In recent casting news, Geoffrey Rush joins Spielberg’s Vengeance (with Eric Bana and Daniel Craig), Laurence Fishburne boards MI:3, and Alan Cumming announces he won’t be back as Nightcrawler for X3. Well, good to hear at least the blue fuzzy elf will miss the Ratneresque carnage Fox is about to perpetrate on the X-Franchise.
Category: Steven Spielberg
One More Crusade.
Moving a long-awaited project closer out of development hell, George Lucas approves the new Indy IV script. If Harrison Ford also approves, Indy IV could get a 2006 start, after Spielberg finishes both Vengeance, his Munich Olympics film with Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, and his Liam Neeson Lincoln biopic, based on a forthcoming book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
On War, Violence, and other Grimm Matters.
In this weekend’s movie bin, yet another new look at Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and a higher quality version of the trailer for David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence that premiered at Cannes last week. And, further into the future, the one-sheet for Terry Gilliam’s return, The Brothers Grimm, makes it online. Along with Heath Ledger, Matt Damon, and the lovely Monica Bellucci, Grimm also includes Peter Stormare and Jonathan Pryce. Seeing Sam Lowry back in the Gilliam-verse should be worth the price of admission by itself.
Four, War, and a Bore.
Big-time summer trailers piggybacking off of Sith this week include the final trailer for Fantastic Four (I actually liked the Magic Johnson NBA spot, but this is looking lame again) and a new War of the Worlds trailer, with our first brief look at the invaders. Also, Top Guns Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and Josh Lucas go up against a renegade Skynet-like fighter in the new trailer for Stealth. Oof, Sam Shepard and Joe Morton must have some bills to pay.
No…there is another.
More good news emanating from the Sith: Apparently Steven Spielberg had a hand in choreographing the direction of some of Episode III‘s most crucial lightsaber duels. Even if Spielberg didn’t do all that much, the fact that Lucas looked for outside advice this time around bodes well indeed for the final installment.
Apes, Aslan, & Aliens.
Courtesy of Coming Soon, Adrien and Naomi brave Skull Island in this new still from PJ’s King Kong, WETA Workshop shows off its Narnia designs in this catalog of sculpture, and Steven Spielberg unleashes the GOP’s worst nightmare — an ornery Tim Robbins brandishing a shotgun — in some recently-released images from War of the Worlds.
Fanboy Cornucopia.
Thanks to ShoWest and otherwise, there’s been quite a bit of fanboy news to come down the pike in the past few days…
Pats and Bats.
Well, there may have been no nipple sightings during this year’s somewhat sloppy Superbowl (McCartney, you tease) — nor, as Seth Stevenson points out, were there much in the way of memorable ads — but we did get another look at Batman Begins, which included what appears to be our first glimpse of The Scarecrow, as well as a disaster-movie moment from War of the Worlds. I was hoping for more, but ah well.
Kinsey on Lincoln.
Schindler, Rob Roy, Darkman, Qui-Gon, Kinsey…why not Honest Abe? Liam Neeson is apparently in talks to play Lincoln in a Spielberg-directed biopic, to be based on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s forthcoming book, The Uniter. Ok, that’s not bad…but hopefully this project turns out better than Amistad.
Also in loosely related Lincoln-by-way-of-Kinsey news, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir casts a troubled eye at C.A. Tripp’s Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. As he ably points out (as does George Chauncey in the excellent Gay New York), “the difficulty with assessing Lincoln’s private life (or that of anyone else who lived before the 20th century) is that the nature of private life has changed dramatically from his time to ours, and the distance between us distorts the view…Whether [Lincoln and Joshua Speed’s, with whom Lincoln shared a bed] relationship had a sexual component or not, it belongs to a vanished world of intimate male friendships of a kind almost unrecognizable to us.” In other words, sexual orientation is an historically dynamic idea. Homosociality does not necessarily imply homosexuality, and one cannot simply read 19th century sources and infer a 20th century mindset. You have to delve a little deeper. Update: Columbia’s David Greenberg also weighs in for Slate.
Samurai Bat.
The holiday trailer season continues today, with the first look at Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and, if you’re fast, this early copy of the spiffy new Batman Begins trailer. (If that doesn’t work, there are a number of screencaps here.)