The Archivist
Sometime this summer the extremely busy Robin Wright (Ari Folman’s The Congress, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball, Rampart) will be moving behind the camera to make her directorial debut. In the first piece of news since The Archivist was announced late last year, Colin Firth is no longer attached but Wright has apparently managed to add her The Conspirator co-stars Kevin Kline and Tom Wilkinson along with, actresses Sally Hawkins and Anna Kendrick to what will be a robust fivesome of stars (this includes Wright in front of the camera as well).
Gist: Scripted by Ann Cherkis (writer behind the filmed in Montreal, direct-to-video The Secret), this is about an American archivist who desperately tries to win back a valuable account he lost to his ex-wife in the UK while attempting to get her back as well.
Worth Noting: Michael Stipe’s Single Cell Pictures will produce the film – which would be a first in a long time: they’ve only produced: Velvet Goldmine, Being John Malkovich, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and 2004′s Saved!
Do We Care?: I’m citing Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground as a recent, formidable example of an actress moving behind the camera and delivering what is a confident directing debut. We wish the same for Wright.
Rapture Palooza
It’s a good week to be John Francis Daley. His show Bones (which I still refuse to watch because it is not a continuation of the Snoop Dogg ‘horror’ film) was just renewed for a seventh season, and now he’s been cast with Anna Kendrick in the Lionsgate post-apocalyptic romantic comedy called Rapture-Palooza. That’s the film where Craig Robinson plays the Antichrist who wants to take Anna Kendrick’s character to be his wife.
THR calls the film “Zombieland meets The Big Lebowski,” and given the plot synopsis that we’ve known, I suppose I can see that being the case:
A year after the Rapture has removed much of humanity from Earth and the planet has been rendered as a hellish proving ground, Ben and Lindsey try to reestablishing their sandwich cart business. Beyond the occasional blood rainstorm and talking locusts that surface occasionally, the sandwich sellers have a new problem: the Anti-Christ (Robinson) decides he wants to take Lindsey as his bride.
Chris Matheson wrote the script, and the film will be directed this summer by Paul Middleditch. You may or may not recall that this is part of Lionsgate’s new ‘micro-budget’ initiative. While the budget for Rapture-Palooza isn’t exactly ‘micro,’ at around $2m, it still means that we’re not in for a lot of effects. Don’t even expect something as studio-ready as Zombieland. Hell, the titles for that movie probably cost as much as Rapture-Palooza will.
Still, what sounded like a possibly middling premise looks a lot better with this trio as the core cast.
ParaNorman
In 2009 Focus Features and LAIKA released Coraline, the great stop-motion animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s kids’ book of the same name. Now the companies are teaming again for two more stop-motion 3D films. The first is ParaNorman, which will be released on August 17, 2012. The second is an unnamed project that will be released in 2014.
The voice cast and plot for ParaNorman were sent out today via press release; check the details below.
Chris Butler (Coraline storyboard supervisor) wrote ParaNorman, and he and Sam Fell (The Tale of Despereaux, Flushed Away) are co-directing. Focus describes the movie like so:
In the comedy thriller, a small town comes under siege by zombies. Who can it call? Only misunderstood local boy Norman, who is able to speak with the dead. In addition to the zombies, he’ll have to take on ghosts, witches and, worst of all, moronic grown-ups, to save his town from a centuries-old curse. But this young ghoul whisperer may find his paranormal activities pushed to their otherworldly limits.
The voice cast has some names you’ll like: Kodi Smit-McPhee (Let Me In, The Road) in the lead, with Casey Affleck, Tempestt Bledsoe, Jeff Garlin, John Goodman, Bernard Hill (Titanic), Anna Kendrick, Leslie Mann, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Elaine Stritch (30 Rock).
Via Twilight Britney Fan, Source
