Despite what you might have heard, not every release out of Hollywood has to have a numeral in its title or a comic book fan base. This week saw news of a number of interesting new premises for movies. The one that probably takes the cake in terms of quaintness is A Late Quartet. Variety reports this week that Ethan Hawke has joined the cast and describes the premise of this movie as follows:
The story centers on a quartet whose members have performed together for 25 years and have to adjust to one of them retiring due to Parkinson’s disease.Hawke will portray the second violinist whose desire for more solos leads him to have an affair with his jogging partner, leaving him remorseful and saddened by the state of his marriage.
Going in the complete opposite direction to find original ideas is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, based on Seth Grahame-Smith‘s follow-up to his mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (that was in the news last week). It is a retelling of Lincoln’s life story that unveils his real passion: the brutal elimination of all vampires. Grahame-Smith has written a screenplay and it was reported by Empire this week that Timur Bekmambetov is set to start shooting it this winter.
On the high-concept sci-fi front we have I’m.mortal, from Gattaca writer/director Andrew Niccol. The film is about a society in which your aging gene turns off at the age of 25, after which you must buy and bank time. If you are rich enough, you can live forever. But if you run out of time, you are engineered to die automatically. MTV has some casting news about the film this week and /Film worries that it may not be so high-concept after all with a premise and leads (Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake) that could be very much directed at a twenty-something crowd.
Staying with sci-fi, we also have Gravity by writer/director Alfonso Cuaron, which looks like a Cast Away in space: after a mishap while repairing the Hubble telescope, an astronaut must fight her way back to Earth. It cannot be very original if you can use another movie to summarize the plot, so let’s assume I am not doing Alfonso Cuaron (and his son Jonas, who co-wrote the script) justice. THR reports that the female lead is currently being fought over. By the way, Danny Boyle’s eagerly awaited 127 Hours has a similar premise (replace “outer space” with “isolated canyon in Utah”). /Film has the details about that film’s premiere dates (just weeks away).
Then there is a premise that is not so much intriguing as it is misguided: Battleship. Universal is apparently going to spend $200 million to base a movie on the game where you try to sink your opponent’s fleet by guessing how they have arranged their ships. While you let that sink in (pun not intended), I can add that it stars Rihanna in her first feature acting role. Apparently the concept that is taken from the game is that of a naval battle where opponents cannot see who they are attacking. Aliens are thrown in the mix to make it interesting. JoBlo reports that the plug was almost pulled on this project but that filming will actually start in a week or two. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess on set of One Day
Last but not least, I finished David Nicholls’ One Day this weekend. A wonderful book that I highly recommend (read John O’Connell’s excellent review in The Times) with quite an intriguing premise of its own: Emma and Dexter have a college fling on July 15, 1988 and we revisit them every year on that same date over the next twenty years. I was happy to see that the adaptation (Nicholl’s own screenplay) is already shooting, under the direction of Lone Sherfig. Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess star as Emma and Dexter (not so sure about the former, but I’ll keep an open mind). Just Jared has some on set photos of the shoot in Edinburgh. The scene looks like the book’s coda, where Emma meets Dexter’s parents for the first time. A late 2011 release is expected for this one.
Cheat Cut 