Gawker: defamer, short circuit

Good Looking Kids to Be Made Ugly for Our Entertainment

Richard Lawson — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:28:00 EDT

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Easy A just sounds more and more intriguing, though little else coming out of the West does. It's still all remakes and reboots and robots and, sometimes, carnival barkers.

That Easy A movie—a teen flick loosely based on The Scarlet Letter—is shaping up to have a pretty respectable cast. Lisa Kudrow, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Thomas Haden Church, and Malcom McDowell have all been announced as costars. Oh, and also Penn Badgley from Gossip Girl. Feh. [Variety]

A&E has canceled Patrick Swayze's clunky bad lieutenant drama The Beast, which is sad for him. [Variety]

Speaking of beasts, British heartthrob Alex Pettyfer and American oddity Mary-Kate Olsen have joined High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens in the film Beastly, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story. Pettyfer will play a handsome but arrogant little shit who gets transformed into an ugly person by Olsen and, presumably, saved by Hudgens. Unlike its animated predecessor, we do not see Oscar nominations in its future. [Variety]

Oh, that's cute. Heroes is still bothering to hire actors to be on their show. Robert Knepper, who played T-Bag on Prison Break, has joined the cast as a villain referred to as the "Carnival Barker." Ohhh twissssted. [THR]

Dimension has tapped Dan Milano, who's written for Adult Swim, to craft the script for their planned Short Circuit remake. Because what the world needs now is more remakes. And robots. Always robots. [Variety]

Terrence Howard is prepping a TV project based on the life of Ronald Farwell, an LAPD detective who infiltrated the Black Panthers in the late 60s and 70s. [Variety]

CBS says that they see light at the end of the tunnel, recession and ad revenue wise. Funny because most of their viewers are also heading towards a bright light. (Because they're old. And dying.) [THR]

Compounding (and maybe even stealing) our...

STV — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:25:00 EDT

Compounding (and maybe even stealing) our acute grief at the news of Short Circuit Redux, LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez today mulls over the pandemic of horror glutting the marketplace. With this week's release of Prom Night leading the way, Fernandez counts more than a dozen do-overs en route to theaters, including the certain evisceration of classics like Friday the 13th, The Birds and Near Dark; a Stanford professor deigns to comment that audiences can't be bothered to think and dread at the same time, so they take comfort in the familiar. Kind of like Fernandez himself, in a way, who latched on to our Short Circuit distress by reworking our "End of Ideas" tag for a lede ("Smell that? It's the decay of original ideas"), citing stars Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy being "at the height of their powers" (we said they were "in top form") and hitting the 1986 original's IMDB Quotes page to flesh out our mutual concern over Fisher Stevens' garish Indian stereotype. We feel your pain, Jay — but you already knew that, didn't you? [LAT]

God Sheds a Tear, Shoots Self at News of 'Short Circuit' Remake

STV — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:40:07 EDT

Mere days after the news of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure 3 flared a fresh ulcer in our cultural digestive tract, news over the wire says Bob Weinstein is planning his own Apocalypse Pre-Game Show with a remake of the 1986 hit Short Circuit. The original featured Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy in top form as the annoying flesh-and-blood foils of a stupid fucking wise-cracking government robot named Johnny Five, who gets struck by goddamned lightning and finds Gadget Jesus or some bullshit that changes his whole global perspective to pro-peace/disarmament/"fuck you Ronald Reagan." But wait — it gets worse.

The original asshole writers, S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, will return for another round of well-paid douchebaggery, which Weinstein's Dimension Films will foist on the American public as a "worthy addition to its family film slate" at a dark date to be determined. Self-loathing producer David Foster is coming back as well, pledging to "factor in advances in technology" and maximize soul-destroying audience pandering. No word yet on whether the shrill Indian scientist so expertly stereotyped by Fisher Stevens will make his own comeback, but whether it's Stevens or Guttenberg or fake-ass CGI or anything else you can conjure to make this anti-idea worse, that's what Weinstein will deliver. God is dead, goodbye cruel world. Seriously, fuck this movie.

'Short Circuit's' Johnny 5 still alive [Variety]