Peter Pan Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Almost one year ago, I fell head over heels for Annie Leibovitz's photographic recreations of famous, animated Disney scenes. She shot Scarlett Johansson as the running Cinderella, Beyonce Knowles as Alice in Wonderland, spinning around in teacups that came from Disney World, and David Beckham as the Prince who fights off Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. Now the next set of images have hit the net. They are housed over at The Disney Blog, and I'm still swooning.

I think that what I like most about these images is that they're awesome even if I don't particularly care for the people in them. Leibovitz knows how to capture the essence of each scene, and it makes me wonder just how stunning a carefully-plotted, full-length feature would look. (D*mn good, but long to do, and expensive to boot!) This time around, we've got the above, which features Mikhail Baryshnikov as Peter Pan with Gisele Bundchen as Wendy Darling and a teeny Tina Fey as Tinker Bell. But there's also images with Jessica Biel as Pocahontas, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony taking a magic carpet ride in Aladdin, and one more from that film, which looks split from the first, that has Whoopi Goldberg as the Genie.

As an added bonus, TDB also has a bunch of behind-the-scenes pics, which help you see how these great images came to be.

Avast readarrs! Today be Septembarr 19th -- Talk Like a Pirate Day, where land lubbers lounge with arrsome pirate lingo without pillaging saucy wenches, donning patches, or walking the plank. Ye might ARR the day away, or watch yeself some Petarr Sarrsgarrd. But maybe ye like to pull out the bung, drink up ye Grog, and fire up the VCARR. If ye do, here be a treasure chest of movie booty and pirate kings. Godspeed!

Sorry, this is as far as my pirate-speak goes!

The Pirate King -- The Pirates of Penzance (1983)

In 1980 New York City theater producer Joseph Papp fired up The Pirates of Penzance for his Public Theater, with a young Kevin Kline cast as the Pirate King. It was so successful that the cast brought it to Broadway, and then onto the big screen with almost everyone reprising their roles (Angela Landsbury was the lone change). Kline swaggered, swung his sword, and wrapped his tongue around 'often' and 'orphans,' because -- he is the Pirate King, Taran-tara, Taran-tara, and it is, it is a glorious thing to be a Pirate King!

Maybe it's because they look like they swam with dinosaurs, or maybe it's because they can be found in so many places throughout the world (Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia), but it seems like everybody's got a crocodile story to tell. Whether it's the crocodile that bit off Captain Hook's hand (Peter Pan), the crocodile backs that James Bond runs across (Live and Let Die) or the giant Asian croc that mysteriously made its way to Maine (Lake Placid), nobody can resist the water-dwelling reptiles. Very helpfully, MJ Simpson has assembled "The Complete Killer Crocodile Filmography," which includes many strange and wonderful-sounding international titles.

Simpson's list includes a half-dozen for 2007, which sounds like five too many. Set in South Africa, Primeval was first out of the gate. It was advertised as "Inspired by the true story of the most prolific serial killer in history," but Scott called it an "amazing three-headed undercooked movie" with "outrageously underwhelming CGI effects." The Australian picture Black Water is also said to be based on true events, but shouldn't have any problems with underwhelming CGI: the filmmakers say they "went to the north of Australia and braved the waters with real live saltwater crocodiles." Their web site includes footage of crocs thrashing about and gnawing on their cameras, and the trailer looks very promising: a man, his wife and his sister-in-law are stranded in a mangrove swamp surrounded by crocodiles when their boat is overturned and their guide goes missing. Sounds like the Open Water formula, but if the filmmakers can deliver 90 minutes of simmering tension, I'd watch it in a skipped heartbeat. Plans are to release it in Australia in November; Grindstone Entertainment Group claimed North American rights, but since they're a direct-to-DVD label (as noted by Ryan), evidently Black Water will be sadly denied exposure on American cinema screens.

[Via Inside Film Magazine]

I haven't read Peter Pan in Scarlet, the recently published book that was an officially-commissioned sequel to J.M. Barrie's classic children's novel Peter Pan. The Peter Pan sequel was written not by Barrie, but by author Geraldine McCaughrean. Apparently Peter Pan in Scarlet takes place when Wendy and the Lost Boys are all grown up and learn that Neverland has been damaged by WWI. To save it, they have to find a way to become children again, since adults are generally disallowed in Neverland. I can't tell from the summaries whether the book is meant to appeal more to adults or to children.

I admit I have a built-in distrust of sequels that are not written by the original author -- I won't go anywhere near the "sequels" to Rebecca, Gone with the Wind, or The Secret Garden. It's a trend I would very much like to see fade away. However, Peter Pan in Scarlet has obviously gathered some popularity, as the film and television rights have just been sold ... and no, not to Disney, either, or any American studio for that matter. The rights to film the book were bought by a group that includes the U.K. Film Council, a government organization that encourages filmmaking in Britain, BBC Films, and the Headline Pictures production company. There's no word on whether the final result will be a theatrical release or a made-for-British-TV movie, although I would guess that the potential box office on a family film about Peter Pan would indicate the former. I would also guess that the feature will be live-action rather than animated, considering the groups involved. If you've read Peter Pan in Scarlet, do you think it would make a good movie, and why (or why not)?

Last fall Disney unveiled a line of merchandise called Fairies, which follows the company's successful Princesses franchise. As part of the series of products and licensing deals, Disney will release straight-to-video animated films featuring Tinker Bell (since when is her name two words?), the tiny pixie duster from Peter Pan, and her fairy friends. As if J.M. Barrie isn't rolling around in his grave enough after the video sequel Return to Neverland or from the fact that Disney has created a clique of friends for Tink (unlike with the Princesses line, Disney doesn't already have a bunch of fairy characters to mine from), Disney is further ruining the playwright's iconic characters by having Tinker Bell speak. And providing her voice is Brittany Murphy.

Maybe some people are okay with a talking Tink, but if I'm not one of them. If I remember correctly, a lot of the plot points in Peter Pan have to do with her inability to communicate by any other means than pantomime. Maybe she just is so small that her voice doesn't  project to humans, and she can speak perfectly with other fairies, but it still ruins part of her character to hear her voice, especially if it is the same as Murphy's voice.  What next? Pooh loses weight? Donald buys pants? Oh, I know! Make another Bambi sequel that claims Bambi's mother wasn't actually killed by the hunters.

 

• Bee Season - Richard Gere as a rough-boy sailor in An Officer and a Gentleman? OK. Richard Gere as a singing and dancing attorney in Chicago? Convincing enough. Richard Gere as a Jewish husband (of Juliette Binoche) and father exploring the mysteries of God through the flawless spelling of his daughter? Oy. Many parts of this existential drama about the ways in which a brilliant 11-year-old (Flora Cross) affects her family are sketchy, as no one of the characters is well-drawn enough for us to care about them too much. Genius was captured far better in films like Little Man Tate and Searching For Bobby Fischer.
 

We all love to talk about how Hollywood never has any new ideas, and the folks there rarely do anything to change our minds, churning out crappy sequel after crappy sequel, and endlessly remaking and tweaking old ideas. Among those poor, abused old ideas is that of a little, green-clad boy named Peter Pan. From a silent adaptation in 1924 to the retina-scarring image of a fully-Naired Robin Williams as a grown-up Peter in Hook; from the 1950s cartoon version to Johnny Depp's J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland, Hollywood just cannot get enough of that flying kid. And now, just in case you were worried a whole three years might pass without another Peter Pan flick, New Line has bought a pitch that approaches the story from a rather promising horror angle.

Blandly-but-cleverly entitled Pan, first-time writer Ben Magid's pitch has a supernatural twist, and depicts Peter as "a villain tracked by police captain named Hook"; New Line paid for the pitch and then set the film up to be developed through the recently-founded Energy Entertainment management group. Because I'm a whore for dark detective stories, I think this approach has a ton of potential. The more rational among you, however, will probably say that it's going to be a crappy, gimmicky mess with a throwaway story that probably won't be able to sustain 90 minutes of film. Sigh. Dammit, why can't you just let me dream for a few minutes?