After a good number of years chugging along as a “that guy” actor and doing small parts in films and a handful of episodes of a TV show here and there, things finally seem to be working out for Adam Scott. Over the past five years or so he’s really been able to develop a persona, an on-screen character that casting people know how to use, and it’s led to him being knee deep in work. Not only is he a regular on the outstanding NBC series Parks and Recreation, but he’s also starring opposite names like Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, and Maya Rudolph in Friends With Kids, he’s got a movie with Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Kaplan, and Isla Fisher called Bachelorette that just debuted at Sundance, and in the next year he’s going to be in Dan Fogelman’s movie My Mother’s Curse, he’s co-starring in a romance called See Girl Run, and he’s going to be in a movie called A.D.O.C. with titans of the screen Jane Lynch and Richard Jenkins. The guy looks to be on top of the world. But, the new role that he’s negotiating for may be the biggest thing he’s been involved with yet.

If you ask me, Brian De Palma has been really underperforming over the last decade or so. I think I remember seeing Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia from him, and that’s about it. When was the last time I was truly excited to see a De Palma film? You’d have to go all the way back to when he worked with Nic Cage on Snake Eyes. Thankfully, the director has a new project in the works, and while it’s not quite as exciting as a re-pairing with Nic Cage, it does sound appropriately ridiculous. This time he’s working on a remake of a Burt Reynolds movie, with Jason Statham in the Burt Reynolds role. Probably not a lot of people remember 1986’s Heat, because by all accounts it was pretty bad. It’s the type of movie that goes through multiple directors over the course of its production, and then eventually forces the guy who has to take credit for directing to not even use his real name.

Now that John le Carré’s spy novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” has been adapted into a highly acclaimed film of the same name that made a bunch of money on a worldwide level, we can probably expect to see a flood of his other works suddenly making their way to the big screen. And at the head of that pack is director Anton Corbijn, who plans to make an adaptation of Le Carré’s “A Most Wanted Man” the followup to his 2010 film The American. The screenplay has been adapted by Edge of Darkness writer Drew Bovell, and tells the story of a mysterious Russian immigrant in Germany. Or, as the book’s Amazon description puts it: “A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse round his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa. Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client’s survival becomes more important to her than her own career. In pursuit of Issa’s mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the sixty-year-old scion of Brue Freres, a failing British bank based in Hamburg. A triangle of impossible loves is born. Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the so-called War on Terror, the spies of three nations converge upon the innocents.” The big news about this film is that the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The last time we heard about director Richard Ayoade’s follow-up to his quirky and likable teen drama Submarine, we were hit with the news that Jesse Eisenberg had been cast in the lead. The Double is based on a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novella called “The Double: A Petersburg Poem,” which is a trippy tale about an average Joe who’s being followed around by his exact double, an evil doppelganger intent on ruining his life. Eisenberg, of course, is playing the lead and the lead’s evil twin, which is exciting in itself; but now that THR is reporting that up-and-coming young actress Mia Wasikowska is also joining the cast, my excitement surrounding this one has, well, doubled. Seeing as this is less a direct adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella and more a work written by Ayoade and Avi Korine that’s inspired by the original story, it’s hard to say what role Wasikowska will actually be playing in the film. But seeing as she’s a major actress, I guess we can infer that it’s going to be a large one? What THR does seem to know for sure is that Ayoade promises that his film is “funny, frightening and dream-like” and it will “reflect on loneliness and our need to love and be loved.” Sounds like The Double is going to share some themes with Submarine. Is this the first glimpse we’re going to get at Ayoade the auteur? Couple this onscreen duo with the satiric wit that Ayoade displayed in his first film, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Pretty much from the first moment that the Hunger Games movie became official, Lionsgate has been confident that it’s going to be a huge hit. The entire production of the film has been the subject of a media blitz too large to recap here. So it comes as no surprise that even before the first film has been released, work has begun on getting its sequel together. For those not in the know, Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” was the first part of a trilogy of novels whose subsequent books are titled “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay.” So what’s the news on development for Catching Fire? The Wrap is reporting that not only has Lionsgate secured Hunger Games director Gary Ross to come back and do the sequel, but they’ve also hired screenwriter Simon Beaufoy to come on and adapt the book into a screenplay. Beaufoy has an impressive resume that includes films like Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, so I don’t really think his hiring can be seen as a disappointment, even though it might point to the notion that Collins and Ross might not be as hands-on with the writing process on this one as they were the first.

Anybody who has either read Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Series or seen the original film adaptations directed by Niels Arden Oplev and Daniel Alfredson knows that David Fincher’s upcoming film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is going to have two potential sequels after its release. The question is, will he pass the torch to another director to make the English language versions of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and The Girl Who Played With Fire like Oplev did, or will he take them on himself? Ace Showbiz reports that Fincher spoke on this very issue during a recent press release, and though he doesn’t sound all that thrilled with having to make Dragon Tattoo sequels, he’s probably going to do it anyway. He plans on making them the same way you pull off a bandage though, in one quick motion so that he can be done with it.

Leonardo DiCaprio and his production outfit Appian Way have been sitting on the rights to the novel The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America for quite a while, with intents to eventually get it made with DiCaprio himself starring as the main character Dr. H.H. Holmes. Holmes was a serial killer from the late 1800s, a twisted freak who built a murderous funhouse of a hotel that contained a gas chamber, a crematorium, and a dissection table… amongst other things, which led to him capturing and murdering anywhere between thirty to a couple hundred people during the Chicago World’s Fair. There’s movement on the project now, as DiCaprio and his people have sold the rights to Warner Bros. and are going to team up with the studio to produce. The first step to actually making a movie is to get a script, so to that end Warners has hired Graham Moore to do an adaptation. You might recognize Moore’s name, because he recently made some waves when his script The Imitation Game was named at the top of the 2011 Black List. And in addition to being a hot screenwriter, he’s also a native Chicagoan, which makes him kind of perfect for this project.

A months old interview that The Calgary Herald did with author Russell Banks is getting some new attention today, because The Playlist found a nugget of exciting movie news in it that has generally flown under everyone’s radar. Apparently Banks’ novel “Rule of the Bone” is ready to be adapted into a film, and will be directed by a name who’s recently become hot in Hollywood, Debra Granik. If you can remember back all the way to 2010, Granik directed Winter’s Bone, a Sundance film that got nominated for a lot of awards, put on a lot of year-end lists, and immediately launched the career of new it-girl actress Jennifer Lawrence. It was also my favorite film of last year, so this news of Granik’s next work has me feeling pretty jazzed. As a strange bit of trivia, this will be Granik’s third movie in a row that has the word “bone” in the title. She proceeded last year’s Winter’s Bone, a story about Ozark Mountain meth-heads, with 2004’s Down to the Bone, which starred Vera Farmiga as a drug-addicted housewife. So what’s this novel that Banks wrote about? Drugs. I think I sense a pattern forming.  The book’s Amazon description introduces it like this:

Saoirse Ronan has been through a big couple of years, despite being such a young actress, the highlights of which have probably been her breakout performance in the period (time, not menstrual) thriller Atonement, and her starring role in Joe Wright’s slick assassin movie Hanna. Despite such lofty accomplishments, it’s starting to look like 2012 is going to be her biggest year yet. She’s currently filming a Neil Jordan movie called Byzantium, she co-stars in recent festival assassin flick called Violet & Daisy, and she’s also set to star in an adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s non-Twilight young adult novel The Host. Sounds like the girl has a busy schedule, but somehow she’s managed to squeeze another project in. Variety is reporting that the budding young starlet has now signed to head the next film by Kevin Macdonald (the guy who made The Last King of Scotland, not the Kids in the Hall guy, that’s Kevin McDonald), How I Live Now. This one is also an adaptation of a novel about young people, but decidedly less creature filled and much more war torn than Meyer’s book. “How I Live Now” was written by Meg Rosoff, and Amazon describes its plot as such:

For those not in the know, “Ender’s Game” is a 1985 science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card that has, over the last few decades, grown pretty mightily in acclaim. Despite not being all that old, science fiction fans often rank it right up there with the classics of the genre. So it’s kind of weird that it’s taken so long to get a film version off the ground. Nevertheless, with X-Men Origins: Wolverine director Gavin Hood set to helm and Hugo’s Asa Butterfield set to star, it’s finally here. And now that the tough picks are out of the way, it’s time to start filling out the rest of the cast. The bulk of this novel concerns its gifted young protagonist Ender and his experiences attending a government school for elite soldiers. You see, we’re in an intergalactic war with a relentless species of aliens that we call Buggers, and it’s getting down to the wire when it comes to the existence of the human race. The fate of our species is resting pretty firmly on the shoulders of young Ender (Butterfield), but how is he supposed to grow up as the ultimate military commander when he can barely even make it through basic things like anti-gravity training, learning to shoot, and dealing with school bullies? One way is by becoming friends with Petra Arkanian, a tough young girl who takes Ender under her wing and drags him through those first through semesters of warrior school kicking and screaming. [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Most zombie stories have their own origins for the walking dead, and their own special names for the rotting, shuffling fiends. In Cherie Priest’s novel “Boneshaker” they’re called “Rotters” and they’re created when people are exposed to a toxic gas. That’s one way in which Priest puts a new spin on the old zombie tropes, the other is that she’s set the zombie apocalypse in a steampunk world, creating a mish-mash of genres that should get nerds dressed in black clothes and nerds dressed in brown clothes drooling alike. A more descriptive introduction to the book, from its Amazon page, reads like this: “In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead. Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.” According to a press release [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone company has, along with help from Universal, optioned the next big Hanks-starring vehicle. This one will be an adaptation of a novel called “In the Garden of the Beasts” and will see Hanks traveling back in time to Nazi Germany to play U.S. ambassador William Dodd. Dodd, along with his socialite daughter Martha, were fully engrained in the upper crust of Berlin back in 1933, right when things were starting to get crazy there but before everybody knew just how crazy. Dodd and his family lived amongst the Nazis, with his daughter even having an affair with a Gestapo official, but eventually conflict arose when they started to become more and more aware of the violence and evil that was happening right under their noses. Couple of real detectives, those two. “In the Garden of the Beasts” was written by Erik Larson, who is also known for “The Devil and the White City,” which told the life story of Dr. H.H. Holmes, a Chicago serial killer who murdered a bunch of World’s Fair guests from out of town in a hotel that he had built to be a funhouse of torture and terror. That book has been optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio and his people, so, you know, Larson is building up quite the lucrative career of writing creepy books and then selling their film rights to huge movie stars. Good for him. It’s always nice to see a weirdo make good. I hope he [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Kenneth Branagh seems to be a fan of author Henning Mankell. First he ,adapted the author’s series of novels about policeman Kurt Wallander into a series called Wallander for the BBC, and now there’s news that he’s going to direct a feature film adapted from another Mankell book, “The Italian Shoes.” You may be wondering what The Italian Shoes is about, and I’m glad you asked, because I didn’t know either. A quick trip over to the novel’s Amazon page reveals a hunk of text that describes it like this: “Living on a tiny island entirely surrounded by ice during the long winter months, Fredrik Welin is so lost to the world that he cuts a hole in the ice every morning and lowers himself into the freezing water to remind himself that he is alive. Haunted by memories of the terrible mistake that drove him to this island and away from a successful career as a surgeon, he lives in a stasis so complete an anthill grows undisturbed in his living room. When an unexpected visitor alters his life completely, thus begins an eccentric, elegiac journey…” Perhaps that unexpected visitor is an ex-girlfriend, because according to a Variety report Branagh is very serious about getting Anthony Hopkins to play the good doctor and Judi Dench to play a former love interest of said doctor. It would make sense that a lady would be the life-changing experience. Isn’t that always the way?

One of Disney’s biggest historical successes came back in 1954 when they released a live action version of the Jules Verne story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They pumped a huge amount of money into that movie and all of its giant squid spectacle, and then saw their risky investment pay off when it became a hit. That was pretty much the beginning of Disney in the live action movie game. 1954 was a long time ago though, and there’s now probably a couple generations of people who have never seen that film, which is so important to Disney history. To fix that, the studio has been working on a remake for a while. So far the Leagues remake has been slow to get off the ground. At one point McG was set to be in charge of the whole thing, and a whole slew of different screenwriters were helping the process along, but that all fell apart. More recently David Fincher has been said to be involved in getting this one going, but it’s still not clear where exactly it fits into his schedule. The rumblings of Fincher making this movie soon seem to be getting a bit more credibility though, as Deadline Nantes is reporting that Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker has been brought on board to help Fincher shape the re-told tales of Captain Nemo. There are probably about a million jokes to be made right now about all of the vile things that were in Se7en, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Steve Carell seems to be attaching himself to a new project on a daily basis. Just off the top of my head, he’s got Dogs of Babel, Burt Wonderstone, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World coming up – so I’m starting to take all of these attachments with a grain of salt. Is he really going to be able to squeeze all of these starring roles into his schedule? But, nonetheless, another one has been announced. The latest news, coming out of Deadline Armonk, is that Carell will be starring in an adaptation of a Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel novel called “Lunatics.” The books centers on a rivalry between two suburban dads that escalates to the point that it creates butterfly effect-type global consequences. More specifically, the novel’s description on Amazon reads, “Philip Horkman is a happy man-the owner of a pet store called The Wine Shop, and on Sundays a referee for kids’ soccer. Jeffrey Peckerman is the sole sane person in a world filled with goddamned jerks and morons, and he’s having a really bad day. The two of them are about to collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, terrorists, subversives, bears, and a man dressed as Chuck E. Cheese.” The screenplay will be adapted by Barry and Zweibel themselves, but there is yet to be a director attached to the project. Maybe, if he’s not too busy, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Big man on campus Martin Scorsese is just about done working on his upcoming film Hugo, so it’s about time that he figures out what his next project is going to be. To that end, he’s reportedly been circling around a potential film called The Snowman, which is set to be an adaptation of a Jo Nesbo novel of the same name. Nesbo is a Norwegian author known primarily for mystery stories and children’s books whose Harry Hole series has sold more than 5 million copies. The Snowman is the seventh book in a series of them about detective Harry Hole (I definitely recommend turning on your safesearch before researching these novels). Hole is one of those drunken, self-destructive detective archetypes who is always close to be thrown off the force because of his behavior, but ultimately kept around because he gets things done. The Snowman is  a serial killer story that starts off with missing woman’s pink scarf found wrapped around the neck of a creepy snowman. I don’t know exactly what would make a snowman creepy, but the story is set in Oslo, and they probably have a lot more kinds of snowmen there than we do here in the Windy City. I picture it as being snowy.

“APOCALYPSE 2388. Earth is on the brink of extinction. Legendary explorer KURTZ has been sent on a desperate last bid mission to scout an unknown planet on the far side of the universe. A planet that may sustain human life. Butcommunication with Kurtz mysteriously ceases and rookie flight officer MARLOW is assigned the perilous task of completing the objective. Tracking Kurtz into the unknown he reaches it. A new earth. And a race of beings at the dawn of time. But Kurtz has his own plans for the new world and man’s last hope for survival. And to achieve it he will take man to the only place that will protect paradise. Into darkness.” That’s the synopsis for Into Darkness (via CHUD), a new film from Haunting in Connecticut director Peter Cornwell which is an adaptation of “Heart of Darkness” set in the dark beyond of space. Because the world was aching for it. The concept sounds moronic, but it’s a sci-fi version of what’s happening with Jane Austen and zombies. Whereas Francis Ford Coppola took the novel and set it in a modern context of Vietnam to reinvigorate its meaning, Cornwell and company plan on shooting the thing into a contextless void where we can’t directly relate the struggle to something real. That plan seems even more silly considering that most great science fiction is set in space as its own metaphor for what’s going on in real life – not built by placing a metaphor inside of another [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

When I first heard that a new version of The Three Musketeers was being made by Paul W.S. Anderson I initially thought that he was a bad choice for the material, that he would just end up making something ridiculous. Now that I’ve actually seen the movie, I’m certain that he was a bad choice for the material, because he did in fact make something ridiculous. You know this story by now, it’s been around for like 175 years or something, so too much plot summary probably isn’t necessary. There are three famous Musketeers, the king’s personal soldiers, Athos (Matthew MacFayden), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), and Aramis (Luke Evans). They used to be big time, but now they’re out of a job because a corrupt Cardinal (Christoph Waltz) is taking control of France and instituting his personal guard as the new power in the nation. Also there’s a young chap name D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) who has traveled to Paris to become a Musketeer, but he finds the place in disarray. Backstabbings and power plays commence. But let’s get back to how bad most everything in this movie is. The most egregious of all the offenses this new Three Musketeers commits is the punishment it doles out to its characters in the form of horrible dialogue. Never have you come across a script with more hackneyed, generic movie clichés than this. Everything that comes out of the characters’ mouths is clunky and unnatural. It feels like the movie went through absolutely zero [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The Lost Symbol is the third book in a series of them written by Dan Brown. Already the first two books in the series, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, have been made into big time film adaptations starring Tom Hanks, and the longtime plan has been for this third book to become a movie as well. But recent events have show that it’s going to be made by a different creative team than the people who were behind the first two.

Film fans already got a glimpse at the early days of The Beatles’ career with 1994’s Backbeat, a dramatization of their days working the club scene in Hamburg. Now there’s a new film in the works that is going to tell the story of their last days together as a band. Richard DiLello worked as a gofer for The Beatles’ late-career recording company, Apple Records, between 1968 and 1970, and his written account of his time there The Longest Cocktail Party is going to serve as the source material for the new film. During his time working at Apple, DiLello established personal relationships with each member of The Beatles, as well as their closest friends and family, and his book is told from his own perspective, watching this huge world crumble with outside eyes. The film version of The Longest Cocktail Party is being produced by a team consisting of Michael Winterbottom, Oasis’ Liam Gallagher, and Winterbottom’s longtime producing partner Andrew Eaton. The screenplay is being adapted by Four Lions writer Jesse Armstrong, and Winterbottom himself intends on directing. That makes perfect sense, as he already has experience directing a film called 24 Hour Party People, so The Longest Cocktail Party shouldn’t be much of a stretch. The biggest hurdles in the way of getting a film like this together are going to be affording the rights to enough of The Beatles’ catalogue to put together an appropriate soundtrack and finding the right actors to bring the iconic quartet to life. [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]