Spike Jonez Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We reported a few months ago that Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (the geniuses who gave us Shaun of the Dead) were hard at work on Hot Fuzz, his follow up film. According to Pegg, Fuzz is "like a British Shane Black movie," in which he was set to star alongside Nick Frost (Shaun's Ed) as "mismatched cops who team up in a West Country backwater." Now, though, it sounds as if Pegg's statement may have been misunderstood by the press - Moviehole is reporting that, while he (and Frost, presumably) will indeed appear in the film, the lead roles will in fact be played by ex-Bond Timothy Dalton and Jim Broadbent. Sounds good to me - both men are incredibly talented, and it would be a treat to see Dalton doing clever comedy. The movie is set to begin filming soon, so hopefully we'll have some answers sooner than later.

Meanwhile, from another corner of the internet comes a rumor about Spike Jonze's eager-anticipated (or maybe that's just me) live-action Where the Wild Things Are adaptation: Better Than Fudge reports that Catherine Keener told Charlie Rose that she's been cast as Max's mother, and will be acting alongside puppets created by Jim Henson's studio. Again, promising news (at least the Henson part) - if it's true.

Everyone and their brother has been eagerly looking forward to the film version of Maurice Sendak's seminal children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, and the announcement that Spike Jonze would direct only kicked the frenzied anticipation into higher gear. Problems, however, arose, primary among them the fact that Universal (who owned the property) had some serious disagreement with Sendak about what Variety calls "the concept" of the movie.

Happily, however, at least that problem has been solved: in a display of class rarely seen in Profit, Profit, Profit! Hollywood, Universal agreed to let the film's producers shop the movie around - and it's now owned by Warner Brothers, who plan to get the it going later this year. Woo hoo! Just to refresh your collective memories about the project, the script has been co-written by Jonze and annoyingly-trendy-but-actually-brilliant novelist David Eggers, the movie will be CGI-aided live action, and Sendak has described himself as "in love with" what Jonze and Eggers have done so far. Did I mention "woo hoo"?