Hollywood Round-up, 7/21-22

By Jason Apuzzo. • Angelina Jolie showed up at Comic-Con yesterday, in black leather – and the audience nearly blew the roof off in approval.  She talked about her character in Salt. Money quote: “She’s an interesting, damaged type of person … She’s not just heroic, or even brave. There’s something a little off about her … and maybe there’s something a little off about me. Maybe it’s a good match.”  Um, right.  I’ll be talking more about this film tomorrow.  In the meantime, director Phillip Noyce does an interview about Salt with the Wall Street Journal today.  Plus check out related Cold War-themed buzz about the new Jack Ryan reboot, Moscow.

• Jolie hubby Brad Pitt will apparently be both producing and starring in World War Z, the adaptation of the blockbuster all-out-zombie-war novel.  I skimmed through this novel when it came out – it read fairly well, although it’s certainly nothing special.  My sense is that it will adapt well to the screen – unless the zombie genre is already dead, so to speak, by the time Pitt gets to it.

• There’s a deluge of news coming out of Comic-Con right now (see here).  Tron: Legacy has a big new trailer out, for example, and frankly I’m disappointed with it.  It looks incredibly trite – with the hackneyed, Baby-boomer inflected ‘search for the father’ theme dominating throughout.  Isn’t there any other story these guys can tell?  My enthusiasm for this film just dropped about 3 floors, although it’s not quite in the basement just yet.

• The rumor mill currently has The Riddler as the new villain for Batman 3, with the potential of Inception‘s Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the role.  How much do I care about this?  Actually very little because The Dark Knight bored me to tears.

• We’re now learning more about Captain America … and apparently the redoubtable Captain is no longer going to be a “flag waiver,” or “jingoistic” (thereby defeating the point?) … and now probably I’m “not going to see this film” and its creators have “just lost my business.”  And you can quote me on that.  Making a quick visit to Comic-Con, Captain America director Joe Johnston had this to say about his film, which is currently shooting in London: “[T]his is not about America so much as it is about the spirit of doing the right thing … It’s an international cast and an international story. It’s about what makes America great and what make the rest of the world great too.”  Does that include the Nazis, by the way, whom Captain America fights in Johnston’s film?  Are they ‘great’ too?

• In other Comic-Con news: Alien invasion flick Battle: Los Angeles is making a big splash (see here and here); Zack Snyder is moving forward on the script for Frank Miller’s Xerxes (we covered this project previously here); Karl Urban (Bones McCoy in Star Trek) may be tapped to play Judge Dredd in the long-developing Judge Dredd 3D reboot; Jennifer Lawrence talks about ‘prepping’ to play the sexy Mystique in X-Men: First Class; the Wonder Woman character will soon have her own Mac cosmetics line;  and Pixar is being consulted on Disney’s forthcoming reboot of the Muppets movie franchise.

• Natalie Portman and director Darren Aronofsky are set to open the Venice Film Festival with their new ballet thriller, The Black Swan, featuring Portman as a ballerina who has a steamy erotic relationship with a rival ballerina played by Book of Eli’s Mila Kunis.  And we certainly are a long way from Queen Amidala now, aren’t we?  [Side note: setting The Wrestler aside, has Aronofsky really done sufficient penance for The Fountain?]

• In the new wave of film projects being launched in the wake of the Twilight craze, we now have a post-apocalyptic teen girl novel, The Hunger Games, being adapted by the same screenwriter who’s writing the new 24 movie (which takes place Bourne-style in Europe, by the way).  Get ready to see a lot of this.  Teenage girls are the new teenage boys in Hollywood.

• The Islamist punk who was threatening the South Park guys has been arrested in an anti-terror sting, thank goodness.  What they should now do is lock the guy up and force him to watch South Park, which would actually be worse than waterboarding.

• Apparently inspired by Sex and the City, a British woman claims to have spent the past 10 years bedding a thousand different men. She’s now making her way through Law and Order DVDs, and plans to sue the men for harassment.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Katherine Heigl’s career rolls on, implacably, without a hit in sight. The sturdy blonde is now set to star in Adaline, billed as an “epic romance”; and she’ll also be playing a bounty hunter (?) in the forthcoming One for the Money. Adeline is described as being about “a beautiful woman who hasn’t aged in 100 years but hasn’t found love, either,” which sounds like about half the women in West LA.  Ph.D. dissertations will someday be written on how Heigl has blown her career, but in the meantime we wish her well on these increasingly Sisyphean projects.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 at 11:45pm.