Odds and Indianas

Producer Frank Marshall talked to Connecticut’s New Haven Register yesterday, and said director Steven Spielberg is shooting the new Indiana Jones movie just like the other three. According to Marshall, they’re not “cheating” with computer-generated graphics.

This makes me very happy. Given executive producer George Lucas’s total (and debilitating) reliance on CG in the Star Wars prequels, I was afraid he’d try to push computery stunts and backgrounds on Spielberg for Indy IV.

Excellent political commentator/cartoonist Tom Tomorrow snapped some of the coolest pictures I’ve ever seen of how the production turned downtown New Haven into 1957. The bottom photos show the stunt doubles of Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf cruising around town on a motorcycle.

And then, Just Jared posted a whole bunch of shots of Harrison and Shia themselves on the bike! (Be careful. There are a couple of ads on the page that might get you fired if you’re at work.)

Totally awesome. I can’t wait for this.

Let’s take the motorcycle with the sidecar filled with hot dogs and Cokes to see Fourth Installment of the Indiana Jones Adventures on May 22, 2008!

Spawn vs. Batman, and other Dark Knight casting updates

Some new names have been added to the cast of next summer’s Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight.

A while back, MTV posted this video in which rapper David Banner revealed that he’d auditioned for the role of Gamble, one of the many thugs who tries to get a bigger piece of the action in Gotham City after the fall of Carmine Falcone in Batman Begins. In the video, he asks his fans to pray for him to help him get the part. Then he makes a promise “to the hood” that if he gets the part he’ll smack Batman in the face, even if it isn’t in the script, so that all the kids in the hood will know that “Batman got smacked by David Banner.” Then he smacks the camera. Hard.

I liked Banner opposite Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan, but his Bat-smacking comments might have lost him the part.

The good folks over at MTV’s movie blog have posted a new story in which they reveal that the part of Gamble has definitely gone to Michael Jai White.

White is no stranger to comic book movies, having played Spawn in the 1997 adaptation of that character. (He also voiced the monstrous Doomsday for the Justice League cartoons and Green Lantern in a recent Justice League video game.)

And according to his IMDb page, he’s got black belts in seven martial arts and holds 26 competitive titles. So I guess that if Gamble does indeed smack Batman in the face, White is certainly qualified to do it.

Meanwhile, Batman on Film’s Jett Ramey has posted some other casting updates naming, among others, beautiful Monique Curnen as a Gotham City detective named Ramirez. (You might remember Monique as one of the pretty Perez de la Torre sisters in M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water.)

Ramirez is apparently a new character; when a casting notice was sent out a while ago for a female cop, I assumed it would either be Rene Montoya from the comics and cartoons or Lopez from Gordon’s task force in the Dark Victory graphic novel.

Jett’s page also says we’ve got Vincenzo Nicoli as a mob boss and Nydia Melroy as a judge.

Let’s take a moment to run through the cast again:

Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman

Heath Ledger as The Joker

Gary Oldman as honest cop Lt. Jim Gordon

Michael Caine as Bruce’s trusted butler, Alfred Pennyworth

Morgan Freeman as Wayne Enterprises CEO — didn’t you get the memo? — and Batman’s gadget man, Lucius Fox

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes

Aaron Eckhart as Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent

Eric Roberts as mob boss Sal Maroni

Anthony Michael Hall as someone yet to be revealed

Michael Jai White as Gamble

Monique Curnen as Detective Ramirez

Melissa McCarthy and Nathan Gamble as Gordon’s wife and son

Nestor Carbonell as the mayor of Gotham City

Vincenzo Nicoli as a mob boss

Nydia Melroy as a judge

William Fichtner as Potentially Very Unlucky Bank Manager

We’ll probably see Cillian Murphy in a cameo as The Scarecrow, and Tim Booth apparently told a radio show that he’d cameo as Mr. Zsasz again.

(For more news and photos from The Dark Knight, please click here.)

The Dark Knight begins its mission to take back the streets of Gotham City on July 18, 2008!

Brandon Routh and Christian Bale talk Justice League

There’s an article in Variety saying that married writing duo Kieran and Michele Mulroney have completed their Justice League script for Warner Bros.

So far, their only other writing credit involves being among the six credited writers on Mirrors, a Kiefer Sutherland horror movie that’s due out this year. And Kieran is the brother of Dermot Mulroney, who, contrary to my occasional confusion, is not the same person as Dylan McDermott. (I’d love to know how that meeting went. “Let’s do a Justice League movie! Get me the kid brother of Dermot Mulroney and, if he’s hitched, get the wife involved, too!”)

The Justice League of America, of course, is the super-team of the DC Comics universe featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and then a revolving door of other names like Green Lantern, The Flash, Green Arrow, Martian Manhunter, etc.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I think I’d rather see lots of good movies featuring the individual characters, and if one of them just happens to pop up for a few minutes in another’s movie, even better.

And it’s possible that the movie will never even happen anyway.

The most pressing question is whether Warner Bros. would recast it from the ground up and keep it separate — which I think would be the wise thing to do — or include their current Superman and Batman actors, Brandon Routh and Christian Bale.

But what do Routh and Bale have to say about it?

IESB posted this video interview with Routh in which he says he’d definitely be interested in being in it and working with Christian Bale.

Bale’s answer, when asked by IGN, was a bit more ambiguous: “It’s like I was saying to Chris [Nolan] — I’ll probably be doing this in dinner theater somewhere in my 50s, so I won’t knock it. Because who knows where I’ll end up?”

If Justice League actually happens, I think they should keep these guys out of it. I wouldn’t want a Justice League movie interrupting the good thing Bale and Christopher Nolan are doing with Batman, and I don’t want the Superman from Superman Returns ever to appear on film again. (You can read some reasons why right here.)

And despite my problems with Superman Returns, let the record show that I have no problems with Brandon Routh. I think he made an excellent Superman — especially given the unforgivably awful material he was given — and even before the film opened he was already visiting sick children in hospitals. Routh really embraced the responsiblity of the role both on and off camera, and I commend him infinitely for that. I just wish there was a way to get this guy in a better Superman movie that writes off Superman Returns as a bad dream or something.

Anyway, that’s the latest on this project. Done correctly, it could be a lot of fun. In the meantime, I guess we’ll find out when we do.