Tuesday 23 November 2010

Morning News Bulletin

Good morning all.

The Morning News Bulletin is a daily roundup of film news that happened over the last couple of hours while we were fast asleep here in SA. In today's headlines, Jaden Smith will star in M. Night Shyamalan's next movie, Darren Aronofsky gives us more details on The Wolverine, Buffy The Vampire Slayer is set to get the reboot treatment and Liefling tops the local box office. As always, check out the full details on these stories after the jump.



Fresh off the box office hit that was the Karate Kid, Jaden Smith is now poised to star in director M. Night Shyamalan's next movie One Thousand A.E. Up till now all that we knew about the project was that it's from a script by Gary Whitta (Book Of Eli) and that it is a sci-fi movie. Jaden Smith recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly and revealed that at the moment he is currently reading the script and that, without giving much away, the film is set "in the future and it is about a journey". By extrapolating from that highly insightful short statement as well as the movie's title, I have a feeling that this is going to be very similar to the animated film Titan A.E. which was released back in 2000 and was also set in the "future" and at a fundamental level was also about "a journey". In that film the journey was to find a new home planet for what was left of the human race after Earth was destroyed. Indeed the A.E. part in Titan A.E. stood for After Earth and I doubt it's a coincidence that M. Night Shyamalan's one also ends with the letters A.E. So all in all this is very likely to be another post-apocolyptic sci-fi film with whats left of the human population facing off some form of enemy, either aliens or artificially intelligent machines, in a battle for survival with a M. Night Shyamalan twist thrown in at the end for good measure (the last humans will turn out to have been in a video game simulation all along!). Consider us disinterested for now.

Darren Aronofsky’s split from Rachel Weisz may explain him deciding to feed fan boys with some news about the new Wolverine film that he is directing. According to TotalFilm, the director of the acclaimed film's Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Requiem For A Dream is going to direct The Wolverine, based upon Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s 1982 mini series. Hopefully it’s better than Wolverine Origins, which while promising, kind of regressed into a film that was not true to any Wolverine story – come on, how can they have a super Weapon X character that was not actually Deadpool!!! Expect a preview on the Deadpool film soon. A good start is that Christopher McQuarrie who wrote the Usual Suspects has adapted The Wolverine’s script. It follows Logan (Wolverine) falling in love with a married Japanese woman. Having read the comics where he did samurai fighting, it will be awesome to finally see Wolvie’s far eastern escapades. Hugh Jackman reprises his role so at least he has room to give an even better performance than he did in the past four films in which he played one of the most popular superheroes of all time and Marvel comics’ biggest star this side of Spiderman. Consider us interested.

According to the LA Times, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is being rebooted as a new feature film. The original 1992 Buffy film, starring Kristy Swanson, spawned a brilliant TV show by the same name starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. In fact, it was the probably the best thing Ms Gellar has ever been in. All we know at the moment is that the film is not going to focus on Buffy's high school days - University then? The team behind the project includes Dark Knight producer Charles Roven and will be written by Whit Anderson. Most of you guys probably are more familiar with the long running TV version of Buffy by created by Joss Whedon than the 1992 film but he won't be involved with this one as he is going to be directing a small indie art-house movie called The Avengers. Kristin Dos Santos from E! Online asked Joss about his thoughts on the reboot and this is what he had to say about it:

This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths—just because they can’t think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself. Obviously I have strong, mixed emotions about something like this… I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death.  But, you know, AFTER.  I don’t love the idea of my creation in other hands, but I’m also well aware that many more hands than mine went into making that show what it was. And there is no legal grounds for doing anything other than sighing audibly. I can’t wish people who are passionate about my little myth ill. I can, however, take this time to announce that I’m making a Batman movie.  Because there’s a franchise that truly needs updating. So look for The Dark Knight Rises Way Earlier Than That Other One And Also More Cheaply And In Toronto, rebooting into a theater near you.

The new Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie is expected to be released in theatres late next year or in early 2012.

We end off today's news bulletin with the trailer for local movie Liefling which was released on Friday and debuted at number one on the local box office this past weekend (look out for our weekly box office analysis later today):



That's it for today folks. See you again tomorrow.

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