Stuff: Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad… Except for Dancing

Some movie news websites want to make you read 700 words just to find out who was cast in what. Screw that. We read all the nonsense and pass the time savings onto you. All the pop culture news you need, at your leisure, in a single post. You’re welcome.

Animal Farm…the musical. No bullshit. Apparently the people that brought you the musical version of Billy Elliot are working on this, but no start date yet. Not for a while. Let me break that down for you: Elton John, the man who wrote the songs for The Lion King is working on songs to put in the mouths of Snowball and Napoleon. Weigh that. Source.

Russell Brand, who is killing me loudly with his Arthur remake (currently in production) is in talks to play the swashbuckling John Hawkwood at Fox. (Don’t worry, I had never heard of him before either. Go here.) Jared Stern, who’s apparently done work for Disney, is scribing. And will “create a screenplay tailored around Brand’s image.” So…Hawkwood will have…huge…hair…? Source.

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Driving Miss Daisy is headed back to Broadway. And Jesus, the cast: James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave and Boyd Gaines. It starts October 7th for sixteen weeks. Source.

Paul Giamatti, who is so good it’s ridiculous, will play Krushchev. But not just Krushchev, but while he was taking a tour of the U.S. for two weeks in 1959. Variety calls it “one of the lighter chapters of the Cold War,” which makes sense…we guess–the book this is all based on is called K Blows Top. Which apparently comes from Krushchev really, really wanting to go to Disneyland. Go figure. This production is for Playtone, who brought you Giamatti as John Adams. Nice.

Law and Order is dead. Long live Law and Order. The original series is gone and Dick Wolf confirms they’ve “exhausted every effort” to bring it back. Of course, the Los Angeles iteration is coming with Alfred Molina and Terrence Howard as DAs alternating episodes and the previously mentioned Skeet Ulrich as one of the detectives. The source was Variety, but they don’t play nice so I can’t really link them. Oh well.

A Little Night Music replaced Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury and re-opened August 1st. Of course, they replaced them with Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch (hear that?–that was Rox making a gleeful noise). Yet another show I would kill to see. Source.

Monsters has some promise. Check out this behind-the-scenes vid with a couple of interesting bits from the film…

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (previously mentioned here) finally hits LA/NYC on December 10th and then will expand. Hurry, already.

The Thor trailer from Comic-Con is onine. And quite tasty, I must admit. Find it here. For now.

Total Recall, the remake (as previously mentioned). Len Wiseman (Underworld) is in talks to helm and Columbia wants a “contemporized adaptation.” Read: updated special effects and more splode, most likely. Kurt Wimmer (Salt) is scribing. Source.

If you dig anything we list with an Amazon link on the site, and you buy it via the link, we get kickbacks. Kickbacks are our friend. Not as much our friend as you are, so don’t get jealous. But still.

Apocalypse Now has been announced for a three-disc Blu-Ray boxed set, containing Now, Now Redux and Hearts of Darkness. That comes out October 19th from Lionsgate. Granted, there’s a two-disc version, but the documentary that’s the third disc is quite good and you want it. Click here to pre-order from Amazon.