Thursday News Roundup: Straczynski, Goss, Ronin
Daniel Swensen
A few choice bits from around the Internets.
The DVD Babylon 5: Lost Tales is now available for pre-order at Amazon, which fills me with a mixture of anticipation and dread so heady it can barely be described. On one hand, more Babylon 5! On the other hand, the last thing we saw from Babylon 5 was Legend of the Rangers, an incredibly unfortunate outing that nearly made me hate the franchise retroactively. Despite the alarming presence of Tracy Scoggins, I remain stalwartly optimistic about this. The plot, according to questionable Internet palimpsest Wikipedia, goes thus:
Voices in the Dark will be set in 2272. It will feature two linked plotlines viewed separately one after the other but covering the same 72-hour timespan: the first follows ISA President John Sheridan on his way to B5 for a celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the formation of the Interstellar Alliance. During the journey he unexpectedly picks up the Centauri Prince Regent Vintari (third in line to the Centauri Imperial throne) on the edge of Centauri space, and receives a warning from Galen the techno-mage about coming events. The second will feature Colonel (formerly Captain during the series’ run) Lochley on B5 awaiting Sheridan’s arrival, who summons a priest from Earth space to help deal with a mysterious, seemingly supernatural problem.
Yeah, okay. Still encouraged. At least the movie isn’t about Tracy Scoggins… I mean, Captain… I mean Colonel Lochley. Man, it’s not even out yet and I already can’t keep up. If successful, Lost Tales will continue with a second installment, which will feature Michael Garibaldi… now that, I really can’t wait for. Anyway, the DVD comes out on July 31.
Also in the news: Luke Goss, best known as swaggering villain Nomak in the marvelous Blade II, will be appearing in another Del Toro offering, namely Hellboy II:
Luke Goss is rejoining director Guillermo del Toro for Universal Pictures’ Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The movie reunites the first movie’s principals—Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz Sherman and both David Hyde Pierce and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien—for a supernatural action-adventure that sees the world of myth rebelling against humanity, the trade paper reported.
Goss will play Prince Nuada, a ruthless leader who treads the world above and the one below, defying his bloodline to awaken an unstoppable army of creatures. Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola wrote the script. Filming is scheduled to begin in June in Budapest for an Aug. 1, 2008, release.
Goss previously worked with del Toro on Blade II, in which he played the villainous vampire Nomak.
I can only hope that Goss will play some sort of swaggering badass. He swaggers so very, very well. It would be a shame to waste his swaggery talent.
Finally, also according to Sci Fi Wire, Frank Miller’s sci-fi epic Ronin may be coming to the big screen. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve literally been waiting twenty years to see this. I read Ronin just out of high school, and waited breathlessly for the day when it would be made into a movie. I even had a very histrionic false start when someone had told me that there was a movie coming out named Ronin, and that it starred Robert De Niro. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I found out it was just a John Frankenheimer movie about gunning down ice skaters.
Also, look for a new Twelve Days of Dimfuture later today if all goes well!
May 10th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Do you think a Ronin movie will keep the ending? ‘Cause it’s, you know, weird. On the other hand, the Frank Miller movies so far have been slavishly loyal to their source material. And yay Frank Miller and all, but how the hell does he rate?
May 10th, 2007 at 11:45 am
On one hand, it seems like Hollywood has finally started refraining from fucking up the endings of the things they adapt. On the other hand, I’m not so sure Ronin’s original ending couldn’t use a little tweaking. I’m going to put my money on them changing it, but, despite my enthusiasm for the project, I don’t think that’d be an entirely bad thing.
May 10th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I need to read [i]Ronin[/i]. It’s getting a bump to the top of the ole list. Also yay to the continuing usage of green screen. Pulling these kinds of fantasy action movies in with a less than 100 million dollar budget = greater chance of them being profitable = greater chance of more source material being adapted into movies = (hopefully) years of interesting movies to come. Yeah, so the 300 wasn’t what I’d call stellar, but it was still engaging enough to be worth the price of the ticket.
May 10th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I feel like a putz for using UBB code.
Anyhow, Sylvain White doesn’t exactly fill the mind with uncanny wonders at his directorial competence, but he can’t be worse than Brett Ratner, am I right?
May 10th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
I’ve used BBCode myself. Lucky me, I can edit my own gaffes! It’s good to be the king!
And I can’t imagine ANYTHING being worse than Brett Ratner.
May 11th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Uwe Boll?
May 11th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Oh man. You just gotta make my life hard…
May 11th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Seriously though, I wonder how well Ronin will play. I first read it about six or seven years ago and though I enjoyed it quite a bit, it reminded me, in the backwards way that discovering old works can, of a much more recent film: The Matrix. Not that I think Joel Siegel’s gonna bust on this film, mustache quivering, chin covered in frothy spittle, eyes slitted in rage, shouting with every ounce of testosterone his aged, proto-Captain Kangaroo body can muster, “This is just The Matrix with swords!”
I know it’s juvenile of me, but I hope one day I can have a mature, appropriately-budgeted theatrical movie adaptation of a comic book that’s animated. It would take so much work to create motion with Miller’s early 80s artwork, but I definitely think it would be well worth it.