SugarMosh

Definitely one for the girls!

Dear John has gone straight to number one at the US Box Office and has knocked Avatar’s seven-week reign to number 2

Dear John is a romantic Drama about Special Forces Army Sergeant John Tyree (Channing Tatum) and Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) who meet whilst they are both back home for their holidays.

After only 2 weeks together romance blossoms but John must return back to the Army to complete his last year and Savannah to college. Before they depart they promise to write to each other and maintain a long distance relationship.

Over the next few years, as love grows, and distance keeps them apart, so does the difficulty of the decisions that John is faced with.

If this is true love surely nothing the world throws at them will keep them apart?

This is an inspirational film, and very heart warming. A breath of fresh air from all the action films that have been dominating the cinemas the past few months and one that I would recommend to watch not just for the simple yet moving story but also because Channing is looking rather lovely! I can see many teenage girls flocking to the cinemas when this movie is released!
Rating: ******* (7/10)

Release Date: April 14th 2010

After the film, Sugar Mosh was very lucky to be part of a Question & Answer session organised by LoveFilm, with the stars Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried.

There was a live web link so it was being streamed worldwide!

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• ‘Dear John’ Tops Box Office, Ousts ‘Avatar’ (justjared.buzznet.com)
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Fox 2000 has won the rights to British author Catherine Fisher's novel, Incarceron, and will turn it into a big screen adaptation.

The book was released in the UK in 2007 and has just made the New York Times Bestsellers List. The sequel, Sapphique, was released in the UK in 2008 and is due Stateside in January 2011. Undoubtedly, Fox is hoping to turn the young-adult dystopian fantasy into a film franchise. No directors or writers are yet attached to the project.

Here is the book's official synopsis: Incarceron is a prison so vast that it contains not only cells, but also metal forests, dilapidated cities, and vast wilderness. Finn, a seventeen-year-old prisoner, has no memory of his childhood and is sure that he came from Outside Incarceron. Very few prisoners believe that there is an Outside, however, which makes escape seems impossible. And then Finn finds a crystal key that allows him to communicate with a girl named Claudia. She claims to live Outside—she is the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron, and doomed to an arranged marriage. Finn is determined to escape the prison and Claudia believes she can help him. But they don't realize that there is more to Incarceron than meets the eye, and escape will take their greatest courage and cost more than they know. Because Incarceron is alive.


Georgine Waller

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Tuesday 2 March 2010

Jason Winer - the DGA winning director of ten of the episodes of the first (ongoing) season of freshman hit Modern Family - has been signed up to helm the long-mooted remake of 'classic' Dudley Moore comedy, Arthur.

This time around it's going to be the eminently loathable and national annoyance Russell Brand who gets caught between the moon and New York City.

Don't despair just yet however for the thing has been written by Peter Baynham - known to the movie world as the Oscar nominated co-writer behind Borat and Bruno, but best known to us as a prominent member of the Armando Iannucci-generation of British comedy writers whose name was in the news only yesterday when Armando was talking about a possible big-screen outing for Alan Partridge (Iannucci, Baynham and Steve Coogan - were the main writers on the later episodes).

No dates for this one yet but so far the ingredients are looking good. We might just be getting used to the idea of it, and even, perhaps, looking forward to it a bit... how about you?

SL

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Tuesday 2 March 2010

We are literally counting the grains of sand until Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time hits cinemas on May 28 – especially now this second trailer has given us an extended hit of how mind-blowing the effects are looking.

Offering up a heady mix of action, adventure, Arterton and abs (courtesy of Jake Gyllenhaal's ultra-honed Dastan), POP promises to be one of the summer's biggest blockbusters.

Check out the trailer below.

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Tuesday 2 March 2010

Sean Bean has signed on to star in Death Race 2, the prequel to Universal's 2008 explosive action flick starring Jason Statham.

Bean will star opposite Luke Goss in the feature that Universal is releasing under its DVD Originals banner. Roel Reiné is directing, and co-starring with Bean and Goss are Lauren Cohan, Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo and Frederick Koehler. Paul W.S. Anderson, who directed in 2008, is producing along with Jeremy Bolt.

The prequel will be the origin story for the character named Frankenstein, a convicted cop killer (Goss) in a declining American empire where a racing reality show is about to be born in the country's corrupt prison system.


Georgine Waller

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Tuesday 2 March 2010

It looks like James Cameron might have to start the search again for the next project to get him a hat trick at the top of the box office list - his plans to adapt Charles Pellegrino's historical tome The Last Train From Hiroshima for the big screen look bleak now that Pellegrino's book has been pulled from publication after questions arising as to the veracity of the novel.

Although the book has seen healthy early sales and has garnered good reviews, Pellegrino's publishers, Henry Holt, have halted the book's run after the Associated Press raised concerns about one of his interview subjects, who falsely claimed to have been on board the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It also now appears that the problems may run deeper, as the book's two key figures - Father Mattias, who allegedly lived in the city at the time of the bombing and John MacQuitty, who oversaw his funeral - have come under question.

A statement from the publisher's said: "It is easy to understand how even the most diligent author could be duped by a source, but we also understand that opens that book to very detailed scrutiny. The author of any work of nonfiction must stand behind its content. We must rely on our authors to answer questions that may arise as to the accuracy of their work and reliability of their sources. Unfortunately, Mr. Pellegrino was not able to answer the additional questions that have arisen about his book to our satisfaction."

Bizarrely, there are now also doubts as to Pellegrino's own veracity, as his claim that he received a PhD from Victoria University in New Zealand lacks proof and therefore is being treated with suspicion. This is all quite bad news for Cameron, who has collaborated with Pellegrino on several occasions - he wrote the introductions to Pellegrino's books The Jesus Family Tomb and the most recent Hiroshima one, and Pellegrino also acted as an advisor on Avatar.


Georgine Waller

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Tuesday 2 March 2010

For his seventh collaboration with director Tim Burton, Hollywood legend Johnny Depp has buried his enviable good looks behind a layer of make-up, a huge ginger wig and an even bigger titfer to play The Mad Hatter in the upcoming Alice In Wonderland. EMMANUEL ITIER goes down the rabbit hole and talks to the star about adding a new back story to Lewis Carroll's character, his kids' love of Edward Scissorhands and his fruitful relationship with Burton...

So this is the seventh time you've worked with Tim Burton...
"I think so. Somewhere around there."

Tim Burton says that each time he works with you that you surprise him. Do you feel the same way?
"Yeah, each time out of the gate with Tim, the initial thing for me is to obviously come up with a character but then you start thinking that there's a certain amount of pressure where you go, 'Jesus, will this be the one where I disappoint him?' I try to work really hard, especially early on to just come up with something that's very different that he hasn't experienced before, that we haven't experienced together before and that I think will stimulate him and inspire him to make choices based on that character. So I basically try not to embarrass him."

You've created some iconic characters, do you ever have to look back on your own work to make sure you don't repeat yourself?
"Well, you definitely do at a certain point, and especially because I've played English a number of times, have used an English accent a number of times and so it becomes a little bit of an obstacle course to go, 'Oh, that's teetering into Captain Jackville', or 'This one is kind of teetering over into Willy Wonka'. So you've got to really pay attention to the places that you've been. But that's the great challenge, that you might get it wrong. There's a very good possibility that you can fall flat on your face, but again, I think that's a healthy thing for an actor."

What was your reaction to being asked to play the Mad Hatter?
"Well, I mean to be honest he could've said Alice and I would've said yes. I would've done whatever character Tim wanted, but yeah, certainly the fact that it was The Mad Hatter was a bonus. It was because of the great challenge to try and find this guy and not to just sort of be a rubber ball heaved into an empty room and watch it bounce all over the place. I had to find that part of that character but also a little more history or gravity to the guy."

In the new film, the Mad Hatter is given a back story and it's quite a tragic one...
"Well, there's the whole Hatter dilemma really, which is where the term 'mad as a hatter' came from; the amount of mercury that they used in the glue to make the hats and everything was damaging. So looking at him from that perspective, it's this guy who's literally damaged goods. He's physically damaged. He's emotionally a little obtuse. It was kind of taking that and deciding that he should be as opposed to just this hyper and nutty guy, he should explore all sides of the personality at an extreme level. So he could go from one second being very highfalutin and with a lot of levity and then straight into some kind of dangerous potential rage and then tragedy. So, yeah, it was interesting. Trying to map it out was really interesting."

Was there ever a time in your career where you felt things were getting a little too weird? Like Johnny In Wonderland?
"The whole ride, my whole ride and experience on the ride since day one has been pretty surreal in this business and it defies logic, why I'm still here. I'm still completely shocked that I still get jobs and still am around. But I guess more than anything it has been, yes, a kind of Wonderland. I've been very lucky."

Did you think it was going to be like this when you started out?
"No, not at all. I had no idea where anything was going but you can't. It's almost impossible to predict anything like that. I had no idea. I had hoped. I mean, truly, after having, or I felt like after I'd done Cry-Baby with John Waters and Edward Scissorhands with Tim that they were going to cut me off right then. I felt at that point that I was on solid ground and I knew where I was going or where I wanted to go and I was sure that they would nix me out of the gate. But I'm luckily still here."

Of all the characters you've worked on with Tim, which of them has been your children's favourite?
"My children's favourite? It's funny because they've seen it but they have a difficult time watching it because it's their dad and they make that connection, but it's Edward Scissorhands. That's by far my kid's favourite. They just connect with the character and also they see something, their dad feeling that isolation, feeling that loneliness. He's a tragic character and so I think it's hard for them. They bawl when they see that movie."

You've done a few films now based on 19th Century literature (Sleepy Hollow, Finding Neverland and now Alice In Wonderland), what draws you to that era?
"I just go from certainly J.M. Barrie and the wonderful characters he created to Lewis Carroll and even French literature with [Charles] Baudelaire or over in the States with [Edgar Allan] Poe. Like Tim has said about Lewis Carroll, you open those books, you open The Flowers Of Evil and you begin to read, if it was written today you would be absolutely stupefied by the work. It was this incredible period where the work is timeless. I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion, those great 19th century writers."

Do you remember when Alice In Wonderland first came into your life?
"I do remember vaguely that I was maybe roughly five years old and reading versions of Alice In Wonderland, but the thing is the characters. You always know the characters. Everyone always knows the characters and they're very well defined characters which I thought was fascinating. Even people who haven't read the book definitely know the characters and can reference them. I actually went back, and, ironically this was maybe only a year prior to Tim calling me, and I had re-read Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. What I took away from it was all these very strange little cryptic nuggets that he had thrown in there. I was really intrigued by them and became fascinated with them because they were asking questions that couldn't be answered almost or made statements that he couldn't quite understand, such as 'I'm investigating things that begin with the letter M'. That took me through a whole stratosphere of possibilities and finally doing a little research finding that the M is Mercury. Those things just became so, so important to the character and you realize that the more you read it. If I read the book again today I'd find a hundred things that I missed last time, the book is constantly changing."

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Monday 1 March 2010

When Disney's very wonderful The Princess And The Frog is released on Blu-ray soon, the disc will feature a teaser trailer for Disney's upcoming film, Tangled. The film used to be called Rapunzel, so we know that it will have something to do with a chick with seriously long hair being stuck up in a tall tower, which is lucky, because the trailer doesn't really give away many plot details.

It looks like Tangled will be hitting American cinemas in the autumn, but no UK release date has been annouced as yet.

Take a look at the teaser trailer in the player below. That's Mandy Moore's voice in case you didn't realise...

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Monday 1 March 2010

Adam Brody (The O.C., Jennifer's Body), Alia Shawkat (Whip It!), Catherine Keener (Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief) and Allison Janney (Juno) are in negotiations to star in the family dramedy The Oranges, to be directed by Julian Farino.

Hugh Laurie and Leighton Meester have already been cast in the film, which tells the story of a man (Laurie) who begins a romantic relationship with the daughter (Meester) of a family friend. Brody is in line to play the part of Laurie's son, who falls for Meester's character and is devasted to learn she is dating his dad. Shawkat would play Brody's sister, Keener their mother and Janney would star as Meester's mother.

Filming begins at the end of this month in New York.


Georgine Waller

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Monday 1 March 2010

Can you believe it's been two decades since we first took a trip to the screwed-up small town of Twin Peaks? Thanks the combined efforts of co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, what started out as a brilliantly bonkers subversion of the murder-mystery genre soon descended into a different kind of madness as killer spirits, backwards-talking dwarves, log ladies and one-armed psychos began to crawl out of the woodwork. As the second series finally makes its bow on DVD (available to buy from March 22), we spoke to Mark Frost about the legacy of the series...

It's 20 years since the first episode of Twin Peaks aired (April 8, 1990 on the ABC network), how do you think the show stands up after two decades?
"I've not actually watched the show in a real length of time, because once you have made a show you don't really need to watch it. From what I have heard it's been picked up by a new generation of kids, who have grown up and seen it on DVD, and they seem to be pretty caught up on it, so it doesn't feel like it has had a lot of drop off, which for a TV show is very unusual. I guess it's a good sign, that we have kept their attention as long as we have."

How did the concept come about originally?
"It really came about as a result of a conversation David Lynch and myself had, we were working on a couple of features together and one of our agents posed the question, 'What would you guys do if you were asked to come up with a television idea?' ABC, which at the time was in last place among the TV networks, in particular was looking for something, anything and we came in at the right moment and hit them with the idea. It ended up going the distance, very much to our surprise I must say."

Obviously the show has got yours and David Lynch's stamp all over it, but did you ever have any vision of where the show would go? Obviously you started out with a murder mystery, yet it developed it to something very different...
"What ABC had in mind when they sat down with us, was something along the lines of a bizarro version of a day-time soap. This was, remember, coming out of an era which had been dominated by shows like Dallas and Dynasty. We certainly weren't going to do anything like that, but I had the idea of wrapping a murder-mystery around it and making a kind of hybrid genre. And much to our surprise, they kept saying yes at every stage of the development process. Even at the point when they wanted us to make the pilot, they didn't think it would be made into a full series. They said it should run as a seven-hour mini-series and if we were lucky get a few college students to take a look at it during the spring break. But they were caught completely by surprise when we hit the kind of numbers we did."

You've often said that you made the plot up as you went along, but did you have any long-term plans for the show?
"I can certainly tell you that we certainly had everything worked in terms of what the Laura Palmer mystery was, well ahead of starting the series. We didn't think much beyond that until that story was resolved. Try as they might, there are shows today which will try to tell you they know where they are going, I have to say, especially in the case of Lost I don't find that a particularly convincing argument."

There were clearly a lot of improvisational elements to the show. Obviously the famous one was Frank Silva, when he was accidentally cast as Killer Bob, one of TV scariest characters. How do you think that approach affected the way the series flowed?
"You know what it did, it reflected a philosophy we had about the show which was to hire good people, get everyone involved and, should there be any happy accidents occur during the making of the show, don't be afraid to fold them into the mix. So for instance, Frank Silva who was a set dresser on the show, was working on set right until the camera was rolling and didn't have time to clear, and was stuck behind a bed kind of craning his body in an uncomfortable way to be out of the shot. But when we say the dailies, we saw his face reflected in a mirror which quite by accident had been placed on a dresser near by... and it was pretty terrifying. We knew there would be a character like Bob, we just didn't think he would reveal himself in the way he did. That being said, as soon as he did, we said let's use it and that's often how some very cool things happen."

Considering the kind of programmes, which were considered popular in the early Nineties, do you feel you were taking a chance, making something as different and out there as you could?
"Bucking the trends of television often creates some of the most popular TV shows. That's often the origin of some of the best television made. I didn't feel any undue pressure or that we were out on a limb in anyway, I just thought we were doing our own thing. Because of the way we set up the deal going in, we had a really unusual amount of creative freedom and I guess that the valuable reason, especially to the networks and producers, is that sometimes when you don't mess with the process you can end up with something really quite valuable. I'm afraid that's a lesson which has often been lost in recent years."

Do you have any regrets about the show?
"You know there was a bump in the flow of the narratives from one major story to the next [the discovery of Laura Palmer's killer and the introduction of a mid-season story arc] and if I had any regrets about the show it would probably be that I wished we had worked out a smoother transition. The Laura story was so cumbersome and grabbed people's attention; it was a very tough act to follow. And I almost felt like our audience needed a bit of a palette cleanser to get the taste of that out of their mouths, before we involved them in another big mystery. I think there are some justifiable criticisms of the second season, perhaps the storytelling wasn't quite as taut or as fraught with emotion, in the second half. But I thought by the time the second season came to an end, we were pretty much back up to the standard we had set."

The second season ended with a number of major cliff-hangers, but we never got a chance to see what happened next. How would those plots have been resolved?
"I think it's always easy to say what if, but if we had the chance to do a third season, we would have hopefully raised the bar a little bit higher."

At the end of season two, Audrey Horne's life seemed fairly extinguished, Agent Cooper was possessed... Did you have a story in mind, for where that may have gone after?
"We did, we had at least knocked out the first half of the next season and to be honest with you, I have completely forgotten what these were at this point. But I do remember at the time we thought we were on to something pretty cool."

Do you think we'll ever see a resolution?
"Maybe so, there has been a lot of talk of the years of finding some way to round it off and we did explore that a couple of years ago, but it became impractical from a story standpoint. I mean all the actors are 20 years older, it's a little harder to sell that Audrey is still in high school. It was great fun while it lasted, and it's certainly fun to see that people are still enjoying it today."

Did you have a favorite character, there's quite a rich selection?
"Well clearly Agent Cooper, what was there not to like about him? I know for me, he was the centre of the story, he was the Sherlock Holmes, he was the guy carrying us through the mist and he was the character, for me, who was the most fun to write. It felt like I knew who this guy was. To take him places and put him through things was an awful lot of fun."

There was a return to Twin Peaks with the film Fire Walk With Me, which I think many people thought would offer some resolutions, but it actually turned out to be a prequel. What was the decision behind that?
"Well to be honest, it was a decision David made on his own, I was off making a movie. And I had a very strong conviction that we had an audience hanging on by their thumbs and I wanted to move the story forward and take it to the next level. He wanted to go back and revisit the origins of the Laura Palmer story and I felt that we had covered that already in the series itself in more oblique and interesting ways. That being said, I thought he did a really interesting job with it, I wasn't terribly involved in the making of it and didn't have much to do with writing it."

Glen Ferris

>> Real the whole article | on Screenrush - Friday 26 February 2010