Little White Lies - Star Trek Feature

BROKEN EMBRACES

DIRECTED BY Pedro Almodóvar ETA August 2009 The ingredients FOOTAGE may be familiar, but Almodóvar’s latest offering is looking extremely enticing: Penélope Cruz, Spanish passion and a mournful air of mystery. The new trailer is filled with some brilliantly striking colours too; we can’t wait to see a bit more.

FOOTLOOSE DIRECTED BY Kenny Ortega ETA April 2010

Bad news for Zac Efron fans: he’s just bailed on playing the Kevin Bacon role in Disney’s forthcoming Footloose remake. Worse news for the rest of us: the project is still likely to go on without him.

CASTING

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS DIRECTED BY Quentin Tarantino ETA August 2009

Basterds’ trailer suggests a film every bit as nasty as you might expect from Tarantino doing The Dirty Dozen, but after the lukewarm reception to Death Proof, we’d say he has quite a bit to prove.

FOOTAGE

TRUE GRIT DIRECTED BY Joel Coen, Ethan Coen ETA TBC

Given the provenance of this story, take it with a pinch of salt, but Joel Coen recently told The Daily Mail that he and Ethan are planning to remake the John Wayne classic True Grit, sticking closer to Charles Portis’ 1968 source novel.

NEWS

UNTITLED JOAQUIN PHOENIX DOCUMENTARY DIRECTED BY Casey Affleck ETA 2010

Everyone wants to know if Joaquin Phoenix is pulling some form of elaborate stunt or if he’s just gone nuts. Following the actor’s bizarrely vacant appearance on Letterman in February, many people seem to be favouring the latter opinion.

Affleck’s documentary is currently in production, so hopefully we’ll discover the truth next year.

NEWS

BIUTIFUL

DIRECTED BY Alejandro González Iñárritu ETA December 2009 Javier Bardem halted work for a week after injuring his spine during the filming of Iñárritu’s latest.

He plays a drug dealer who runs into conflict with a cop who also happens to be an old childhood friend.

NEWS

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE UNDEAD DIRECTED BY Jordan Galland ETA Late 2009

In which a layabout lothario is persuaded to direct a production of Hamlet, only to find himself embroiled in a strange conspiracy involving sexedup vampires and the Holy Grail.

It sounds extremely odd, but it’s bound to be better than Lesbian Vampire Killers.

WTF?!

FILM IS A FICKLE BUSINESS, SO HERE WE SALUTE THE MOVIES THAT NEVER QUITE MADE IT. THIS ISSUE, JAMES WRIGHT LOOKS AT STAR TREK: THE BEGINNING. “It’s a fact, sure as day follows night, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as every oddnumbered Star Trek movie is shit.” Simon Pegg, Spaced There’s a lot riding on JJ Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise, not least the hopes and dreams of millions of dedicated fans. But even before Abrams’ welcome involvement, there was light at the end of the wormhole for long-suffering Trekkers. Four years ago, Erik Jendresen’s script offered them the sort of solution that they’d been awaiting for decades.

Riding high on the success of Band of Brothers, Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter Jendresen was commissioned to revive Star Trek’s fortunes after the abysmal tenth feature, Nemesis, in 2002. What he turned in was 121 pages of radical changes to the Trek universe, tentatively titled Star Trek: The Beginning. Not only did Jendresen effectively throw out the Star Fleet manual, he also ditched any previously seen central characters.

Jendresen described recent Trek films as “just another crew in jeopardy where the captain does something brilliant in the end.” He wanted to avoid this structure, as well as the tedious time travel get-out clause that many of the films had fallen back on. Instead, he opted for a complete overhaul, taking the film in a sinister direction and moving far away from Star Trek’s traditional sterile look.

Taking place after the events of prequel show Enterprise but before the original Star Trek series, the script portrayed the human-Romulan war, commonly depicted as a major interstellar conflict of atomic nature.

This choice led one commentator to describe the script as ‘a classic war story set in the Star Trek universe’. The film would have seen a whole new narrative without the typical captain and crew, instead focussing on a band of rebels acting against Starfleet’s commands. They were to be lead by Tiberius Chase, progenitor of a certain James Tiberius Kirk.

Despite the rather tantalising glimpse of what Star Trek could have been, the introduction of a new studio president at Paramount saw the project scrapped in favour of Abrams’, and a reboot of an earlier script entitled Star Trek: The Academy Years – a title that for many fans treads uncomfortably close to Police Academy.

It’s impossible to say if Jendresen’s sweeping changes would have been successful with its legions of Klingon-speaking followers, but based on films such as Starship Troopers, Serenity and even The Dark Knight – all of which embraced a darker and more nihilistic approach to their source material – there’s every reason to believe that The Beginning could have been the start of something great. As things stand, Abrams’ vision is now the final frontier.

Chances of boldly being resurrected: As likely as the warp drive neutralising the magnetospheric collar. That’s very unlikely, in case you don’t speak Trek.

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