"Why didn't you write me? ... BRAAAAAAAAINS..."

God dammit. For the last time, people, zombies are not timely metaphors. They’re not symbols of consumer culture, or overpopulation, or the war on terror, and they sure as hell aren’t the perfect jumping off point for a teen romance. They’re big sacks of movie meat that you can explode without pondering motive or remorse, like Nazis. ZOMBIES ARE TO BE EXPLODED.

Anyway. Summit has released some new stills from Warm Bodies, their zombie romance adapted from Isaac Marion’s book by Jonathan Levine. Wait a second, the guy who directed 50/50? What the shit? It stars Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class), Teresa Palmer (I Am Number Four), Rob Corddry (lots of stuff), Dave Franco (James’s brother), Analeigh Tipton (who?) and John Malkovich (awesome). Here’s the book description:

R is a young man with an existential crisis–he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he has dreams.
After experiencing a teenage boy’s memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and stragely sweet relationship with the victim’s human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.

Yeah, because that’s what I’ve always wanted in my zombie films, more wonder, and longing. I loved 50/50, but it doesn’t bode well that they released three pictures, and they’re all of a hot dude looking zombie-ish. Look, all I’m saying is that at this rate, it’s not going to be long before the goth dudes in high school start wearing blueish lipstick and crazy contacts to guy with the guyliner, and that’s how I’ll know it’s finally time to kill myself.

[ComingSoon]

All year I’ve been sitting through movies like I Am Number Four, Cowboys and Aliens, Super 8, Monsters, Skyline, Transformers 3, Battleship, Battle: Los Angeles, Green Lantern, Attack the Block, Thor… thinking, “Jeez, when is someone finally going to make a movie about an alien invasion?”

It looks like director Chris Gorak and producer Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) have finally answered my prayers, with The Darkest Hour, from Summit Entertainment, starring Emile Hirsch and Olivia Thirlby (or as I like to call her, OLIVIA THRILLBY!). This time around, the aliens attack Moscow (they’re trying to steal our expensive whores!). The twist is, this time, the aliens are invisible! And they can see us with infrared heat vision! This new wrinkle really turns the idea on its head, doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve never seen something like that before. Except in Predator. Which they remade last year.

“ALIENS! CHICK SCIENTIST! ‘SPLOSIONS! THE MILITARY!” -Every movie for the last five years.

[HD Trailer at Apple]

Wow, that’s one of the more esoteric headlines I’ve ever written.  To break it down for you, Allan Loeb is the awesom-o-like script machine behind such films as 21, The Dilemma, and Kevin James’ “Martial Farts” (working title), and he’s incredibly successful.  But now there’s a new guy peddling really-warmed-over-sounding ideas on the block, and his name is Daniel H. Wilson.  Formerly known as a Robotics Ph.D. candidate who’d written cutesy coffee table-ish books that look like they took about an afternoon to write, such as How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown, it was announced last month that Steven Spielberg would be directing his upcoming novel, Robopocalypse, which sounds, well, basically like a Terminator knockoff from the studio that made Transmorphers.

Now Deadline says Wilson has sold another novel, Amp, to Alex Proyas, which sparked a bidding war even though this one’s not finished yet either.

With Alex Proyas poised to produce and potentially direct, Summit Entertainment has just closed a deal for screen rights to AMP, a near-future science fiction thriller novel by Daniel H. Wilson. The novel is set in a world where the technology designed to make the disabled whole, turns them into supermen. Deal was low six against seven figures.
I’m told that aside from Summit, Working Title and Paramount also chased a novel that has a mix of scifi action and political allegory reminiscent of District 9 [don't you mean *will* have? -Ed.]. Wilson took the Summit deal because he was impressed by Proyas, who’ll shoot the picture at a modest budget in Australia. Wilson is writing the book, and the plan is to hire a screenwriter who’ll take his novel pages and draft them into script form, the way Drew Goddard did while Wilson was scribbling away on Robopocalypse.

And here I thought “your novel sounds great, here’s a million dollars!” was just a barista fantasy.  Hey, remember when “Gee, this sounds like a bunch of things I’ve already seen” wasn’t a compliment?

You can sell anything to young girls or crazy cat ladies by advertising it as being related to Twilight, so it was bound to happen that someone would do it without permission.  The first to end up in court?  The company that made Bella’s jacket.  Explain why abstinence is sexy to my cats, Hollywood Reporter:

Summit filed a lawsuit against women’s fashion designer BB Dakota on Friday for copyright and trademark infringement. On the company’s website, BB Dakota advertises a blue cotton canvas jacket like this: “Bella Swann (sic) wears this jacket in Twilight and scores the hottest vampire in high school, and so can you!”

False.  Vampires do not attend high school.  Please cease and desist immediately.  Sincerely, The Anti-Vampire Defamation League.

When the jacket debuted in 2008, Women’s Wear Daily wrote that it was “the stuff that legends are made of.”

Blue cotton canvas.  By the transitive property, legends are made of blue cotton canvas.

MTV’s web site remarked it “brings you this much closer to Robert Pattinson.” Stylist.com called it “love at first bite, er, sight” with a price tag that didn’t suck.  And SoJones.com sang its praises as “very vampirelicious.”

“Vampirelicious” is an acceptable adjective.  I’ll allow it.  Biting jackets remains prohibited.

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That’s right, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is set to become a movie, thanks to Summit, who bought the rights the story, which had previously been in development at Fox 2000.  The sad thing is, it’s not surprising that they’re making a movie out of a storyless, 1992, research-driven guide book.  The surprising part is that it’s taken them this long.  Cue the asinine PR quote:

“‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’ is not just the title of a book, or what we know will become an amazing film and TV franchise – it is a pop cultural mainstay and comically, sadly, romantically, all too often still true these many years after first being published,” said Eric Feig, Summit’s president of production. [Variety]

Hmm… so would you consider it comic, tragic, or romantic that I want to punch you in the kidneys until you piss blood?  I don’t get it, are people worried that it’ll make them look bad if they talk like a human being in a press release? Anyway, still no word on how they plan to turn this book into a movie, but dollars to donuts it involves Ashton Kutcher and an assh*le kid in a stupid hat.

Women be shoppin’.