“It’s the teenagers who work at the fast food places, and immigrant laborers who come across the border, working in the packing plants, and an executive. It’s kind of from different perspectives. It’s the different sides of the fast food industry.” Richard Linklater discusses his next project, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which may star Maria Full of Grace actress Catalina Sandino Moreno. Sounds a bit like Traffic.
Category: Directors
The Candyman Can.
Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew? Willy Wonka opens the factory for public consumption in the new and rather saccharine trailer for Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. To quote the man himself, “You’re really weird.”
Four, War, and a Bore.
Big-time summer trailers piggybacking off of Sith this week include the final trailer for Fantastic Four (I actually liked the Magic Johnson NBA spot, but this is looking lame again) and a new War of the Worlds trailer, with our first brief look at the invaders. Also, Top Guns Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and Josh Lucas go up against a renegade Skynet-like fighter in the new trailer for Stealth. Oof, Sam Shepard and Joe Morton must have some bills to pay.
Lost Cause.
Apparently, David Gordon Green’s forthcoming film adaptation of John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is no more. This version, co-scripted by Steven Soderbergh and set to star Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Mos Def, Lily Tomlin, and Olympia Dukakis, was axed (according to Green) because “it didn’t cater to a lot of the cliches or conditioning of contemporary American studio sensibilities.”
Wayne on a guilt trip.
Liam Neeson goes all Qui-Gonny yet again in this short clip from Batman Begins, to be aired during tonight’s Smallville. I dunno…all the “search your feelings, young Padawan” claptrap in this scene gives me pause.
Eternal Crossing of the Spotless Fink.
In between film projects, the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman have teamed up for Carter Burwell’s Theater of the New Ear, a pair of radio plays recently performed at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The cast includes Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, and Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Coen’s “Sawbones,” and Meryl Streep, Hope Davis, and Peter Dinklage (taking time off from Lassie, I presume) in Kaufman’s “Hope Leaves the Theater.” (These apparently were also performed in Brooklyn two weeks ago, but tickets were hard to come by.)
Without chemicals he points.
So, that‘s what he’s been up to. Apparently, David Lynch has been shooting a film called Inland Empire, with Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jeremy Irons, for the past two years. “‘It’s about a woman in trouble, and it’s a mystery, and that’s about all I want to say about it,’ said Lynch recently.“
Drive the Wayne.
For completists out there, Coming Soon obtains the international Batman Begins trailer, which follows the domestic one but includes some previously unreleased footage.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.
AICN‘s Moriarty checks out the early sets and pre-viz for Paul Greengrass’ The Watchmen, a project apparently still under the gun at Paramount.
The Ape Wrangler.
“The one thing that the Lord of the Rings had taught us that we did not know in 1996 is that fantasy is best told in a very realistic way. The lesson we took in re-writing Kong last year was that the best fantasy experience in the cinema is one in which you utterly believe in what’s happening and in which the characters believe in what’s happening.” Three Monkeys talks Kong with Peter Jackson.