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High-res stills from Hannibal Rising are at OutNow. There are also new stills from Crank (aka that Jason Statham movie).
LatinoReview is reporting that director Jon Favreau wants Rachel McAdams (also attached to play Clare in The Time Traveler's Wife) for the part of Virginia "Pepper" Potts in the adaptation of Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr. is playing Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. [imdb]
Don Cheadle will direct and star in a biopic of the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis. The film, Miles Davis, will follow his life as a short-temper and frequent drug use drew him sharp criticism, and yet he managed to essentially help reform the genre of jazz three times in his life. (Dark Horizons)
I love what Michel Guillen at The Evening Class has to say about Mel Gibson's Apocalypto: "Gibson follows Will Durant's lead in reiterating that a civilization cannot be destroyed from without until it has destroyed itself from within. And guised in that bleak assertion is, in my humble opinion, a suspicion or paranoia that the same thing that happened to Mayan civilization could happen to us. That can only be a good thing to reflect upon, God forbid."
The Australian has an interesting piece on litblogs: "Above all, readers of books who also enjoy reading blogs are conscious that they are drawn to the most highly powered technology in their homes and offices to talk about the simplest cultural technology there is, one that can be picked up, kept for many years on a shelf, borrowed and lent and returned to at will without needing to be refreshed or substantially remodelled. It is this poignant attachment to old technology, together with a well-balanced sense of the rich possibilities offered by new media, that is probably closest to the heart of blogging about books and writing."
The National Board of Review names Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima best film, and Pedro Almodovar's Volver best foreign film. Other winners include: Helen Mirren, Forest Whittaker, Ryan Gosling, and The Departed.
The critics on David Lynch's Inland Empire. (GreenCine Daily)
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Excuse me while I try to rid the sick taste from my mouth - Luigi De Laurentiis Jr. is developing an adaptation of Valerio Massimo Manfredi's historical novel, Empire of the Dragon, about a band of Roman soldiers who become militiamen for an exiled Chinese prince. Manfredi also wrote the book that was the basis for The Last Legion, a ludicrous-looking action-adventure set in ancient Rome, which will open early next year. I've tried to read "Empire of the Dragon," made curious by its premise, but wound up cursing the book before I was more than halfway through. Manfredi, an Italian scholar of history and archaeology, clearly venerates Roman history, but he is so lacking in ironical insight and humour that his own writing seems to have come from another time: his heroes are archetypes of manly excellence, preposterously free of prejudices towards either women or the alien cultures that they encounter. And don't get me started on all the oriental stereotypes Manfredi uses for the section of his book set in China.
At least the general Maximus (Russell Crowe) in Ridley Scott's Gladiator had some risque thoughts about his dead wife; the legate Metellus moons poetically over his, yet seems a completely bloodless creature - right up to the moment he falls in love (and into bed) with a Chinese princess (I mean, please), only to leave her with barely a thought when he has to return to Rome. There's only so much of it you can take before what Manfredi is doing starts to read like naive historical white-washing. The author wants to portray the people and world views of the ancient world without imposing our judgments upon them, yet his own decisions about he decides to include or neglect, what he is able to imagine and what he is not, is entirely normative. What's more it isn't even good prose; the prose, my friends, is terrible. It was like sitting through the so-trumpeted "real" King Arthur starring Clive Owen but a hundred-fold worse.
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Am I the only person who finds these Japanese Casino Royale posters showing M, Vesper, Solange and Le Chiffre rising from the foreground like James' mojo ridiculously funny?
