What if kamikaze NYT op-edder Greg Smith were a chicken from the Henson Workshop? What else? “My proudest moments in life — laying a plastic egg in Johannesberg, my LGTB teen awareness work with Bert, becoming Gonzo’s 539th domestic partner — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. With its cheap efforts to turn Gen X parents misty with sentimentality, the Muppets just doesn’t feel right to me anymore. I’m no Chicken Little — if things don’t change soon, the sky will indeed be falling.” [ The Awl ]
Move over, Prometheus : David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson are here with a 30-second foreign teaser for Cosmopolis , their adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel about a young billionaire’s dark, demented and all-around catastrophic 24-hour Manhattan odyssey. And it looks amazing. In fairness, it’s basically only 30 NSFW seconds of hyper-edited visuals, but what visuals: Times Square overrun with dinosaurs, Pattinson’s Eric Packer shooting a hole through his hand, limousine trysts and pee breaks, and all the quintessentially Cronenbergian glimpses of the perverse in the quotidian. Niftier still is the dialogue introducing the teaser, clipped in DeLillo’s own trademark staccato, hinting at a spiritual fidelity to the flawed but sui generis source material. It just looks and feels right . We’ll see how the other 100 minutes or so can compare later this spring, when Cosmopolis presumably debuts (and lands an American distributor) at Cannes. [via Movies.com ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There’s no script, no budget and no confirmed Charles Grodin to complement the “buddy” part of the “buddy comedy” formula that worked so well 24 years ago, but that’s not stopping the zeitgeist from panicking over the current state of Midnight Run 2 . To wit, Brett Ratner is now linked up as the director. Like we’ve never heard that before . Everybody calm down! Not that it doesn’t get somewhat worse, as Mike Fleming reports at Deadline: The studio and [De Niro’s production company] Tribeca put the wheels in motion on the sequel early last year, when they hired Tim Dowling to write a draft. [David] Elliot & [Paul] Lovett, who were writers on G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra , and are working on the sequel to Four Brothers (which they also scripted) will continue the storyline of Walsh, the ex-Chicago cop who, when last seen, set free the turncoat mob accountant The Duke at LAX and walked away with a wad of cash he’d use to open a coffee shop. So, yeah: Still early. Anyway, to recap, De Niro played bounty hunter Walsh and Grodin played Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas in the 1988 film, which was written with such profane, caustic fervor by George Gallo and directed by Martin Brest in his follow-up to Beverly Hills Cop . All of which raises a few questions: Would the retired Grodin reprise his role? (He’s said he’s open to it, but he’s also 77 next month and doesn’t exactly need the paycheck.) What is it with Ratner wanting sequels to Brest classics? (If it’s not Beverly Hills Cop 4 , then it’s Midnight Run 2 . Just give him Son of Gigli already and let’s be done with it!) And can Elliot and Lovett find a place for Yaphet Kotto to return as well? Because there is no Midnight Run 2 without perpetually vexed FBI agent Alonso Mosley delivering some serious comeuppance. [ Deadline ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
