napoleon Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Al Pacino's Next Iconic Role: Napoleon!
Filed under: Casting », Family Films »
Napoleon seems to be all the rage these days, conquering his way to the big screen. But rather than have dueling pictures for the same audience, we've got one adult romance and one child's tale coming our way. The first is Napoleon and Betsy, a historical romance that grabbed Emma Watson last year. To add to the French flavor, we're now getting an adaptation of Staton Rabin's children's book, Betsy and the Emperor, and The Hollywood Reporter posts that Al Pacino has signed on to play the infamous Frenchman.While the first project takes some liberties, morphing the true story of friendship between a defeated emperor and young girl into a romance, this keeps things platonic for its tween audience. (A welcome note because the thought of a Pacino/Watson romance is, well, unseemly.) Based on the true story of Betsy Balcombe, Rabin's tale follows the 14-year-old as she breaks out of her family's fear of Bonaparte and becomes his friend while he's exiled on St. Helena. The relationship is based in fact, but the book then adds a bunch of flair with accidental death and hot balloon adventures.
Apparently Al has been itching to tackle Bonaparte for a while, and I imagine this is a bit of a compromise -- as a big-name actor often busy with iconic drama, who yearns to play a certain historical figure, a tween-themed film isn't usually the project of choice. Nevertheless, it's great to see Pacino walk beyond that Righteous Kill and get some more worthy gigs. Lear, Bonaparte ... what's next? Thomas Jefferson?
Another Darwin Biopic Set for 2009
Hollywood loves dueling biopics -- Columbus, Capote, Amy Fisher; if there's more than one source to mine from, there's more than one movie to be made. The latest figure to get head-to-head films is Charles Darwin. Though I haven't heard anything more on Chase Palmer's take, titled Evolution's Captain, since I wrote about it last November, it is supposed to be released some time in 2009. If that remains true, it will have some company, because Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas is also planning to deliver a Darwin film the same year (the bicentennial of the naturalist's birth).
Thomas' version will be based on "Annie's Box" (aka "Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution"), a bio written by Darwin's descendant Randal Keynes. While Palmer's film should deal more with Darwin's scientific explorations, this one will be centered more on the naturalist's home life, particularly with the death of his daughter Annie, which he blamed on inbreeding (Darwin married his first cousin). The adaptation is being written by John Collee, who I had actually thought would be appropriate for Palmer's film, and will be directed by Jon Amiel. A good guess is that Keynes' son Skandar, who acts in the Narnia films, will get a part as one of Darwin's kids (he had 10).
Other dueling biopics headed your way:
Miles Davis
Marvin Gaye
Chet Baker
Napoleon
Projects About a Short French Guy Race to Completion
Filed under: Drama », Romance », Newsstand »
How does it happen that there are so frequently movies about the same damn thing in production simultaneously? Be they over volcanoes, escaped zoo animals, Truman Capote, or Marvin Gaye, races to hit the screen first seem to take place insanely often -- and it's happening again, this time with projects about Napoleon. And they're not only about Napoleon: Both films are about "his final days on St Helena and his friendship with a 15-year-old [English girl]." In this case, though, the similarity is not a coincidence. Scarlett Johansson, who will star in Napoleon and Betsy (Though how the hell she's going to play 15 is a mystery to me.), was once in line to play the same role in The Monster of Longwood, the other Napoleon project. When she didn't get the job, she promptly threw together her own production of the same story, the cheeky devil. Right now, though, it looks like Longwood and director Patrice Chéreau (the man who, in Queen Margot, gave us the most gorgeous corpses the world has ever known) will have the last laugh: Chéreau expects to begin shooting this winter, while Johansson's project has no hope of starting until 2007, due to her own busy schedule.
Pacino is Napoleon
Filed under: Casting »
Reprising his Merchant of Venice partnership with producer/director team Barry Navidi and Michael Ratford, Al Pacino
has signed on to play Napoleon in an as-yet-unnamed biopic. Apparently
playing the short, aggressive, exiled emperor has long been a dream for
Pacino, and he feels that Navidi and Ratford are the right people to
bring Napoleon to the big screen. (You know, since Abel Gance did such a
crappy job of it.)Interestingly/oddly, the film (which won't even begin shooting until 2006) will focus not on Napoleon's years in power or his time spent freezing in Russia (Personally, I think that would have been a great movie. Who doesn't like to see cold people eating horses?). Instead, it will explore the Frenchman's later years on St. Helena, where he apparently struck up a friendship with a young British girl. Inevitably, of course, the exiled ex-emperor became "infatuated" with the lass. Oh, come on. Someone please tell me this isn't just an excuse for yet another old-man-with-hot-young-girl movie.
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