Trailer: State of Play

This one made LiC’s Watch List for 2009 based on the cast and because I liked Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland. I have to admit though, the trailer doesn’t do anything for me. It looks like a routine Hollywood thriller in every way.

Of course, as I’m fond of pointing out, trailers are usually [...]

Weekend Forecast: 10/9/08

Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, opening in limited release 
There isn’t much to get too excited about in the wide releases this weekend:

Body of Lies. A Ridley Scott thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a CIA agent on the trail of a terrorist leader. He is guided from afar by CIA veteran Russell Crowe but with his life [...]

Ridley Scott’s Strange ‘Nottingham’ Casting Claim

In the few short months that I’ve been keeping tabs on daily movie news, Twilight pimping MTV has quickly positioned itself as the least reliable establishment source for news and the most likely to pass along unverified nonsense in the interest of page views. They didn’t originate the (probable) lie that Clooney would be The [...]

Loose Ends: News You Can Lose

Here’s a collection of production items that have come across my desk in the last few days, none of which were interesting enough to inspire their own piece.
Ghostbusters 3. People are strangely excited about a possible new Ghostbusters sequel. I love the first one, barely remember the second and never thought to myself “gee, I wish they’d make [...]

It’s Elementary: Crowe not Watson, Depp not Riddler

UK tabloid based rumors swirled over the weekend that Russell Crowe would play Watson opposite Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes in the upcoming Guy Ritchie film based on the Arthur Conan Doyle characters. That’s all well and good, but it’s another tabloid lie. Ritchie himself tells Empire “I don’t have a Watson.”
Meanwhile, Cinematical puts to rest [...]

LiC 2008 Fall Forecast: October

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton in
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York
Moving right along with the Fall Forecast. Here’s what’s coming up in October. Once again, all dates are subject to change based on studio whim. LiC’s picks are starred.
October 3
An American Carol. I love Airplane! as much as anyone, but David Zucker’s name hasn’t been attached [...]

Body of Lies 2.0

Yahoo put up a much improved Body of Lies trailer yesterday (catch the old one here). The film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a CIA operative who infiltrates a terrorist network in Jordan was written by William Monahan (The Departed) and is directed by Ridley Scott. Russell Crowe also stars as DiCaprio’s handler.
Body of Lies is set for [...]

Goldstein Unties the ‘Nottingham’ Mystery

On his The Big Picture blog at the LA Times, Patrick Goldstein sniffs around the mystery behind the delay of Ridley Scott’s Nottingham by talking to Universal Chairman Marc Shmuger.
Apparently in the original script written by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris (Bulletproof Monk), the sheriff of Nottingham was portrayed as “a CSI-style forensics investigator, set [...]