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| Nicolas Cage |
December 2009
Movie Entertainment
Jim Slotek
TALL ORDER
And it is written, the tall shall play short, and the short shall play tall.
A few issues back, we noted the casting of 6’4” Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) as a CGI-shrunk Lilliputian opposite Jack Black in Gulliver’s Travels. The Judd Apatow rep-company player called it the only time he’s ever been shorter than a movie’s star.
Now comes the reverse. Next month, Willem Dafoe – 5’7” according to celebheights.com (and that’s in heels, if you ask me) – is scheduled to start filming John Carter of Mars, the long-awaited big-budget movie of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series of pulp novels.
Dafoe plays nine-foot-tall Tars Tarkas opposite Friday Night Lights’ Taylor Kitsch as Carter. “The height is definitely part of it,” Dafoe says with a laugh about his reasons for taking the role. “He’s the lead martian warrior, basically. At this point I’m not sure how they’re doing it – a combination of FX and prosthetics and stuff.”
“I worked with (director) Anthony Stanton before – I did a voice on Finding Nemo – and I’ve seen the sketches and it’s fantastic. He’s incredible and I’m just very excited.”
NIC OF TIME
His noir turn in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant remake notwithstanding, Nicolas Cage is going all “family man” on us.
“It’s going to be an interesting year for me, 2010,” says Cage, who’s releasing no fewer than three movies next year, with two of them – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Season of the Witch – being PG or milder. “The beauty of these movies is I don’t have to gratuitously, violently kill people. I can entertain and not have to be shooting them in the face or chopping their hands off.”
“Sorceror’s Apprentice is in the grand Disney tradition of, y’know, big magic and enchantment and adventure for the whole family. And in Season of the Witch, I play a 14th-century Teutonic knight who’s transporting a so-called witch across the Austrian alps for exorcism. And that’s in keeping with what we’ve been talking about as well.”
And then there’s Matthew Vaughn’s cartoonish Kick-Ass, “where I play a father who raises his daughter to be an assassin.” But hey, there’s a family values angle there too!
CANDELABRA IN THE WIND
Some of you thought we were joking when we reported Michael Douglas was in talks to play the late flamboyant pianist Liberace. But filming is set to go as you read this, with Steven Soderbergh directing and Matt Damon as Scott Thorsen, the boyfriend who infamously sued Liberace for palimony.
GET OUT THE ADVIL
Among films being remade or sequelized in 3-D are: Spy Kids 4, Halloween III, Tron Legacy, The Smurfs, Hellraiser and Scanners. Hey, if Hollywood has the technology to make pieces of brain fly right at you, you know they’re going to use it.
SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN
Here’s the definition of “not working.” Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox-Arquette and David Arquette are all signed, sealed and delivered for, ahem, Scream 4, which begins filming in the spring. And when we hear that David Cronenberg is in talks with Fox to make a remake of his own remake of The Fly, we start to think that, just maybe, Groundhog Day was a documentary.