hip hop Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Hollywood isn't Hollywood without a competing project. We've had competing projects about asteroids, ants, and volcanoes and now? Now it's the Easter Bunny, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Ignoring the fact that a lot of people don't celebrate Easter, two studios are racing to get bunny-themed projects into theaters. Sony Animation is going with Hip Hop, a mix of CGI and live-action that's being penned by Greg Ostrin and Michael Weiss. Sony's Easter Bunny gets tired of delivering eggs and chocolate with so little thanks, and decides to retire. He becomes a suburban family's pet, and turns their lives upside down. Given the title, I have to wonder if he will somehow become a "hip hop" star?

Meanwhile, Universal's shingle Illumination Entertainment has picked up I Hop as its debut live action film. Written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, this Easter flick borrows a page out of The Santa Clause (whose sequel Paul penned), where the Easter Bunny is hit by a slacker's car. Thankfully, animal death isn't as family friendly as killing Santa, so the Easter Bunny only suffers a broken leg. But he's unable to do his job, so the slacker must do it for him, and save Easter. (No egg hunts? No Cadbury chocolate? That's the collapse of civilization as we know it!)

In the meantime if you screenwriters hurry, you should get your your pre-Christian fertility cults scripts done and purchased in time for the next trend ... paganism!

I'm sure that if Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur were still alive today, they would have loved to brag over which one got their life story on the big screen first. Tupac wins if you count the doc in 2003, though Notorious made Biggie the first to receive a biopic -- so I'm not sure who wins, exactly. Nevertheless, Tupac's family wants a biopic now and The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Shakur's mother, Afeni Shakur, and her production company, Amaru Entertainment, are suing Morgan's Creek Entertainment over their deal for a biopic of the murdered rapper, leaving the hip-hop flick in legal limbo.

There have been rumblings regarding a film for almost a year now, and with the success of the B.I.G. flick, Notorious, it would seem to be the perfect time for Shakur. But Morgan's Creek's deal first started going south when they filed a lawsuit "claiming that Amaru, which controls the Tupac estate, backed out of a done deal to sell life rights for a biopic about the slain rapper-actor." Now Amaru is countersuing, and according to their complaint, "Morgan Creek allegedly was one of several suitors for the project, including Paramount, Fox Searchlight, Kennedy/Marshall and Brett Ratner's Rat Entertainment. The cross-complaint says key details of a deal, including an executive producer credit and backend participation for Afeni Shakur, were not worked out with Morgan's Creek and that she hadn't even seen the proposed contract."

Picture this: the year is 1985; a little girl is in her pajamas and seated in front of the TV entranced by the awesomeness that is Krush Groove. I've listened to a lot of music over the years, but I always came back to hip-hop. Come to think of it, I've listened to it, read about it -- heck, I've even watched every junky documentary that came my way. Not to mention that, to this day, when I hear It's Tricky, I make sure the volume is maxed out. So you would think that a Run DMC biopic would be good news, right? I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but I'm not keeping my fingers crossed, and here's why: The Hollywood Reporter announced that Notorious screenwriter, Cheo Hodari Coker, has signed to adapt Bill Adler's (the group's former publicist), Tougher Than Leather: The Rise of Run-DMC -- The Authorized Biography.

So what has me so worried? Well, if Coker managed to gloss over one of the biggest mysteries in pop music history, just what exactly does he have planned for Run DMC? But that's not all: an even bigger problem is that the film has yet to receive an 'all clear' from any of its subjects (Run, DMC or Russell Simmons). But of course that might have a lot to do with a competing biopic that Simmons and Reverend Run were shopping around last year.

In a few months, English professors across the world are going to be saying "Dear God, Jane Austen is rolling in her grave!" or "Thank heavens, Clueless is just too outdated to get the young kids reading."

Variety reports that Screen Gems is planning a hip-hop musical re-imagining of Jane Austen's classic novel, Emma, from a screenplay by Tyger Williams. Chris Bender and J.C. Spink will be producing via their Benderspink shingle. Screen Gems head Clint Culpepper says he got the idea from watching Lil Mama's Lipgloss music video. Retitled Emme, It will take place in, surprise, an inner-city high school and will revolve around a stepbrother and sister. There will be 15 song and dance numbers.

Give a man an outlet for expression and you feed his inspiration for a day. Teach a man to express himself and you feed his inspiration for a lifetime.

In the powerful and, if we're lucky, influential documentary Word.Life, a young man named Chris Rolle, aka Kazi, mentors a group of teens in a program called The Hip Hop Project (HHP), a division of New York organization Art Start. Initially attracted by the promise of recording an album they think will be immediately produced, the young hip hop hopefuls end up in the program four years, during which time they learn to develop their lyrics through personal experience and identification. A girl named Princess writes about the abortion she had when she was younger. Cannon, who watches his mother die of multiple sclerosis during the making of the film, turns his heartache into song.

Well, at least they're not asking Limp Bizkit to do it again.

The Chicago rapper has been picked to pen yet another updated version of the classic TV theme for the third installment of the series. Apparently, director J.J. Abrams wants this new film to be "familiar, but absolutely brand new" and thinks Kanye is just the man to handle the task of re-interpreting the main theme. As long as Abrams is trying to make the movie "familiar, but absolutely brand new" he should also try making it "lengthy, but brief" and "riveting, but dismissible."

Patrick Swayze is going around telling hip hop magazines that he wants to be a rapper.

(Should I just let that one sink in?)

Yup, it's true. Swayze, you'll remember, was the biggest star in the world in 1987, when the surprise smash success of Dirty Dancing turned She's Like the Wind, a little slice of Swayze from the film's soundtrack, into a huge hit. 19 years later, he's apparently trying to relive that glory by recording a rap single. He told allhiphop.com [via Page Six, who are leading this morning with the headline, "Is Patrick Swayze Crazy?") that he's got a song in the theoretical works that will prove "rap rhythms [are] an emotional undercurrent for ballads."  But don't hold your breath, Swayze fanatics – the sometime star says he doesn't yet have a "timeline" for the no-doubt revolutionary single's release.