Indy, Bond, Trek, Batman: Movies coming in 2008
Thanks to the long lead time for big-screen productions, the
2008 film schedule will go on largely uninterrupted despite the
writers strike.
With a solid range of prospects, the 2008 lineup offers plenty
of intriguing questions.
Can Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones still throw a punch? Is Harry
Potter looking ahead to the senior prom now that he’s in his
next-to-last year at Hogwarts? Will Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto
live long and prosper as the Trek world’s new Kirk and Spock?
And just what have perpetually lovelorn writer Carrie Bradshaw
and her gal pals been up to since Sex and the City went
off the air in 2004?
Sarah Jessica Parker, who reprises the role in New Line Cinema’s
upcoming big-screen adaptation of Sex and the City, is not
at liberty to say.
“I was given a pill by New Line, and it erased my short-term
memory. They took away my script,” said Parker, who rejoins
castmates Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon.
Coyness over plot points is an epidemic this time of year as
stars and filmmakers look ahead to their big releases. In the age
of internet spoilers, everyone wants to keep as much as they can
secret so fans don’t go into the theatre already quoting the
script.
Continuing the story of Bruce Wayne after Batman
Begins, director Christopher Nolan bluntly said “you’ll need
to see the movie” if you want to know what Christian Bale’s
tragedy-torn superhero is up to.
Nolan does offer an answer to the obvious question: Why doesn’t
the latest Batman movie have the word “Batman” in the title?
“In doing a continuation of the story, we didn’t want to give
the impression that it’s just going to be the standard-issue
sequel,” Nolan said of The Dark Knight, due out the US
this northern summer from Warner Bros. “We wanted this to be the
definitive take on who the Dark Knight is and what that represents
and what the meaning of that appellation is.”
The sequel does make good on the tease at the end of Batman
Begins, which set up Bale’s first encounter with his ultimate
nemesis. Heath Ledger plays the Joker, and Nolan promised an
utterly different take from Jack Nicholson’s in 1989’s
Batman.
“The corrupted clown face is built into the icon of the Joker,
but we gave a Francis Bacon spin to it. This corruption, this decay
in the texture of the look itself. It’s grubby. You can almost
imagine what he smells like,” Nolan said.
Fan imaginations have run wild over Paramount’s Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first film
about Ford’s archaeologist-adventurer in 19 years.
Set in 1957, Crystal Skull pits Indy against the Soviets, whose
number includes Cate Blanchett, Ford confirmed. Beyond that, Ford’s
not leaking plot details, including whether new co-star Shia
LaBeouf is Indy’s son or whether Ford shares any romantic moments
with Blanchett.
“They remain true to their characters. There’s a certain tension
between the two, but not a sexual energy,” Ford said cryptically of
his and Blanchett’s characters.
Ford also kept quiet on how Indy reunites with Karen Allen’s
character.
“It’s great to have Karen back,” Ford said. “I can’t really tell
you much, though. It’s a little too early to be saying much more
than what’s already been said, and I don’t want to be the one to
unwrap the Christmas present.”
While it remains a mystery if Ford gets to play LaBeouf’s dad in
the new movie, Indy himself is not reunited with his own father.
Ford was disappointed that Sean Connery, who played Henry Jones Sr
in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, decided not to reprise the
role.
The 65-year-old Ford had a joke worthy of Indy about that: “As I
told Sean, I’m getting old enough to play my own father, so we
don’t need him, anymore.”
Along with Indy, Batman and Carrie, Hollywood offers plenty of
other familiar names this year.
TV’s favourite alien hunters, Mulder and Scully, return for 20th
Century Fox’s as-yet-untitled second X-Files movie, with
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reunited with series creator
Chris Carter, who’s directing.
C S Lewis’ sibling heroes are back in Disney’s The
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, with The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe director Andrew Adamson running the
show again and Liam Neeson reprising the voice of talking lion
Aslan.
Daniel Craig has his second outing as 007 in Sony’s
still-untitled James Bond adventure, with Judi Dench returning as
spymaster M and Jeffrey Wright reprising his role as CIA colleague
Felix Leiter.
Agent Maxwell Smart, who started as a Bond spoof on 1960s TV,
comes to the big-screen in the Warner Bros action comedy Get
Smart, with Steve Carell in the title role, Dwayne Johnson as
a superstar operative and Anne Hathaway as Agent 99.
Minus Rachel Weisz, his co-star in the first two Mummy movies,
Brendan Fraser has another go at fighting a resurrected dead guy,
this time an ancient Chinese ruler (Jet Li), in The Mummy: Tomb
of the Dragon Emperor. Frasier also stars in Journey, a 3-D
take on Jules Verne’s sci-fi classic Journey to the Centre of
the Earth.
And Star Trek revisits its roots, with Pine taking over
William Shatner’s role as bold Enterprise Capt James Kirk and
Quinto stepping in as Leonard Nimoy’s Vulcan science officer Spock.
The Paramount film is directed by Lost creator J J
Abrams.
Along with such action and visual-effects spectacles come an
intriguing range of dramatic stories.
Brad Pitt reunites with Babel co-star Blanchett for
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on an F Scott
Fitzgerald story about a man who ages backward from old age toward
infancy.
Director Baz Luhrmann reteams with Moulin Rouge star
Nicole Kidman for Australia, co-starring Hugh Jackman in a
tale of a cattle drive down under amid a bombing by Japanese forces
during World War II.
In another World War II saga, Spike Lee directs Miracle at
St Anna, the story of four Americans (Derek Luke, Michael
Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller) who are part of an
all-black division fighting in Italy at a time when segregation
remained the standard.
“You had the dilemma of these soldiers who really had to battle
on two fronts. They were fighting for their country in a foreign
land, and at the same time, in many parts of the United States,
they were still considered second-class citizens,” Lee said. “This
offers a really rich character study of Negro soldiers going
through that conflict. They want to fight for their country, but
they have to ask: Is this really worth it when I could go back to
Alabama and be lynched?”
Other big 2008 titles: Starship Dave, with Eddie Murphy
playing an entire space craft in a sci-fi comedy about a group of
tiny aliens seeking haven on Earth inside a vessel disguised as a
human; Wall-E, the latest from the animation masters at
Pixar (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), about a
robot left to tend the planet after humanity has left; Speed Racer,
starring Emile Hirsch in a live-action update of the TV cartoon
show, directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, creators of The
Matrix flicks; The Incredible Hulk, with Edward
Norton the latest incarnation of the scientist with a really angry
alter ego; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,
featuring Daniel Radcliffe and pals in the second-to-last adventure
of the boy wizard; Leatherheads, a 1920s football comedy
directed by and starring George Clooney alongside Renee Zellweger
and John Krasinski; and The Spiderwick Chronicles, a
fantasy based on the children’s books about a mum (Mary-Louise
Parker) and her kids who move into the magical house owned by an
eccentric relation.
Parker was not into fantasy as a child, but Spiderwick
Chronicles allowed her to branch out into the family
genre.
“I did read Narnia, but I was more of a Little
House on the Prairie person. I’m not really a fan of things
flying around, but I always wanted to do a children’s movie, and
this seemed like sort of an atypical fantasy-type thing,” Parker
said. “The children, they weren’t archetypes. They were very unique
and they had some complexity to them. And the mother did, too. She
wasn’t just the perfect mother who was always struggling. She loses
her temper.”
Also coming this year: He’s Just Not That Into You, a
romantic comedy that casts Ben Affleck alongside two Jennifers -
Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly, along with Scarlett
Johansson and Drew Barrymore; Mamma Mia!, featuring Meryl
Streep, Pierce Brosnan and the songs of ABBA in an adaptation of
the stage musical; You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, a comedy
with Adam Sandler as an Israeli commando who fakes his death so he
can become a New York City hairdresser; Step Brothers,
with Will Ferrell and John C Reilly as middle-aged slackers who
suddenly become kin by marriage; Dr Seuss’ Horton Hears a
Who, an animated version of the children’s classic featuring
the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell; Iron Man, with
Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow in a big-screen version of the
comic-book hero; and Madagascar: The Crate Escape, an
animated sequel reteaming the voice cast of Ben Stiller, Chris
Rock, David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith as zoo animals in the
wild.
Pinkett Smith’s husband, Will Smith, returns to the big
box-office date he has owned in the past, starring with Charlize
Theron in the Fourth of July release Hancock, the story of
an alcoholic superhero that he promises will range from crazy
comedy to sober drama to visual spectacle.
AP
