Find the new Beatles? Really? Pardon me for thinking this is one of the dumber remakes to be announced in recent memory, even if Robert Zemeckis is behind it. According to Variety, the performance-capture happy director is in negotiations to redo the 1968 Beatles movie that brought such songs as “Eleanor Rigby,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “With a Little Help From My Friends” and the title song to life in vivid animation.
Seriously, how can you remake this strange acid-trippy classic if you don’t have the Beatles to back it up? That’s what made the original so engaging, those cocky fellows from Liverpool and their Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band alter egos – well, that and the music-hating Chief Blue Meanie (“Floooooowwwwers!”), his minion Max and his evil henchman, Glove, who did all the pointing and smashing. This is just a silly, silly idea. Now, if Tim Burton were to reinvent it in live-action form, with Johnny Depp as the soldier Old Fred, who takes a Beatles-esque group in a yellow submersible to Pepperland, THAT would be something to consider.
In other movie/casting news: James McAvoy will make cancer funny – along with the help of Seth Rogen, of course. The Wanted star has signed up to do a comedic adaptation of the Will Reiser novel I’m With Cancer, based on Reiser’s real experiences fighting and beating cancer in his mid-20s. Rogen is producing and co-starring, while Nicole Holofcener (Friends with Money) is directing. What’s with Rogen playing sidekicks to guys with life-threatening diseases?
And speaking of directing, Robert Redford is getting back in the saddle to do The Conspirator, the story of Mary Surratt, a boardinghouse owner hanged after she was convicted of aiding Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Hmmm, that should interesting.