Upcoming movies

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Searching the IMDB, after seeing Pirates, for more info about various people, I came across two interesting upcoming movies:

First, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, apparently a film based on one of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, featuring Russell Crowe as Aubrey, directed by Peter Weir (Truman Show, Dead Poets Society, Witness, etc). I haven't read any of the books, but I keep hearing them recommended, and I imagine a lot of folks will be happy to hear about the movie (if it's done well).

Second, and more likely that I'll see it: The Remains of the Piano. Get this: Eric Idle is directing a spoof of the Merchant/Ivory movies, featuring Geoffrey Rush as "Hopkins, the aristocrat" (as in Anthony Hopkins, presumably), Anjelica Huston as Countess Von Kunst, Alfred Molina as Mussolini, Billy Connolly as Inspector MacGuffin, Neve Campbell as Helen, Tim Curry as Reverend Whoopsie, Julian Sands as Charles, Robin Williams in a thus-far-unnamed role, and my favorites:

Orlando Bloom as Daniel Day Lewis (isn't that an inspired bit of casting?), and

Patrick Stewart as Obie Ben Kingsley.

I suspect that it's going to be very silly and a great deal of fun. We'll see.

6 Responses to “Upcoming movies”

  1. Jeff H.

    Orlando Bloom seems to be gone from the listings for The Remains of the Piano and there’s some stuff at the bottom indicating that he opted out. Pity about that, but the movie does look like it has the potential to be extremely amusing.

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  2. Jed

    Weird—that change in the IMDB must have just been made in the last 20 hours, maybe the last 10. He was listed as being in the cast last night and (unless the page was cached in my browser) this morning, but you’re right that now he’s gone.

    Ah, well. Hope the rest of the casting is accurate.

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  3. Jay Lake

    Must read Aubrey/Maturin books…must read them now…

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  4. Jacob

    I have read most of the Aubrey/Maturin books. I would say: 1) Read them, they are terrific, and 2) don’t start them if you have something important that you should be doing in the next couple of months. There are a lot and they are addictive.

    I’ll certainly be interested to see the movie, but I don’t have super high hopes, because what I love about the books is the contrast between the extroverted, talented but never self-aware Aubrey and the brilliant, neurotic, compulsively analytical Maturin. Not sure how you’d make that work on the screen — I would expect it to lean more towards Aubrey in focus, which will be fine, but less interesting than the books.

    The Eric Idle movie looks like a riot. Did anyone see Stiff Upper Lips, which was billed as a Merchant/Ivory spoof? I never did.

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  5. Jay Lake

    Ditto Jacob on reading the O’Briens. I’m not confident in the movie because the books achieve an almost freakish level of detail, part of what makes them such a pleasure to read, that would be difficult to capture in a film.

    Sigh.

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  6. Jed

    Heh. Just got automated link-exchange spam from a horror website telling me that this page is useful to their site’s visitors, so they’ve linked to it from their upcoming-movies page. If that were true (the site appears to be down or nonexistent), I imagine many horror fans would be sadly disappointed to come to this page and find a five-year-old blog entry mentioning two non-horror movies.

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