances look jerkier than an art student’s stop-motion film — and more tedious, too. It can take up to three minutes for him to cross a scene, and if you think the camera or actors do anything to distract from this you are wildly overestimating: a) their commitment to the project; b) their understanding of cinema, c) their baseline brain activity. Then there’s the movie’s title villain, The Master, played by Torn Neyman. At one point, he studies himself in the mirror and declares, “Yes, I am the face of horror.” That’s him in the poster with the fancy moustache. Scary, right? In addition to being widely recognized as one of the biggest stinkers in filmdom, Manos is also a testament to the healing power of laughter. The movie is now a cult favorite thanks largely to the crew behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, who mocked it to pieces in 1993 , and, on Aug. 16, mauled it a second time — this time, live — when they reunited under the name of Rifftrax . FreakZone took a similar approach. The video game version of Manos: The Hands of Fate is an homage to retro gaming and a satire of almost every other movie game ever made. It avoids sucking by wallowing in the cliches of video-game movie adaptations. And there are many. In the 1980s and ’90s, every movie franchise was turned into a platformer. Childish sword and sorcery tales, action movies, romantic dramas, tearjerkers about people in wheelchairs who were scared of heights — it didn’t matter. Manos, the game, improves upon the movie right from the get-go with better acting. It also reminds you of how evil games used to be before they started being built for the mediocre skills of broad movie-going audiences. In FreakZone’s Manos , it’s possible to die at the first jump. Tap A and misjudge the distance, and that’s it, you’re dead. (In Manos , the movie, the Master takes a good 20 minutes to get around to killing Torgo.) There are also invincible immortal enemies (who do nothing but float up and down), edge-of-the-block jumps for bonus items, and even curse-inducing sine-wave-flying enemies to knock you off platforms and trigger Castlevania flashbacks. The real glory of this game is proving that the internet is better for creativity than a whiteboard made of LSD. Hollywood spends more money to minimize risk than the Secret Service, and the gaming industry hasn’t just been taking notes. If you walked into a video game publisher in the ’90s and told them you wanted to make this game, they would have hired new security to escort you out of the building just so their regular security didn’t have to touch you. But now a few people with the right combination of skills and mental problems can build and sell a game like Manos: The Hands of Fate for a couple of bucks, and it’s fantastic. There’s a real chance the $1.99 I paid for the game will represent 50% of the publisher’s entire profit on the sale, but I’m still glad I gave it to them. That’s because with Manos: The Hands of Fate , FreakZone has achieved the impossible: It made a game that was better than the movie. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
