The Week In Geek: Hunger Games, Dredd, Expendables 2
The stories that have been getting us hot under the collar this week.
For the second week running, we’ve been gifted another still from The Hunger Games by Entertainment Weekly. This depicts the opening ceremonies of the games, with Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson preparing their outfits with Lennie Kravitz’s Cinna. It’s not a particularly exciting shot, to be honest, and we are hoping that this film can dish up some serious blood and guts in return for making us look at endless pictures of the protagonists doing not very much at all.
Judge Dredd creator John Wagner has waded in, with this interview taking in his stance on the Stallone version of his character (he wasn’t a fan) as opposed to the new version, Dredd, opening later this year with Karl Urban in the lead. The pick of the bunch was this quote concerning the reboot; “The plot is about Dredd and his world. It’s impossible to cover every aspect of the character and his city – perhaps that was one of the failings of the first film; they tried to do too much and ended up with not a lot. Dredd homes in on the essential job of judging – instant justice in a violent future city. I like the actors, they’re well cast and they handled their parts well. Olivia Thirlby is perfect as Anderson, the young psi judge. She gives the character a touching vulnerability. Karl Urban will not remove his helmet and will not kiss his costar.” Dredd fan rejoice! It seems like we’re finally getting a film to do justice (no pun intended) to the source material. We’re also glad to hear that Thirlby’s performance was well-received, as we were beginning to worry about what her involvement with The Darkest Hour would do for the sparky young actress.
Some cool news on the comic adaptation front, as Platinum Studios are looking to bring Atlantis Rising to the big screen. The five-part story of the undersea kingdom’s conflict with the upper world is huge in scope, and with the personnel behind 300 and The Immortals on board, we think we know what to expect with this one.
We never thought we’d say this, but we aren’t very happy with Chuck Norris. The cult star has reportedly been instrumental in ruining our chances of enjoying The Expendables 2 by insisting that it be a PG-13 if he is to appear in it. As much as we love Chuck Norris (please don’t hit us Chuck), we can’t help thinking that Stallone would have been better off ditching the 80’s star in favour of maintaining the edge that an R rating would have brought. The Expendables is supposed to be the antithesis of sterile, boring PG-13 action movies, and with this news we have gone right off the project we previously looked forward to with rabid excitement.
Lastly, Ben Wheatley, director of the awesome Kill List (and all around top bloke – check out our interview here) has spilled the beans on his new project, Freakshift. A horror project which the director says is similar in tone to the work of Paul Verhoeven – Robocop style satire combined with a filmmaker who is real hot property right now sounds like a good combo to us, and the films’ premise sounds incredible; “It's got that interplay and banter and emotional stuff that’s done so brilliantly in Hill Street Blues. And it involves the teams of people and the professionalism and all those things that are great about cop shows, but with monsters and lots of genre-action. It’s also a mix of my favourite video-games. Doom especially, which is why I’ve got our leads running around with pump-action shotguns – which they use copiously.” Brilliant.
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