Mike Myers' latest, The Love Guru, has been sparking up a lot of controversy. There were (and still are) Hindu protests based on the trailers. Then, the British Film Institute declared that it wouldn't screen the film, nor would it be involved with any release of the comedy. Now, we're getting some positive press about the film -- straight from Deepak Chopra.

via cinematical.com

James Caan has stepped down from the political comedy Nailed after a dispute with director David O. Russell over what appears to be a cookie.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the trouble started Wednesday on the first of Caan's two days of shooting the role of a U.S. speaker of the house who chokes to death on a cookie. Russell asked him to cough as he choked, but Caan argued that the character couldn't cough and choke to death at the same time.

via movieweb.com

A presidentially pardoned woman, Kemba Smith, is making her way from prison to the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter posts that producer Will Packer (Trois, Stomp the Yard) has bought the life rights to her story. The project will be produced through his Rainforest Films, and Packer is currently looking for a writer to pen the project.

Smith's story is pretty shocking and should make for an interesting film. Born in Richmond, Virginia, she was raised by middle-class parents and led a life free from troubles with the law until she made her way to Hampton University. There, she "met a man who ended up being the leader of a $4 million crack cocaine ring and one of the FBI's 15 most wanted." For the love of this man, she dropped out of school and went on the run with him.

Although the government acknowledged that Smith never sold or took drugs, "she was charged with conspiracy to distribute crack and was sentenced to 24 years in prison." In 1999 she was featured in Glamour Magazine, which described how she came to be charged for her boyfriend's crimes. In 2000, after 6 years in prison, President Clinton pardoned Smith on his way out of office. Since then, she has since created the Kemba Smith Foundation, and works to gain rights for ex-felons -- namely, the right to vote, serve jury duty, and run for public office.

via cinematical.com

Despite the talk and the buzz, I never thought it would actually happen. If any novel merits the term "unfilmable," certainly Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is it. I mean, the climax is a 60-page radio broadcast! And the entire thing is what can charitably be called a screed, preaching Rand's extremely unliberal "objectivist" political philosophy. So when I heard that Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog and the upcoming The Life Before Her Eyes) was developing the project, with Angelina Jolie attached to star as Dagny Taggart, my reaction was quite simply: Pfffffft.

But it looks like I pfffffted too soon. Comingsoon.net talked to Perelman this week, and he told them that he's finishing up the script, and that Lionsgate wants to start shooting in December. So, uh: it looks like this might actually happen.

via cinematical.com

Right on the heels of the announcement that Elizabeth Banks would play the First Lady in Oliver Stone's ever-so-timely biopic of President George W. Bush (which is surely, as Erik Davis put it in the above-linked post, "one of the strangest projects in recent years"), Variety reports that James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn have been cast as George H.W. and Barbara. Josh Brolin is already set to play Dubya himself. The film is called simply W.

Cromwell is an expert at playing United States Presidents. He's portrayed fictional heads of state in The Sum of All Fears and an episode of The West Wing, as well as the extremely non-fictional Lyndon B. Johnson in the 2002 made-for-TV movie RFK. He's also played Senators, high-ranking military officials, and WIlliam Randolph Hearst. If anything, I'm worried that he might be too presidential for the role of the folksy George H.W. As for Burstyn, well -- if she can convincingly paint her face blue and run shrieking through the forest trying to kill Nicolas Cage in a bear suit, Barbara Bush should be a cinch.

via cinematical.com

Although I read Libertas and other conservative sites regularly, on the premise that it's a good idea to know what the barbarians are up to before they get to your gate, I rarely post about stories I read there. This piece they had up yesterday, though, is so blatantly misinformed and misguided that I felt compelled to address it.

The piece is yet another conservative rant against the liberal Hollywood machine. It starts out by linking to an article over on The Daily Standard, deemed by Libertas an "insightful piece on a disturbing trend." That alone set off my inner alarm bells, but I gamely went off to see what insights the Standard had to offer. In his piece, titled "Hollywood on the Offensive -- Child Abuse Hits the Silver Screen," Kevin Kusinitz starts out by attacking two films from Sundance 2007 -- Hounddog, starring Dakota Fanning as a young rape victim, and An American Crime, a dramatization of the murder of Sylvia Lukens in 1965, starring Ellen Page.

via cinematical.com

Once upon a time, back when I started out this line of work, it was my aim to see every movie ever made. Then came the VHS player. Once the direct-to-video market began, numerous filmmakers stopped thinking of the pleasures and rigors of making films for the big screen...

via cinematical.com

Black calls the Judd Apatow-produced comedy 'a funny look at biblical tales.'

Why are we here? What is the meaning of existence? Over the millennia, some of the world's greatest thinkers have speculated on life's biggest mysteries, looking for nothing less than an answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything...

via vh1.com

There is a report online claiming that Bruce Willis might portray former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke in director Robert Redford's adaptation of Clarke's memoir Against All Enemies...

via movies.ign.com

I wasn't planning to talk about the strike today, so I zipped by most of the news to find other things to write about. That is, until I came across a certain picture that inspired me to write about a few pieces of news that have stuck out...

via cinematical.com

Thought Harry Potter was blasphemous? That was kids' stuff compared to the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, in which God is an imposter, angels are sexually ambiguous and the Church kidnaps, tortures and assassinates to achieve its goals, one of which is stealing children's souls...

via mtv.com

Poor New Line execs. In trying to sanitize the more anti-religious elements of their big December release, The Golden Compass, they've managed to tick off both atheists and Christians. The December movie, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and kid newcomer Dakota Blue Richards — and based on the first book in fantasy novelist Philip Pullman's anti-church His Dark Materials trilogy — revolves around a girl's journey into a parallel world to save her young friends.

via movies.go.com

Vanessa Redgrave accepted a career achievement award during the Hamptons International Film Festival. Of course, if you know anything about the actress besides her work, you know that she doesn't bite her lip in awards situations. In the seventies, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting performance in Julia. Members of the Jewish Defense League protested the ceremony, the Academy got death threats, but Redgrave still won the Oscar, and in her speech, she said she wouldn't be influenced by "a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums - whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world, and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression."

via cinematical.com

The relationship between Egypt and Israel is what you might diplomatically call "thorny." While the two nations have officially been off each other's backs since the 1979 Camp David Accords, there's still plenty of resentment and outright discrimination when it comes to their movies and other artistic products. Many Egyptians take the position that Israel should be boycotted altogether until the conflict with Palestine is resolved -- so, you know, don't hold your breath.

via cinematical.com

There's nothing quite like a helping of George W. Bush to get the blood pumping and fill your head with visions of lust and romance...right? No? Okay, maybe only if you're Laura Bush. Nevertheless, a documentary made about his 2000 presidential campaign, Journeys with George, is going to be made into a fictional movie. Reuters reports that filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House), is going to adapt her doc into a romance, at the urging of Steven Zaillian -- the Oscar-winning writer of Schindler's List. I guess if there's anyone to convince someone of writing something, it'd be him!

via cinematical.com