The Doctor in the Hallway News Report 07.18.07
Posted by Ben Moser on 07.18.2007
Jared Leto is Nobody, Brittany Murphy will not be eccentric, Travolta was not a homophobe, and more stories in varying tenses of the verb "to be." Read it, or be doomed to relive high school English!
Hello to you all, children, and welcome back to the Doctor in the Hallway News Report. I'm pressed for time, so let's get right to the news.
Leto? He's nobody.
Jared Leto and Sarah Polley are set to star in Mr. Nobody, a romantic drama from writer-director Jaco Van Dormael.
Nobody is described as a multilayered love story inspired by the "butterfly effect," the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly's wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away. Set in the not-so-distant future, the story follows Nemo Nobody (Leto) who, at 120 years old, is the last mortal surrounded by happy immortals as he relives his real and imaginary years of marriage.
This strikes me as being potentially horrible. Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy to see Jared Leto getting work. He's a pretty underrated talent. Still, nothing about this seems even the slightest bit interesting. I have the feeling that this is going to be so weird for the sake of weird that even David Lynch will be embarrassed.
Everybody's got something to hide…
Brittany Murphy, Jason Lee, Giovanni Ribisi, Jim Broadbent, Tim Roth and Lili Taylor have all signed for Myriad Pictures fantasy comedy The Other Side.
Script by Michaels and Phil Reeves centers on a young grad student (Murphy) must spend the summer working at a scientific institute on a remote northern island.
She discovers an eccentric community of characters who are hiding a secret about a terrible tragedy that took place many years before.
Nice cast. You've got me with the suggestion that Lee and Roth are going to have a pretty big playground, assuming they're two of this "eccentric community." I once tried to join an eccentric community myself, but the hazing rituals were just a little bit much.
I wanna be eccentric…
Free from Eastern Europe's Bond-age
007 is coming home. Eon has informed Prague's Barrandov Studios, where much of Casino Royale was shot, will not be used for the next film in the series reports Variety.
Instead the franchise's old home of Pinewood Studios in the UK will be utilised as the film's main production base when shooting begins in December on the twenty-second feature in the more than four-decade old series.
Lack of financial incentives in the country is being cited as the reason for the non-return, combined with the loss of the Hellboy sequel and competitive shooting locations in Hungary, Bulgaria and Serbia are making the Czech film industry nervous.
The Czech film industry losing ground to the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Serbian film industries is so shocking that I might have to actually relearn what eastern Europe looks like. Well, if Serbia can make it as a film giant, it's only a matter of ten years or so before we can expect the same from Baghdad. What? No? I can't imagine why you're so pessimistic…
Dude, you're so gay for John Travolta.
Hairspray director Adam Shankman has hit back at a journalist who is proposing a boycott of the film because its star John Travolta has "no business" playing an iconic gay character. The Pulp Fiction actor stars as super-sized woman Edna Turnblad in the latest adaptation of the kitsch musical, angering the editor of gay newspaper Washington Blade, Kevin Naff. Naff claims Travolta should never have been cast in the role because his religion Scientology is "homophobic." But Hairspray filmmaker Shankman is astonished by Naff's claims, insisting Travolta has "no problem with people being gay." He says, "I am stunned this has gotten that far. He (Naff) has made the dumbest claims on the entire planet. Everybody involved in Hairspray - all the creators are gay. So John has no problem with people being gay - me, the writers, composer, John Waters - all gay. John's personal beliefs never walked onto my set. I never heard the word Scientology."
I want to find reasons to take pot-shots at Scientology as much as the next guy, but I've never heard anything about homophobia from the Thetanites. Stuff like this is why when the gay card is legitimately played, it just seems petty and oversensitive. Besides, if Scientology really hated homosexual, Tom Cruise would have switched to Kabbalah by now.
If Tom Cruise is our king, does this make me our queen?
Take it to the (town) house!
Fox 2000 has set John Carney to direct Town House, a Doug Wright-scripted comedy that begins production in January. Pic marks the studio debut for the director of the Sundance prize-winning film Once.
Story revolves around the son of a dead rock legend who has managed to live as a recluse by slowly selling off his dad's memorabilia. But he runs out of things to sell and is forced to sell the townhouse his father left him. The imminent sale forces the man to come to terms with himself and his role as a father to a teenage son.
Well, we have a big pretentious award winner tackling what is almost certainly a big pretentious script. I can't think of a better match. Except maybe Macaulay Culkin and Mila Kunis, those two are adorable together. Almost as if one's made of soft serve ice cream and the other's made of waffle cone. Clearly, I have nothing to actually say about this movie or John Carney.
Re-Habitually making up(see what I did there?)
Samantha Ronson is out to prove just how much she values her friendship with Lindsay Lohan.
The Los Angeles disc jockey has filed a multimillion-dollar libel suit against paparazzi agency Sunset Photo and gossip blogger Perez Hilton for daring to suggest she betrayed Lohan by planting drugs in the actress' car and selling her out to the paparazzi.
I have no idea who This Ronson bird is, but I'm so over suing people just to prove my loyalty to my friends. You hear me Mitch? I told that girl you had the herp to protect you from her and don't think suing her for slander just because she told everyone else is the way to restore our friendship. Just sayin'…
If you sue someone, I might go back to being a redhead…
That'll do it for this week…
Okay, so my pick of the week is actually a book. That's only because I won't be able to watch anything where I'm going this weekend, but I will have a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with me. A month-and-a-half ago, I'd never read a single one and only seen one of the flicks. It's nice for me, though, because I've only been wondering how it's all going to end for a week or so. So take that, chumps who've been wondering for years. I'll be back and funnier next week. Until then, don't do anything I wouldn't do…
