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LATEST INDUSTRY NEWS (Last Updated: 08/01/07)

McG Plans Scary Buddy Comedy

[07.31.07 - 10:01 AM]

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Charlie's Angels" director McG is teaming with the Oscar-winning writer of "Little Miss Sunshine" for his next movie.

"Nightcrawlers," a visual effects-laden action-comedy, is about a neurotic father who must turn to his childhood tormentor in order to face his lifelong fear of the dark and the monsters who have haunted him.

"It's a buddy comedy where what kids are afraid of turns out to be real, and our guys have to go into these fearscapes and battle all these monsters," said McG, a.k.a. Joseph McGinty Nichol, who is eyeing a November start for the production.

The Warner Bros. project was written by Michael Arndt, who won an Oscar this year for "Sunshine," his first script. Brian Lynch was the original writer on "Nightcrawlers."

McG most recently directed the Warners football drama "We Are Marshall," starring Matthew McConaughey and Matthew Fox, which fumbled at the box office with a $43.5 million gross.

McG also plans to direct "Yucatan," a heist movie based on almost 1,700 pages of recently discovered notes and storyboards done by the late Steve McQueen for a passion project he had planned to star in. McG will also produce, with "Harry Potter" producer David Heyman.

"Like any suburban pussy, I'm infatuated with Steve McQueen," McG said.

McG made a name for himself in the music video world and broke into features with the 2000 hit "Charlie's Angels," the movie version of the popular 1970s television show. He also directed the sequel, "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle."

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

[08.01.07 - 08:27 AM]

BACK TO THE FUTURAMA!
Los Angeles (E! Online) - Good news, everyone! After getting cryogenically frozen out from the prime-time schedule, Futurama is coming back, bigger than ever.

During a panel discussion Saturday at the Comic-Con Convention in San Diego, the masterminds behind Fox's Emmy-winning sci-fi-spoofing animated series, Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, revealed that four full-length straight-to-DVD movies are in the works, which 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment will roll out beginning in the fall. The first film, Futurama: Bender's Big Score, arrives in stores on Nov. 27. It will follow pizza delivery boy Fry and the rest of Planet Express gang as they fight to save the world from nudist alien Internet scammers who send Bender back to the pre-global warming past in a scheme to plunder the Earth of its greatest riches. Al Gore, whose head turned up in couple of Futurama episodes and whose daughter Kristin was a staff writer for two years, will be back for a cameo appearance. Other guest stars include Sarah Silverman and Coolio.

According to the brain trust, all the principal writers, producers, and original voice cast—including Billy West (Fry, Dr. Zoidberg, Professor Farnsworth), John Di Maggio (Bender) and Katey Sagal (Leela)—who worked on Futurama during its bumpy 1999-2003 run on Fox, will be back for the DVD movies. The other three features are titled Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs, Futurama: Bender's Game and Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder. Groening and Cohen screened a five-minute trailer for Bender's Big Score, drawing raves from the hundreds of fanboys in attendance. Devotees were also treated to a live reading of a Futurama comic book and given a complimentary issue, courtesy of Groening's Bongo Comics.

The Futurama announcement comes six months after Fox initiated talks to revive the 'toon, and after the studio's staggeringly high sales for Family Guy's first direct-to-DVD feature offering, Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story. Despite three Emmy wins, including a 2002 trophy for Best Animated Series, Futurama was deep-sixed in 2003 after five seasons due to low ratings. But Futurama refused to go quietly. Reruns of the show's 72-episode library began airing on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and did so well that Comedy Central signed a deal in June 2006 to bring the comedy back with 13 new half-hour episodes scheduled to run next year.

BOCHCO HIRES LEGAL TEAM FOR NEW TNT DRAMA

By Nellie Andreeva Wed Aug 1, 2:37 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Jane Kaczmarek, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Gloria Reuben lead the cast of Steven Bochco's new legal drama for TNT.
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Written by Bochco and lawyer-writer David Feige, author of the 2006 book "Indefensible," the untitled project revolves around young lawyers who have been friends since law school but now work on opposing sides.

An Emmy nominee for each of her seven seasons on Fox's comedy "Malcolm in the Middle," Kaczmarek is making a dramatic turn with the TNT project, playing a stylish, imperious and slightly crazy judge who runs her courtroom like her own private fiefdom.

Kaczmarek has experience playing a judge as she voices occasional "Simpsons" character Judge Constance Harm.

In his third starring turn with Bochco after ABC's "NYPD Blue" and "Commander in Chief," Gosselaar will play a charismatic and fiercely idealistic public defender who frequently finds himself pitted against the vicissitudes and injustices of an unwieldy bureaucracy. Gosselaar also appeared on Bochco's Iraq War drama "Over There" for FX.

Reuben, a two-time Emmy nominee for her supporting role as a physician's assistant on "ER," will play the funny, bright and savvy head of the public defender's office who monitors the other public defenders' case loads and lives.

Also cast were Melissa Sagemiller (Showtime's "Sleeper Cell"); Currie Graham ("NYPD Blue"); Teddy Sears ("Firehouse Dog"); J. August Richards (WB Network's "Angel"); and Jonathan Scarfe (TNT's "Into the West").

Reuters
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Capsule Reviews of this week's films

By The Associated Press Wed Aug 1, 4:25 PM ET

Capsule reviews of films opening this week:
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"The Bourne Ultimatum" — All along, they've been calling this the summer of threes — you know how "they" can be, putting things into tidy little boxes. And they focused mainly on the ballyhooed blockbusters that came out at the beginning of the summer: third installments in the "Spider-Man," "Shrek" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchises. But now as we're creeping into August, traditionally a dumping-ground time at the movies, we have easily the best threequel of all. "The Bourne Ultimatum" kicks all of their butts — literally and figuratively. It's the first one that doesn't feel like a dragged-out continuation of a series, but rather a climactic, satisfying culmination. (Though, who knows? The ending does leave the door open for the possibility of "Bourne 4.") Paul Greengrass, who also directed part two, 2004's "The Bourne Supremacy," as well as the riveting "United 93," continues to prove himself a master of mood. He's done something astonishing here: He's made an action film that's both delicate and aggressive, a difficult balance to strike. It's all stuff you've seen before — car chases, fistfights, international jet-setting and spy vs. spy intrigue — but it's so expertly crafted and the cast is so superb that "Bourne Ultimatum" exceeds all expectations of the genre. Matt Damon remains a strong, stoic force in the center as the amnesiac assassin of Robert Ludlum's novels, still seeking answers about his past. David Strathairn, Joan Allen and Julia Stiles co-star. PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of action. 110 min. Three and a half stars out of four.

• Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Bratz" — The Transformers did it — they made the leap from the toy store to the big screen. But unlike those dazzling, shape-shifting robots, the Bratz are actually less than meets the eye. Yes, the four young women who play the living dolls are pretty and perky and they have enough energy to light up a decent-sized suburb. Girls — a very specific niche of girls ages 8-10 — will probably want to be them. And in these tabloid-friendly times, they are much better role models than Britney/Lindsay/Paris/Nicole. They go to class and fight to stick by each other when high school cliques threaten to tear them apart, rendering them BFFs (best friends forever!) no more. But wow, is this movie mind-numblingly vapid and shrill. In the hands of director Sean McNamara, who also did the painfully earnest Hilary Duff vehicle "Raise Your Voice," it isn't even a movie so much as an extended commercial for MTV and Skechers shoes and the L.A. outdoor shopping center The Grove, sort of the Las Vegas of malls. That's where Sasha (Logan Browning), Jade (Janel Parrish), Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos) and Cloe (Skyler Shaye) go for retail therapy when the pressure to fit in starts to get them down. Chelsea Staub is pretty hilarious in an intentionally over-the-top way, though, as the queen bee who rules Carry Nation High School so completely, she has the various social groups organized into a lunchtime seating chart. PG for thematic elements. 110 min. One and a half stars out of four.

• Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"El Cantante" — If it weren't for the infectious, wall-to-wall salsa music, which Marc Anthony performs with a clear, stirring voice and great passion, it would be easy to write this off entirely as a shameless vanity project. Not for Anthony, mind you, but for his wife, Jennifer Lopez, who gets top billing and serves as a producer. Director Leon Ichaso has made a pretty standard biopic of salsa legend Hector Lavoe, hitting all the obligatory highlights of the singer's life: his arrival in New York from Puerto Rico, his first gig, his first meeting with the sassy Puchi (Lopez), who would become his wife and the mother of his son. There's the rise to stardom (marked by the de rigueur montage of screaming crowds, concert posters and newspaper clippings) followed by the descent into heroin abuse, his attempted suicide and eventual death from AIDS in 1993. Through it all there's Lopez, making a million wardrobe changes and shaking her thing backstage in a million gratuitous cutaways. She and Anthony do have chemistry, though, and watching the real-life couple isn't nearly as distracting as it was when Lopez co-starred with then-fiance Ben Affleck in the notorious "Gigli." A lot of that has to do with the fact that Anthony actually can act, something he previously hinted at in "Man on Fire." R for drug use, pervasive language and some sexuality. 116 min. Two stars out of four.

• Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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