Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Well, I said in the last blog that I would be back on Sunday, yet somehow in the past few days I've actually found something to do to keep me out long enough so that sleep is more important than blogging. Luckily, there hasn't been much movie news. Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson's District 9 took the box office, and a few other trivial things that I'll get to later.

Firstly, we'll bring Jackson back into the picture, as MarketSaw, a fellow Blogger member, has a post circulating three rather huge rumors on the upcoming film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic tale The Hobbit, which got reported on several other major blog sites as well. To begin with, the most believable of the rumor mill, is that the films will be shot in 3-D. This really comes as no surprise seeing that Jackson was vocal during the San Diego Comic Con on converting The Lord of the Rings over to the format a few weeks ago. Another believable piece of the story is that Jackson and director Guillermo del Toro will be making the fantasy book's characters a little darker. This really comes as no surprise, especially an emphasis on Smaug, which I feel was rather dark in the first place. At the same time, I love the difference of tone from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, so I hope that in connecting the films in the franchise, the unique tone of the book isn't lost. Lastly, the article mentions that there will be a third film, bridging the two works, and that Jackson will return as director for the bridge movie. This gets to a point that is debatable, no matter how capable Jackson's hands are. What do you think? Also, should we trust a Blogspot? Without looking further into the MarketSaw subsite, I could easily assume it is a fledging college student/grocery store bag boy/cinephile like myself that created a massive rumor to stir up site traffic.

A story that I missed over the past few days of absence was that Robert Downey, Jr. was being rumored to play the vampire Lestat in a new film based on Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series. Today, BSC has a few quotes from Rice herself on the topic of Downey becoming the third actor to take on the role of the lead vampire. The article still doesn't confirm or dismiss the original speculation.

Speaking of vampires, I found a rather odd item circulating the cinema blogsphere... a Twilight themed dildo. From the tiny bit of the description I could bring myself to read, I understand that it sparkles like Edward's skin, as well as having the "pale flesh tone reminiscent of a new moon's glow". Feeling left out of the apparently new "hip" thing of masturbating to Twilight, I looked up the more appropriate topic on Google search of a Star Wars sex toy. What I ended up finding was this terribly unsettling article from Landover Baptist Church's web site, about a boy having carnal relations with a seven foot replica of Jar Jar Binks.

ComingSoon has a story up that Lionsgate is developing a remake of the 1987 classic Dirty Dancing. Now, I bitch and moan a lot, but there's very few news items I report on here that would cause me to go out and protest, and I'll be damned if Lionsgate didn't pull one of those scenarios out of the hat when I just imagined someone other than Patrick Swayze saying "Nobody puts Baby in a corner".

Finally, the other day, a new trailer for the David Lynch produced, Werner Herzog directed flick My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done debuted. I have to admit, it looks watchable, but coming from the minds of Lynch and Herzog, as a team, I am quite disappointed that I'm not blown away watching this. Still, I think it is worth your time.


P.S. As an added bonus for my absence, here is the more than likely illegal way I spent an afternoon the other day, watching Martin Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver on YouTube.