Is It Possible to Make a Movie Worse Than Valentine's Day?
No one really knows, so one director, and possibly one actress, are endeavoring to find out. Also today: NBC orders two dubious sounding pilots, Matthew Weiner has a casting change for his first movie, and trouble in New Zealand.
This news is a leeettle bit old, but whatever. Kristin Davis, who played the fastidious and psychosexually damaged Charlotte on HBO's Sex and the City, is working on a new pilot for NBC. It's based on the book The Happiness Project, about a woman spending a year seeking happiness, and will be adapted by a writer from The Chuck, a show about Chuck. So it's basically Eat Pray Love, only a little less hippie-loose in the way that Julia Roberts is these days. With Davis it will likely be shrill and prim. Not quite Charlotte levels of shrill and prim, she was playing a character after all, but somewhere on that same spectrum. Let's hope they keep the poop jokes coming, though. [Variety]
Speaking of NBC, they've also picked up a pilot from transcendent genius Jamie Foxx, about a girl, possibly played by Selma Blair, from a mafia family who goes into hiding after her family is killed by a rival family, and then she's all grown up and is a lawyer but also part-time assassin trying to track down the family that killed her family, while trying to find her last living family member. The title should probably be We Say Family A Lot: A Jamie Foxx Production. Well, except, apparently they want to call it Tommy's Little Girl. So hopefully it's actually a reality show about grizzled 'n grumpy old Tommy Lee Jones getting saddled with a long lost baby grandniece or something. "Watch as Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones changes diapers, and... has a change of heart. Tommy's Little Girl, this fall on TLC." I would watch that and you know you would too. [Deadline]
A sixteen-year-old child by the name of Skyler Samuels has landed the role of Tommy Lee Jones' baby grandniece a magic teenager on the ABC Family pilot Nine Lives, based on the YA novel series. So good. Heroes for teens, except Heroes had teens. Or maybe it's like Twilight, except instead of dog-people it's cat-people. I mean, "Nine Lives"? Also, she's being pursued by mysterious people, which is even a little Alex Mackian. The Secret World of the New Moon Heroes: now an ABC Family TV pilot. [Deadline]
Scared the Hobbit movie might take filming elsewhere because of very public disputes with actors unions and other entities, the government of New Zealand has called meetings with Warner Bros. to try and work this crazy thing out. Frankly I hope they do, because where else can you film such grandeur? The Canadian Rockies? Not really. Maybe Chile. I was just there and man it is surprising to me that more movies aren't filmed there. It is crazy gorgeous, and I didn't even get to see Patagonia. So maybe that's it. Maybe they should go to Patagonia. That'll be fun for everyone involved. Sounds pretty logistically simple, right? I mean, you have a built-in polar fleece sponsor right there! [THR]
Cool boy-movie director Michael Mann is apparently "mulling", like fine autumn wine, over the idea of directing a big movie about the Battle of Agincourt, which of course features prominently in Billy Shakes's Henry 5: Hotspur's Revenge. That could be cool! It wouldn't be about Henry or anything, it'd be about a less famous person, I guess sort of a Titus Pullo kind of character. I like things about old things. Yay! [Deadline]
Here are two worthy bits of news from the same source. The first is that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's new movie You Are Here may have gotten something of a downgrade in casting. Zach Galifianakis, Jennifer Aniston, and Bradley Cooper were once attached, but now it seems that cast has shifted to Jack Black, Matt Dillon, and Renee Zellwegger. Weird to live in times when Jack Black and Renee Zellwegger are considered less-than, but that's just the world we live in. Rachel McAdams is apparently still a possibility as well. So that's that. The second bit of news is that Lea Michele, the result of an attempt to clone Idina Menzel gone terribly awry, might join the cast of Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, another ensemble comedy in the vein of Marshall's own Valentine's Day. And, look. I'm sorry. I usually go in for a romantic comedy, sometimes the cheesier the better. But Valentine's Day was such an unwatchable pile of maggot-infested horse shit that I can't believe anyone is making another movie in the same format. Seriously, Valentine's Day was the most aggressively ape-fuckingly bad movie I've seen in a long, long time. And I just watched Predators yesterday. (To be fair, Predators is actually just kind of good.) So, go on with your bad self, Lea Michele. You make that piece of donkey vomit. But don't come crying to those Gleek fans of yours when everyone's mad at you for being in this sure-to-be wet devil's fart of a movie. [Pajiba]