The notoriously widescreen Marlon Brando has seduced
notoriously picky novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez into allowing
The Grandfather Godfather to adapt his novel, Autumn of the Patriarch,
as a movie. In turn, Brando says that this film, which is centered around
an aging Latin American dictator, will be his last. If the film does
get made, one can only hope that it's great, sweetening the first consummated
Hollywood experience of the much-beloved Marquez, and allowing Brando
to exit with the grace that his skill as an actor deserves. Good luck,
gentlemen.
Hugh Grant's set for Mickey Blue Eyes, a romantic comedy
about a high-flying Manhattan art dealer whose nuptials are threatened
by his fiancˇe's father's day job as a Mafioso. Grant is co-producing
the film with his permanent fiancˇe, Elizabeth Hurley, who would
likely agree that for a relationship to be so endangered, something
would have to really suck.
What can you say about a project that people have been trying to finance
for four years, but whose massive budget left Paul Verhoeven
making Showgirls and Arnold Schwarzenneger in a Mr. Freeze
costume? Verhoeven is saying, "Let's try again." With Starship Troopers
about to hit theaters with some major thunder, the RoboCop/Basic
Instinct director is anxious to get his Arnold-attached Crusades
back in the pipeline. One little problem, Verhoeven told Variety,
"It can't be made for less than Titanic." That's before you get
ready for the protests from the religious right. If you think they were
upset when the current "Greatest Filmmaker Alive," Martin Scorcese,
made The Last Temptation of Christ, just wait until they see
this trailer: "From The Director Of Showgirls and That Bug Movie,
Arnold wants the Grail and he's killing Jews by the thousands to get
it! (image of Arnold's rippled, sword-carrying torso, ready to hack
someone to death) "Cwucafy you? It's naught dat kind a Cwusade!" (Arnold
swings the blade, cut to black on the sound of the decapitation and
then a card, reading, "Coming for The Cup, Christmas 1999").
E-mail me. I won't tell anybody,
except maybe all our readers.
