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Megan Fox has secured her first major post-'Transformers' role joining Jennifer Westfeldt's directorial debut, the ensemble comedy, "Friends With Kids."
Starring Adam Scott and Kristen Wiig as well as real-life couple Westfeldt and Jon Hamm, the story reportedly centers on "a pair of thirty-something best friends who observe the toll that having kids has taken on the couples they know and resolve to bypass that stress by having a child and then dating other people."
Scott and Westfeldt will play the lead couple with Hamm and Wiig play another, and Fox will play a girl Scott begins to date -- not exactly the most challenging, typecast-breaking role, though apparently "when [Westfeldt] met with her, she thought Megan was spot on." A third couple is currently being cast, which we guess may involve talent from an early script reading which featured the likes of Rebecca Creskoff, Rosemarie Dewitt, Noah Emmerich and Scott (who ended up being cast).
Shooting was set to begin sometime this month with a theatrical release for April apparently already lined up. Mike Nichols and Jake Kasdan are exec producing and assisting Westfeldt with her first time behind the camera. [THR]
Speaking to the French press while promoting "Legend of the Guardians," new "Superman" director Zack Snyder may have spilled the beans on what the plot may entail. If a shaky French translation is to be trusted, we're going to be blessed with yet another origin story.
According to Snyder, "As I have already explained, the film will focus on the early days of Superman, so there will be no links with other films. This is not a remake then. Similarly, although I still cannot talk about the script—I can assure you that this new Superman will not be based on a comic book in particular.” This does defeat the theories that the new film would be based on pre-existing storylines like "Birthright," "All-Star Superman" or "That Peanut Butter Jar From Krypton Shan't Open."
So what does this tell us about the upcoming film? The most significant information has to be the suggestion of "early days," meaning yet another younger Superman, so those Jon Hamm rumors can be put to rest. We can count Brandon Routh out as well, since his version of the character was meant to be the well-traveled version of the first two films in the series. Beyond that? We dread the possibility of an origin story, one of the most tiring tropes this genre has inexplicably embraced. Do we need to know where Indiana Jones found that fedora? Where Charles Foster Kane bought that sled? How Stella originally obtained her groove before losing it, then subsequently retrieving it through the love of Taye Diggs? We do hope it's just iffy translation, and that Snyder's "vision" is able to accommodate a Superman that we haven't seen yet before, and not yet another version of a story everyone knows by heart now.
Adam Scott has joined Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig and Jennifer Westfeldt in the latter's directorial debut, "Friends With Kids."
Earlier this month, the project began taking shape with Hamm joining the film and Wiig and Anne Hathaway as "hopefuls" to come aboard. While Wiig has joined, it looks like Hathaway has moved on with Westfeldt taking a role in front of the camera as well. The film project, which Westfeldt also wrote, was previewed earlier this year at a theatre festival reading with Scott being one of the participants. Other actors who took part in the reading were the stellar likes of Rebecca Creskoff, Rosemarie Dewitt, Noah Emmerich though it isn't known if any of them will follow Scott.
Plot details are hard to come by but earlier this summer Hamm, whose longtime girlfriend is Westfeldt, talked about the tough decision to have kids, the poor examples of marriage they both had from their youth and losing his parents at a young age and we would wager that these experiences have helped shape the material. "I like kids but I also like the option to close the door," Hamm said. "Becoming a parent is a whole other life, and it doesn't stop."
Production on the film is set to begin next month in New York City.
Would there be a potential comeback role more appropriate for Mel Gibson than some sort of tongue-in-cheek involvement with Matthew Weiner's critically-adored, '60's-set drama "Mad Men"?
Rumors have it that the fantasy teaming may actually be in the works. Women On The Web report that Weiner is a fan of Gibson and has recently met up with him to plot a collaboration for the show's next season, its fifth, which begins lensing next summer. Weiner is said to have "told a pal recently that he sees a lot of dramatic potential pitting Gibson against Don Draper."
Too good to be true? It looks like it. According to a source close to the show, the rumor is bunk and more importantly Weiner and Gibson "have never met." Ah well. We figured it was too soon for Gibson to be talking about acting roles. He's yet to do the talk-show-interview/crying-in-public routine that these sort of situations usually demand before all is forgiven. Surely this all spawned from wishful thinking but we guess stranger things have happened.
Gibson, of course, still has Jodie Foster's man-and-his-puppet tale "The Beaver" waiting in the wings even if its prospects seem up in the air at this stage. We're also still wondering if his planned William Monahan-scripted Viking epic with Leonardo DiCaprio is officially dead and gone just yet. It might be bias, blind optimism but something tells us audiences haven't been put off Gibson by his recent tape-gate scandal — in fact a recent CBS/Vanity Fair poll said that 76% of respondents replied that they would not be less likely to see a Mel Gibson film following his latest controversy. Whether Hollywood feels the same way is another question.
How to react when a movie is not intended to be “just” a movie? The new film “Howl” isn’t intended to be a direct narrative as much as an introductory course. You’ll get more from watching this in an intro to poetry class than at the cineplex; better to have a pen and pad than a bucket of popcorn. “Howl” is so named for the seminal poem by Beat Generation avatar Allen Ginsberg: who isn’t played by multi-hyphenate renaissance man James Franco as much as mimicked and impersonated. As significant as the source is (the poem itself is a desperate cry for help during a period veering towards the political compromise some ignore but that we’re currently embroiled in), “Howl” the movie can only, at best, serve as a companion.
The film, from documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, interweaves three methods of telling the same story. One strand of the film utilizes what we’re told are the recorded musings of Ginsberg from an interview taken during the trial, where “Howl” publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was prosecuted on charges of obscenity. As the poet, it’s difficult to divorce this Ginsberg manqué with the very public persona of Mr. Franco, whose profile has gained mileage less from a string of watchable movies than for erratic, unpredictable performance art comprised of off-center interviews, ersatz public appearances, and self-mocking stunts disguised as film performances. It’s quite the hurdle for any accomplished actor, never mind the Emmy winner Franco, who embodies Ginsberg’s dismissive concerns about the lasting influence of his artistic contemporaries. His casual, lying-around-the-couch physicality in these moments, shot with a handheld camera, makes it hard for the viewer to distinguish where genius/bloviater Ginsberg beings and the very public art student Franco (currently angling for multiple literary degrees) ends.
The second strand follows the obscenity trial, again based on actual court documents. During these proceedings, shot with a flat TV sheen, the prosecution, represented by an especially-actorly David Strathairn, faces off against the far sexier, more convincing defense, represented by the most lethal of weapons, Mr. Jon Hamm in a suit. The more things change, the more they stay the same: as cartoonish as the prosecutions’ arguments against the value of “Howl” may be, the government continues to struggle against labels of obscenity and arbitrary regulations of free speech. The case proposed by the prosecution is that “Howl” cannot be considered “art” or not, considering the profane language and unconventional attitude. Our government’s definition of obscenity has changed, but not the fact that the standards remain arbitrary and a slave to the whims of a few politicians and self-appointed guardians.
The third, and least-successful strand of the film involves the actual reading of the poem. In a black-and-white café, Franco-as-Ginsberg recites his work for yuppie beatniks who react as if, familiar with Ginsberg’s work, they are attending a Greatest Hits session. Franco reads the poem the way a fat person eats a sandwich: sloppy and ravenous, but not without panache. Accompanying him (because simply reading the actual poem isn’t enough) are a series of arcane illustrations and animations making a futile attempt to render Ginsberg’s work literal. It’s a crushingly ill-conceived idea for several reasons, but specifically that it tries to visualize what Ginsberg’s words already evoke, thus undermining the actual work by considering it a candidate for visual recontextualization. It’s a testament to how strong Ginsberg’s words were (and how shoddy the animation is) that you will likely be distracted from the onscreen images by the visuals the text conjures up in your own head. “Howl” is still discussed today on more than just the merits of the obscenity case.
For those unfamiliar with “Howl” the poem, the movie should assist in awakening this interest, and so credit must be given to the film that spotlights a socially-significant work of art. Where Friedman and Epstein go wrong is in almost obscuring the subject in hand with what amounts to a series of gimmicks. The courtroom sequences stack a deck that needs not be stacked, explicating how one cannot measure the merits of poetry with prose, a feat that all great poetry accomplishes on the page. The nuts-and-bolts interview segments with Franco-as-Ginsberg have that under-thought, thrown-together element always present when artists who don’t care to explain their work are thrust in front of a mic. They also commit the crime of spotlighting Ginsberg’s intellectual origins with bullet-point precision, unsure as to whether this is a film about a work of art or its cavalier creator. And of course, the animation does not work. “Howl” has merit as an introduction to a great work of art, but aside from doing the library legwork for uninformed viewers, its entirely perfunctory. [C]
Megan Fox has secured her first major post-'Transformers' role joining Jennifer Westfeldt's directorial debut, the ensemble comedy, "Friends With Kids."
