The A.V. Club - Newswire

Books: Newswire: The Walking Dead's Robert Kirkman being sued by original illustrator and former best friend

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:34:00 -0600

Last week was an unusually contentious one in the world of comics (even for the normally contentious world of comics), and Friday evening brought news of one more legal battle that we saw but were like, “Damn, not another one. Let’s just talk about it on Monday.” And that’s today, so: The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman is being sued by original series illustrator Tony Moore, who claims that he has not received his appropriate share of royalties, thanks to being duped by Kirkman into signing away his rights to the now very lucrative franchise. Compared to the ...

Film: Newswire: The BAFTA Awards give everything to The Artist, proving that British people are aware it's a silent film

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:11:00 -0600

Still mortified by the actions of certain Liverpool ruffians, the BAFTA Awards went out of their way to celebrate The Artist last night, allowing the film to sweep more than half of the dozen categories in which it was nominated, even when it faced exceedingly British competitors such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Iron Lady. Through pursed lips and punctuated by plenty of embarrassed harrumphing, the red-faced presenters awarded Michel Hazanavicius’ ode to silent films best picture, director, actor, screenplay, music, cinematography, and costume design—thus proving that one is well aware that The Artist is a silent ...

Film: Newswire: Weekend Box Office: Valentine's Day belongs to the hunks

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:05:00 -0600

Apparently, mid-February is the new summer. There was enough audience to go around for all four of the week’s top openers, despite a spate of negative reviews for each of them. Having already coughed up $30.5 million to boost the opening weekend of his last big romantic drama, the Nicholas Sparks adaptation Dear John, viewers were powerless to resist the leaden charms of Channing “The Big Brisket” Tatum in The Vow, as he wrapped his beefy arms around Rachel McAdams and $41.7 million. And with a modest $30 million budget, massive profits are assured, especially in the ...

Music: Newswire: No official cause of death after Whitney Houston's autopsy

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:50:00 -0600

Officials conducted an autopsy on Whitney Houston's remains Sunday, but the cause of death officially remains unknown, and won't be determined until toxicology results come back in several weeks. Houston's body was discovered in the bathtub of her Beverly Hills hotel room, and the singer had water in her lungs when she died, prompting initial reports that she drowned after taking Xanax and drinking alcohol to calm her nerves before a performance Saturday night at an event honoring record executive Clive Davis. TMZ is reporting that the L.A. coroner's office has already told Houston's ...

Music: Newswire: R.I.P. Whitney Houston

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:37:00 -0600

A pop music superstar whose fame was once nearly as big as her once-in-a-generation voice, Whitney Houston died today at the age of 48. Police are investigating the cause of death, though there are no obvious signs of criminal intent. Houston died in a Beverly Hills hotel room, where she was staying while in town to perform at a musical tribute for her mentor, music executive Clive Davis, which still went on as scheduled this evening. Also moving forward is tomorrow’s Grammy telecast, a show Houston once owned and once again will overshadow, only this time for horribly shocking ...

TV: Newswire: John Goodman and Roseanne Barr are getting back together

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:21:00 -0600

Roseanne Barr’s Downwardly Mobile is already essentially a rehash of Roseanne—what with its focus on finding the funny in poor people, its setting among the even lower-rent digs of a trailer park, and of course, all that Roseanne—and suddenly that's even more official. Deadline reports that John Goodman is in final negotiations to join the NBC pilot, thus reuniting with his former TV wife, former Roseanne executive producer Eric Gilliland, and former role as that guy whose lovably teddy-bearish persona softens Roseanne’s natural abrasiveness and makes her seem human, even almost likable. Of course, this ...

TV: Newswire: Melissa McCarthy helps get her husband his own CBS sitcom

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:00:00 -0600

Melissa McCarthy and her writer-actor husband, Ben Falcone—recently seen as McCarthy’s make-out partner Air Marshall Jon in Bridesmaids—have co-written a comedy pilot for CBS. The show would be a starring vehicle for Falcone, so if the network picks it up, not only will the other guys in the writing room at The Looney Tunes Show have to stop calling him "Mr. Melissa McCarthy,” the two of them could lunch together every day at the CBS commissary and hold hands while talking about how things are going on their respective sets. That wouldn't be enough to get ...

Books: Newswire: Marvel forces Ghost Rider creator to stop saying he's Ghost Rider creator

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:45:00 -0600

After nearly five years of bitter and depressing legal back-and-forth only slightly ameliorated by the fact that it concerned a biker with a flaming skull, Marvel has won a lawsuit that forces Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to stop identifying himself as “Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich,” simply because he is the creator of Ghost Rider. The oddly existentialist decision brings an end to a court battle first launched back in 2007, when Friedrich sued Marvel claiming that rights to the character had reverted back to him in 2001, and were subsequently being exploited by the company’s Ghost Rider ...

TV: Newswire: Bradley Whitford to bring the worlds of Parks And Recreation and The West Wing even closer together

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:41:00 -0600

The Huffington Post has a whole bunch of potential spoilers for the rest of the Parks And Recreation season (which you can read here if so inclined), but perhaps the one of greatest interest—especially to that Venn diagram overlap of Parks and West Wing fans that surely exists—is that Bradley Whitford has an upcoming guest spot. The Aaron Sorkin muse will turn up as the departing city councilman whose seat Leslie is running for, inspiring an episode that’s reportedly crammed with West Wing homages—most obviously its title, “Live Ammo,” which intentionally recalls one of Rob Lowe ...

TV: Newswire: John Stamos returning to sitcoms, finally

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:09:00 -0600

It’s been a good week for the Stamos-aholics amongst us. First the word came down from the Grammy gods on high that sometimes-drummer John Stamos would be a part of the upcoming Beach Boys reunion at the Grammys, and today Deadline reports that the erstwhile Uncle Jesse and his dimples could be coming back to sitcoms full-time. Stamos has signed on to star in Little Brother, a Fox comedy pilot about a man who finds out he has an ex-con half-brother played by comedian T.J. Miller—the mad scientist-haired cameraman from Cloverfield (and our fellow “Spa Weekend with ...

Film: Newswire: Syfy-caliber movie Legion to become actual Syfy series

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:52:00 -0600

Finding inspiration, like so many networks seem to be doing these days, in its Netflix queue, Syfy has begun developing a TV adaptation of 2010’s Legion—a series that would potentially join the channel’s adaptation of The Adjustment Bureau, as well as the dozen other movie-to-TV shows pitched this development season that were most recently compiled here, because we’re tired of digging up the links to all of them over and over again. So just go look at that list. According to Deadline, Legion’s writer-director Scott Stewart is set to direct and executive produce the small-screen ...

TV: Newswire: Elliott Gould and Jon Voight are moving to Showtime

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:34:00 -0600

Aiming to outdo HBO’s recent recruiting of Alan Alda with their own unconventional ’70s sex symbols, Showtime has drafted both Elliott Gould and Jon Voight to join the cast of the upcoming Ray Donovan, which stars modern-day “thinking woman’s sex symbol” Liev Schreiber. Indeed, there will be a whole lot of thinking women thinking, “As a thinking woman, I regard these men as a symbol of sexy things and feelings.” Anyway, as previously reported, the show stars Schreiber in the very au courant role of (in the words of the press release) a “professional troubleshooter” to an elite ...

Film: Newswire: Yet another version of Beauty And The Beast in the works

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:52:00 -0600

Because the best stories are those that can be told again and again, preferably in competing versions and all at once, Beauty And The Beast is making inroads toward becoming the next Snow White in terms of fairy tales that producers believe in their heart can sustain multiple simultaneous updates, if only they clap loudly enough. Joining that growing chorus today is Christophe Gans, with the Silent Hill director now shopping his own version of the story with Vincent Cassel as the Beast and Lea Seydoux as the woman who loves him. Did Gans have an appropriately grandiose statement to ...

TV: Newswire: NBC's The Munsters show has been put on hiatus for retooling

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:21:00 -0600

Demonstrating just how much NBC apparently has riding on a reboot of The Munsters, the network has taken Bryan Fuller’s darker, edgier, more geographically aware update Mockingbird Lane off of its fall schedule, likely pushing it to a midseason start date. Variety reports that the production has now been delayed until summer, as NBC dedicates itself to giving the project the “extra attention” it needs to “get the elements just right”—sharpening the edges and darkening the dark stuff, as it were. Presumably this will also give them time to overcome the greatest hurdle facing what could otherwise be ...

Film: Newswire: New version of Rebecca to be haunted by the memory of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:18:00 -0600

Alfred Hitchcock won his only Best Picture Oscar for 1940’s Rebecca, suggesting that anyone who would attempt their own adaptation of Daphne du Marier’s novel—as DreamWorks and Working Title are now planning—would be haunted by the lingering spirit of their predecessor, with everyone cruelly comparing this would-be replacement to the original Rebecca and forever finding it wanting. And then cinephilia's various housekeepers, who have preserved Hitchcock's room in their hearts just as he left it, would encourage this new film to commit suicide, and other referential metaphors. But this younger, updated version of Rebecca ...

Games: Newswire: Today in music videos: Bruce Springsteen invites you to sing along with "We Take Care Of Our Own"

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:13:00 -0600

When Bruce Springsteen released "We Take Care Of Our Own," the first single from his upcoming album Wrecking Ball, some took the chorus at face value as a nationalistic call to arms. This interpretation conveniently overlooked Springsteen's history of writing songs expressing the exact opposite of what the booming chorus and rousing music conveys (see "Born In The U.S.A.")—not to mention the actual lyrics to "We Take Care Of Our Own," which explicitly rail against leaving our country's poor and disenfranchised to suffer without a helping hand. Maybe that's why the video for "We ...

Music: Newswire: Madonna's stalker on the loose after escaping mental health facility

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:37:00 -0600

In 1996, a man named Robert Dewey Hoskins hopped a security wall guarding Madonna's Hollywood home and threatened to cut the singer's throat if she refused to marry him. Hoskins was later arrested and sent to prison for 10 years. Last July, Hoskins was arrested again, and shipped off to a mental health facility in Norwalk, Calif., where he remained until recently. As of today, nobody knows where he is; according to L.A. police, Hoskins has escaped the mental hospital, and remains at large. It appears his breakaway was pretty nonchalant: In a spare moment when no ...

Games: Newswire: Double Fine Productions raises $1 million for new graphic adventure game in under 24 hours

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:50:00 -0600

One of the chief things standing in the way of further production of more graphic adventure games, of the sorts that made publishing houses LucasArts and Sierra On-line famous back in the late '80s and early '90s, is the long-held notion within the video game industry that graphic adventure games won't sell well enough to recoup those companies' investments. Thus, pioneers of the genre who are still in the industry have found themselves unable to sell new adventure ideas. Those pioneers include Tim Schaefer and Ron Gilbert, both formerly of LucasArts and now working for Double Fine Productions, two ...

Film: Newswire: George Lucas says Han never shot first, you were just confused

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:29:00 -0600

Last month George Lucas, emboldened by his impending retirement from the business of blockbusters, opened up about his weariness with the complaints of Star Wars fans who have long griped about his many changes to the saga over the years—for instance, making it so that Han shoots first, to correct what was once a glaring “violation of his own naïve style.” And while that’s more explanation than George Lucas believes you deserve—and it’s already out there for public consumption, and everyone is now familiar with it—there is, of course, no reason why that explanation ...

Film: Newswire: Here's who's been cast so far in Jason Reitman's "all-black Reservoir Dogs" reading

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:08:00 -0600

Director Jason Reitman has been entertaining audiences with movies that are not his own for a while now, gathering diverse and inspired groups of actors for live readings of films such as The Breakfast Club, The Princess Bride, and The Apartment that you could have seen if only you lived in Los Angeles and weren’t broke. His next one-night-only, already-sold-out performance on February 16 is his most dramatic reinterpretation yet: Reitman will take the (fittingly, very talky) script for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and completely overhaul the cast with all black actors, a decision that he and co-curator ...