News Week in Review 16th July – 22nd July 2007

Absolutely knackered writing this as got in from a midnight screening of Transformers and have had way too much Red Bull. Transformers is the best movie of the summer thus far but is deeply flawed nonetheless. More on that later though. You will notice below that there is no Jim Carrey related story this week which is amazing. There was some cobblers about a son of Ace Ventura film which I decided not to write about to spare you the pain…….

* Bad news for Matt Damon and Star Trek fans this week. The actor who is Jason Bourne has denied any involvement in JJ Abrams forthcoming Star Trek reboot. He does confirm however that he got the approval of The Shat himself William Shatner to be the new Captain Kirk. Apparently they are looking at casting someone even younger as Captain Kirk, someone who is twenty. Be afraid, be very afraid.

* Former master of the genre John Carpenter is apparently hard at work on a new film entitled LA Gothic. The story takes place in LA over a couple of days and concerns a priest, his daughter and the various vampires,demons and zombies that inhabit Hell-A. The fact that Carpenter is working again is something to be grateful for. Lets just hope this is on a par with The Thing and Escape from New York rather than Vampires and Escape from LA.

* David Duchovny revealed this week that X-Files 2 was nearly ready to go with the script complete and a release date scheduled some time in 2008. The script is by series creator Chris Carter who will make his feature directorial debut with the sequel. I loved the X-files right up until season 8 and can't wait to see Mulder and Scully together again. I hope that this project is still a monster of the week type story that they used to do so well rather than one of the convoluted alien mythology stories.

* Festival fave horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has been dumped by distributor the Weinstein Company and instead picked up by Senator Films for an early 2008 release. The film was meant to debut over the summer and is supposed to be a throwback to the nasty slasher films of the early 1980's. Sounds good to me….

* Jared Leto and Sarah Polley have signed on to star in sci-fi romance Mr Nobody. The story concerns a man who is the last mortal left on a planet populated by people who live forever. At age 120 he starts to reminisce on his marriage. The director is first timer Jaco Van Dormael.

* 68 year old Sonny Chiba a veteran of Asian action movies has announced he is to retire from the genre. The man who is Hatori Hanzo will now focus his attention on less action heavy roles and setting up a school with Jackie Chan for the next generation of Asian Action stars.

* John Leguizamo has joined Mark Wahlberg in the cast of M.Night Shyamalan's The Happening. The story concerns something about hostile plants attempting to take over the planet. Its got to be better than the godawful Lady in the Water.

* After falling through the fingers of George Clooney and Kevin Smith among others, the film version of The Green Hornet has now landed in the lap of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Rogen is currently hot property due to the likes of Knocked Up and the pair wrote the forthcoming Superbad which has a lot of buzz around it. Its not clear yet whether their version of The Green Hornet will be a comedy.

* Gavin Hood the director of the critically acclaimed Tsotsi has been announced as the director of the forthcoming Wolverine movie. The script by David Benioff is still an unknown quantity but it is thought that it will explore Wolverine's origins in more detail.

* Ridley Scott will produce and possibly direct an adaptation of soon to be published novel The Passage. The story concerns a government experiment on death row inmates that results in super-vampires and an orphan who has special powers related to the crisis. The novel isn't due out until 2009 so it truly must be something special to attract this level of talent straight away!