Movie News: I Hate Tentacles

Meet Blackbeard



This man is in talks to play Blackbeard in Pirates of the Caribbean 4. I didn't think those movies could get any better, but I guess I was wrong. (I know it's cool to hate the last two, but I can't help liking them.) Penelope Cruz is going to be in it too, which could ease my grieving over Keira's absence.

Sharktopus vs Dinoshark



The world's not awesome enough for a movie with both Sharktopus and Dinoshark in it, but Undead Backbrain has the complete skinny on their separate films.

Moby Dick with Dragons



And Danny Glover as a fantasy-world Ahab. I'm skeptically curious.

Doc Savage movie



I don't know enough about Doc Savage to be truly excited about this, but any pulp adventure movie set in the '30s is going to get my money.

Dean Koontz's Frankenstein on screen... again



It was meant to be a TV series (I reviewed the TV-movie/pilot a few years ago), but Koontz didn't like how it was going and pulled his name off it, choosing instead to co-author a series of novels. Now those novels are becoming at least one film. I never did get around to reading them, but I'm curious now to see how the new film version compares to the old one.

Monster in Paris



Unfortunately, they're not making a movie out of my and Jason Copland's Paris-set giant monster comic just yet, but there is an animated film in the works about "a shy movie projectionist and an inventor who team up with a cabaret star, an eccentric scientist and his monkey to save the city from a monster."

I miss John Hughes



I pulled out The Smiths' Louder than Bombs to listen to recently. That album always makes me think of John Hughes because he's the one who introduced me to it. After the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, I made a habit of getting the soundtracks to all his films, knowing that I'd find some amazing stuff on them. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" was on Pretty in Pink and Kirsty Macoll's cover of "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby" is on She's Having a Baby, but I also have Hughes to thank for Echo and the Bunnymen, Love and Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel, Kate Bush, Flesh for Lulu, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and of course Simple Minds. He's even responsible for my digging into Bowie's career any earlier than Let's Dance thanks to that quote at the beginning of The Breakfast Club.

By sheer coincidence, Vanity Fair ran a series of articles on Hughes about the same time I was listening to The Smiths. /Film has conveniently collected them, but my favorite part was learning that he never lost that love for new music. According to /Film's summary, "His iTunes library filled several hard drives, and he planned the playlists for his sons’ weddings as carefully as he had the soundtracks for his movies. In recent years, he took to dispensing pre-loaded iPods to people he liked, much as he’d assiduously compiled mix tapes for Ringwald and Broderick in the old days." There's a great story about the one he gave John Candy's son and how it was eventually used, but you should go read that one for yourself.