Last week Mickey Rourke was trying to see if he could juggle roles in both “Conan” (see below) and Tarsem Singh’s Greek mythology tale “Dawn Of War,” previously described as “Caravaggio meets ‘Fight Club'” with a pinch of Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet.” The film already stars Henry Cavill and Freida Pinto and Rourke is now confirmed. Production shoots in Montreal soon and apparently they’re contemplating 3D (naturally). The film is produced by the same people who produced “3oo” but Singh is at least a true visualist, even if his last picture, “The Fall,” was a little ridiculous (though visually rich).
Stephen Lang, the bad-ass character actor (see “Public Enemies”) sometimes reduced to playing cartoonish antagonists (see “Avatar”) is apparently in line to take the villain role in Marcus Nispel’s remake of “Conan.” Nispel is the guy who directed the remakes for “Friday the 13th” (awful) and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (less awful) so we have little interest to be frank. The film already stars Jason Momoa (TV star from “Stargate: Atlantis,” “North Shore”and “The Game”) and Mickey Rourke in a father role, which we assume is probably small. Considering the talent here, we don’t have hopes for Lang’s role either, but hey, we’re happy to be proven wrong. A brutal, but coherent “Conan” that wasn’t intellectually bankrupt would not be the worst thing in the world.
This morning we noted that Neil Patrick Harris would be singing and dancing with Martin Short at this weekend’s Oscars, and would be directing “Rent” at the Hollywood Bowl from August 6-8. Now, according to Deadline, he has grabbed the lead role voice role for Sony’s “Smurfs: The Movie” which will be a mix of animation and live-action. Something tells us this means NPH won’t be playing Papa Smurf and that old blue fart won’t be the lead of this one.. Oh we’ve got it messed up. Neil Patrick Harris won’t play a Smurf, he’ll play a human who hopefully steps on all those brats. We’re hoping regardless, they’ve created an extreme new Smurf, cause hell that would make the series better, right?
There’s been rumors of a “Gilligan’s Island” happening for months and now Warner Bros. is going to try and make a full run at it now. The fact that “Arrested Development” writer Brad Copeland and “Dark Knight” producer Charles Roven are involved will probably fuel age-old rumors that Michael Cera would play Gilligan, but we will bet the life of our blog (which you can delete in its entirety) that this will never ever happen (we would win that bet apparently, as the rumors were Cera and Bill Hader fucking around and pulling your chain). File under: the dumbest projects announced in 2010 which we’ll round up at the end of the year.
Get excited! Test shooting for “Green Lantern” has begun. The film comes out June 17, 2011 and should start shooting in earnest soon.
