Results Of The Second film ick Poll

Seems like you guys like Edgar Wright. Me too - but he wasn't my selection from this list... And, no, neither was Mary Lambert.

Movie Minesweeper - The Bad Punting Edition

I can't punt. I've been listening to Kodachrome by Paul Simon. Again.

- Chud have come out and reported that Billy Crudup will be Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. Suits me.

- More Comic-Con details are out.

- A Hulk casting call has revealed that - surprise, surprise - there will be soldiers in the film.

- What is Indiana Jones looking for this time? Aint It Cool have a very interesting theory. I hope it's true, and I expect it is.

- Neil Gaiman linked to a piece on Travis Knight, the lead animator on Coraline. It confirms that the film is being shot digitally and in stereo vision. I love 3D.

- Aisha Tyler has joined Karl Urban and Larry Fishburne in the cast of Tony Kaye's Black Water Transit. Come on Tony: I'm rooting for you.

- David Morell's novel The Brotherhood of the Rose has been optioned by Warner Bros.

- Variety have today given Trailers form Hell some kind of official launch - months after I first linked to it. As well as (my favourites) Joe Dante and John Landis performing commentary tracks for exploitation trailers, the site now features the more-readily hip Edgar Wright and eternally unhip Mary Lambert.

- The Swing Vote cast has been rounded out to include Dennis Hopper, Kevin Costner, Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez and Madeline Carroll. The stars is out (and so is Madeline Carroll).

And I need to take a breather, so I'm publishing this and coming right back with another heavy load.

Oh - and if you're interested, I'm listening to all of Tapestry by Carole King. Best. Album. Ever.

Movie Minesweeper - The Mini Minesweeper

I've just found out the UK press screening of Transformers coincides with a Wedding I not only have to attend, I have to 'film'. Very disappointing.

Here's a small-ish Minesweeper update to take my mind off of the disappointment.

- Michael Apted has signed on to direct Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Where were those Neil Burger rumours coming from? And where did they vanish to?

- Zac Efron's debut star vehicle is Seventeen, pitched as Big in reverse and written by Bringing Down the House's Jason Filardi. Which only reminds me how much I love Big and don't like Bringing Down the House at all. Interestingly, Efron is already making weak excuses for his non-involvement in Haunted High School Musical in the mini-interview. Why can't people just be honest about their real motivations?

- The Ridley Scott/Monopoly story has been bouncing around for at least nine days. I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now. Though I do know exactly how it could work and... actually, I've just cracked it. A great idea for a Monopoly movie. Hmmmm.... I'll probably have forgotten it by morning, but at least I won't be so cynical about the movie now. Probably.

- Melvil Poupaud is to play a race commentator in Speed Racer.

- SlashFilm has saved our memories and imaginations the bother by putting John Lennon and Yoko Ono alongside Dane Cook and Jessica Alba.

- Jim Broadbent has confirmed his Indy IV role - a Professor at Yale. Teeny cameo? I hope not.

- Talking of that Jones boy, MTV have the first look at Lego Indy. Tee and indeed hee.

- The AV Club have spoken to Joe Dante. Read it.

- The estate of Dr. Seuss have refused to sanction the name Sam I Am for Christina Applegate's new show. The replacement? Samanth Be Good. Better.

- Paul Reubens has a role in Todd Solondz' new film. That strikes me as a perfect combination.

- This all comes from Variety: Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz and Valeria Golino (three and a half out of four is pretty grand) are to star in Theo Angelopoulos' Dust of Time. Meanwhile, Susan Nettlebeck has cast Gillian Anderson and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in Helen.

- Disney aren't the only US animation house forging alliances in India. Time Warner are also up to the same trick.

Small Soldiers The Second

Joe Dante's Small Soldiers is a bit wonky but I do love it dearly. Indeed, once the awkward exposition is dealt with, and we're stripped down to the set-pieces and satire, everything does kick up a gear or two and really gets moving. So very underappreciated - just like most other Joe Dante movies.

Now, it looks like a sequel is on the cards. Sadly, like the potential third Gremlins film, Dante hasn't been signed up, and it seems unlikely that he will be. The core concept is the selling point of what will likely go straight to DVD.

The new Small Soldiers script is being written by Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons. They're also developing Master Mind, the first film Ben Stiller is producing at Dreamworks Animation. That one is a kind of post-Incredibles superhero gimmick film in which the supervillain Master Mind kills his goodly nemesis Uberman in the first set-piece and then suffers from depression and a crippling lack of direction.

It could work. It will need a clever script that sidesteps cliche. This revisionist superhero stuff is getting to be a rather crowded subgenre.

Master Mind's directors are to be Cameron Hood and Kyle Jefferson, animators climbing up the Dreamworks ranks. It will, like all other Dreamworks animations from 2009 onwards, be released in 3D.

Kicked, Bitten And Scratched

Naomi Watts has signed to star in Kicked, Bitten and Scratched, a romantic comedy adaptation of Amy Sutherland's animal training memoir. Todd Louiso and Jacob Kosoff are writing the script. You'll probably recognise Louiso as an actor - making mixtapes in Jerry Maguire, being delicate in High Fidelity - but he also directed Love Liza and, again with Kosoff, wrote the upcoming Ben Stiller and Jason Schwartzman comedy, The Marc Pease Experience.

I'm looking back at Naomi Watts' CV here, and this one hardly stands out. A good part of the reason for this is, of course, how varied her CV is. I think I saw her first of all in Flirting - if I did see For Love Alone, the previous film she made, I certainly have no recollection of it. And I must have seen her in Home and Away, if only for a brief glimpse as I channel hopped, or while I was visiting soap-addicted family.

As for her brief appearance in Joe Dante's Matinee, I wish I could picture it now. I believe she was in a mock up of something like a Kurt Russell/Disney family film. I adore Matinee, but I never picked up the DVD (so far) - mainly as the R2 version is bare bones and pan-scanned to 4:3. Inexcusable.

...and the little pieces of Tank Girl that I really, honestly, deeply loved (cumulative running time: under four minutes) weren't any pieces with Watts in - through no fault of her own. They just weren't Jet Girl scenes. Thinking back on it now, though,

So, I guess, Mulholland Drive was, for me as much as the rest of the movie watching world, the moment Naomi Watts really started to matter a little bit more. After that film, she was a talking point, a star, one of the ingredients of a film that one would be likely to discuss rather than ignore.

And I guess that's when it started getting wobbly. The quality of the films that Watts has opted for since David Lynch foist her into the limelight has been genuinely unpredictable. King Kong and I Heart Huckabees were wonderful; 21 Grams, Stay and The Ring 2 were most definitely not; the first Ring and Le Divorce watchable but far from essential.

What's interesting, though, is that she's some kind of off-centre star. Somehow, Watts doesn't slot so readily into the big, generic movies like Julia Roberts or (Watts' best friend) Nicole Kidman. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it looks to me like there's something vague around the edges of Naomi Watts' public image, and I always find it impossible to predict the style, budget or genre of her next film.

Maybe it's just because she finds it hard too. A girl has to work, right?

Those Heavenly Trailers From Hell

Joe Dante has kicked off the Trailers from Hell project, providing commentary for 5 old exploitation trailers. There's no doubt about it - he's the number one man for the job. And that includes Tarantino, say, and Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas.

The five films in Dante's opening wave are: The Unearthly, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Terror, From Hell it Came... and Monster from Mars. What would be a good follow up, I wonder. A box set of the five films in full, each also with Dante commentary wouldn't be too much to ask is it?

Oh. Apparently it would.

Say Uncle: Warren's Creepy And Eerie Coming Back From The Dead

After publishing Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster World, Warren launched Creepy and Eerie, two pioneering horror comics. They've been forgotten, really, left in the shadows of Tales from the Crypt, but they're not gone. Not for good.

Now the two brands are being redeveloped by Submarine Entertainment and Grand Canal Films, with an eye to creating some theatrically released films. As a back up plan, the producers aren't ruling out TV or even something online.

I don't think the iconography of either Creepy or Eerie is particularly strong, and there's barely any nostalgiac currency in the names, so this seems like a dead-end to me. The resulting films may end up masterpieces, but I can't see how they're going to benefit from the brand association.

Maybe there could be some work for John Landis or Joe Dante, however, and that is always a good thing, even when it isn't, if you catch my Blues Brothers 2000 shaped drift.

Dante Looks Back To The Sixties With Kaleidoscope Eyes

For the longest time, Roger Corman's The Trip was without a certificate from the BBFC, effectively banning it from cinema and video in the UK. It was refused four times, the last in 1988, before it was finally permitted an 18 certificate on November 21st 2002. I'd already picked up an R1 DVD by then, but I'm glad that should I now ever want to book it into a British cinema, I won't need to appeal for special dispensation from the local council.

The rationale behind the 'banning' was that the film was "instructive" in the arena of drug use - wheras, say, Easy Rider is not or The Matrix is not or Go is not or... I could go on... for hours. To make sure his 'instructions' were at least adjacent to reality, director Roger Corman reportedly experimented with hallucinogens during the writing and production of the film. It's this acid-streaked shoot that will provide the basis for Joe Dante's upcoming The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes.

The real Corman is to cameo in the film, alongside Martin Scorsese, John Sayles and Jonathan Demme. No idea who will be playing the young Corman role, the moviemaking protagonist, as yet but it's tempting to imagine he'll be introduced to the real man in a scene not unlike Johnny Depp and Hunter Thompson's moment together in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As for Scorsese, it strikes me as essential that he is cast as the slacks wearing, cufflink adorned uptight Itallianamerican cameraman of the Woodstock era.

Dante's out at Berlin at the moment, russling up cash, interest and partners for the $7 million film. Shooting is scheduled for later in the year and hopefully we'll see this living up to it's immense promise sometime in 2008.