Sunday 24 February 2008

Weekly Ketchup: Wolverine gets more mutants.

From:
by Greg Dean Schmitz

WOLVERINE AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS
X-Men Origins: Wolverine lit up the movie news sites nearly every day this week, as a large ensemble cast was trickled out in dribbles and spurts. What we're left with a week later is a cast that looks more and more like the movie should be called Weapon X or even X-Men 4, as it includes nearly every character ever connected in the X-Comics in any way to Weapon Plus or the Weapon X program, and a few that weren't. Where to start? Well, first off, there is Danny Huston, who will be playing the younger version of Stryker (Brian Cox) from the second movie (keep in mind that in the comics, Stryker wasn't even involved with Weapon X). And then, there are the many, many Weapon X characters: Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber, replacing Tyler Mane with someone who is more "actor" than "wrestler/stuntman"), Silver Sable (Lynn Collins), John "Kestrel" Wraith (Will I. Am of the Black Eyed Peas) and Agent Zero (AKA Maverick) (Daniel Henney). Not part of Weapon X (traditionally) but also included in the cast are Gambit (Taylor Kitsch from TV's Friday Night Lights) and "Barnell" (Dominic Monaghan, who played Charlie on Lost, and also played a recurring midget in a few movies back in the early 2000s. I KEED.).

The confusing thing about Monaghan's character of "Barnell" is that the trades are saying that he has electricity powers, but the only Barnell in the Marvel universe is a mutant named Beak, who is a sad sack with the physical features of a bird (beak, chicken feet, feathers all over, the whole thing), without the expected ability to actually, you know, FLY. Beak is miserable and very sympathetic in a "zero to hero" way that Monaghan would be perfect for (let me admit right up front that Beak is one of my favorite new X-characters introduced in the last 10 years). So, why they're saying he's got a completely different M.O. is mildly bizarre. If they're going to fake us out, you have to wonder why they would bother using the "Barnell" name. And, oh, yeah, there are also rumors that an extra has been seen sporting a huge fat suit as The Blob.
With all these potential enemies (or team mates of a sort) being announced, Wolverine's biggest threat was also announced this week, in the form of the daughter of that "Achey Breaky Heart" guy, and the unstoppable juggernaut that is The Hannah Montana Movie. If her B.O. beats Wolverine's B.O. on the 5/1/09 weekend, it will be a sort of generational milestone, I suspect. I would give Hannah Montana her own story, but ummm... I don't really have much to say. I've seen commercials for the TV show, and it appears to be about a teenage girl who is secretly a Britney Spears type pop star. And it's very popular with girls who were born after I received my Masters Degree. Oh hey, look, I actually did write a paragraph about Hannah Montana. So... NEXT!

WOULD YOU RATHER BE REMEMBERED AS EBENEZER SCROOGE, OR FRASIER CRANE?
Comedy director David Zucker (whose filmography started with Airplane! and most recently includes Scary Movie 3 & Scary Movie 4) has set his particular style of movie satire on tackling the Christmas genre, apparently, with plans of doing a modernized, Americanized adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, called An American Carol. Kelsey Grammer starred in a TV version a few years back as Ebenezer Scrooge, and so he's been picked by Zucker to star in this version as well. I'm sort of reminded of how many times Patrick Stewart has played Scrooge (in a 1999 TV movie, and in several stage versions), and to this movie's detriment (before it's even made), of how great Stewart was as Scrooge. I'm pretty sure Patrick Stewart probably would not have signed on for Zucker's movie, so... yay for Frasier.

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