Posts tagged with movie-adaptations
A very serious yawn in the making.
Natalie Portman and Michael Fassbender have just been cast as Lord and Lady Macbeth in an upcoming movie adaptation of Shakespeare's play, according to NME. I've read several glowing...
Never again, Marvel. I do not forget.
Marvel's 2011 Thor movie is, bar none, my least favorite superhero movie ever. To be fair, I liked Chris Helmsworth's enjoyably dim portrayal of the title character, Tom Hiddleston's campy take on Loki, and Kat Dennings's sunny performance as Natalie Portman's assistant. Unfortunately, literally every other character sucked...
Too Lifetime?
Judy Blume's 1981 novel Tiger Eyes has been made into a movie. The film, directed by Blume's son Lawrence and co-written by the author, is due out June 7th. I've never been a huge Blume fan—most of her best-known books were written before I was born, so the buzz was long over by the time I was old enough to read them, they're too angst-ridden for my taste, and any shock value they might have had was pretty much nil in my house...
Made for TV?
Be still my heart: BBC America is apparently planning a miniseries adaptation of Susanna Clarke's 2004 novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, set to air in 2014. Of course, if they really want to do justice to the book...
Reworking Romeo and Juliet. Again.
Hmm. A new take on Romeo and Juliet, "Adapted for Screen" by Julian Fellowes, and starring Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth (whom I will always think of as "Unexpectedly Hot Pip" from the Great Expectations adaptation with Scully from The X-Files)? What, exactly, does that "adapted for" credit mean? What did he change? I'm concerned, dear readers...
Widescreen worthy
Architectural Digest recently posted an article and slideshow about the lavish constructed for Baz Luhrmann's upcoming adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I have my doubts about this movie—I'm pretty sure it's going to be insane, although possibly in a good way...
Room 237, in depth
I had no idea people had devoted so much energy to analyzing Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining, but apparently there's enough interest in picking apart the deeper significance of every shifted prop, altered costume, and misplaced window to justify making a whole documentary about it...
Aim high
According to THR, Constantin Films is planning another film version of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. David Goyer will direct, Jeremy Bolt (of the Resident Evil franchise) will produce, and they're apparently planning to take a "graphic novel approach" to the story. I figured that meant something vaguely cartoonish...
Much ado about nothing... that I particularly care about, anyway.
The teaser trailer is out for Joss Whedon's adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and it looks... artistic. Black-and-white, y'know, and heavy on the strong, dramatic words flashing across the screen in equally strong, dramatic font...
Two Pinocchios? Why would you want even one?
Last week, NPR posted a helpful round-up of the many current and recent film projects inspired by fairy-tales, ranging from Red Riding Hood to the nine(!) Oz movies currently in the works...
Attack of the Highfield Mole!
Well, the CGI industry should be pleased with this news: after spending several years languishing in development, Relativity Media is finally moving forward on a movie adaptation of Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams's Tunnels series. (We reviewed the first few books in the series...
Anachronisms ahoy!
Slashfilm is warning us to brace ourselves for Dodge and Twist, a movie retelling of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist that will combine "the context of a period film with modern action thrills". They're comparing it to Guy Ritchie's recent Sherlock Holmes films...
DO NOT WANT.
I'm sorry, but I'm voting "no" on this one: according to Deadline, Guillermo del Toro is planning to produce a movie adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel The Secret Garden, and it's rumored that his version will be set in the American South at the turn of the 20th Century...
There are big names behind the Vampire Academy movie
The upcoming movie adaptation of Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy has some serious YA street cred: according to Deadline, Daniel Waters, writer of the iconic black comedy Heathers, has written the script for the first movie, and his brother, Mean Girls director Mark Waters...
The Graveyard Book movie is back on
I had no idea (or had forgotten) this movie was even in the offing, much less that the project had gone off the rails. But apparently Neil Gaiman's 2008 novel The Graveyard Book was being developed as a stop-motion project to be directed by Henry Selick and produced by Disney, with a planned release date of October, 2013. Things went downhill last summer...
Reworking Cinderella
I didn't even realize Disney was making a "revisionist" film version of Cinderella, but apparently the movie is running into problems. Cate Blanchett is still on board as the wicked stepmother, but director Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go) has left, allegedly due to "differing views on how to tell the story" between him and the studio...
The Rabbi's Cat (film review), by Joann Sfar
I was recently sent a DVD screener of The Rabbi’s Cat, a 2011 animated film adaptation of Joann Sfar's graphic novel of the same name. I'm no film critic, and my previous experience with Sfar's work is limited to reading his sword-and-sorcery-on-drugs series Dungeon (which he co-created with Lewis Trondheim, and I have always found more exasperating than amusing), but I'll try anything once...
Cold open
Okay, I'm really looking forward to seeing this. MTV Geek recently posted a clip of the first four minutes of Warm Bodies, the not-very-thinly-disguised zombie version of Romeo and Juliet, and it looks ridiculously fun. Also, uh, just plain ridiculous, but that's never stopped me from enjoying something before...
"Looks promising" is a stretch, but...
The trailer is out for the upcoming movie adaptation of the fairytale Jack the Giant Killer. It looks like the kind of CGI extravaganza I usually avoid, but I like both the cast (Nicholas Hoult, Ewan McGregor, and Bill Nighy) and the director (all the non-crappy X-Men movies' Bryan Singer)...
Generic fantasy
Aaand the trailer is out for the upcoming movie adaptation of City of Bones, the first book in Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series. I tried with these books, I really did, but they were so boring. Seriously, they were as predictable as a telenovela...
In 2013, we can celebrate surviving the Mayan Calendar apocalypse with zombie movies
Trailers have recently been released for two upcoming movie adaptations of popular zombie novels: Max Brooks's World War Z and Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies. Warm Bodies looks like tremendous fun (I've heard complaints that the novel's Romeo and Juliet stuff is irritatingly heavy-handed, but dude: Rod Corddry makes a perfect zombie Mercutio), but...
The series that wouldn't die
One more bit of TV-adaptation-related news this week, and I'm done, I promise: Moviehole.net is reporting that they have confirmed the Twilight series won't end with the upcoming Breaking Dawn 2. Apparently, the next evolution of the series is already in the works...
An American adaptation cannot be far behind
There have been a ton of fan-created trailers, but I'm pretty sure this is the first legit look at the upcoming German movie adaptation of Kerstin Gier's YA time-traveling novel Ruby Red (or Rubinrot, in German), and I can't tell you how excited I am to see it. The second book (Sapphire Blue) is finally coming out in English next week...
Carrie 2.0
The trailer is out for the new version of Carrie, and thus far I'm not feelin' it. I think Chloe Moretz is a fine actress, but she's never struck me as being particularly vulnerable, and Sissy Spacek's seeming fragility went a long way toward making the character memorable...
Alfred and Alma
The trailer is out for Hitchcock (the other Alfred Hitchcock-related project, which is not to be confused with the TV show about a young Norman Bates or The Girl, the HBO film about his treatment of Tippi Hedren). This is the film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho...
One of these things is not like the others.
Uh... does the world really need a Little House on the Prairie movie adaptation, particularly one from the director of Pineapple Express and Your Highness? I don't know how I feel about this...
Lisa Kleypas gets the Hallmark treatment
Speaking of movie adaptations of underwhelming books by otherwise excellent authors, apparently there's going to be a TV movie adaptation of Lisa Kleypas's novella Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor, to air on ABC this December. I'm torn...
Jennifer Crusie on the big (or maybe small?) screen
According to Jennifer Crusie's blog, Agnes and the Hitman (which she co-wrote with Bob Mayer) has been optioned for film. Apparently, this has happened before, but this time it's for real; there's a script and an option check and everything...
Camp classic in the making, perhaps?
The trailer is out for the upcoming adaptation of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's Beautiful Creatures, and I don't know, you guys. This movie looks like it takes itself super seriously, and the source material might not bear such close examination...
Still stupid
A trailer has been released for director Andrea Arnold's film adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and, while I have no desire to actually watch the movie, even I have to admit that this version looks beautiful...