News for August 1-4, 2000

4 August, 2000

Coyote Ugly

Interesting article on the movie

3 August, 2000

Sum of All Fears

Ben Affleck = Jack Ryan?

Rollerball

Fire slows down production

Planet of the Apes

Helena Bonham Carter goes ape

1 August, 2000

Eye See You

That ludicrous title belongs to the movie formerly known as D-Tox. The film stars Sylvester Stallone as an alcoholic cop in rehab. Universal apparently has little faith in the film as they currently have no plan to release it in the United States. It will be released overseas and if all goes well then it could get an American theatrical release sometime in 2001.

The $60 million movie was directed by Jim Gillespie (I Know What You Did Last Summer). Finished in the spring of last year the movie looked so good that it was recut with Stallone's aid, considerably extending post production. Apparently that did little to make it watchable leading to the odd plan to show the movie. Universal has tried to sell the domestic rights with no success and apparently even considered shelving it permanently.

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The folks over at The Reel Site planted their buts in a seat long enough to suffer through Keanu Reeves football comedy and reported back with the results.

In its half-asleep, directionless sort of way, The Replacements will probably succeed at entertaining anyone who likes football and has low expectations. Every moment that works only works because it's a pure reenactment of a pre-existing cliché, but there are enough of those moments -- moments that work -- strung together that the movie is easy to watch. For all its lack of anything original or interesting, there's little that actually fails to work on a purely surface, moment-to-moment level.

Read the rest of the review.

Wes Craven will producing Dracula 2000, a modern retelling of the classic Bram Stoker novel. Written by Joel Soisson and directed by Patrick Lussier, the movie will star Christopher Plummer, Jonny Lee Miller, Omar Epps, Jeri Ryan, Gerard Butler and singer Colleen 'Vitamin C' Fitzpatrick.

Based on well known material, a movie like this has to work hard to seem original and a good script is vital. Veteran script reviewer Stax got a copy and shared his opinion on it.

Overall, I found Dracula 2000 to be a decent but formulaic entry in the vampire film genre. The script left me feeling rather ambivalent. I did not dislike it but I wasn't bowled over, either. As I sat down to read it, I must admit that I expected it to be nothing more than a cheesy B-movie. To my surprise, though, that was not really the case. The script took itself quite seriously. Unfortunately, I just never knew enough about the characters to truly care for them and the story itself followed all the requisite beats of the vampire movie narrative. Although my copy was missing a few pages from the latter part of Act Two, I was still able to follow and understand the plot line. That tells you something about a script if you can miss what is essentially a few minutes of screen time and still figure out what happened; are those missing moments really that necessary then?

Read the rest of the review at Stax's home, FilmForce.

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Tomb Raider

Principal photography begins