In this morning’s roundup of movie news ‘n’ notes from around the web, Peter Jackson opens the door to “The Hobbit,” and Memorial Day means bad movies.
On the heels of the lowest-grossing Memorial Day weekend in 11 years, Cinematical reposts a year-old Elisabeth Rappe piece [5] about her favorite Memorial Day movies from years gone past. She loses me with the line, “My own personal favorite has to be ‘Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’” – although if you look at Box Office Mojo’s list [6]of the biggest Memorial Day weekends ever, the pickings are pretty slim. The top 10: “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “Bruce Almighty,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Mission: Impossible II,” “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” and “Madagascar.” “Crystal Skull” (below) is the only one of the batch to score higher than a dismal 60 on Rotten Tomatoes [7], and it’s now widely derided as the worst Indiana Jones movie ever. In other words, welcome to summer.
Gregory Ellwood does a semi-exhaustive roundup [8] of the possible replacements for Guillermo Del Toro as director of “The Hobbit” movies. He comes up with 17 possibilities, which he calls “a list of intriguing candidates they will no likely consider.” Obviously there’s a typo in there, but I’m not sure whether he means this as a list of candidates they will now likely consider, or candidates they will not likely consider, because it seems to contain directors in both categories. Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton are, as he says, unlikely to want to adapt to Peter Jackson’s vision; Ang Lee and Paul Greengrass hardly seem like a good fit. But Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Alfonso Cuaron would be imaginative, daring choices. (Hit Fix [8])
Peter Jackson, meanwhile, told the Dominion Post [9]in New Zealand that if the only way to ensure that the movie is made is for him to direct it, “obviously that’s one angle which I’ll explore.” And obviously that’s one angle that a great many people want – though those people might not include Steven Spielberg, with whom he’s making “Tintin” and, next year, its sequel. (Dominion Post [9])
The Irish bookmaking agency Paddy Power, meanwhile, have posted odds [10] on who'll direct "The Hobbit," and they've got Jackson as the favorite at 5/4 odds, followed by Brett Ratner (!) at 4/1 and a change of heart from Del Toro at 5/1. JJ Abrams and Christopher Nolan, neither of them on the HitFix list, round out the top five. The rest of the list, while it doesn't include sensible choices like Neill Blomkamp and Sam Raimi, does contain the names Ron Howard, James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Michael Moore -- not because they're at all likely to end up with the "Hobbit" gig, but probably because those are names Paddy Power's clientele might actually have heard of. (Paddy Power [10])
In honor of Clint Eastwood’s 80th birthday on Monday, Pavan Amara and Charlotte Sundberg list “80 things you might not know” [11]about the birthday boy. He’s only died in three of his films, and only been shot dead in one, which wasn’t a Western (“Gran Torino”); he’s directed 32 films and won 109 film awards; and he “claims never to have sworn in front of a woman.” That last one may be true, but after an encounter in a men’s room at the Palm Springs Film Festival last January, I can testify that the guy swears quite entertainingly in front of men. (The Independent) [11]
“The Blair Witch Project” helped put the small town of Burkittsville, Maryland on the map. The 180 residents of Burkittsville do not consider this a good thing. They’re tired of weird tourists asking about a witch that never really existed and was part of the filmmakers’ imagination, not a local myth. So on Monday, says the L.A. Times [12], they voted on whether to sell the “Welcome to the Historic Village of Burkitsville” signs given to the town by Artisan Entertainment after the micro-budgeted film grossed an astonishing $249 million. Apparently they could make about $3,000 by selling the signs on eBay, which would help fix some broken sidewalks. A local website, the Maryland Community Newspapers’ Gazette.net, [13] says the signs actually read “Welcome to the Historic village of Burkitsville, 1824” – and that if the vote is in favor of selling them, it’ll be a combination of local and Internet auctions. The mayor says the voters are split “half and half really.” (Los Angeles Times [12]) (Gazette.net [13])
Finally, an appropriate quote from David Poland [14] to begin his analysis of the less-than-expected boxoffice figures for “Sex and the City 2”: “Once again, Hollywood helps prove that women are smarter than Hollywood sometimes thinks.” (The Hot Blog [14])