News Week in Review 11th June – 17th June 2007

There are some interesting little tidbits of info for you below, but by far the best thing this week was the debut of some trailers for the autumns coolest sounding films. Among these are the Graphic Novel based Horror 30 Days of Night, the Christian Bale/Russell Crowe western 3.10 to Yuma and another western from Paul Thomas Anderson starring Daniel Day Lewis called There Will be Blood. All of these trailers are pretty great and can be found on You Tube or Yahoo Movies.

* Gil Kenan the director of the hugely overlooked Monster House is directing City of Ember based on a book by Jeanne DuPrau. The story concerns a city with no light apart from street lamps and what happens when the power source fails. Bill Murray has joined Toby Jones (Infamous) in the cast. Hopefully this will live up to the huge promise Kenan showed with his debut its not clear whether this will be live action or animated but lets hope its another gorgeous animation.

* Rachel Weisz has been cast of the mother of the dead girl in Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones. Its going to be great to see Jackson return to smaller less effects driven films along the lines of Heavenly Creatures. If done right this one will no doubt be up for all kinds of awards in early 2009.

* William Hurt (Oscar nominated for A History of Violence) Has joined the cast of The Incredible Hulk as General 'Thunderbolt' Ross. He joins an impressive cast of Edward Norton, Liv Tyler and Tim Roth. The director is Louis Leterrier who made the underrated Jet Li flick Unleashed. The fact that so many heavyweight thesps are involved in this must mean we are in for something special.

* The J-Horror remake bandwagon rolls on with Elizabeth Banks (The 40 year old virgin, Slither) being cast as the evil stepmother character in the remake of A Tale of Two Sisters. Dreamworks is behind the new version with Thomas and Charles Guard directing. The original is good but they must be really running out of ideas if they are remaking this. Its probably a reaction to the recent box-office failure of R Rated horror films as the original is pretty tame.

* Psychological thriller Born concerns a claymation artist who moves to a quiet English town with his family and finds his creations coming to life. Real life husband and wife Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly play the leads and Daniel Simpson directs from a script by Clive Barker (Hellraiser) and Paul Kaye. The Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space) have been brought in to integrate stop motion animation into the film. This sounds like it could be one of the scariest films on the horizon at the moment.

* Carice Van Houten from Paul Verhoevens Black Book has joined the cast of Bryan Singers WW2 film Valkyrie. She joins Tom Cruise and Kenneth Branagh with a script by Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, The Way of The Gun). The plot concerns the plan to assassinate Hitler. This is shaping up to be a film we have been waiting for Singer to make ever since The Usual Suspects.

* David Goyer, the writer of best-comic-adaptation so far Batman Begins and the dire Blade: Trinity has signed on to write and direct a new version of The Invisible Man. The set up has the Invisible Man recruited by MI5 as a spy during World War 2. Sounds intriguing, lets hope its not another Hollow Man or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

* The Box office figures aren't even in yet for Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer and J Michael Straczynski has been brought in to craft a Silver Surfer movie. Apparently the solo Surfer movie will head in a darker direction than the FF4 movies. Straczynski is an inspired choice considering his work on comics such as Midnight Nation and Rising Stars. He also had a stint writing Spider-Man for Marvel.

* The writer of The Fifth Element, Robert Mark Kamen has been hired to write the CG animated version of Gatchaman (Aka Battle of the Planets). Kevin Munroe who was also behind the recent TMNT is directing. If you remember the cartoon series like I do (First cartoon I remember really liking) the check out some of the production design artwork on Ain't it Cool to get really excited!

* Some ex Industrial Light and Magic employees are working with Japanese scientists in a top-secret lab on an IMAX 3-D Godzilla movie. I hope to god this gets a release in UK IMAX , most of the latest Godzilla movies don't even get an official DVD release over here. If you wanna see a REALLY COOL Godzilla movie then get the Region 1 DVD of Godzilla- Final Wars directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. It kicks a lot of ass.