The Wackness is the dopeness
Friday is a major US holiday and the release calendar is all mucked up so I’m rolling out the Weekend Forecast a day early again this week. First up is the only wide release which actually opened on Tuesday for those of you keeping score at home:

Hancock (7/1). Just what summer needs, [...]

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Moviefone has the new James Bond trailer in HD Quicktime. 
Click here to see the Low-D version.
There’s something about James Bond that’s connected directly to the part of my brain that’s still 12 or 13 years old so please forgive my continual plugging of this movie.

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Eve and WALL•E - Just a couple of crazy robots in love
Thursday brings us to another Weekend Forecast. Prospects are certainly better than last week.

WALL•E. I’m taking a break from the tail end of the LA Film Festival just for opening night of the latest from the fine folks at Pixar. I’ve said it before [...]

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You could do worse than watching Singin’ in the Rain this weekend
I’m just saying…
I thank the movie gods that the LA Film Festival starts tonight because this is truly an awful weekend for new movies. My suggestion? Go rent an armload of Cyd Charisse musicals instead.
Nevertheless, because we must, here are the wide releases:

Get Smart. [...]

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The love for JJ Abrams approaches Whedonesque or Apatowian heights in some quarters, but LiC is not one of them. Then again, I’m a mystery-puzzle nerd so the news yesterday that Mr. Abrams would be producing a movie based on this NY Times story by Penelope Green caught my attention.
The short of it is that [...]

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Next up for Spike Lee is Time Traveler which he plans to co-write and direct from a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the first African-American Ph.Ds in theoretical physics.
Co-written with Bruce Henderson, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality traces Mallett’s life story from poverty to Ph.D. and of [...]

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I haven’t seen a movie based on a Dennis Lehane novel yet that I really liked, but they just keep coming. Clint Eastwood directed Mystic River, Ben Affleck did Gone Baby Gone, Martin Scorsese is working on Shutter Island and now Sam Raimi joins the fray with The Given Day, to be published September 23.
Lehane [...]

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I managed to avoid it before Indy 4 and I’m not watching it now, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to tempt you with it. Courtesy of Trailer Addict.

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Hulk SMASH puny summer movies!
Here’s what’s opening wide on Friday the 13th:

The Happening. Other than the fact that Mark Wahlberg is in it and it’s directed by M. Night Shyamalan, I know exactly nothing about this one. Whatever your opinion about Shyamalan, he’s a guy whose movies you don’t want spoiled. If I’m going to see [...]

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Positioning themselves firmly as the home of tired retreads, Millennium Films is adding The Three Musketeers to its stable of shopworn properties that now include Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, Hercules, Buck Rogers and Rambo.
The story will reportedly tell how the original three, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, first teamed up.
The best part for Millenium? Alexandre [...]

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Studio Pinhead #2: Don’t you ever get tired of doing remakes and sequels all the time?
Studio Pinhead #1: What are you crazy? It’s all about name recognition. We save a fortune on public awareness.
Development Weasel: That’s right. Half of our sales job is already done before the scripts are even written.
Studio Pinhead #2: What about [...]

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Neil Jordan has put together financing for his self-scripted film Ondine in which Colin Farrell plays a fisherman in southwest Ireland who reels in a sea nymph played by Alicja Bachleda (Trade). The film begins shooting in mid-July.
Meanwhile, Cameron Crowe is stirring up an as-yet-untitled romantic comedy starring Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon. Scott Rudin [...]

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My first response to the teaser trailer for The Pink Panther 2 was “What’s a French policeman doing lurking around the El Portal theater in North Hollywood?” and my second response was “Wait a minute, they’re making another one of these things?”
Then I looked the last one up at Box Office Mojo and found that [...]

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In Internet time this is already old news, but in the interest of following up on stuff I’ve already talked about, here it is anyway.
Speaking to Defamer’s Stu VanAirsdale, Werner Herzog shed some light on his upcoming Bad Lieutenant project with Nicholas Cage.
Turns out he’s not actually remaking Abel Ferrara’s film so much as making [...]

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They’re cranking out remakes faster than I can make fun of them. This time it’s an LiC childhood favorite: Peter Hyams’ Capricorn One, the conspiracy thriller about a fake mission to Mars starring Elliot Gould, Sam Waterston, James Brolin, Hal Holbrook, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, Brenda Vaccaro and of course, O.J. “Stabby” Simpson.
Peter Buchman who [...]

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Mmmm…Dumplings
I love a Weekend Forecast in June, how ’bout you? Actually, there isn’t much to write home about this week. Undaunted, we start off with the wide releases:

Kung Fu Panda. DreamWorks hasn’t done much in the animation department that has gotten me excited. This one’s an unlikely hero story about a tubby panda chosen to [...]

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Forget about Brett Ratner, the disturbing angle on news that the long-rumored Beverly Hills Cop sequel may finally be making some headway is that for every note of justified skepticism, there’s someone who actually thinks it’s a good idea.
Why do the studios keep churning out sequels and remakes? Because there are always enough dumbasses who can’t let [...]

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Campino and Wim Wenders - star and director of Palermo Shooting (Getty Images)
Palermo Shooting, the latest film from LiC favorite Wim Wenders, is scheduled to be unveiled in competition at Cannes on Saturday, but according to a Reuters interview from Scott Roxborough, Wenders was still working on mixing the film when the festival began and the [...]

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Due to ’scheduling conflicts’ (like maybe he’s just signed on to too many movies), Martin Scorsese is out as director of the upcoming Bob Marley documentary and Jonathan Demme is in.
Demme is no stranger to non-fiction music films, having made the classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and, more recently, Neil Young: Heart [...]

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…to form a production company?
Two if they’re Mark and Michael Polish, the identical twin writing-directing-producing (and sometimes starring) brother team behind such enigmatic films as Twin Falls Idaho, Northfork and the more recent (and more mainstream) The Astronaut Farmer.
According to Variety’s Michael Flemming, the two have formed Prohibition Pictures with the aim of producing four [...]

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Studio Pinhead #1: You know, there just aren’t enough movies with swords anymore.
Development Weasel: You mean like light sabers?
Studio Pinhead #1: No, none of that phony sci-fi samurai shit. I’m talking about man swords.
Studio Pinhead #2: …like porn?
Studio Pinhead #1: No! Metal swords. Big ones. Like claymores. Like, roll a d20, score a critical hit [...]

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Anders Danielsen Lie in Joachim Trier’s Reprise
LiC’s limited release Pick of the Week
There are plenty of decent limited releases from previous weekends still kicking around (The Visitor, Young@Heart, Son of Rambow, The Fall, OSS 117) and it might be a good time to try and find one because there is only one new wide release [...]

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According to Variety’s Pamela McClintock and Anne Thompson, Michael Moore is going to make a sequel to Farenheit 9/11 which will be released next year.
Though the original was the highest grossing documentary ever in the United States with $119.1 million and an additional $100 million overseas, Moore’s most recent film Sicko only pulled in $24.5 million [...]

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Jody Hill, Will Ferrell, Ben Best, Danny McBride and Adam McKay
Throw a press conference in L.A. to promote a $70,000 indie martial arts comedy called The Foot Fist Way written, produced and directed by three friends from the North Carolina School of the Arts and you might be hard pressed to find many takers. Promise [...]

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According to the L.A. Times’ Sheigh Crabtree, Steven Spielberg told German magazine Focus that Chicago Seven is on the back burner and that he hopes to begin filming the oft rumored Abraham Lincoln biography in 2009 to coincide with the 16th president’s 200th anniversary.
OK, I’ve already lost interest in this story, but I’ve gone and typed [...]

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In older but lighter news, John Waters is going to tacky up everyone’s favorite consumer holiday with Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey.
According to The Hollywood Reporter:
“The plot is officially under wraps but is said to center on the title character, a boy named after his favorite dessert. He runs away from home during the holidays [...]

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Go, Speed Racer! Go!
If week #2 of Summer’s wide releases don’t thrill you, there are a handful of interesting looking limited releases to choose from. First up, here’s what’s most likely opening at a theater near you:

Speed Racer. Box office watchers are smelling a bomb, but I really hope this movie is a splashy, kinetic [...]

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Three weeks after James Caan left David O. Russell’s Nailed, supposedly over an argument about how the actor should choke on a cookie, James Brolin has stepped in to fill the role.
Russell has a reputation for running a contentious set, not only getting into a fight with George Clooney on Three Kings, but most famously appearing all over [...]

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Heads were scratched over the scheduled January ‘09 release for Frank Miller’s The Spirit starring Gabriel Macht, Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson, but Lionsgate must feel good about what they’re seeing because they’ve moved the film up to Christmas ‘08.
January is practically a graveyard for movie releases, whereas Christmas is one of the busiest movie going [...]

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Two weeks before Atom Egoyan’s latest film is scheduled to premiere at Cannes, Sony Pictures Classics has snagged it for domestic and select international distribution.
Adoration, starring Rachel Blanchard and Scott Speedman, is Canadian filmmaker Egoyan’s 11th feature and his 7th collaboration with producer Robert Lantos. The drama tells the story of a teenager who assumes a false [...]

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