1. The Social Network (Sony/Columbia, 2,771 Theaters, 121 Minutes, Rated PG-13): If you asked me several years ago if there would be a movie about Facebook, let alone one written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, I’d say you had to be crazy. But here we are.

I don’t know how to take this film. I read some where that it will be a Rashomon-like approach to the subject. This is hard to portray in a trailer, but the way all the ads for this film has been cut, it makes the film out to be about a swaggering as–er…yahoo who gains fame and fortune then immediately gets sued. Which might not be far from the truth, whatever that is, but not a really balanced report.

Jesse Eisenberg seems to be playing Mark Zuckerberg as a cross between the Big Lebowski, Ted Grant and Charles Foster Kane. Which I’ll admit is a tough combo to pull off but doesn’t really add up to an intriguing character to me.

2. Case 39 (Paramount Vantage, 2,211 Theaters, 109 Minutes, Rated R): It’s strange to see Renee Zellweger in a role like this. It seems almost inevitable that every actress of a certain age will turn to horror sooner or later, but Zellweger’s squeaky innocence doesn’t seem to meld well with the angst and pathos you need as a scream siren.

At least this film has a unique twist. Zellweger plays a social services agent who is called into investigate a case of child abuse. When she gets there, she finds the situation to be different than expected. The child might actually be possessed, or a demon itself.

Which, if that is the case, it is a unique spin on the whole “possessed child” genre that is so common. And kudos for the filmmakers from not shying away from the R rating. It is my opinion that all horror films should be an R if they are to be taken seriously.

3. Let Me In (Overture Films, 2,020 Theaters, 115 Minutes, Rated R): Two R rated horror films opening in the same week? I know Halloween is at the end of the month, but odds are both of these films will be out of theaters by the time the holiday rolls around.

And since I’m on a rant, can we have at least a ten year moratorium before foreign films are remade into English-language versions? This films is a remake of the 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In. Maybe it’s a Swedish thing, because they started making the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo while the Swedish version was just reaching our shores.

This version appears to be exactly the same as the original, too. A young, bullied boy finds an unlikely protector in a girl next door. Turns out his protector is a vampire, and the protection comes with a price the boy might not want to pay.

Christopher Plummer has joined the cast of David Fincher’s adaptation of Stig Larsson’s novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Plummer will be playing Henrik Vanger, the man who hires disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to investigate the disappearance of his beloved great-niece who vanished four decades earlier. Oddly, Max Von Sydow had been previously linked to the role and there seems to be no word as to why he no longer is.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo starts shooting later this year for a December 21, 2011 release.

Via The Hollywood Reporter.

Arthur Penn, director of the ground breaking Bonnie And Clyde, died in his Manhattan home on Tuesday, September 28, 2010. He was 88.

Drawing on the influence of the French New Wave, whose films he discovered as a teenager, Penn took a screenplay about a pair of minor, Depression-era criminals and turned it into a darkly comic story that shocked 1967 audiences with its moments of sexuality and sudden bursts of violence. Older critics were turned off by the film, but younger audiences connected with the film’s rebellious sensibilities. Additionally, Bonnie And Clyde would be marked by film historians as the film that heralded the “Film School Generation,” paving the way for directors like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Terrence Malick  and Francis Ford Coppola.

Penn got his start directing during the 1950s in the heyday of live broadcasting. His direction of the Playhouse 90 anthology series telling of the story of Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, earned him an Emmy nomination in 1957. He would restage the story for Broadway two years later and won a Tony Award. In 1962, he adapted the story again, this time for the silver screen and earned an Academy Award nomination for his efforts.

Penn’s first feature film was the 1958 Paul Newman-starring western The Left-Handed Gun, a low-budget film for which Penn drew on much of his television experience. After being fired from The Train (1964) after a few days filming, Penn’s next film was 1965′s Mickey One. Although it fared poorly at the box-office, it did pair Penn with actor Warren Beatty. When Beatty signed on to star in and produce Bonnie And Clyde, he was insistent that Penn be brought onto the project to direct.

Although he continued to make films, Penn was never able to fully duplicate the success he had with Bonnie And Clyde with the follow-ups Alice’s Restaurant,  Little Big Man and Night Moves, but by the mid 1970s, he found that the shift towards blockbuster filmmaking was rendering his style of more intimate and artistic storytelling out of vogue. In between stage work, he did find time to direct a small handful of films including The Missouri Breaks, Target and Penn And Teller Get Killed, his final narrative film.

Actor Tony Curtis has died of cardiac arrest early Wednesday morning in his Las Vegas home. He was 85.

Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, New York, was a rare mix of mantinee idol good looks and acting talent. His acting career began shortly after his service in the Navy during World War II. He enrolled in acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop in 1947 and soon found roles on the Broadway stage.

While in New York, he was discovered by agent Joyce Selznick, niece of Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. Joyce arranged a meeting between her uncle and Curtis, leading to the start of his Hollywood career.

His first film was a bit part in 1949′s Criss Cross, which led to a bevy of small roles–usually as the heavy–in a number of films until his breakout roles in Sierra and Winchester ’73.

By the late 1950s-early 1960s, Curtis had become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, starring in such critical and commercial successes as Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), Operation Petticoat (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Sex and the Single Girl (1964), among others.

Curtis was also known for he controversial private life, including battles with depression and his marriage to Psycho actress Janet Leigh, a 12-year marriage which resulted in in two daughters, one of which is noted film actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

Curtis was nominated for only one Academy Award in his career, for Best Actor for his role in The Defiant Ones. He lost out to David Niven for his role in Separate Tables.

Sally Menke, the film editor best known for her collaborations with director Quentin Tarantino, was found dead yesterday in Bronson Canyon, outside of Los Angeles, CA. Menke had disappeared while hiking Monday and the police had conducted a search of the Griffith Park area where her body was found. It is unknown if t he heat wave that the area was undergoing at the time contributed to her death. She was 56.

Menke collaborated on all of Tarantino’s feature films, from his debut Reservoir Dogs to last year’s Inglorious Basterds, and earned Academy Award nominations for her work on Pulp Fiction and Basterds. Perhaps more than anyone besides Tarantino himself, she was responsible for the look and feel of the director’s output. There is no way that her contribution to Pulp Fiction, with it’s non-linear narrative, can be understated. Menke always looked forward to her collaborations with Tarantino and would always check to see if he was about to begin production on a new film before taking on jobs with other directors. For his part, Tarantino has stated that he writes his films byhimself, “But when I edit, I’m writing with Sally.”

Outside of her work with Tarantino, Menke also edited such films as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Heaven & Earth and Mulholland Falls.

Below are two clips focusing on Menke and her collaboration with Tarantino. The first is a featurette from the Death Proof DVD that profiles Menke and what she does. The second is something more playful, a collection of “Hi Sallys,” greetings from actors and crew on the set for the editor to find while she was working on piecing the film together.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard any news on Walt Disney’s attempt to bring the classic western hero the Lone Ranger to the big screen. We’ve long known that Johnny Depp has long been attached to the project as the Ranger’s sidekick Tonto and that producer Jerry Bruckheimer had brought in his Pirates Of The Caribbean scripting team of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to write the screenplay. Now it looks like the group may be joined by another Pirates alum as Deadline is reporting that director Gore Verbinski is in talks to helm The Lone Ranger.

This will not be the first time that Depp and Verbinski will have worked together since the third Pirates movie hit screens in 2007. Depp recently supplied the voice of the title character for Verbinski’s debut outing as an animation director, Rango, due out later this year.

Bruckheimer has been having a bit of trouble getting The Lone Ranger going at Disney. Director Mike Newel was on the film for a while, but failed to get it in front of cameras. The biggest impediment to getting Lone Ranger into production is probably Depp himself, who has numerous projects in development that could get greenlit and push any potential start date for Lone Ranger back even further.

While I thought that the first Pirates movie from this group was great fun, I found the second and third to have more than a bit of the stick of cash-grab on them. Hopefully, they’ll be able to capture the same lightening in a bottle that they did before.

Gloria Stuart, the actress who appeared in numerous films in the 1930s and 1940s before having a career revival five decades later in director James Cameron’s Titanic, has passed away on September 26, 2010 at her home in West Los Angeles. She was 100.

Stuart won the role of the older, present-day version of Kate Winslet’s character Rose, in Titanic as director Cameron was looking for an actress who had been working back in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system.

Enticed into a contract at Universal Studios in 1939 by the promise of “big plans,” Stuart found her career mired in rather bland b-movie programers. The few times she got to shine were in her three collaborations with director James Whale – The Old Dark House (1932), The Kiss Before The Mirror and The Invisible Man (both 1933). A move over to 20th Century Fox yielded only little better parts, outside of the 1938 Shirley Temple vehicle Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farms. Discouraged, she retired from acting by the 1940s and the instance of her husband, comedy writer Arthur Sheekman.

Stuart came back to acting in the mid-1970s, taking the occasional small television or film role. Her role in Titanic was the biggest of her career resurgence and earned her, at age 87, her only Academy Award nomination. Although she did not win the Oscar, she did receive the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role.

She always kept a sense of humor about her late career rebirth. In her 1999 memoir, I Just Kept Hoping Stuart wrote, “When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn’t realize it would take so long.”

We continue our celebration of the 35th anniversary of the American release of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a look at the script for the aborted sequel Revenge Of The Old Queen.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Part 2:
Revenge Of The Old Queen
A First Draft Screen Play Of A Musical For Film
With Book And Lyrics By Richard O’Brien
And Music By Richard Hartley
Undated Draft

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a film phenomenon like no other. A 1975 adaptation of the British rock musical that paid homage to 1950s science-fiction b-movie programmers and the then-current decade’s sex, drugs and rock and roll credo, it had failed in a traditional release only to find a new and continuous life on the midnight movie circuit. As THE decade was coming to a close and the popularity of Rocky Horror showed no signs of abating, studio executives at Twentieth Century Fox would turn to the musical’s creators Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley for a direct to the big screen follow up. The result was 1981′s Shock Treatment, a film that wasn’t really embraced by Rocky Horror fans at the time.

It would be almost ten years before O’Brien and Hartley would take a second stab at a Rocky Horror Picture Show follow up. Where Shock Treatment followed the further travails of the now married Brad and Janet Majors without really referencing Rocky Horror in a story that was billed “Not a sequel but an equal,” this new attempt made it clear that it was a more direct sequel right from the script’s title page – The Rocky Horror Picture Show Part Two – The Revenge Of The Old Queen.

It has been a decade and a half since the events of that fateful evening chronicled in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the eternal night of the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, General Riff Raff is found mourning over the coffin of his dead sister Magenta, and his mental disposition has not improved overtime. No one knows it was he who killed her in a fit of jealous rage over an alleged liaison she had with Lord de Lordy, second in line for the Old Queen’s Royal Deck chair after her son Frank N Furter. Magenta’s current deceased status, though, has apparently not put much of a damper on their “relationship.” Riff is summoned before the Great Furter herself, the Old Queen, who commands that he return to Earth and bring back her son Frank so he can assume his rightful place as her heir before she dies. It is apparent that Magenta’s murder isn’t the only one that Riff is hiding.

Meanwhile on Earth, Steve Majors, an agent for the Bureau of Investigation Into UFOs, has made a startling discovery. While reading an old file labeled “The Denton Affair,” he has uncovered the fact that the popular movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was based on actual events that happened to his older brother and his fiancee fifteen years ago. He confronts his boss Ray Ammbo with this information, plus the fact that there are still Transylvanians on Earth and that they have at least one safe house, hidden away in Fresno. Ray, whose son Sonny is a teen pop star with the song “The Moon Drenched Shores of Transylvania,” knows all this already, as he is obviously a collaborator with the Transylvanians. But he knows that the safe house has been abandoned for some time, so he lets Steve go and investigate in order to get him out of his hair.

Driving cross-country to Fresno, Steve is contacted by fellow agent Judy Brankmire, with whom he went to Denton High School. Judy has already arrived at the safe house and is waiting for Steve in order to begin their investigation. While waiting, she decides to freshen up with a shower, not knowing that the stall is a disguised transducer, a Transylvanian space and time teleporter. As she is soaping up, Judy is accidentally transported to Transylvania as Riff Raff teleports to Earth. Of course, the running shower soaks Riff. Judy arrives on Transylvania covered only in a bit of bubbles and is met by Lord de Lordy. The two are instantly smitten with each other.

At the Fresno safe house, Riff Raff has been alerted to Steve’s impending arrival by a phone call from the agent. Tricking Steve into believing that he is Judy’s brother George, Riff Raff bundles the agent into the transducer to Alaska. Riff then heads for Denton, only to discover that a housing development, Happy Homes, has been built on the land where the castle once stood. Returning to the local Holiday Inn, where a transducer has been hidden, he encounters Janet Majors, nee Weis, who is so far derelict that neither of them recognizes the other. Riff then teleports to the past.

Stranded at an Alaskan Holiday Inn, Steve takes a stab at figuring out the transducer’s controls, teleporting into Ray Ammbo’s office, joining Ray, Mary Lou, Sonny and the recently arrived Lord de Lordy and Judy, who are on the run from the Old Queen who has accused them of sedition. The group crams themselves into the transducer and teleports to the Denton Holiday Inn shower that Riff just used and then follow him back in time.

Everyone arrives outside the House but before Riff or anyone else can get inside to stop the younger Riff from murdering Frank, a firefight erupts between all the parties. Steve is knocked unconscious in the melee and Riff kills Lord de Lordy and Judy. The House takes off as it did at the end of the first film and the Old Queen’s soldiers are killed. Ray is also killed, but not before revealing that he is actually Sonny’s adoptive father – his real parents are Janet and Frank N Furter, making him next in line for the Transylvanian throne.

The Old Queen dies and Riff Raff pledges his allegiance to the new ruler, Sonny. Riff, Sonny, Janet and Mary Lou head back to the present and Transylvania for Sonny’s coronation. Forgotten, Steve regains consciousness. Heading back towards his childhood home, Steve tries to convince his mother that he is her son from the future. As she calls the cops, Steve shouts a warning that the Transylvanians are infiltrating the country and to “Keep watching the showers!”

The script’s title page states that the document is a “first draft screenplay of a musical for film.” What it should say is that it is a very rough first draft, one that only sketches out its characters and plot in the broadest of strokes. You can see where O’Brien is trying to feel his way through the story, having a rough idea of its form but not having it yet molded in to its final shape. The plot is the barest of bones with no strong narrative thrust outside of Riff Raff trying to cover up his being the murderer of Frank N Furter. Most of the song lyrics seem to be in place with the exception of the untitled one that Sonny sings in his introduction. (O’Brien notes that it goes “something or other like this” right in the script.)

Lots of ideas are hinted at but never get fully developed. For example, Steve Majors discovers that the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show chronicled events that actually happened to his brother and his fiance at the hands of a sexually libertine extra-terrestrial mad scientist. But the idea never has a life of its own beyond the scene in which it is introduced except for allowing Sonny to interject “asshole” and “slut” when Steve mentions Brad and Janet in his presence later on. But it raises questions whose answers could have lead to some interesting plot lines. How did the movie get made and by whom? Was it secretly put together by Transylvanians and if so, for what purpose? W. D. Richter’s The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eight Dimension used a similar “fictional story as part of a film’s reality” device, but with Orson Welles’ famous “War Of The Worlds” Halloween broadcast being the actual arrival of aliens. However, Buckaroo Banzai scripter Earl Mac Rauch twisted the concept back on itself and had the aliens hypnotizing Welles into saying that his broadcast was a prank to cover up their arrival. But the appearance of a movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show within the narrative of its sequel hints at many possibilities left unexplored.

Similarly, there are some characters who feel underdeveloped as well. Lord de Lordy seems to exist only to provide a reason for Riff Raff’s pre-film murder of his sister and to be the device to get the Old Queen to come to Earth. Once those two functions are done, author O’Brien, in the guise of his alter ego, promptly kills him off, along with Judy. Ray Ambo’s secretary Mary Lou has even less of a reason for being in the script outside of looking pretty in a short skirt.

Reading Revenge Of The Old Queen, it is hard not to try and interpret many of the choices O’Brien makes as reactions to criticisms of the previous Rocky Horror sequel, Shock Treatment. Where Shock Treatment seemed to distance itself from Rocky Horror in an effort to tell a new story about Brad and Janet, Revenge Of The Old Queen evokes Rocky Horror at every opportunity. By concentrating on Riff and the Transylvanians, it seems as if O’Brien was hoping to evoke the spirit of the early parts of Rocky Horror, specifically Brad and Janet’s arrival at Frank N Furter’s home and the “Time Warp” musical number. There’s some drugs and sex, and even the Transylvanians’ Earthling allies like Ray are hedonists of the first order. The film’s finale even takes place on the grounds of the first film’s phoneless castle while the finale of that film is going on inside!

Curiously, though, O’Brien does toss in a nod or two to Shock Treatment. During Riff Raff s opening soliloquy to his dead sister’s coffin, he exhorts her to come out so “we can play doctors and nurses,” an entreat that recalls the lyric in Shock Treatment‘s title tune that “Playing doctor and nurse can be good for your health.” The present day housing development built on the land formerly occupied by Frank N Furter’s castle is called “Happy Homes.”

It’s hard to completely be able to evaluate the new songs O’Brien has penned for the movie without hearing them performed. Reading the lyrics’ texts reveals that they do the jobs that songs in a musical are supposed to do – reveal characters’ emotions and motivations and move the plot along. They are also distinctly O’Brien’s work containing the internal rhymes, word play and sense of whimsy that can be found in the songs of Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment.

In “I’m A Mother (A Real Mother),” the Old Queen sings of her son Frank “Was ever a mother blessed with such a boy/ Was ever another’s breast pressed to such joy/ My one and only son was more libidinous/ Than any honeybun including Oedipus.” Later, some diner patrons warn us to “Never Let Your Daughter Date An Alien” by singing of “Creeping horror from the eerie depths of time and space/ Heaping horror on the fairer sex of a finite race.” There’s some definite rhythm to the language that is unmistakenly O’Brien’s.

But the biggest question concerning the script – Would Rocky Horror Picture Show fans have liked the movie that it would produce? – is hard to answer. While it certainly contains elements of the first film, there’s no real strong sense of theme or message. Rocky Horror extolled us to “Don’t dream it, be it.” (Even if that philosophy didn’t work out too well in the end for Frank N Furter.) In fact, given Brad’s off-screen fate and Janet’s boozy portrayal onscreen, it feels as if O’Brien is repurposing the end of Rocky Horror Picture Show into more of a cautionary tale. I don’t know how well that would have gone over with fans.

While I am unsure what the ultimate reasons were why this project was abandoned, I am sure that second pass through the script would have firmed it up and focused the story more.

British actor Stephen Fry announced over the weekend on BBC radio that he will be playing Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft in the upcoming sequel to director Guy Ritchie’s 2009 hit Sherlock Holmes. For those unfamiliar with Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Holmes stories, Mycroft was Sherlock’s smarter brother, though he never had the ambition to fully use that intellect. He also has a vague but powerful connection to the British government.

While I think the casting of the erudite Fry is a pretty good call, I’m not sure that I see a family resemblance between him and Robert Downey Jr.

Sherlock Holmes 2 starts shooting later this year for a December 2011 release.

We continue our salute to the 35th anniversary of the American release of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and it’s impact with this vintage piece of television news reporting.

As the midnight screening audience participation phenomenon spread across the country, local television stations were quick to pick up on it. And in it relatively conservative 1970s, it was easy to point cameras at kids dressed outrageously to generate a little controversy, ratings and usually some snide condescension from reporters.

But what makes this clip shot at St. Louis’ Varsity Theater interesting is one of the interviewees. Right at the 1:25 mark is future REM frontman Michael Stipe in full Frank N Further makeup and costume. Although there is no date information on when the piece originally aired, it was probably produced in 1977 or `78 while Stipe was living across the Mississippi River in Colinsville, Illinois before heading to be an art major at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia and future music stardom.