Matthew McConaughey Is Getting Into the Murder Business
Don't tell Sarah Palin, but he wants to murder a mom. Also: James Cameron is everywhere forever, he will never die. A song gets turned into a movie, later to be turned into a Broadway musical, probably. HBO is dead.
Loungey lothario Matthew McConaughey has signed on to star in a new movie called Killer Joe. So, let's see. Killer Joe. OK, uh Joe is a slick, laissez-faire corporate buccaneer who is contracted to underhandedly kill business deals for a living, but his whole worldview is turned upside down when he meets Delia Daniels, an idealistic social worker whose dad Joe is majorly screwing over by killing a deal. Will he change his ways? Will he let love into his heart? Will he grow up? Find out this March in Donald Petrie's Killer Joe. That's probably right. Oh, wait. What's that? Killer Joe is actually based on a dark comedy play by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy Letts and is about McConaughey being a hitman hired by a brother and sister to murder their mother for insurance money? Oh. Wow. OK. Good on you, Matthew. Thinking outside the box. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go pitch Killer Joe Jim to Paramount. [THR]
Here's good news. Remember Titantic? Titantic is a boat that died a million years ago and thirty years ago James Cameron made a movie called Titantic: The Explosion, starring Leonard Dick-Cap and Carly Winslow. It made thousands and thousands of dollars and everyone knew again what the Titantic boat was. But apparently they didn't know enough! Now the British, who built Titantic, will be making their own $15M miniseries about the ship's tragic ice murder for their British television networks (called "telly stations" in British). Isn't that great? We have not had enough Titantic in our lives at all. But now we'll get a whole miniseries's worth. Welllll, we will if we live in Englands. If you don't live in Englands or the Welsh, you shan't be watchin' that vessel be melted, shipmateys. Well, maybe on DVD video. That's possible. You know, it's too bad that there has never been a Titantic miniseries before. (Look at that cast! Famed authoress Harley Jane Kozak! The relatively unsinkable Marilu Henner as the definitely unsinkable Molly Brown!) So enjoy it, everyone, except you guys on the boat, 'cause uh oh. [Variety]
Remember James Cameron, from the paragraph above this one? Well, he's gone and decided to make a telly station series out of his hit documentary True Lies, about Valerie Plame and her kick-ass hubby, Scooter Libby-Plame. Yes, True Lies is going to become a TV show. They're planning on taking the secret spy series to the networks any day now. Good thing there have only been shows like Chuck and Alias and Undercovers and Covert Affairs and movies like Killers and Mr. & Mrs. Smith to fill the secret spies void since 1994. We haven't had nearly enough secret spies. One hopes for mostly one thing when one thinks of this series: Every episode will have a moment where, like in the movie, a character is told: "No. Dance sexy." Every single episode. Whether it be Judy Greer as the Jamie Lee Curtis part (probably, right?) or Tom Arnold as the Tom Arnold part (definitely), someone will be told to No, dance sexy. Which would be reason enough to watch. Plus: Shooting! And maybe a Tia Carrere cameo! Also it could be funny if now Eliza Dushku was cast as the wife after playing the daughter in the movie. [Deadline]
If Killer Joe didn't sound Elmore Leonardy enough to you, here's an actual Elmore Leonard movie in the works. William H. Macy has signed on to star in a film version of Leonard's novel Freaky Deaky, about bomb-loving '60s radicals turned money-loving '70s bombers and how they (do or do not!) get foiled by the law. Everyone here has read all of Elmore Leonard's books, right? Well, OK, you don't have to read the Westerns, but everything else, right? If not, please get the freak (and the deak) off the internet and go read them all. They are so fun and good! And, oddly, have a semi-decent success rate for movie adaptations. Sure you might get the occasional Killshot, but usually they come out OK. Plus, Macy! [Deadline]
Even though True Blood is supah-dupah popular and everyone loves how good and not boring its third season finale was (sarcasm alert), HBO has the lowest subscriber base it's had in four years. What is happening? Well, it's probably just the slow ebb from the giddy heyday when both Sex and the City and The Sopranos, the two main HBO megahits, were both on the air, at the same time. Now it's all lesser-watched stuff like Hung and Eastbound and Down. Basically Boardwalk Empire needs to be a smash or else HBO will be dead forever. Why bother not being sensationalist about this?? HBO NEAR DEATH, STEVE BUSCEMI NAMED NETWORK'S LAST HOPE. Pick up that headline, Showbiz Spy! [THR]
Here's more good news. Garth Brooks, a singer still wanted for questioning in the brutal 2001 murder of rock musician Chris Gaines, wrote a song once called "Unanswered Prayers", about a dude who runs into his "old high school flame" at a "hometown football game". Well now that song, a single song, is getting made into a Lifetime movie for women. It will star Without a Trace's Eric Close and former actress Samantha Mathis as the married couple, with Madchen Amick as the high school football flame. The only way I will watch this movie is if either the high school girlfriend is literally flaming and on fire, or if the movie devolves into a horror of psychosexual madness as the Garth Brooks character lies shrieking in an alleyway, holding a bloody shag wig and screaming into the night "Chris!!! Chris!!! I'm sorry!!!" [THR]