Just in case you couldn’t read the plot synopsis:

In Clash of the Titans, the ultimate struggle for power pits men against kings and kings against gods. But the war between the gods themselves could destroy the world. Born of a god but raised as a man, Perseus (Sam Worthington) is helpless to save his family from Hades (Ralph Fiennes), vengeful god of the underworld. With nothing left to lose, Perseus volunteers to lead a dangerous mission to defeat Hades before he can seize power from Zeus (Liam Neeson) and unleash hell on earth. Leading a daring band of warriors, Perseus sets off on a perilous journey deep into forbidden worlds. Battling unholy demons and fearsome beasts, he will only survive if he can accept his power as a god, defy his fate and create his own destiny.

I know what I just wrote regarding movies that have significant screentime for female characters, but at the same time I am also wondering just who this Alexa Davalos chick is and why the editors chose to put her in a trailer that’s all about bad-assery if her role as Andromeda is to be the damsel in distress. I want to see more monsters! And more of Sam Worthington kicking those monsters in the teeth!

Clash of the Titans will be released in the U.S. on March 26, 2010.

I am a girl who read the first two volumes in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series and bawled because I remembered what it was like to be a girl who didn’t fit in, who felt that the only people she could trust were her group of tight-knit friends, and the woman that I am now mourned the loss of those friendships to time and distance.

That’s why at first I cheered when I read in Peter Bart’s and Michael Fleming’s Variety blog that author Ann Brashares had scored another movie deal based on her writings that hadn’t even been published yet.

According to Fleming:

New Regency and Peter Chernin won a bidding battle for screen rights to My Name is Memory, the first of a three-book series written by Ann Brashares. Deal was high six against seven figures.

Good for Brashares, I thought. She really knows how to appeal to teen and ‘tween girls, and she can write scenes like the ones where Tibby is coming to terms with her friend Bailey dying from childhood leukemia that can earn it a spot in the list of movies that pass the Bechdel Test.

And then I read the logline for the book series:

[The] series begins as a college age couple meets, and a young man makes a startling confession. Turns out their souls have been reincarnated over hundreds of years, but these soul mates keep losing each other. While he remembers the details of their previous lives—and his often exasperating attempts to connect with her romantically—she cannot recall the events of those past lives, nor the rivalry that exists with another soul that keeps getting in the way.

In fact, not only does that plot borrow too much from The Time Traveler’s Wife and Twilight, it also borrows a bit too much from Hancock, minus the superpowers.

You know what would make an excellent movie or series of movies? Why hasn’t some smart producer like Mean Girls‘ Jill Messick taken a look at the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld? It takes the best parts of the “Twilight Zone” episode originally titled “The Eye of the Beholder,” tosses it into a dystopian future worthy of 1984, adds in a Red Dawn-esqe resistance movement, and sets the whole blender on frappe.

Too bad I don’t have pots full of money, eh?

Stardust and Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of the Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. comic book will be seriously rated R and stars Nicolas Cage, Aaron Johnson, Lyndsy Fonseca, Mark Strong, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad) and Chloe Moretz. The film opens April 16th, 2010.

Related Posts: Nicolas Cage is Ready to Kick Ass in Adaptation of Marvel Comics Book

UPDATE: Coming Soon’s video seems to have gone away, so I replaced the link with Trailer Addict’s.

For it was Moon director Duncan Jones himself who forwarded to his Twitter list the link to the blog article written by an associate of his, that sourced ScreenDaily.com’s article reporting the news. With that kind of pedigree, you know the news has to be good.

Anyway, the movie in question is called Source Code, and the news is that Jones will be directing it, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the lead role. The film, which will start filming early next year, will be distributed in the U.S. by Summit Entertainment for Vendome Pictures and the Mark Gordon Co. after having been at Universal Pictures with Topher Grace as the lead and Shane Abbess as the director in 2007 (according to Variety).

/Film.com has some possibly spoilery comments on the plot, based on a first version of the script that writer Brendon Connelly read:

In the first scene, a man named Colter—Gyllenhaal’s character—wakes up on a train headed through the New Jersey countryside. He has no idea how he got there and nobody he speaks to can offer him any clues, though he is told that, to his surprise, he has taken this train every day for the last three months.

After some interaction with the various characters in his train car, many of whom become more important as the story unfolds (particularly Christina… but I won’t say why, and mention her in part to just raise the question of who the female lead might be), Colter heads to the bathroom where, quite surprisingly, he finds a bomb. Unfortunately, just after Colter finds it, a cell-phone detonator is triggered and…

…he’s killed. In fact, the entire train explodes. There’s a big ball of fire and, for just eight frames of film, some other cryptic goings on that only make sense later. We’re now seven or eight minutes in and about to be shocked.

…Colter awakens again, this time in an Isolation Unit where he’s being debriefed by a man named Goodwin, perhaps symbolically so. It seems that Captain Colter Stevens has just been living through a virtual simulation of the incident on the train in order to discover who it was that bombed it.

As for his previously announced plans, Jones himself had this to say , also via his Twitter feed:

For those asking, Mute [is] still in the plans, just slightly delayed. It’s a hard sell…whereas Source Code came with an offer hard to refuse.

If  “offer” means “money” like I think it might, I don’t think I’d mind waiting for Mute so that Jones can raise the funds and increase his bankability as a director in studio execs’ eyes.

Because that’s just the price you pay when you have such a strong debut as an indie filmmaker.

Related Posts: Duncan Jones riffs on Blade Runner in Mute

I’m going to be one sad puppy when I live-blog the Oscars this year, because I am not getting my wish of having Neil Patrick Harris be the host of the show. Instead, producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic have decided that not only should Steve Martin return for a third time to host the show, but that he’d be sharing the duties with Alec Baldwin. All I know is that this time, I’m going to have a bottle of wine handy. (Source: Variety)

Helen Mirren is joining the cast of Red, and no one could be more surprised than original graphic novelist Warren Ellis, who said in response via Twitter: “So weird.” The Hollywood Reporter added that Mary-Louise Parker and John C. Reilly would be joining the cast as well, as his innocent bystander love interest and one of the cohorts that lead Bruce Willis is hoping to help him throw an assassin off his tail. (Source: Variety, THR’s Heat Vision)

And speaking of John C. Reilly, he’s one more actors who has decided to jump into Cedar Rapids , the Ed Helms comedy vehicle. The new cast members include Reilly, Sigourney Weaver, and Alia Shawkat. The only detail given was that Weaver would be playing Helms’ former seventh grade teacher. (Source: Variety)

Related Posts: Charlize Theron steps out, Nicole Kidman remains to genderbend as The Danish Girl, Trisha’s Take: Oscars ceremony gets new producers… again , Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis to possibly see Red?, Quick Cuts: Matt Damon, Josh Brolin to gain some True Grit, and others

That’s right: Movie Make-out is looking for a third writer to expand its coverage of film news. (Okay, let’s face it; I don’t post much, so really a second writer.) Thick skin, the ability to edit images for posting on teh intarwebz, strong grammar, and the desire to churn out a healthy balance of news and commentary (not just fanboy-like bitching) are a must. A broad knowledge of film — that includes movies made before you were born and outside of the United States — and familiarity with WordPress are a huge plus.

Please submit 2–3 writing samples, ideally of recent movie news, to gordon at multiplexcomic.com. Please include at least one independent and/or foreign film, cite (link to) at least two sources in each article, and provide an example of an image or video you would use to illustrate the post. You will not be writing reviews (at least not at first), so please do not send them as samples.

According to Variety, Cooper will be starring in a suspense thriller from Relativity Media and Universal Pictures called Dark Fields, directed by Neil Burger (The Illusionist).

The plot, which I have some problems with, is as follows:

Project is described as a what-if story about a designer drug that can make you rich and powerful. Eddie (Cooper) is a down-and-out New York writer until he possesses a pill that gives him the ability to access the full capacity of his brain. He soon realizes that his newfound intelligence and success come at a hefty price as mysterious forces begin to pursue him.

First of all, I don’t think that increasing the ability to access all of your brain’s capabilities is automatically going to make you successful. It’s what you do with the information and abilities that you’re given that makes a person succeed in life. I mean, how many people do you know who are bright and talented, but due to some strange circumstances of life haven’t been able to fully utilize their talents?

Second, any writer worth his salt would not see the taking of this drug as being beneficial because he’ll have read “Flowers for Algernon” or seen Charly and would know that it’s not going to end well. I hope that screenwriter Leslie Dixon (Hairspray) addressed these problems when she adapted the script from the novel by Alan Glynn. (Incidentally, the description of the novel’s plot sounds way more intriguing than the movie.)

Filming will start late next spring.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov.Starring Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey.

If you are a skeptic in any way, shape or form, the I feel that I am honor-bound to tell you that you may hate The Men Who Stare at Goats.

But let me back up for a bit.

Based on the non-fiction novel by Welsh journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson, Goats tells the fictional story of a journalist named Bob Wilton (played by Ewan McGregor) who goes to Iraq in search of a story to prove to the coward within himself that he matters in the world.

But his journey really begins before he even thinks of going to Iraq when he is confronted by his own skepticism in the form of a “nutcase” named Guy Lacey (played admirably by Stephen Root) who claims that not only can he stop the beating heart of a hamster, but that he was once a part of a secret platoon of psychic warriors that operated within the U.S. army out of Fort Bragg.

What follows is a great non-linear tale full of characters and situations that you have to keep reminding yourself is based in reality, which is why being a skeptic may be detrimental towards getting any bit of enjoyment out of the film.

I give full-credit to screenwriter Peter Straughan for crafting a strong narrative against which the struggles of our everyman Wilson are compared and contrasted. I also give full-credit to director/producer Grant Heslov and rest of his team for assembling such a great team of actors who don’t just portray their roles, the actually inhabit them.

Cast against McGregor is George Clooney who plays Lyn Cassady, supposedly the greatest of the secret “Jedi Warriors” and the other character whose journey from hero to fallen hero and back again we see contrasted against Wilson’s. Cassady is a true believer, and due to how earnestly Clooney portrays him—and a little bit of practicality during the earliest scenes between Wilton and Cassady—by the time the story reaches the part seen in the trailer where he makes a goat keel over, you are completely drawn into him. Of the rest of the cast, special consideration goes to Kevin Spacey, who does a great job portraying nominal antagonist Larry Hooper as actually having emotions other than jealousy and spite. (Then again, this could be a bit of wishful thinking on my part because I enjoy seeing Spacey in morally ambiguous roles where he is neither the out-and-out villain nor the overwhelming good guy.)

If there was a part of the movie that felt flat to me, it was the scene where two teams of self-centered security contractors in Iraq shoot each other up in a case of mistaken identity and end up foisting the blame onto the locals. Even then, that scene was necessary towards getting the audience to believe in the original goal of the Jedi Warriors which was to engage the enemy in a more honorable and non-lethal form of armed combat.

And that’s what this movie is about: beliefs and convictions, the inner struggle to uphold them, what happens when negative emotions corrupt them, and how one holds onto them when almost everyone around you seems to have given up.

Wilton ruminates on this very matter in a piece of narration somewhere towards the middle of the film because by that point, he’s been almost kidnapped, shot at, lost in the desert, and weakened by dehydration as well as the firm belief that he is going to die without proving himself. He wonders why he chose to follow Cassady and even if it wasn’t explicitly stated in the voice-over, you can tell that Wilton is just hoping for something good and righteous to enter his life.

In the end, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a really funny little morality tale that one really must see—and stay through the credits for the disclaimer—to believe.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is rated R for language, some drug content and brief nudity. The film hits US and UK theaters on November 6.

And boy, did he talk!

Fans of Australian rocker Nick Cave can rejoice as the two leads for his script The Wettest County in the World have got stars’ names attached to them. Hillcoat said that Ryan Gosling and Shia LaBeouf were attached, but quickly added “But yeah, I shouldn’t really talk about it cause it’s in the middle of all sorts of stuff.” Which means that they’re still “in negotiations.”

The movie will be about “west Virginia, moonshine, backwoods, and Prohibition,” and if anyone else out there isn’t suddenly feeling nostalgic for “The Dukes of Hazzard” TV series, I will eat my hat.

Pre-production has not yet started.

According to Variety, Roberts and co-producers Philip Rose and Lisa Gillan acquired the rights to a non-fiction book called In the Neighborhood by Peter Lovenheim which will be published next April.

The conceit of the book is that Lovenheim felt as if there wasn’t enough community spirit in his neighborhood of Brighton, New York after a family that lived down the street suffered a horrible tragedy. So, he decided to create one by spending a night in each of his neighbor’s homes and learning all about who they were as people.

An opinion article published in the New York Times gives a brief taste about what we’d be in for during the rest of the book and movie and so far, I agree with writer Michael Fleming’s assessment that it’s going to be “Capra-esque.”

This will mark the fifth deal that Roberts has with Reliance Big; here’s information about the other films-to-be:

My Mother the Cheerleader: Though it does have a terrible title, this novel by Robert Sharenow set in the 1960s is about a 13-year old girl whose worldview is challenged when a New York reporter comes to do a story on her mother who spends her mornings jeering at the first black girl in their community to go to an all-white school.

Jesus Henry Christ: Directed by Dennis Lee and expanded from his 18-minute short film of the same name, the film’s plot is now about a 10-year old test tube kid’s search for his biological father.

Mallory: Written by Matthew Faulk and Mark Skeet (Vanity Fair), this would be a biopic about British mountaineer George Mallory who attempted to climb Mt. Everest three times but died on his third attempt. His body was only recovered in 1999.

The Journey is the Destination: Based on the journals of photographer Dan Eldon who was killed by an angry mob while covering the story of a botched U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia, the movie will star Daniel Radcliffe and is slated to begin production in 2011.

I’m not surprised that he was cast in the role, but it does make me a little sad because I have a feeling that Hopkins is going to play Odin the same way he did Hrothgar in Beowulf, Old Ptolemy in Alexander, and Titus in Titus Andronicus. And that’s not very fun at all.

Also in the article is a note that British actor Tom Hiddleston will be playing Loki. Hiddleston is a relative unknown like Thor star Chris Hemsworth, though he does have some British TV credits to his name.

Interestingly, Hiddleston’s IMDB page also notes that he’ll be in The Avengers, too; wonder what that says about that movie’s plot.

Related Posts: Natalie Portman is Jane Foster in Branagh’s Thor, Kenneth Branagh may have found his Thor

The project of his that has supposedly been stalled is Justice League due to Warner Bros. moving up production on the Ryan Reynolds-starring Green Lantern which—according to a bit in the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune that got run all over the blogosphere—is setting up production offices and stages there and not in Australia due to the exchange rate.

This economic factor and reporter Mike Scott’s assertion that Lantern and the Flash and Wonder Woman films will be a lead-up to League means that Miller’s going to have some time on his hands—which he is choosing to fill by going back to work on the third Mad Max sequel, now called Mad Max: Fury Road.

The article that’s running in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph is just as sparse with concrete details as the Times-Picayune’s is, but there are a lot of juicy quotes to pour over and names to Google:

The Daily Telegraph has learned that work on the film will start immediately, injecting tens of millions of dollars into the economy and creating more than 500 jobs.

Much of the work will be done at Redfern’s CarriageWorks and there will also be 30 weeks of filming in Broken Hill. It is estimated the whole project will take two-and-a-half years to complete, create 540 jobs and generate countless millions.

Miller, himself, chimed in as well:

“Hollywood has cut its production in half. Big movies like Fury Road and Happy Feet are rare and competitively sought after in all the filmmaking regions of the world,” he said. “The production agreements have been a long time in the making and Premier Nathan Rees and his team have worked like Trojans to ensure this substantial investment comes into this country. Not only does it help fuel the local economy but it means many talented people get a chance to practise their craft and lift their skills.”

However, there was no mention in the article of whether or not Miller was going to continue with the idea of making this an anime movie; with all the talk of creating jobs and whatnot, I am starting to doubt that development in the project.

Updated on 10/29: Variety’s Dave McNary and every other scribe in the movie biz must have been working overtime because there are some more concrete details to add to this production news.

Even though no one knows exactly what the plot will be, Miller was able to reveal that Charlize Theron and British actor Tom Hardy (Black Hawk Down) will star in Mad Max: Fury Road, but he wouldn’t confirm that Hardy would be leading male or whether or not Mel Gibson would return to the series.

Related Posts: Mad Max to get new life as a 3D anime film

The film stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, and Sigourney Weaver, and it hits theaters on December 18, 2009.

Thanks to a recurring role in the HBO TV series “Hung,” Anne Heche has gotten her name out in the Hollywood world again; it has rewarded her by landing her two movie roles. She’s teaming up with Ed Helms to star in a comedy called Cedar Rapids as a woman he befriends at an insurance convention and then will go on to play a businesswoman that hires Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlburg to look into the financial losses at her company in The Other Guys. (Source: Variety)

Tony Scott is going to be directing a film about the rise and fall of the Chippendales dance clubs and its founder Steve Banerjee, from a script by Lisa Schrager (Pay the Girl) which itself will be adapted from a manuscript written by Rodney Sheldon. The only two reasons I mention this project is that a) I remember wanting to go to a Chippendales club when I was a pubescent girl in the 1980s and b) I just realized that both Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley from the “Saturday Night Live” sketch about the audition process are dead. (Source: Variety)

Related Posts: Jeff Bridges to join Coens for some True Grit?

This does not appear to be an adaptation of the video game of almost the same name — despite the fact that Bethesda Softworks secured the name Fallout earlier this year for “entertainment services in the nature of an on-going television program” and for “motion picture films about a post-nuclear apocalyptic world.”  Title change imminent, or did Variety bury the lead? Most likely the former.

The Fallout was written by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean.