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Doux News: February 16, 2014

This Week: It? – Post Valentine’s Day – This Week in Casts – Winter's Tale – Superhero Roundup – Coming Soon to a Small Screen Near You – Game of Thrones, Season Four – Renewals Galore – Random Recommendation – This Week in Cats


It?

Stephen King’s It has already been adapted for the screen once: the 1990s miniseries is cheesy and not nearly as fun as the Big Book o’Clown. (That's how I like to think of it.) But now rumors are afoot for a…dare I say it?...more high-brow adaptation. Cary Fukunaga has been connected to the project for a while. Although Fukunaga is busy now, more than one source (here and here and here, although their degree of certainty varies) indicates the possibility that the Jane Eyre and True Detective director will give us a tasteful version of the killer clown.


Post Valentine's Day

Just broken-up? You might enjoy this video, in which a couple ends their relationship, and makes a few surprising revelations, using only movie titles.





This Week in Casts

Jere Burns (Justified) may be cast in Rashida Jones’ upcoming cop-procedural spoof Tribeca, as her boss.

Michelle Fairley (Game of Thrones) has joined the cast of the 24 reboot, Live Another Day.

Kevin Alejandro (True Blood, Arrow) will have a co-starring role in the upcoming ABC show Clementine, about “a habitual criminal [who] digs into the mystery of her origins after she becomes the target of a group of zealots who fear she possesses latent supernatural abilities that she will one day harness for either profound good or monstrous evil.” It sounds so silly that I can’t wait to see it.

Laurence Fishburne will play Anthony Anderson’s father in the upcoming ABC comedy Black-ish. This will not conflict with his role on Hannibal.

Alyson Hannigan has nabbed a co-starring role in the upcoming More Time with Family. Assuming the pilot gets picked up, Hannigan will be back on CBS just months after the HIMYM finale.


Winter's Tale

I tend to shy away from Nicholas Sparks novels and films, or anything that remotely resembles a Nicholas Sparks novel. For that reason, I've more or less ignored the previews and billboards for Winter's Tale, a new Colin Farrell movie that came out this week: it looked like a dopey love-through-the-ages flick to me, and probably to you, too.

Although I still haven't seen it, this write-up in the LA Times has me changing my tune. Winter's Tale is based on Mark Helprin's book of the same name, which sounds like a slightly sweeter version of Cloud Atlas. And the film was co-produced, written, and directed by Akiva Goldman, who has written the screenplays for The Da Vinci Code and A Beautiful Mind, but is beloved by me for his work on Fringe. Goldman told the LA Times that he was working on the script when his wife died, after which "the book suddenly went from something I loved to the only thing that mattered."

That sounds like a film worth watching.


Superhero Roundup

Paul Bettany, who already had a co-starring role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Jarvis, Iron-Man’s eButler, will now have a fleshier task in the upcoming Age of Ultron: he will play the Vision. That’s not the only bit of in-joke casting going on in superheroland, though. John Wesley Shipp, who played The Flash back in its 1990s CBS days, will join the cast of the upcoming CW version of the show.

Also on the small screen, Donal Logue (Terriers, Sons of Anarchy) has joined the cast of Fox’s Gotham as Detective Harvey Bullock. As I mentioned last week, the show will star Ben McKenzie of The OC and Southland in the role of James Gordon.


Coming Soon to a Small Screen Near You

John Oliver of Community and The Daily Show is getting his moment in the footlights with a comedy show titled Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It premieres April 27th on HBO.

BBC America, meanwhile, is plotting something even weirder than an entire show featuring John Oliver: they want to combine Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham into one person. According to Deadline, after the Sheriff’s family is killed, he decides to take down King John. Creator Cole Haddon most recently worked on Dracula, so I’m not sure how excited we should be about this completely unnecessary update to Robin Hood’s legitimacy. He is an outlaw, for goodness sake! Let him be outside the frakking law!


Game of Thrones, Season Four




Renewals Galore

The CW went renewal crazy this week, offering Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Arrow and even Reign another season. As Sunbunny pointed out on Twitter, Beauty and the Beast is conspicuously absent from that list, as is The Tomorrow People. Perhaps they are waiting to see how the new show Star-Crossed, which premieres Monday night, will do.


Random Recommendation

The Atlantic has an excellent article on “Why Writers are the Worst Procrastinators,” in which author Megan McArdle explains the difference between the “growth” and “fixed” mindset: a person who sees failure as an opportunity for growth is okay with “failing better” until improvement happens. A “fixed” person, however, tended to have success early in life (especially school), and therefore struggles with the idea that accomplishments are hard. (We always got As without trying!)

The fixed person sees failure as an indication that they will live sad, miserable existences until finally they die alone and their cats eat them. That quest for perfection terminates their initiative, especially since in writing we only see the “highlights reels” of other works, and never the backstage madness that went into the creation of a final draft.

In other words, I can’t recommend a better article to read as you writers out there put off sitting down and actually finishing the darn whatever-it-is that you are working on. I really connected with her description, and I hope it’s useful for some of you, too!


This Week in Cats

Thanks to Already Pretty for the link!


2 comments:

  1. Love the break-up video! Clever, clever people.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for all the news, Josie. I look forward each week to reading this. :-)

    I think I'll pass on "Star-Crossed." It sounds too much like a combination of Roswell and Alien Nation. However, if someone here reviews it and recommends it, I might change my mind.

    Btw, it's Akiva Goldsman, not Goldman.

    - tucsonbarbara

    ReplyDelete

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