The Screengrab : kung fu

Morning Deal Report: Ashley Judd Meets the Tooth Fairy

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I vaguely remember reporting a while back that Dwayne “The Rock” John had signed to star as The Tooth Fairy, but I wasn’t sure if that happened here in the real world or in a dream. (Yes, I sometimes dream of blogging for the Screengrab. In my underwear. Which really doesn’t distinguish it from reality in any way.) Variety confirms this is really happening with this morning’s news that Ashley Judd has joined the project. “Johnson plays a minor league hockey player nicknamed the Tooth Fairy. Judd plays his girlfriend, a single mother of two kids.” The screenwriters include Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, so you can expect a big-screen sitcom here.

Regular Steven Spielberg collaborator Jeff Nathanson will adapt The Maze of Bones, the first novel in the 39 Clues series. “39 Clues is built around the extended Cahill family, the most powerful clan in the world,” says The Hollywood Reporter. “The series is designed as an interactive adventure for kids ages 8-12 that will involve books published simultaneously in several countries, online games and hundreds of collectible cards as readers compete to solve the mystery of the Cahills' power by searching around the world and through history.”

And in giant robot news, Voltron: Defender of the Universe is headed for the big screen. It will be directed by Max Makowski, someone I had never heard of before this morning but who I have now decided I hate. Per Variety, Makowski “most recently penned the big screen adaptation of TV series Hawaii Five-O for Warner Bros. He also is attached to direct Warners' feature based on series Kung Fu and an American redo of Japanese pic Shinobi at U.” See? You hate him too, don’t you?

Related:
The Rock IS "The Tooth Fairy" and Other Worst Case Scenarios
Spielberg Gets a Clue

Jessica Yu's Protagonist

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Jessica Yu's previous documentary feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, did a scarily inventive job of fleshing out the fantasy life of the reclusive "outsider artist" Henry Darger and detailing the lonely existence from which Darger had only his imagination as escape. For her next trick, Yu was offered the job of making a film about one of the great shapers of classical tragedy, Euripides. Yu took them up on it, sort of: her new film Protagonist intercuts between four men as each describes part of the major dramatic arc of his life, according to Euripides' chain-reaction formula of "Provocation" followed by "Opportunity", leading to "Doubt", etc. Yu sifted through hundreds of potential candidates before settling on her four stars. As it happens, the final four included her husband, the writer Mark Salzman, who narrates a hilarious account of his adolescent attempt to transform himself into Caine from Kung Fu. [Also memorably retold in his memoir Lost in Place. — ed.]

The others are Hans-Joachim Klein, a former German terrorist who participated in the 1975 attack on meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna (and who can also be seen in another current documentary, Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate); Mark Pierpont, who spent years proselytizing for Christianity as a "cure" for homosexuality, using himself as Exhibit A, before he snapped out of it; and Joe Loya, whose rough childhood shaped him into a nihilistic serial bank robber. About the worst thing you can say about the finished film is that, with four good stories split up over the course of its running time, it can leave you a little hungry for more, and in this interview with Aaron Hillis, Yu confirms that she had to cut out a lot of good stuff. (Here's hoping the DVD will make room for some choice deleted scenes.)

One surprise is that, having concentrated on getting the subjects who seemed best suited to her game plan, she found herself making a movie about what seems to be a specifically male form of craziness. She was looking for people who thought they "had to go on this quest where they had lost track of the original idea — we called it the 'Fever' stage — and then that fever needed to be broken by one moment, this dark epiphany, where they realized, 'What am I doing?'. . . It's something you see in drama all the time, in narratives, but it hardly ever happens in real life, yet it seems to have happened to them. The five or six women we found, when things went awry, tended to notice things were falling apart. Then it would go to an end and they would stop what they were doing. But the men seemed to be going full speed and then crash into a wall. That, for many reasons, was what we were looking for: the crash, not things crumbling."

— Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent