In the Works: Anderson, Campos, and More
The big “in the works” news today is the release of the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, embedded below. According to the official synopsis from Fox Searchlight, Anderson’s second stop-motion animated feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) “tells the story of Atari Kobayashi, twelve-year-old ward to corrupt Mayor Kobayashi. When, by Executive Decree, all the canine pets of Megasaki City are exiled to a vast garbage-dump called Trash Island, Atari sets off alone in a miniature Junior-Turbo Prop and flies across the river in search of his bodyguard-dog, Spots. There, with the assistance of a pack of newly-found mongrel friends, he begins an epic journey that will decide the fate and future of the entire Prefecture.”
Bill Murray (who turns sixty-seven today, by the way), Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, F. Murray Abraham, Tilda Swinton, Kunichi Nomura, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, Scarlett Johansson, Yoko Ono, Greta Gerwig, Courtney B. Vance, and Ken Watanabe are among those lending their voices.
Also in the Works
The Playlist’s Kevin Jagernauth points us to Sanjiv Bhattacharya’s profile of Robert Pattinson for Esquire, wherein the star of the Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time talks about his work in Antonio Campos’s forthcoming film, The Devil All the Time: “You literally cannot get darker. It's fucking dark. This character is an evangelical preacher in the South in the Fifties, but he's gleefully bad and kind of funny and charismatic too. I know, it's irresistible.”
“Akira is revving back up,” reports Deadline’s Anita Busch, and Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople,Thor: Ragnarok) is thinking seriously about taking it on. This would be “a live action version of anime artist Katsuhiro Otomo’s six-volume graphic novel. The story takes place in the rebuilt New Manhattan where a leader of a biker gang saves his friend from a medical experiment.”
Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) will direct Elisabeth Moss in Call Jane, “based on the true story of a 1960s movement called the Jane Collective,” reports Variety’s Justin Kroll. The story “focuses on an underground network of suburban women who secretly provided safe abortions for women before the landmark decision Roe v. Wade.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit has broken the news that “Linda Hamilton is returning to the world of Terminator, reuniting with James Cameron, the creator of the sci-fi franchise.” Cameron’s confident that, as he says, “it’s going to make a huge statement to have that seasoned warrior that she’s become return. There are 50-year-old, 60-year-old guys out there killing bad guys, but there isn’t an example of that for women.” In the New York Times,Nicholas Barber suggests that “we shouldn’t get too carried away. Mr. Cameron has also said that Ms. Hamilton will be passing the torch to a younger star: He is looking for ‘an 18-something woman to be the centerpiece of the new story.’ . . . The mighty Sarah Connor returns—and then she is elbowed aside by someone a third of her age.”
Matt Damon is “set to star as John R. Brinkley, a real-life 20th century doctor who conned his patients into thinking that he had discovered the cure to impotence, in the drama Charlatan,” reports Variety’s Ramin Setoodeh. Brinkley’s the subject of Penny Lane’s 2016 documentary, Nuts! Setoodeh note that screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien (Ocean’s Thirteen, Showtime’s Billions) will adapt Pope Brock’s book, Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam.
Elvira Lind (Bobbi Jane) has shot what may eventually become a documentary about a wild year in her life with Oscar Isaac in which he won raves for his performance in Sam Gold’s production of Hamlet at New York’s Public Theater and learned that his mother had become seriously ill—and the couple decided to have a baby. She writes at the Talkhouse Film: “I organize this footage in folders, I back it up on a second drive, I treat it like I do my other films. But I know that even though this may be the strongest, most honest and unfiltered footage I have ever captured, it will most likely never get seen by anyone.”
Series
“Just days after its series premiere, HBO has renewed its praised drama series The Deuce for a second season,” reports Deadline’s Denise Petski. “Created by George Pelecanos and David Simon and starring James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the show chronicles the rise of the porn culture in New York from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s.” In the New York Times,James Poniewozik suggests that it’s “about the sex trade in the same way that Mr. Simon’s The Wire was about drugs, his Treme was about jazz, and his Show Me a Hero was about zoning. Each of Mr. Simon’s works is ultimately about systems: people of different classes, races and levels of power, whose choices (or lack thereof) define an economy and a society. That macro idea makes The Deuce smart. Its micro detail—a Studs Terkelesque catalog of the million ways to chase a hustle— makes it art.”
“Sean Penn will star in The First, Beau Willimon’s [House of Cards] upcoming Hulu original series,” reports Hunter Harris for Vulture. “According to Hulu, the show will be set in the near future, and will ‘follow the first human mission to Mars exploring the challenges of taking the first steps toward interplanetary colonization.’”
At Cineuropa, Jorn Rossing Jensen reports that Lukas Moodysson (Show Me Love,We Are the Best!) “will write and direct Gösta, HBO Nordic’s first Swedish—and Scandinavian—original television series.” He’s “already delivered the script about a 28-year-old child psychologist who moves from Stockholm to a rural town, where he rents a cottage in the woods. ‘I want Gösta to be a mix of comedy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: as funny as possible and as serious as possible,’ said Moodysson, who will direct all eight episodes.”
Netflix has “announced that it’s bringing Amy Poehler, Natasha Lyonne, and Leslye Headland together for a new comedy series, with Poehler producing, Lyonne starring, and Headland writing the first episode,” notes Sam Barsanti at the A.V. Club. “The show doesn’t seem to have a name yet, but Netflix’s official synopsis says it’s about ‘a young woman named Nadia (Lyonne) on her journey as the guest of honor at a seemingly inescapable party one night in New York City.’”
For Little White Lies,Sofie Steenhaut reports on a new horror series picked up by The CW. “Having produced female-led narratives in the past (How to be Single,Whip It) [Drew] Barrymore and [Nancy] Juvonen want to go even further with The Black Rose Anthology: it will be exclusively written and directed by women. Each hour-long episode will explore basic human fears from a female point-of-view: guilt, jealousy, repression, paranoia, insanity, sexual obsession and survival.”
“Jordan Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions banner are behind The Hunt, a hot drama series spec,” reports Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva. “Written by David Weil (Moonfall) and inspired by true events, The Hunt follows a diverse band of Nazi hunters in 1970s America as they set out on a quest for revenge and justice—tracking and killing hundreds of Nazis who, with the unconscionable help of the U.S. government, escaped justice and embedded themselves in American society.”
Also, “It is true—HBO has given a formal pilot green light to Watchmen and has ordered backup scripts for the project, Damon Lindelof’s followup to his praised HBO drama series The Leftovers. . . . Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ iconic limited comic series, was previously adapted into a feature film in 2009 by Zack Snyder, who is not involved in the TV series.”
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.
