Cinematical

As the years progress, our tastes change. However, there is one thing that never fails to make me smile -- whether I'm watching it or just thinking about it: Paul Rudd dancing. The man is white dancing brilliance!

Skimming MTV, I spotted a little talk with David Wain, who says that he wants Paul Rudd to be his leading man in the stage production of Wet Hot American Summer that he's hoping to put together. Strangely enough (at least to my mind), he doesn't site Rudd's dancing, but rather says: "Paul Rudd is a great singer. I just need to find the right musical collaborators."

Wain, my dear, the voice means nothing if you get that man movin'.

In honor of the man's killer moves, I thought I'd share my favorite Rudd dance scene (Overnight Delivery!), plus a few others for your weekend enjoyment after the jump.

Finding out how your favorite movies came to be is generally very rewarding and educational. You seek out The Seven Samurai, and thank the film gods that a robotic shark failed to work. At the very least, you can win trivia contests by knowing what Rosebud was, and impress your friends by telling them who was originally cast as Aragorn.

And then there's the stuff you wish you had never known. This week, you may have been one of the Indy fans who eagerly downloaded the Raiders of the Lost Ark transcript, where George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan hashed out ideas for one of the greatest film characters of all time. Cool stuff. Useful if you aim to write books or movies someday. Then I read this bit about Marion and Indy, and their ideas for their early love affair gone wrong:

GL: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

LK: And he was forty-two.

GL: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

SS: She had better be older than twenty-two.

Yesterday it was announced that Marvel was changing the release dates for a few of its upcoming heavy hitters, including Thor (pushed to June 17, 2011), Captain America (July 22, 2011) and The Avengers (May 4, 2012). Additionally, we were told that Spider-Man 4 would hit theaters on May 6, 2011 -- allowing the summer of 2011 to become a make or break time for the future of several Marvel properties. But what was the thought behind making these release date adjustments? Is it simply to give folks a little more time to get the films right, or did part of it have to do with freeing up the schedule of one Jon Favreau?

According to a Marvel spy who wrote into AICN, that's exactly what's happening. Says the spy: "Avengers is delayed a year because of financing issues but also because the plan is for Favreau to helm it. Everybody here loves the guy and he wants to do it, but it would have been impossible for him to do before the date change given his Iron Man 2 commitments. Also partly the reason why he agreed to do the Stark sequel on such an accelerated schedule was so he could get given first dibs on this. It would still be a punishing schedule for him, so hes not firmly confirmed yet, but he is certainly the presumptive director at this point."

What do you think? Is Favreau the man to direct The Avengers, or would you rather some fresh eyes at the helm?

Almost twenty years after it terrorized the boob tube, Stephen King's creepy clown is back.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that It is slated to hit the big screen, courtesy of Lin Pictures and Vertigo Entertainment. Dave Kajganich, the pen behind the 2007 Invasion, has been tapped to adapt King's new work and bring it into the new millennium -- and out of 1958 and 1985. Kajganich is also becoming the new adapting man about town, taking on projects like Escape From New York and another King scare fest, Pet Sematary.

Back to It -- As you might remember, this is the story of a group of kids who take it upon themselves to bring this creepy, shape-shifting creature called Pennywise down, back in '58. They hurt it, flee, and then decide to bind themselves together in case they ever need to fight It again. In one of the most warped rationales ever, this involves not only blood, but the lone girl of the group having sex with all of her boy pre-teen friends. Years later, the thing, who often takes the shape of the classic creepy clown, starts killing again and the friends reunite for another baddie butt-kicking.

I'm betting that the kids become teens so that the sex can become a sexy, marketable aspect of the film, but other than that, I'm curious to see how this gets updated. But how about you? Do you want more It?

Follow me if you want to live.*

*Yes, that's really obvious.

These days, we've become accustomed to watching projects get oversaturated with big-name talent. Step by step, the biggies sign on until there's literally no room left on the big screen. But Noah Baumbach is switching things up with Greenberg and creating a pretty fresh cast of big-name talent, mumblecore, newbies, and international flavor.

Variety reports that Brie Larson, Rhys Ifans, and Juno Temple are joining Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig in the upcoming dramedy. The Baumbach story focuses on a New Yorker (Stiller) who moves to LA to figure out his life while housesitting for his brother, and ends up getting involved with his brother's assistant (Gerwig). Ifans will play Stiller's best friend, who is going through a divorce, while Larson will provide herself as "college-age temptation," and Temple plays her friend.

I'm thinking we've finally got someone to give Ellen Page a run for her money. These days, young talent that doesn't take the mainstream path is hard to find, but Larson is picking a pretty interesting mix of projects thus far -- including her television time as Toni Collette's daughter on United States of Tara. Mix that with Ben Stiller getting back to dramedy, and how can you go wrong?

This week Disney opens Race to Witch Mountain 31 years after the last Witch Mountain movie, which, to give you a sense of the time, opened in 1978 and featured the top-billed Bette Davis and Christopher Lee as the bad guys! That's a long time ago, but there are lots of other belated sequels to consider. In order of waiting time:

1. Belle Toujours (2006)
Duration between sequels: 39 years
Luis Bunuel made Belle de Jour in 1967 and died in 1983. Lots and lots of years later, the 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira picked up the story thread and re-united the two lead characters. Sadly, original star Catherine Deneuve was either unwilling or unable to re-create her role as the icy Severine, and so Bulle Ogier had to stand in for her. Michel Piccoli once again plays Henri Husson, who years earlier caught Severine in an awkward position -- secretly working daytime hours at a Paris brothel. Now the two elderly characters meet for an equally awkward dinner to discuss -- or not discuss -- what actually happened. Oliveria's work is far more austere than Bunuel's, but it has some delightful and thought-provoking moments.

2. Saraband (2005)
Duration between sequels: 30 years
Bergman created his final masterpiece with this film, re-uniting the now-divorced characters from Scenes from a Marriage (1973), played once again by the great Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. But as in real life, the drama quickly moves on to the younger characters. Bergman shot the film in 2003, but it was not released here until 2005.

In fulfillment of the prophecy that Disney will eventually remake every single one of its live-action movies, here is Race to Witch Mountain. It bears a passing resemblance to 1975's Escape to Witch Mountain, but it's more reminiscent of a tiresome carnival ride whose operator abandoned it and left it to run for 90 minutes. Whatever fun there is in it quickly gives way to tedium.

Appropriately, it's set in loud, gaudy Las Vegas, where Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson) works as a cab driver. In the past he has freelanced his services for one Mr. Wolf, a shady underworld figure whose goons regularly visit Jack trying to re-enlist him. Maybe I shouldn't bother mentioning that, though, because it ultimately has nothing to do with the story. For that reason, I'm also not going to mention Jack's lifelong desire to own a particular Ford Mustang, since that detail was clearly added only after someone read a screenwriting book and paused at the chapter that talked about giving your characters hopes and dreams. It's extraneous.

But back to the actual story. Jack encounters two strange preteens, a brother and sister named Seth (Alexander Ludwig) and Sara (AnnaSophia Robb). They are extraterrestrials whose spaceship crashed in the desert when they came to Earth in search of a MacGuffin, and now they must get the item and return to the ship -- which is problematic, because the U.S. government, led by heartless Henry Burke (Ciarán Hinds), has recovered the craft and hidden it away somewhere. There's also an alien assassin pursuing the kids, though that's another thing that's ultimately not particularly relevant.

Deals. As Eugene Novikov informed us, hard-hitting dolphin doc The Cove was picked up by Roadside Attractions. Via our friends at indieWIRE, we also learned:

• "Don't run! If we must die, we will die." Street protest doc Burma VJ will be released by Oscilloscope in theaters this spring. If you don't think a monk with a megaphone can make for riveting footage, watch the trailer, embedded below.
• Biopic Pedro (about the late gay activist who memorably appeared on MTV's The Real World) will skip a theatrical release and instead debut on MTV before hitting DVD.
• First Run Features acquired Andrew Jacob's Holocaust survivor doc Four Seasons Lodge for theatrical release.
• Lucrecia Martel's critically-acclaimed thriller Headless Woman will hit theaters in August through Strand Releasing.
• Heavy metal doc Anvil! The True Story of Metal, will get a very decent-sized release next month by VH1, of all companies, opening in at least 18 cities on April 10, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Box Office. The three-director team-up Tokyo! took the top spot last weekend, raking in $23,460 at a single theater in Manhattan, per Box Office Mojo. The film, featuring segments directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho, opened to generally good notices. Eric D. Snider said: "Think Paris Je T'aime, only a lot weirder (and about Tokyo, not Paris, duh)."

Festivals. Michael Lerman posted the news that John Cooper has been named Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Cooper told indieWIRE that he wanted to "establish a clearer distinction between the event's festival director vs. its programming director." He also emphasized that Sundance is a "discovery festival, we're not launching Academy Award campaigns." That sounds good as a means of preserving Sundance's artistic integrity and stated mission, but he's not really saying Sundance will eliminate star-studded screenings, is he?

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

A small distributor called The Film Desk has one film in release on just a couple of U.S. movie screens. It has received very little notice from anywhere in the press or the blogosphere. It's an older film, from 1970. It's considered to be something of a classic, but it's not really one of the essential classics, nor is it one of those "unsung" or "forgotten" classics. It's currently available on DVD, so no big gaps have been filled in. I'm not even sure to what extent, if at all, the new print has been restored. But, due to lack of a press screening, I went to see it last Friday with an audience, and it made my week.

Yesterday we reported on a Disney meeting which featured the first image of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland -- and, remember, we told you that the audience were all happy-go-lucky and whatnot with their oohhs and ahhs? At the same meeting, it was announced that in the next issue of D23 (or Disney Twenty-Three) -- Disney's pricey quarterly magazine -- there would be a first look at Wonderland alongside an interview with Burton. 24 hours later, scans of the Wonderland feature in D23 have arrived online -- including the image above of Alice (newcomer Mia Wasikowska) presumably looking down the rabbit hole. Additionally, the scans also show concept art of the famous tea party, hosted by the Mad Hatter (see below). In the article, Burton refers to the film as "kind of a mixture of some distorted live action and animation." We'll update this post when better images arrive online, but in the meantime check out larger versions of these two in the gallery below and the rest over at TimBurtonCollective.





[via Slashfilm]