I never thought I would see the day, Paul Newman is gone. He died on Friday, at his home in Connecticut, from complications from cancer. Mr. Newman was not only a fabulous actor, but he started a vast philanthropic food company, Newman’s Own, that produces some of the finest (in this author’s humble opinion) food you can pick up at the grocery store. Over the history of the company, 100% of the profits have been donated to charity, the total donated just surpassed $220 million. Not exactly a paltry sum.
Newman will be most remembered for his performances in The Hustler, The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Cool Hand Luke. (PS, if you haven’t seen any of these, after you get finished punishing yourself, drive yourself over to the nearest Blockbuster and rent every single one.)
He personified cool, and showed the world that you could still be an actor and a human being. He will be missed.
For all the comic book fans and especially those of Alan Moore’s absolute classic comic/graphic-novel “Watchmen”, the highly anticipated movie version is set to launch in 2009. Directed by Zack Snyder(300), the trailer has already been getting comments across the blogosphere for having extremely cool graphics.
Not all’s good in Watchmen land though, the series creator, Alan Moore, doesn’t support the comic being adapted to the big screen…
“I would rather not know [about the movie],” said Moore. “[Zack Snyder] may very well be [a very nice guy], but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: that it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that’s not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but… I wasn’t impressed with that… I talked to Terry Gilliam in the ’80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ”Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.”’ And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.”
Zack Snyder’s comments on what he thinks of Alan Moore’s reaction to him making the movie…
“We all want to please Alan, and I think that’s a noble thing to want to do. There’s nothing wrong to get the guy who frickin’ created the thing to not hate it, I don’t think that’s an outrageous thing to want,” said Snyder. “I think the approach is to assume that the movie is better, and that’s a mistake. I would never make any assumptions.”
He also has told fans at Comic Con last year that the best he can hope for is that Alan Moore will someday watch the DVD and say, “You know, they didn’t fuck it up that bad.”
In terms of the character line up we have Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian, Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre, and — in an inspired bit of news — Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach.
So far the movie looks to be about 3 hours long, which is pretty long for a super-hero epic, but I can understand the length from just reading the comic book and the mazing amount of detail that went into it. What is interesting is that the “Tales of the Black Freighter”, which is the story-within-a-story in the Watchmen comic, is set to be released as a seperate DVD (obviously to make more money off the fans). either way I’d buy it, I just hope that, as Zack had mentioned, they don’t fuck it up too badly.
From what I’ve seen in the trailer though, at least it looks cool. For everyone reading this, get the comic, I very highly recommend it.
The Changeling is the story of Christine Collins’ missing son in 1928. The Los Angeles Police department was desparately looking for good publicity, so when they found a boy claiming to be her son they gave him to her. She then set off to try to find out what happened to her real son. Check out the trailer below.
Hopefully this role will made up for some of Jolie’s well…crappy roles, namely Wanted. It opens to a limited engagement October 24th.
