This Week’s Movie News

A week, they say, is a long time in the movie world. But a week is also a long time for the mayfly. Poor the mayfly - it only lives for a day. If the mayfly watched the DVD-extended Lord Of The Rings trilogy, it would literally take half their lifetime. Imagine wasting half your lifetime watching that cack. The mayfly’s life is a sad life.

This week’s movie news: Anne Bancroft dies, The Pink Panther gets held back and Wolverine stars in his own film…

Anne Bancroft Passes On
The legendary stage and screen actress Anne Bancroft has passed on after a long battle with cancer. Bancroft was the wife of comedy legend Mel Brooks,
and was blessed with a career spanning nearly six decades, starting out
performing walk-on roles on TV before, ahem, ‘graduating’ to the big
screen.

Best known for her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, Bancroft was a versatile actress. In 1963, she won her only Oscar for her role in The Miracle Worker.

Although
her star status seemed to wane in her later years, she worked hard to
the very end. Be sure to catch her last movie, the upcoming Delgo, a CGI film, when it comes out later this year.

Anne Bancroft died peacefully in hospital on Monday. She is survived by her husband Mel, and her son, Max.

Pink Panther Remake held back

Here’s some good news: the Steve Martin remake of the absolute classic that is The Pink Panther has been held back until 2006. The bad news: it wasn’t held back until 2987. Or destroyed completely.

According
to MGM, with their takeover at the hands of Sony, the film is being
held back to avoid conflicting with the release of another of MGM’s
films, The Wood. Our advice? Just go and watch the original ones with Peter Sellers— they’re a far more appealing way to waste your time.

Wolverine gets his own movie!

Okay, this has been known for a while, but with X-Men 3 just coming out of production hell, Hugh Jackman finally commented on the new Wolverine movie and what the future holds for the psychopathic, self-healing, magnet-hating mutant.

As he told Empire Online: “It got to be a roller-coaster ride there,” he said, concerning the recent problems the third film has experienced, “but
I wasn’t worried because the script is so strong. Matthew [Vaughn] had
his reasons but helped make the movie better before he left. Brett
[Ratner] has come in with a lot of enthusiasm and full understanding of
the franchise. It has been a real learning curve, as has been putting
together the script of Wolverine. That project is a good start for me
as producer, because I have intimate knowledge of the character.”

We’re guessing he doesn’t mean in the Biblical sense. Anyway, scribe David Benioff has been writing away on the spin-off, and production is excepted to begin as soon as.

[story by James Hickey]