I Am Friday's Absent-Minded Link

Some of these tidbits are a couple of days old but my head ain't screwed on right so I'm just getting round to posting them. And a word of warning - it's another half-day at work today and, with my birthday this weekend, this may be all she wrote til Monday. Have a lovely, if so.

--- Before Leslie Returns - I refuse to say "if" because I have convinced myself a sequel is happening for Leslie Vernon - director Scott Glosserman has lined up his definite next project. From AICN:

"... his follow-up flick is officially in the works at Paramount Vantage. It's called PLAYING HOUSE and he's co-writing it with Macy Raymond, who penned the short story upon which it is based.

The one-liner isn't all that inspiring... A young couple are preyed upon when they inhabit a seemingly deserted island mansion. However, I have faith in Glosserman. It'll be interesting to see him take on a horror picture without the comedy."

See how good I am? Didn't I just say a few weeks back that the "couple stalked inside a house by evil forces" was the new template for horror, post-"torture porn"? I also, no matter what Sean would have you believe, called the Giant Monster Movie Rennaisance. This is why y'all need to listen to what I say! I AM WISE.

--- Weird world - the trailer for The Dark Is Rising popped up online the day before last, so if you haven't seen it check it out here. I don't know what to think about it - it is seeming sooo very different from the books, judging from the trailer alone... we'll see.

--- Choke a Witch - Filming's actually begun on another Chuck Palahniuk book! Who'd have thunk? Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston are all up in Choke's business.

--- Speaking of Rogue (as I did in my last post, that is) DH has got an interview with its director, Greg McLean. He says he hardly got any interference from the Weinsteins while making Rogue, which is all fine and dandy, but now it's relying on this assholes to release the thing, which... ain't.

--- Shit news - Hopefully this'll turn out to be false, but FilmIck posted, via Box Office Mojo, that Michael Dougherty's Trick'r'Treat has been pushed back to next year. This thing's long done filming, right? And we've gotten appropriate amounts of coverage - stills, whatnot - for it being released as expected in October. Why would they move it then? Man today's making me bitter.

The Dark Is Rising Poster

Dunno how I missed this scanning through Electronic Cerebrectomy earlier today, but tis the poster for the first adaptation from Susan Cooper's wonderful series The Dark Is Rising:

And Aaron, let me answer your question here, with regards to not having read the book and if it will be any good: if it manages to be even half as good as the books, then it'll be a classic. And hopefully it'll be better than that Lion, Witch, Wardrobe snoozefest!
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I Am Link

--- Starbuck as semi-Cylon - there are some stills from the upcoming "Bionic Woman" television reimagineering at The Daily Mail, of which I'm only interested because it's being produced by David Eick, who's also responsible for the phenomenal Battlestar Galactica reboot and it co-stars, as a villainous robo-chick, Katee Sackhoff, aka Starbuck. In the shots at TDM there's only a glimpse of Sackhoff at the bottom, dueling with Michelle Ryan (Eastenders) as our main character, but plenty of shots of Ryan herself in various stages of robo-composition.

--- Somebody page Werner Herzog! The news that Greenpeace is building a replica of Noah's Ark on top of Mt. Ararat in Turkey seems tailor-made for a new doc from him.

--- Pal-o-mine Sean Collins directed me (again) to more info on The Dark is Rising film adaptation - this time it's an interview with the film's director at SciFi Wire in which he states they've made all sorts of changes to Susan Cooper's original book - Will Stanton's younger and now American, there are bunches of new action scenes and special effects moments added, and it'll be set in a more modern time. Er... okay? Way to just tell us right off the bat that you're doing whatever you want. But I don't much mind a director/screenwriter taking radical changes from the source material - one of my favorites, Kubrick's The Shining, did just that - so I'm not going to throw myself off a cliff or anything here.

--- I'm only linking to the news at AICN that Thomas Jane wrote in to tell them that he's off The Punisher 2 because it allows me to post a picture of Mr. Jane from the original (which I ain't even seen) in super-buff mode, and because he bitches a bunch about having to diet and work out in said letter to AICN, which I found hysterical.

--- Queue-quake - Glenn's passionate post at Stale Popcorn in defense of Francis Ford Coppola's at-the-time derided One From the Heart for the Misunderstood Movie Blog-a-thon at Culture Snob has coerced me to throw the film straight at the top of my Netflix queue; it sounds... fascinating.
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That Ol' Rising Dark

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My bud Sean beat me to this, but that's not gonna stop me from posting it as well; Harry Knowles at AICN got to visit the set of the now-filming The Dark is Rising, based on (I'm guessing, since the name fits) the second book of Susan Cooper's wonderful fantasy series in Bucharest.


The adaptation stars Ian McShane, Frances Conroy, Christopher Eccleston, and relative newcomer Alexander Ludwig as our main boy Will Stanton, and is directed by usual-documentary filmmaker David L. Cunningham and written by John Hodge (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting).

This first set-report is brief, more of an introduction really, but Harry promises much more to come. Of which I will surely dutifully continue paying attention to, because this is a fantastic series of books and I'm seriously looking forward to this.

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I Am Link

--- Here comes the giant croc! Rogue, the second flick by Wolf Creek director Greg McLean, has finally gotten its release date: April 20th, aka 4/20, aka National Pot Smoking Day. Buy me a giant bag of popcorn and some Snowcaps, I'm there already.

Anyway, I think we can maybe expect to see a trailer or a poster someday soon? Something besides those same tired four pictures I've been staring at for months? Maybe???

--- It's... sorta... Pantalaimon!!! Well it's a photograph of the packaging for a plush version (you can see Salcilia too!), anyway. But it's the closest we've yet gotten to seeing any of the Daemons from The Golden Compass. I hope it's just the fact that this is a stuffed animal that transforms that makes Pantalaimon look so... broad... I really pictured him more lithe.

Now I'm just dying to see that creepy Golden Monkey... shudder...

--- Casting is getting going on the film adaptation of Susan Cooper's second book in her The Dark is Rising series, called, funny enough, The Dark Is Rising, and I think this is damned good casting at that: Ian McShane of Deadwood infamy to play Merriman Lyon. Very good indeed. And McShane, or at least his voice, is in The Golden Compass as well. Popular guy.

I really don't understand how they expect to have The Dark Is Rising out by the end of the year, though; I think they're in some sort of bitchfight to beat The Golden Compass, but isn't the world big enough for two wonderful Fantasy series? Well, four, if you include Harry Potter and that Narnia nonsense. But these are not films you want to rush out. You need to build this world convincingly, or it's right down the crapper.

And what's the deal with the order? Are they really shooting the second book first? I am really confused, apparently. Anybody got any more info? Will they shoot the first book at all?

--- Director/Hunk Richard Kelly, of Donnie Darko, spoke up a lil' bit about what's the haps with Southland Tales on his MySpace blog:

"I have been inundated with requests about the trailer for Southland Tales... and I am sorry to say that it does not yet exist :( Sorry everyone... but I promise we are getting closer! We are still in the process of getting the budget approved to finish all of the additional visual effects in the final cut. There were many missing and incomplete visual effects in the Cannes version, so expect lots of improvements! Fingers crossed that we get the additional money... Release date has not been decided upon, as the distribution plans are still in the works."

He also says that he's working on a screenplay for a "big" director that'll be a remake of a film made in 1971, but definitely not The French Connection (thank god!). Any guesses what it could be?

--- And finally, a new and more official trailer has appeared, via Twitch, for The Signal, that horror movie that bowled 'em over at Sundance which I've spoken of before.
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The Dork Is Rising

So I went and saw The Baxter last night after work, as I previously reviewed (and as harsh as I was on Michael Showalter, it really is a decent little flick, you can do much worse), and went home, was in bed by 10pm, and could not be restrained - I had to read the final hundred or so pages of the fifth and final book of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, called Silver In The Tree.

Man, what an awesome acheivement. The way she brings everything together, the way it all leads to one huge moment... it inspires awe. The books got progressively better with each outing (though I might say I liked the first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, more than I liked the second, The Dark Is Rising); they were each richer, more lovingly detailed, more epic and impressive, than the one preceding it... I could really gush.

A really fantastic series.

Which, according to certain commentators, ahem, I am woefully behind the times in knowing. Huh, 'magin that, me being out of "the know". Naw, never!

There is that nagging lil' birdy at the back of my brain (or is it a Mogwai?) whispering that the only thing that got me interested in these books in the first place was the mention somewhere that they were going to make them into movies. So take that! How's that for cool and "with it"!

Now, having read them, I have a hard time imagining how movies could be made. The first and second books are WORLDS different in tone and share only one character, otherwise involving an entire different cast, until they are all united in the third. And that's only the most basic problem - above it all sits the fact that in order to be done right this would be a very, very expensive undertaking.

Though not, I think, as expensive as the His Dark Materials movies would be. Speaking of, I do prefer Pullman's Materials trilogy to The Dark Is Rising, but not by much, I think. Pullman's books were just... meaner, more vicious, and that, in case you hadn't noticed, really strokes my bone.

Cooper's books did leave me with one lingering question, though, that I don't think she wrapped up while she should have - why the three Drew children? Why were they drawn into this adventure? What was Merriman's real relationship with them, why did he choose them? I know there's a history there that we aren't getting, and I thought she'd address it since she raises the question a couple times in the final book, but in the end it hangs, unanswered.

And an essentially useless factoid - Susan Cooper married actor Hume Cronyn a couple years after his first wife, actress Jessica Tandy, died, and was with him until he died a few years later.
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I, Literate

Since my halcyon days of Potter-consumption have passed, I've been in a fret trying to find what to read next. I may've already posted about this, I am pretty sure I did, but right now, after my last epic post, I'm too lazy to do any searching and linking. Anyway, I started reading a book the bf's been nagging at me to read for three years or more, Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer, by Donald Gaskins and Walter Earle.

The stuff of nightmares. Long, vivid nightmares. Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins was the redneck real-life version of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman, using every one of his brain cells to think up more horrific ways of torturing people. He'd wander the aisles of hardware stores, browsing new tools and new terrible ways to use them. The book is told first-person, we are there, we feel what he's feeling, we think what he's thinking. It's a terrible place to be and I think part of why I'm reading it so quickly (I should be done with it tonight, after beginning it yesterday) is I want to be done with it, to not have this maniac in my head for too long.

But it's worth reading, and it's incredibly well-written. Gaskins himself didn't write the thing, it's compiled from interviews with Earle, though Gaskins approved every word before he was executed. There's not even a real tally of how many people he killed, he only (only?) got charged with nine murders the first round, and then a tenth when he killed another inmate in jail, but from his telling of all the details he must've murdered dozens upon dozens more.

I find it odd that I'd never heard of Gaskins until the bf pressured me to read the book. Gaskins did most of his killing in rural South Carolina, around the same area that the bf is from, in the 1960's and 70's, so of course the bf knew about him, but online information is scarce, and no one I've ever asked about it has heard his name. Not to imply that a serial killer should have name-recognition for having been so prolific, since that's an implication that makes me feel dirty, but Gaskins is a pretty remarkable character.

After this I am looking forward to something a little less nightmare-inducing, so I think I'm going to hop right into the world of the five books of The Dark Is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. Supposed to be a classic of fantasy lit, but I've kept myself from learning too much about it before trying it out.
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